The Karl Marx Communist Ball

Yesterday I bought a cajon and a ukulele you can actually get a tune out of.

I played around with them for a bit and the next thing I knew I'd turned into The Bonzo Dog Band. Anyway, here's the result:

The Karl Marx Communist Ball

Fifty second of genocidal whimsy. Enjoy!

After the Revolution

First off, apologies for not updating the blog recently. It's not that I've stopped working on the music; it's more that the endless hours of mixing and remixing leave me too tired to write about the bloody stuff.

Anyway, two tracks have been completed since my previous post: 

Follow Me Down and After the Revolution. 

Yes, it's yet another version of Follow Me Down, but this one is more or less definitive. It's certainly much more carefully thought-out and produced than the others. I changed the key and the tempo, rearranged it and adopted a singing style that was intended as a sort of faux Tom Waites, but actually sounds more like Burgess Meredith. I'm not unhappy with that. Then, of course, there's the long descent into chaos at the end, which was good fun to do.

Tom Waites

If anything, After the Revolution was even more carefully produced and (hopefully) marks the start of me getting to grips with compression. It's there on the vocals, narration, bass and kick drum to help them cut through, but I used none at all on the master mix as I wanted to preserve the song's full dynamics: it starts in a laughably simple fashion (using the time-honoured pairing of melodica and Stylophone) and builds to a point which is hopefully a bit creepy and strident (the song has 50 tracks, 28 of which are vocal tracks). You diminish that development if you use compression to make everything nice and loud.

Owen Jones

There's also a bit of collaboration, which pleases me. Kath Sutherland narrates and joins the Chorus of the Glorious Proletariat for verse three, along with Graeme Sutherland, William Sutherland and Mark Thirlwell. Your status as Heroes of the Revolution is assured, guys.