Mike featured in Guitar Player magazine
The article covers Mike's work in Darkroom, especially on Some Of These Numbers Mean Something, and with Bernhard Wagner on their Pedaltone project.
There's no online link for the article right now, but we'll update this post if and when one becomes available. In the meantime, go buy the magazine!
os, Dec 2008
Darkroom interviewed on WeHeartMusic Radio
You can listen to it here. If you download the whole show, or use the embedded player on the page, our bit starts at about 18:15 in. Or you can download just our section (lower down on the page).
Possibly my favourite quote from the interview: "songs... with lyrics and everything".
Sometimes I forget just how far outside the conventional boundaries of pop we operate.
os, Nov 2008
More reviews
- Progressive Ears
- Vital Weekly
- We Heart Music
os, Nov 2008
More SOTNMS coverage
- A review on webzine The Silent Ballet.
- We're currently riding high at number 6 in the nowlikephotographs chart.
os, Oct 2008
StudioRacks
The solution? Some custom studio rack furniture from StudioRacks. I can't recommend this chap highly enough. Very friendly and attentive service, excellent quality results, and the fact that everything is custom made means you can get exactly what you want.
os, Oct 2008
Darkroom on SoundCloud
First impressions are good - it's a nice bit of web design, good looking and easy to use. It remains to be seen whether it's actually of any use.
And here's a special treat (since the Last.fm page for SOTNMS is still bugged - grrr) - a whole track from the new album, via the SoundCloud embeddable music player. Enjoy!
os, Oct 2008
Improvizone at Switch - video
Improvizone at Switch, October 7th 2008 from Andrew Ostler on Vimeo.
os, Oct 2008
SOTNMS - the drummer's perspective
It's a nice review anyway.
os, Oct 2008
SOTNMS now released
You can order the CD from Burning Shed, or buy the download from most online retailers e.g. iTunes.
os, Oct 2008
First SOTNMS review
Michael's Stretched Landscape #1 is a personal favourite of mine. Pick up a copy if you don't already own this ambient classic.
os, Sept 2008
Improvizone at the Woodford Festival
More info on the event page on Facebook or the Improvizone site.
os, Sept 2008
New album now available for pre-order
os, Sept 2008
Some Of These Numbers Mean Something
Release date is 3rd October 2008, and with any luck you'll be able to pre-order it before then.
From the press release:
Darkroom's new album - Some Of These Numbers Mean Something - is their 8th to date, and marks the 10th anniversary of their first (Daylight) released by 3rd Stone in 1998.
The original brief for the new album was: guitar under a microscope.
In places it's the heaviest Darkroom album yet, but also the most accessible, combining 70s space rock, 80s Sheffield electronica, 60s guitar instrumentals and 90s post rock.
Mixing classic synthesizer & guitar tones with contemporary post-production,
this album combines improvisation with carefully crafted and layered arrangement, and rewards repeated listening.
From Santana & Tangerine Dream to Cocteau Twins & Tortoise: file under ambient stadium rock.
(full text here)
os, Sept 2008
New album - more progress
Expect to hear release details soon. It'll be available from Burning Shed initially, and in digital form somewhat later. I heartily encourage all to buy a physical copy from Burning Shed, so you can appreciate the majesty of the fold-out CD booklet.
os, August 2008
New album progress
What's the music like, I hear you ask. Well, it's something of a departure if you know us from recent stuff, like the podcast, or the Fallout series, but recognisably the work of the same people. Only one track on the album would class as 'ambient', which is the first word I've chosen to describe what we do for years. In a way it's back to the song-type music we explored on Seethrough, though obviously without a vocalist this time. The inclusion of a live drummer on several tracks lends it some post-rock accessibility, but I don't think anyone's going to confuse us with Tortoise. The brief for the album was "guitar under the microscope". It's not the album I thought we were going to make, but it took on a life and direction of its own, and I'm very pleased with where it ended up.
We took some new photos too, with a view to using them on the sleeve, or in related publicity material. I quite like this one - we look adequately enigmatic, without looking suicidal or homicidal.
os, July 2008
Os's Last.fm profile
http://www.last.fm/user/expertsleepers/
Caveat: I share my iTunes library with my wife, so the charts and playlists you see will be skewed slightly. I, for example, am not a great Tori Amos fan, contrary to what Last.fm would have you believe.
os, July 2008
Broken Flowers and Ethiopiques
Highly recommended.
os, July 2008
Darkroom on iTunes after all
Daylight on iTunes
Carpetworld EP on iTunes
os, July 2008
Back - with a new arrival
I'll endeavour to keep this blog going a bit more now things are (fingers crossed) settling down.
os, July 2008
Cheap Chinese mics 'r' us
Mike had a new cheapo Chinese ribbon mic he wanted to try out - the T.BONE RM700. It's an odd looking thing - like a big metal lollipop. We stuck it in front of Mike's awesome Rivera amp and cranked it up.
