Skip to main content

EYE 1996

Ian C Stewart | Michael Million "Eye"MP3

I know, I know, this is like the 50th time I've uploaded "Eye." This recording was part of an extensive batch of songs done and redone by Michael and I in spring 1996. We had the opportunity to record a bunch of our old and new songs on my 8-track, using all our best equipment and with the thought of doing the songs justice. Live drums were the order of the day and we spent many weekends that spring down in the basement at my mom's, just as we had when we both lived in the same town. Of course much of the stuff we did was never finished and only consists of an abandoned drum track with a scratch guitar beside it. But on the other hand there were a few old chestnuts that finally got their due. Now that's not to say that this is THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE version of "Eye," though in all actuality it may be.

I played drums, I think one track of guitar and two tracks of vocals. Michael did the bass and maybe one guitar. The vocals still had the juice to convey the vibe of the song. It sounds like I was drumming along to the Dr Rhythm, which was coming through on my headphones only. At the beginning of this recording you can hear the drum machine through my headphones!

We recorded so many things during these sessions, including many of the first songs we'd ever written together, most of our songs for the band (in Parentheses), the first proper Irreligion EP "Eyes of the Lonely," an XTC cover for "Skylacking," and a few Evil Bread songs for what would've been an EP release at the time. I think that was my plan anyway.

There were also a few songs & riffs from the aborted metal band we tried to have in 1995 or so, with Michael and Gabe on guitars, Brian whose last name I forget & who was in Borborygmos with Mike Gourley on bass and Mike Gourley on the mic. Gourley. Me on drums. We all wrote songs. The band never had a name and never got beyond jamming in my mom's basement several times. I wanted to call it POOPY, which was like the little kid's equivalent of doom & gloom. Which was kind of what the music was like at the time, a bit childish and depressing. Hah. I mean already by the mid 1990s I think we'd all cut our hair and weren't really taking heavy metal seriously in the way we did with Evil Bread in 1991. It was kind of like one big ironic joke or something. But this unnamed new band didn't really have a direction, and we didn't really want to do the food lyrics thing. Which was noble enough in theory but in practice it meant that most of the jam sessions consisted of the four of us (or the three of us if Gabe was AWOL that weekend), mapping out riffs while Gourley sat on the couch with a notebook & a pen, brainstorming who-knows-what.

Consequently Michael and I later recorded the pieces we could remember from that band a few months later & they have names like "Gabe's Thing," "Brian's Thing" "Ska Thing," "Heavy Metal Disco." Working titles.

If Michael and I had a fan base now we could release the spring 1996 8-track stuff as a plush box set. As it is, you're getting "Eye" for the 200th time. Not all of the recordings were slam dunks. The version of "Valley" we did was sped up and had some wrong notes in it. But that's what happens when you just keep hitting record without sitting down & mapping everything out first. Sometimes it works, sometimes you forget how the song goes & you skip a few vital bars or you repeat the fat too many times, whatever.... anyway. It was a good time.

This batch of recordings is where the LET'S JAM, I'LL PLAY DRUMS!!!!!! tracks are mostly coming from. Speaking of which, I'll post more drum tracks soon despite the fact that no one has done anything with the first ones yet.


----------------
Now playing: The Mess Makers - Down The Creek
via FoxyTunes

Comments

reincheque said…
Er...I'll be doing something with your drumtracks tomorrow (or as we say over here, "later today"...).

Regards,


djp

Popular posts from this blog

LET'S JAM, I'LL PLAY DRUMS!

Ian C Stewart "Ian Drums 1" MP3 Ian C Stewart "Ian Drums 2" MP3 Download these MP3s of my drum tracks, or stream them . Rock out on your own instrument, in time with them, record the results & send 'em back to me. We'll JAM. It'll be FUN. DO IT NOW.

THESE CHORDS ARE LIKE FAMILY TO ME

Ian C Stewart "These Chords are like Family to Me" MP3 From the 2003 made-to-be-made-not-made-to-be-heard album I Don't Know Why You Think I Won't Kill You .... this is the last song. This was the beginning of my dabbling with intentional randomness in songwriting. The lyrics for the whole album were compiled from albums by other artists that I enjoyed a lot, such as Adrian Belew's Twang Bar King , The Cure's Pornography , Voivod Nothingface , Mercyful Fate Melissa etc. I wrote out entire lines of their phrases and chopped them together. I think at the time I described it as 'sad psychedelic love songs about satan' overall, which is really being too generous. The music was also randomly chosen from tablature found on t'interwebs for favorite songs of mine. In general I played the chords in reverse order to the original songs but I can still kind of tell in a couple of places what the songs were. The titles were my own, obviously. Although I did cho

Daniel Prendiville - Burst Me Stitches feat Ian C Stewart on drums

portrait of the artists at a wedding, 1998 Daniel Prendiville "Burst Me Stitches" MP3 Burst Me Stitches is a song from Daniel Prendiville's forthcoming album, RAW MESH, which is due for release in the Autumn of 2008. The album will feature a remixed version of the song, so the first sentence in this paragraph was obviously a lie. The whole song was thrown together in a morning and then went through an extensive period of editing to get it into a serviceable condition. To paraphrase the old proverb, record in haste - edit at leisure. Poor ol' Daniel has been listening to too much Fall of late... Plus it makes use of the first of my 'let's jam, I'll play drums' files. So, well done that man.