Now, using Logic 8 and with the help of the software synths like Smapletank and Absynth, I’ve been able to revisit it – and have pulled apart the groove into a number of separate elements of things like dulled metallic hits and strangely EQ’d toms with an extreme ping-ponging left-right delay on them, and found a great muted jazz trumpet patch to work with (and a nice CP80 piano sound) – and as a result I’ve found it relatively easy to go back and strip down and completely reinvent the arrangement.
It’s now totally what I had in my head originally. And that’s a good thing.

The last couple of nights I’ve been doing the annoying bit of trying to sort out the detail of the final mixdown and to master it very carefully without losing the vibe/feel of the whole thing in the process… I think/hope I’ve done it.
You can download “in transit” here…

It’s called “Only A Part, Not The Whole” and you can download the MP3 here…
It’s about 11Mb as it’s almost 5 minutes long, and I’ve saved it down with the best possible sound quality encoding.

(The band it’s posted under is *the rain dogs* which is the name I give for my ‘solo’ work… and I’ve set the ID tags on the song to say it’s from an album called “Music For Pictures 09″ – which I’ll use as a bucket title for any collection of works I build up over the coming months.)
All bodes pretty well for Smallcreep – although the fact that I recovered over *300* song files from the previous session archives suggests we have have our work cut out!

We won’t be using the old Akai sampler anymore as it was just a bit unwieldy and unreliable, and instead we’ll probably be redoing all sampled work within Logic’s own software sampler, or looking at a similar solution.
And we won’t be using Cubase either because we don’t believe in being forced to have USB ‘licence activation’ dongles stuck in our hardware whenever we want to use something we’ve already paid for (fuck off Steinberg, you useless cunts).

As for the level of work, well I pulled over 300 files from the PowerBook – thankfully already pared down into various ‘revised’ and ‘rough’ folders so we can get to work on the most developed ideas first.
More progress as it happens.

Take a walk on the dark side as Smallcreep welcome in the new millennium with a mysterious journey through the bleak underbelly of trip-hop.
Their exploration of a seemy, perverted and strung-out style makes Massive Attack sound like Aqua but there’s no shortage of intrigue, even warped charm in their industrial landscapes.
It jumps and jars but just when you think it’s wholly listenable it dives off into fascinating new waters.

I don’t know how many of you heard the Scott Walker album “Tilt” when it came out, but if you have, you’ll know that there’s a really really scary bit right in the middle of the second track. This CD is a bit like that, but for a full 45 minutes.

“Machine Sex” is probably a first for Hull in two ways: not only is it the first Industrial release from the city that I can think of, but also definitely the first to feature a “parental guidance” warning on the cover! If you listen to the lyrics you can see why, even if (as I suspect) the warning is a little tongue-in-cheek.
Easy listening it isn’t, but it is challenging, and the pair have done well to get it together. If I have any criticism, it’s that the vocals on almost every track give them a slightly samey feel; the almost-instrumental ”Belong” came as some relief. The band are strong instrumentally, and I would have liked to have heard more of that featured.

Nevertheless, “Machine Sex” is a strong debut, perhaps nearer to Nine Inch Nails than anything, but far enough away to have created something very much of its own. Volume 2 should be a killer.

Many of the sketchpads, lyric fragments and proposed ideas were a lot more grown-up than previous stuff; more political, more pressing, more personal. And though much has changed since we last touched them, a lot remains the same, and makes them as relevant as ever. Our own instincts, our current listening habits, and also the odd prod here and there from our friends online (thanks Tomer in particular…) have combined to nudge us squarely back into the mindset of sorting out unfinished business.
And so we aim to complete BACKLASH this year; hopefully this summer. Whilst ‘Timor’ and ‘wasteland_number_two’ have already emerged, there’s plenty still there that’s mostly finished (‘wasteland_number_one’, ‘Videowar’, ‘Gun’, ’4u’ and ‘Souls’) and also plenty more that need extra writing before we can get round to properly arranging and finessing them.

There’s a considerable amount of work to do, even to just get things moving again. First task is to look out out all the old notebooks and scribbles, to transfer various MIDI and sound files to my MacBook Pro and to reset “the studio” to plumb it all in, get Logic 8 up and running, and get ourselves ready to reappraise all we’ve done.
But we have the desire to do it. We think we had a cracking album in the works; only made difficult by its own ambition and by the amount of creative work it unleashed.

Hopefully we can finally get it finished and distributed, and we’ll aim to use this site to update you on progress along the way.
Smallcreep are back, and BACKLASH is back on track.

Cheers,
Gareth