The sound is - interesting. Makes things sound a bit old and knackered. Also it turns out there was a nasty resonant buzz on something - maybe the mic, maybe the cab - but fortunately we recorded a DI signal too. You should still be able to hear some of the buzz on the album, where we felt it was tasteful rather than annoying.
os, June 2008
Forthcoming gigs
- 23rd May 2008 at The Design Museum, London. Mike can't make it sadly. Playing will be myself (Os), Andrew Booker and Steve Lawson.
- 28th May 2008 at Ember, London. Ember, against all our expectations, has re-opened after the fire that cancelled our residency earlier this year. It'll be Mike & myself, plus Andrew Booker and Simon Laffy - a repeat of the line-up at our last Ember gig.
- 4th June 2008 at The Plough, Walthamstow. It'll be Mike & myself, plus Andrew Booker and Nick Cottam.
os, May 2008
Drums!
Andy did us proud, recording some excellent grooves for about half a dozen tracks.
For the gear-heads reading: we used four mics in total. Andy's Blue Ball was in the kick drum. The snare was covered by a dynamic mic of some sort, which I think was the rehearsal room's. Probably an SM-57. We had one half of a matched pair of Rode NT5s as a close-ish overhead, somewhere over the hi-hat. For some reason we didn't use the other one of the pair. Finally we had my trusty Rode NT2-A as an other-side-of-the-room overhead-cum-everything mic. We've been able to get a very nice sound in the mix from this, somewhat random and thrown-together, selection.
os, May 2008
How to lose 3 million fans in one easy step
I've always loved Dazzle Ships. Some great songs, and moreover some really great sounds. After this album OMD start sounding 'successful' i.e. they sound like they can afford the same gear as everyone else. I love the lack of polish in the earlier albums."The album that almost completely killed our career seems to have become a work of dysfunctional genius," says Andy McCluskey with a grin. "The reality is that it's taken Paul [Humphreys] 25 years to forgive me for Dazzle Ships. But some people always hold it up as what we were all about, why they thought we were great."
I always remember when I bought Dazzle Ships (which is not something I can say about most albums I own). I thought I owned everything OMD had ever done, and yet I came across the tape (yes, it was a while ago) of Dazzle Ships in a little music shop on Waterloo Station. I felt like I'd stumbled on hidden treasure. And indeed I was right.
os, April 2008
Prophet '08
Dave Smith was involved in the creation of such legends of synth history as the Prophet 5 when he was working at Sequential Circuits Inc. He now has his own company and is turning out some very nice new machines.
Expect to hear a lot of this keyboard (as well as my trusty Juno 6) on the new album.
Today's podcast episode is a track consisting entirely of Prophet '08, recorded mainly as an exercise in getting to know the new beast. Enjoy!
os, April 08
Last.fm
http://www.last.fm/music/Darkroom
For those not familiar with Last.fm:
It's a web 2.0 social networking kind of thing, and relies to some extent on people tagging the music they listen to, but also just tracks what music you play and works out what else you might like."Last.fm connects you with your favorite music, and uses your unique taste to find new music, people, and concerts you'll like."
Unfortunately it's utterly brain-dead when it comes to handling multiple bands with the same name. Basically, it can't. Of course, there's more than one Darkroom in the world and so we share the page. Which is why you'll find 'Darkroom' prominently tagged as 'indie' on the site. We may be many things, but I'd suggest that 'indie' is not one of them. So, Darkroom fans - or should I say, fans of The One and True Darkroom (us) - get tagging.
os, April 2008
PS I just noticed Darkroom (presumably the other Darkroom) has been tagged as 'nice'. I ask you, who tags music as 'nice'? (If it's you, dear reader, let us know)
The return of the JamMan
I had prepared an unusually large amount of keyboard parts for Mike to play over, so I just sat back and let Mike play this time. We mic'd up a cab driven by a lovely old amp that Mike keeps in his basement. Not least among its features are the rather nice backlit controls - leading us to ignore the music for a bit and have fun taking photos of it in the dark.
This was the session I finally persuaded Mike to break out the legendary combination of Lexicon JamMan and Vortex, which pair formed the basis of the Darkroom sound for some time - until I started doing all the looping in the laptop. It was well worth the effort, as you'll hear when this material ever sees light of day.
More photos here.
os, March 2008
The Dragon's Ball
We were billed as 'lo-fi dreamy techno' (!) The theory was we'd play drones with percussion... but to me, the venue didn't seem right for that, and it's definitely not what came out. Haven't heard the recording back yet - but towards the end, I remember picking up on something Os played and thinking "no echo & maximum fuzz". Darkroom go ambient metal?
The fuzzulator helped make this work: www.demeteramps.com/products/accessories/fuz1.html Small but flexible, it handles vintage, gargly non-linear as well as brutal, bright & focussed with compressed lows. Varying the guitar's volume & tone does something useful as well, and given I typically use a volume pedal after the fuzz, there's a whole range of tones to explore even without echo. Somehow last Wednesday I rediscovered this!
Audio & video to follow...
Mike, March 2008
Update: Andy has written about the gig on the Improvizone blog.
