Monday July 2nd

As I mentioned earlier Udo has been so kind and given us a couple of extra days in the studio. Jakob and Arvid needed to go back to Copenhagen for different reasons and Nagel, the most incredible helpful friend ever, rented a van, drove them and our equipment to Copenhagen and came back to Hamburg the same night. He even went for beers for Udo and me... We can't thank you enough for all your help, Nagel!!!!Udo and I got some good stuff recorded. we did vocals for Idiot On Treadmill and Common Ground, and we did some guitars for Somebody's floor. Udo is great to work with. He has some cool ideas and of course he knows his way around the Ton Hotel studio. We worked until we couldn't keep our eyes open anymore...

Mikkel / Barra Head

Sunday July 1st

Arvid and Jakob partied hard last night... I heard come home in the morning at some point.
As it turned out I could have partied there with them, since we didn't do any vocals. This was Tim's last day and he prefered to have as much basic tracks done, so we did guitars for Common Ground and some small bass parts that we needed. Unfortunately we will have to do the rest of the recordings without Tim, since he's going on vacation with his family now. But Udo has promised to help out and he's a skilled producer and engineer, so we're in good hands. Udo came in the evening and we played around with some of his great electronic stuff for One By One. It sounds like nothing else we've ever done, but still it's really cool...

Mikkel / Barra Head

Saturday June 30th

Now it seems a really long time ago, but at some point this spring we decided it could be fun to play a show in Hamburg while we're here recording. It seemed like a great idea at the time but now that we're a little short of time in the studio, suddenly it did not seem so convenient. We worked at the studio through the afternoon with some bass for Common Ground and vocals for Undermine, but we didn't get a whole lot done before it was off to the Übel & Gefärhlich, which is a pretty cool venue. It turned out to be a really great evening. The nice guys in the band Sport was on the bill too and opened with a great set. Then we entered the stage and it actually felt really nice to loosen up a bit, not worrying about little details for a night and just enjoy playing these new songs live. We played a mixed set with both new and old songs, and while the new ones were fresh in our memory, the old ones were a little more shaky. But all in all we played quite ok, I think. It was packed in the room and among all these nice people were our friends from Delbo and from Sinnbus who travelled all the way from Berlin to see us. Thanks so much for coming, guys! It means a lot! Nagel once again worked incredibly hard making things as nice as possible for us. Jakob and Arvid stayed for some hours at the Übel & Gefärlich listening to the DJ's for the rest of the night, but I had to go home and take care of my voice. There's a lot of work to be done tomorrow.

Mikkel / Barra Head

Friday June 29th

Tim came around 11.00 and we decided to record some of the guitar we did for Undermine again. We also came up with some pretty sweet guitar dubs. We did a few guitar parts for From Hope Comes Doubt and then it was finally time to start recording vocals. We did From Hope Comes Doubt, Some Wars, Gradiska and it went really well. Tim works fast and seems to prefer energy and passion over precision in the vocals. Now I'm not much of singer, but I tend to agree with Tim on this and I just cross my fingers hoping he knows what he's doing - which I feel pretty confident he does. He's talking a lot about what the songs and the lyrics make him feel and how he want to capture that mood. He's really into it...
We made an unpleasant discovery today as well. Unfortunately the take we had of Common Ground wasn't good enough. It was too fast and a little sloppy, so we decided to set up mic's for the drums again, and Jakob will record his drums over night. He's a hardworking drummer, that's for sure!

Mikkel / Barra Head

Thursday June 28th

The days are really starting to be one big blur. I don't remember excactly what we worked on yesterday, but I think we did guitar stuff on Iron To Skin and Idiot On Treadmill with Tim. Idiot On Treadmill got some crazy fast melodic stuff in the guitar riff so we needed to get that pretty precise. Iron To Skin has a really aggressive riff and ended up sounding just great! Late afternoon Tim had to leave to pick up his family, but we worked on some guitar for Undermine guitar ourselves. Jakob has engineered quite a bit before and even though Ton Hotel's equipment is new to him he did really well, I must say. We got some great stuff recorded. Nagel came by at night and with Undermine done we couldn't work anymore without Tim here. After all he's the man calling the shots regarding the production. So we watched a movie and drank a few beers instead.

Mikkel / Barra Head

Wednesday June 27th

With Mikkel in the studio recording guitar the whole day I have decided to step up and start writing a blog entry. So here we go. And what happened yesterday? We recorded bass on Gradiska and started doing guitar. We recorded Gradiska once before for a single that was released about a year ago, but this time we really wanted to give the gloomy feeling in the song more emphasis. The song is inspired by an experience the band had on tour in ex-jugoslavia where we were held back at the border for 24 hours because of bureacracy. I have always regarded that experience as something out of a Kafka novel, and for me it was important that this edgy and eerie feeling got back into the song. And I think it has now. After that Tim and Mikkel started working hard on the guitar - only interrupted by Tim now and then sarcastically commenting on the relentless pouring rain. "Hey guys, guess what... It's raining!!". On the bright side the weather at least isn't giving us the urge to leave the studio. Things are progressing nicely and the songs are really coming to life here in the studio.

Arvid / Barra Head

Tuesday June 26th

We worked pretty hard today. Arvid did some great sounding bass on the tracks that weren't recorded live and we did a great moody live take of a slow song called Accept The Risk. We put up a big empty oil can in the recording room and put a microphone inside it and got some crazy sounding reverb and ambience out of it. We even decided to record the pouring rain (it has been raining almost consistenly for the past week), we'll see if we're gonna use that. At this point all the drum tracks for 11 songs have been recorded. We might do some percussion here and there but the basic stuff is done. Almost all bass tracks have been done too. It feels pretty fantastic to have come this far in the process. So now it's up to me to get the last guitar stuff and the vocals recorded.

By the way, some photos added in the earlier posts. New photos and hopefully a little video on the way too...

Mikkel / Barra Head