Fear Of A Red Planet

Gift Horse is very close to being completed. Matt did eventually get all of his drums recorded, despite the horrible weather. The following sessions were spent on his vocals, my vocals, and mixing. Singing on this record was pretty difficult for me. Matt wanted my vocals in a high octave which, for most of the songs, was at the very top end of my vocal range. Let’s just say I’m thankful for studio magic. Last I heard, Matt is still working on his vocals, though he is almost finished. Vince has been working on mixes as we’ve been tracking and the mix I heard of the song “Last Resort” sounds pretty amazing. Below are a few pictures from our vocal recording sessions.

Way back in June 2009 Deathbeds came back into the studio and recorded 3 songs that would eventually be released as a 7″ entitled No Funeral. This time, Chris Grigg (Woe, Near Dark) stepped in to co-engineered the project with me. After rejecting the first test press, No Funeral was finally released last month on Younglungs Ltd. It was pressed on 300 beautiful clear-green pieces of vinyl. Each record comes with a digital download card. The rejected test press was also released in late 2009 which was limited to 30 copies. Check out the photos below, read the blog on the Younglungs site (or better yet, buy the record from them), and listen to the song “Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death” also posted below.

Deathbeds - Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death

Mose Giganticus has been in the studio the past few weeks recording the upcoming full length Gift Horse. Tracking began in early January at Skylight Studios with Vince Ratti. Matt and Vince sequenced and re-amped all of the synth tracks for the record. Next, Matt was supposed to go into Studio 4 and track his drums with Will Yip, but that was postponed because Will was called away by Lauryn Hill at the last minute to play drums for her in Australia. Instead, we used those days to record my rhythm guitar tracks with Vince at Skylight (Jan 16th & 17th).

The following Thursday and Friday I returned to record my lead guitar tracks and Brooks Wilson came in for the weekend to lay down all of his guitar parts. Colin Smith, who played bass on the original recording (and all previous MoseG recordings), was unable to work it into his schedule, so Brooks handled all of the bass guitar duties as well (Jan 21st – 24th).

At some point it was decided that waiting for Will to return from Australia would push the record too far past it’s deadline so drum tracking was to take place this weekend at Skylight. However, the recent snow storm caused Matt and Vince to cancel the session. Drum tracking may begin tomorrow, or next week. What I have heard of the recording so far sounds great. Matt has recorded some of his vocals but I haven’t heard them yet. The pictures below are from the January 16th – 17th & Jan 21st – 24th sessions.

It was almost a year ago that Mose Giganticus came back into Red Planet to record Gift Horse, the full length follow up to 2008’s Commander! EP. Since finishing the record, Mose had been shopping it around to different labels, trying to find someone to release it. It wasn’t long before a certain label (who as of this writing, because of contractual reasons, shall remain nameless) did express great interest in releasing Gift Horse. One of the conditions, however, is that it has to be re-recorded in one of the studios that this label already has a working relationship with. One of the reasons they want it re-done is that this label has a certain sound for all of their releases and this release will be no different. Another reason, we suspect, is that they want to own the recording and master of the record. Of course, they could easily do this by just buying the existing recording from Mose, so it must be a combination of those two reasons, or even others we haven’t considered.

Whatever the case, I can’t say that I’m not disappointed that it needs to be re-done. We spent a lot of time recording and mixing that record and personally, I think it came out pretty damn well. Not only that, but there is a certain value to having my name and the studio’s name on the release. When a record has as wide of a distribution as this one I expect will have, it means a lot of people will hear it and see our name and hopefully it would send more bands our way. It’s practically free advertising. That is now being taken way from me.

I could look at it that way, or I could see an opportunity. I’ve been recording in my own studio for over 5 years now. I’ve been recording my own bands for about 10 years. It’s been about as long since I’ve even stepped foot in a studio other than my own. This will, at the very least, be a chance for me to see how other engineers operate, learn a few new tricks, and just meet and talk with other people who do what I do. It could be a very good learning experience. Also, when we recorded Gift Horse the first time, I only played a couple guitar parts on 3 of the songs. This time around, Mose wants me to play on all the tracks and also provide backing vocals on some songs. So it’s not all bad news. I’m kind of looking forward to going back in and doing it all over again.

Mose Giganticus will begin recording Gift Horse at Studio 4 with Will Yip and Skylight Studios with Vince Ratti this January 2010.

Red Planet is now in it’s 6th year. We’ve recorded many bands in the short time we’ve been open. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while of compiling a digital download series which I would call Fear Of A Red Planet. I’ve been thinking about it for a long while, yet never really doing anything to get the project going. Well today I finally started going through our old files, listening to what we’ve done over the years, making notes and marking off key tracks I’d want to showcase, just to get the ball rolling. I’ve even contacted a few of the bands because obviously I’m not going to distribute a band’s music without their permission.

I can’t yet say what songs by which bands will be included on this first volume. What I can say is that it will be about 15 tracks. Some of the songs will be remixed from the original session files, some of the songs will be pulled straight from the albums which they originally appeared. Most of the songs will be remastered (or in many cases, mastered for the first time). One or two songs may be live versions. One or two songs may be previously unreleased (exclusive content alert). I will also say that I plan to pull from our entire catalog, even the old stuff from when we first opened that might not sound so good because we were just starting out. Also, I plan to host the compilation on the Red Planet site in a few different mp3 bitrates and also FLAC lossless.

I don’t know exactly how long this project will take to put together. Right now, I’m giving myself 6 months to do all of this. It really shouldn’t take that long, but you never know. It might. So right now I’m aiming for a July release. As it stands now I feel we have enough good usable material (that is if you take 15 songs per volume, 1 song per band, only using the best sounding recordings of the best songs from bands who will give us permission to use them…) for 3 volumes, possibly 4. My hope is that we can release one per year and by the time 2012 rolls around hopefully we have enough new material to make more, or Roland Emmerich was right and the world will end. It’ll definitely be one of those outcomes, for sure.

Wed Nov 18
8pm
$5
All Ages
@ Danger Danger Gallery 5013 Baltimore Ave.

Tenderhooks
Mancruel
The Tanks (IA)
Mose Giganticus
Emotron