Monday, March 10, 2008

Ich bin ein Berliner!

Just back in the land we call home today, seriously feelin the burn from 5 days in Berlin. We hit Berlin last Wednesday for a spot of recording. Myself and Ruairi got over first and we were followed by Neilo and Vinny on Thursday.

After staying awake for 24hours before arriving in Berlin it would be safe to say that we were pretty bolloxed! We did manage to get a spot of record shopping done at Wowsville Records. (seriously recommend checking this place out!)

After a day of walking around Berlin with no sleep we were in much need of an afternoon snooze before our plans to check out the new studio. We were lucky enough to not only have Shaun from Humanzi help produce the recordings but he was nice enough to have 4 messy cunts like us stay in his modestly sized apartment. Only problem was, he didn't know his own address! So when myself and Ruairi went looking for it alone it turned out to be a disaster. We gave up hope soon enough and settled for a beach bar with sand instead of floorboards. It was like something from a fucking Wham video. The 80's porn star looking barmaid was pumping out music to match with the likes of Wet Wet Wet and Men at Work. There was also two dodgy lookin German guys counting large amounts of cash in the corner, who didn't seem to like my exhausted lenghty stares. Lucky enough those closest to Shaun no how good of a memory he has so when Brian called to give us the right address we were saved! But by this time it was to late to sleep so we just grabbed some more beers and headed straight for the studio.

The studio was situated in this really old radio station in East Berlin, the buildings surrounding the studio are like those of the power plant from the Simpsons, except darker!. The studio itself is inside this massive building that from the inside is like an abandoned mental institute, scary stuff! 'well to me anyways'!

Thursday started off pretty bad. We were due to start recording at 10.30am but with the previous nights heavy drinking we both only got out of bed around 12. This was bad news indeed as we were meant to collect an organ from Rudi of the Fuzztones at 11. So with sore heads we proceeded to try get the day back on track. We finally got to the studio around 3.30pm with no organ as we had missed Rudi, he was gone to work, not a good start! We eventually got up and running and to our delight everything went fantastically well! We got the backing tracks to all 5 songs down that day. It was a nice atmosphere in the studio, especially with everyone contributing as a team effort. Brian Gallagher was a major help on drums. Our engineer Fabien was great to work with, considering that he was well able to handle a drunk Neilo showing him his penis a mere 4 hours in and referring to him as a French cunt, (in the nice way!).

We had the same situation the following day with a 3pm hangover start to the day but yet again we got all the work done, we were finished all 5 tracks by midnight, well except for the organ. Lucky enough after some myspace posting Razi from the Assassinations came to the rescue with a nice Eko Tiger organ. So by 6pm on Saturday we were finished, leaving us plenty of time to drink more beers and wreck Fabiens head.

The songs recorded in Berlin will feature on our album along with another release we have planned before the summer.

Also, before heading to Berlin we made some live home demos of the tracks we intended to record. Here is one of those tracks for ya'll to download, for free!

Moving on - http://www.mediafire.com/?sgyd0mymyvn

Photobucket

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