2/17/2024 0 Comments A glimpse of utopia band![]() I think the only overdub was Mike playing a bit of duduk. Most of what you hear is just from the original recording session, with the three of us playing together. It's one of those tunes I feel so fortunate to have been a part of. KT: All the pieces on this album are my favourite but this one has a very special place to me. Maybe in the future, a “wonky” world is the result of killing off the Robots! The result was this “wonky” rhythm unfolding. The track swirls from sad to happy, unnerving to beautiful over its six-minute duration, and maybe part of its uniqueness comes from the fact that mine and Mike’s synths lines were not allowed to communicate with each other. was called When Robots Die and I think either title would have summed up the piece up perfectly. SD: Most of these tracks had many different working titles before we hit upon the final names. ![]() We’re just waiting now for the phone call from Sir Alfred Hitchcock. At the time, after we’d stopped recording, we were all in agreement that it was 10 minutes of our lives we couldn’t get back! But later that night, when we listened back to all of our recordings, we started to identify the eerie, darker side of the Utopia Strong. SD: At some stage during January 2 2018, we decided to attempt a more avant garde approach and shoot for film soundtrack gold – or rather that’s how it turned out. If you listen carefully, the bestial border guards can be heard at the end of this miniature. MY: Before you transition to the afterlife it is necessary to negotiate the Unquiet Boundary. KT: The shimmering sound throughout is actually 'gliss guitar', a technique pioneered by Daevid Allen from Gong, where you bow the guitar strings with a metal rod. Or maybe it’s not a Bass but Kraken lurking within the depths! Such was the case with some of my parts within this piece and for anyone listening on a top notch HiFi system you will feel the floor rumbling with low end bass. SD: One of the fascinations of playing a modular synthesizer is that sometimes, it plays you! While the control freak would be always trying to tame the beast, maybe the easier solution is to occasionally let it have its own way and perhaps this is preferable from an improvisational perspective. ![]() And god forbid you wake the ancient dreamer who lies sleeping since the dawn of eternity. But beware of the passing of the Leviathan. Allow yourself to be lured ever deeper by the sirens that dwell therein. MY: Bathe yourself in the hallucinatory underwater wonderland. Again, back on to what Mike said about the way we work, I played this more elaborate, Magma-inspired part on the bass guitar which sounded great, and Mike and Steve kept saying "Take out that note", "Yeah, and that one" until we ended up with this terrific, headswinging bassline. It crackles with kinetic energy but has this sort of autumnal, wistful quality about it. KT: I love the charged, upward propulsion of Konta Chorus. It was maybe a defining moment for our band that we managed this, and when we were asked to do the Snapped Ankles remix of Rechargeable I personally felt far more confident that we were up to the job! We were euphoric once we realised we’d cracked the conundrum. The making of this album has been my introduction to the world of editing, mixing and production, and it was an eye-opener watching Kavus and Mike wrestling with certain problems within our original recording of Konta Chorus and then finding a pathway to success. Steve Davis: I think this will always remain one of our favourite pieces, but for a while we’d hit a brick wall in how to shape it from its long form improvisation into a defined piece. As we recorded it I could barely play I was laughing so much at how beautiful a collaboration it was and how euphoric a line we’d come up with. Steve wrote a wooden whistle melody which I played, then Kavus composed a harmony part, also for the whistle. There’s a moment towards the end that really emphasises the easy, ego-free, collaborative working relationship we have. Then somehow we managed to find the perfect three-minute Krautrock pop track hiding in the middle of it. MY: This started life as a sprawling 20-minute epic, and went from being what we considered our favourite piece to being almost abandoned for being entirely without merit. You get a tantalising glimpse into this sort of green, slow motion, zero-gravity world surrounded by tentacle-like vegetation and by the time you realise where you are and that you'd like to stay it's evaporated, leaving you wondering if it was ever there at all. Kavus Torabi: Sometimes this is my favourite, it's so brief.
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