Complog 5

The Business End

The Fear Wasabi bandwagon rattled down from it’s HQ in Dundee to Glasgow yesterday for a very pleasant afternoon chatting with Gaia and Giles at Savalas.  The discussion occasionally touched on our “working dynamic”, which now needs to expand a bit given the deadlines and so on, as well as the need to work quite closely with Giles.  My effort at describing our working practise as Fear Wasabi (which, prior to this project was more a semi-improvised live-performance creature rather than a recording one) was that we had “several long discussions before sitting down to record over the space of an evening”, which probably wasn’t terribly enlightening.  I think it’d be fair to say that what we try to focus on is the root concept that we want to convey, and that how we go about making actual sounds follows that.  Sometimes specific ways of conveying an idea will come to us, but often we work just by trying things and seeing how the others react.  Each member of the group plays some sort of instrument, for example on our Traffic interpretation we really liked the video’s simple energy, so you can hear me strumming away at a violin, Gomango playing a harmonium and rattling some fruit-shakers, In/visigen bowing some violin through a guitar effects-pedal and Phipsim playing his beloved Korg x-50 and MicroKorg…all of us huddled around a small microphone.
Anyway, a few hundred words later I feel I’m no closer to really pinning down how exactly we make these noises, hopefully through the mysteries of the internet this will have made some sense to someone somewhere…
Upon it’s return to HQ, Fear Wasabi is pleased to report that it enjoyed some excellent fish and chips from The Silvery Tay (yes, in Newport rather than Dundee.  If ever a city was in real need of a good chipper, it’s Dundee) and sat on the roof of a castle watching the sun go down.