Wired: White Stripes’ New Album on Jack’n'Meg USB Sticks.

As someone who is very keen on living sustainably (more here and here) I’ve actually been thinking about how we can make our EP release more environmentally friendly.

Although the tides are changing towards a download model, I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I keep imagining someone at one of our gigs wanting to buy our EP and being disappointed with not being able to take away a physical product - preferably that plays on their CD player in the car or at home.

One of the ideas that I came up with was using cheap USB drives to release the album. Then the purchaser would get a re-usable drive that had utility outside getting the music home (which would nowadays usually be ripped to iTunes/iPod anyway).

It’s interesting to see the White Stripes do this, albeit with a clever twist - making the USB drive design a premium option.

(PS. I’d be interested to hear from anyone with ideas for making the whole CD thing more sustainable - leave a comment if you have any ideas…)

So on Tuesday night at around 8pm Genevieve handed over a finished set of mixes to us. So we’re now the proud owners of a pre-production master

We’re getting good responses to the mixes so far, which is a good sign. As with any recording project there’s things we’d like to tweak and fix, but thanks to a lot of long hours from Gen we’ve ended up with a great result. We’re looking forward to see what you think.

Some of the songs sound quite different to what we anticipated - but the sound of the drums and bass in particular is very alive - some great room sounds which work well against the more electronic sounds. The middle section of Darker Days in particular is sounding quite a bit different - with a really cool interplay between the electronic and live sounds.

For those of you that have heard us live the songs will still be familiar - but I think some of the arrangements will change to reflect the recorded versions. Should bring a bit of extra life into our rehearsals and gigs in the coming months.

We’ve got one step left to go before pressing the CD and printing the artwork and that’s mastering. We’re expecting to have that completed around mid-July, and we’ll hopefully have samples up on our MySpace profile shortly after that.

After much too-ing and fro-ing we’ve also decided on a name for the EP - Between your lines. And there’s a strong chance we’ll be using a different cover shot than the one I mentioned previously - one of Toby’s shots in fact. But more on that once we have some artwork to show

Anyways - hopefully we’ll have more stuff to put up soon - and then some gigs to announce shortly after that. Can’t wait to get out and playing again…