On Saturday we picked up our freshly minted CDs from Troy Horse. The artwork turned out great - it’s a digipak made of 85% recycled material, with the remainder sourced from sustainably managed forests - so it’s reasonably environmentally friendly to boot.

You can also now buy the EP on iTunes.

We’ll hopefully be getting the CDs available for sale online shortly as well. We’ll keep you posted as things progress…

Of course we’ll also have them at the launch on the 25 June as well - so if you’re coming down to the show you can pick one up then.

Speaking of which, we’ve confirmed that Underlapper and Karoshi will be supporting us on the night - two great acts, so even more reason to come down and help us celebrate

Well, after much too-ing and fro-ing we have artwork!

The result is a collaboration between Toby (who took the photo that the artwork is based on) and myself - we hope you like the result

So we’re just a few weeks away from having finished EPs in our hot little hands. Yay! Hopefully we’ll also have a date lined up shortly as well to celebrate the launch and getting back to performing.

We completed the mastering on Saturday with Don Bartley at Benchmark Mastering.

We’d heard good things about Don (Genevieve, among others, had recommended him) and we certainly weren’t disappointed. Even though we weren’t 100% prepared, Don was able to create an awesome result.

We ended up finishing slightly ahead of schedule too, and we’re really stoked with the results. As with any recording, there were a few things in the mix that we weren’t happy with after listening to it for a while (one of the hazards of keeping to a budget!), and most of those were resolved through the mastering process. Genevieve’s mixes really shine as a result.

Anyways - we’re really happy to have the process finished - now onto artwork and a launch gig

Update: We’ve got some tracks up on our MySpace.

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…

I wanted to write just a little bit about the process we’re going through recording. There’s more “over the jump” if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details of the process.

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We’ve just locked in dates in the studio to start recording. After much looking around and chatting to folks and checking out studios and doing spreadsheets, we’ve decided to go with Revolution Studios, run by Genevieve Maynard.

Genevieve will also be producer of the EP, which will bring a set of fresh ears to the material, and some good outside judgment to the process.

We’ll hit the studio in the last weekend of May, and mix the first weekend of June - so if all goes to plan, and we can sort out mastering fairly soon after that we’ll have the EP ready for release online by mid-June.

It’s all very exciting for us… I’ve forgotten how much of a buzz recording is. So after our gig tonight at the Hopetoun we’ll be getting into rehearsal mode for the recording - at this stage we’re planning 5 tracks.