Taking and Breaking the Heat

Busy busy busy - I've got a single week off in August, but otherwise, there's lots of cool recordings happening at the minute! Mostly sessions for various announced and un-announced projects, but also lots of work on Nothing Wheel, the upcoming Diane Galen solo album! It's some of the most statistically dense material I could come up with, so I'm very excited to finish it off and release it! I was aiming for Scott Walker meets Virgil Donati, and I can't wait to see how close I can get it! That'll probably take another year or so to finish off, so no launch date in site yet, but there are odd clips here and there on my social media. Somehow, I managed to survive the crazy heatwave in my studio with nothing but a desk fan - which I had to turn off while I was tracking drums for Eowa, a local death metal band. I've always been a death metal fan, but I don't tend to play it much. It's definitely not the kind of music to play in an enclosed studio during a heatwave! I'm looking forward to hearing that once the full band mix comes back! Speaking of full band mixes, the Great Manta record has gone gold, so we're hoping to get that out circa late 2022, likely with a couple more gigs in tow! Prefers and Chasmhead are still working on material - all slow but sure progress. As always, I have relatively few slots open at the minute - a few lessons will probably shift around circa September as the new term starts, but anyone interested in tuition should message ASAP, since my waiting list is building up again! As for studio sessions and transcription, I've got a lot more time available in the mornings - since if I'm not sleeping in, I'm otherwise just working on the Nothing Wheel album!

Prefers to Sleep on the Train

 FINALLY "Boundless Eternity, Hereafter Torment" by Prefers to Hide in the Dark is nearly out: the album comes out on March 11th, and in the mean time, the first of two singles, Torn, is live on Youtube, bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and so on! It's a pretty cool progressive rock album, which I had a lot of fun playing both drums and keys on - I'm already looking forward to the next album! Besides doing "proper" music stuff, I also spend a lot of time mucking around with visual assets - I did a couple of teaser and visualiser-type videos for it, and I also made this spiffy little gif from the album cover!

 

Besides that, I've also been pretty busy with Prefers working on some other video content that I think you'll enjoy - there's a band cover of Voices by Dream Theater that I played drums on and have been working on the edit for that should come out pretty soon. The drum part is on my Performance page, but the full video will hopefully be out in a month or so, and fingers crossed there'll be more where that came from!

I'd like to spend more time drumming, but since leaving Pirate, I've been pretty crazily exhausted - keeping things running through the pandemic has messed me up something awful, so I'll hopefully get back to doing more peformance work soon, but in the mean time, pretty much all of my work has been at my desk - transcribing, part writing, and so on. Also included in that is the website overhaul that hopefully means everything looks and feels a bit better, especially on mobiles and tablets!

My 4pm-8pm slots for teaching are TOTALLY full up at the minute, as is my entire Sunday - I've got a bit of daytime availability, but I've got a lot of interested students who are getting dumped onto a waiting list until my availability suits their 9-5 job - but for anyone who has their daytime free, I've still got space! That also includes GMT+ timezones - it's been tricky scheduling in my students in North/ South America because the GMT- timezones push late into my evening, but I've got a couple of students in Europe that can get away with their evening but my daytime, so you lose some, but also win some! As always, drop me a message on my Contact page if you're interested, and we can figure something out!

For some reason, this was on my paste clipboard - I think it kind of sums up everything right now. Roll on Summer!

Spring Cleaning

 Made it through another season - I can't believe I'm about to celebrate 2 years in my studio, it feels like it was only 10 minutes ago I was painting over obscenities that were left on the wall when I moved in! Here's a quick comparison between the day after I moved in and today - no more window, but it's somehow a lot brighter now!

Prefers album 1 should be announced any day now, with Prefers 2 in hot pursuit alongside the Chasmhead album. I expect this year will also see the long awaited Earth Drowning record that I've been putting off until I get a chance to mix it!

I'm still getting a whole load of drum practice in - I feel endlessly frustrated that I have no time to sit down with a camera and track some playing that isn't almost 2 years old, so hopefully this year I'll get around to that and start sounding online like I do in real life! Normally I can just leave a camera rolling at gigs for that, but I'm not expecting the gigging scene to go back to normal until 2023.

I'm leaving Pirate Studios at the end of January so I can focus on teaching and session work instead - which means I'll be getting to the student waiting list at long last! If you've not heard back from me, you're welcome to drop me another email to kick me into action, but fingers crossed I'll clear the backlog over the next few weeks! As always, my 4pm-7pm is usually quite busy, but since I'm teaching in a couple of different timezones at the minute, that might not be an issue for whoever's reading this - so make sure you drop me a message and we'll figure things out from there!

 Here's to another year full of music - and hopefully finally a couple of releases since the pandemic has blocked everything up recently!