Free download-only release
os, Feb 2008Many view Nemeton's "Remix 2", the last track on The DAC Mixes, as amongst the highlights of the album. "Remix 2" was picked as being the best of the four remixes submitted by Nemeton, but it was a close call as the band considered all of them excellent. Rather than have these tracks languishing, unheard, on the Darkroom hard drive, the band decided to put these out as a free download and a subtle advertisement for the original 'The DAC Mixes' album itself (which featured mixes and contributions from Bass Communion, Tim Bowness, Theo Travis, Peter Chilvers and Centrozoon, amongst others).
Os remixes Look See Proof
Check out the official page here or search on your favourite purveyor of discs/downloads.
os, Feb 2008
The Tape 606
Better yet, they've put out a free (as in beer) library of TR606 samples, which I've been having fun with recently. Go get it here.Not another 808 sample! Well actually it isn't... this is 407 samples taken from two 808's recorded into an Ampex 351 1/2" valve 2 track tape machine! That's not all... We also put the 808's through other vintage gear. Plus we recorded the 808's naked into a Metric Halo ULN-2 firewire audio card. Then we chose the best samples. All 24 bit, and all phat analog goodness! If you can't get a hold of a real 808 then this is as close as you can get in samples... Maybe even better than the having the real thing!
os, Feb 2008
Croydon gig, Feb 27th
As for the Norwich Loopfest, we'll be joined by Andrew Booker on electronic drums.
The return of the Space Echo
As is becoming traditional, here's a photo of Mike's pedal selection for this occasion.
There was a new toy this time - in celebration of our recent BBC gig Mike had splashed out on the new Space Echo re-issue. It has an interesting sound - it's supposed to be an accurate recreation of the vintage Space Echo, but not having used one I couldn't say. It sounded a little digital to me. It also has a slightly redundant Knight Rider-eque red light on the front, which is probably supposed to indicate the progress of the 'tape', but wasn't obviously useful.
We also tried mic'ing up the fretboard of a fretless bass (do fretless basses have fretboards?). If that's useful, which it may not be, it will be for a Talk Talk-style "record a string quartet and only keep the sound of someone dropping his bow" effect.
os, Feb 2008
Darkroom on the BBC
We were asked by our good friend (and fan!) Richard Smith to do some music for a special report on the Securitas robbery at Tonbridge, Kent. Yesterday the trial ended and the pieces were shown on the BBC's South East Today show. Some seven minutes of original Darkroom material was used over three sections.
You can currently stream those pieces from the BBC website - go to www.bbc.co.uk/southeasttoday/latest_stories and look for the sections entitled "The story of a £53m heist", "Heist family's ordeal" and "The robbery that went wrong". It's not clear that these are going to be available long term, so go watch them now before it's too late.
This was a fascinating experience for us, not least because of the complete turnaround in track length from what we're used to - we usually improvise for half an hour at a time, and these pieces needed to be 10-30 seconds long!
Watch out for some versions of these tracks appearing very soon on our podcast.
os, Jan 2008
Update: The first podcast piece is up - 3 more to follow. Also there's a permanent home for the videos now on the BBC website here - the direct video links are here and here.
On The Corner - still on the edge
Mike, Jan 2008
Let's Listen To Maths
Someone had clearly given Alex some recent photos of me - the pose and angle reminds me of our recent gig at the Norwich Loopfest.
os, Jan 2008
Blog now supports comments
os, Jan 2008
Darkroom getting lots of play on SomaFM
It's some baffling twitter-alike Japanese site, but it does give a nice indication of recent Darkroom activity on SomaFM.
I knew we were getting a fair amount of play on their DroneZone channel, but it would seem that Fallout 3 has become a favourite on their (relatively recently added) Doomed channel.
Which is nice.
os, Jan 2008
Darkroom showcased on the Ambientia podcast
Slightly old news, but I'm posting it now for completeness, since we never mentioned it at the time.
Back in March 2008 Darkroom were featured on Ambientia, an ambient music podcast hosted by the charismatic Paul Needler (aka Ned). Ned's own musical project is Arms Full Of Sound, which was the content of his podcast for its first season, but recently he's been featuring the music of other ambient artists.
The podcast is at armsfullofsound.blogspot.com.
os, Jan 2008
Tom Heasley's new album
I've long been a fan of ambient tuba player Tom Heasley. I recently got a copy of his latest album, Passages, which for the first time sees him recording with a drummer. Great stuff - check him out at www.tomheasley.com.
I came across Tom when I heard a track of his (Prelude from On the Sensations of Tone) on somafm's Drone Zone. Gorgeous swathes of looped tuba - I was instantly hooked.
os, Jan 2008
Next Ember gig(s?) cancelled
Sadly we have to report that the forthcoming gig at Ember on January 16th has been cancelled, due to the venue being closed after a serious fire on the premises.
Stay tuned for updates - quite possibly the next couple of gigs in January and February will also be cancelled, or moved to a new venue.
os, Jan 2008
Welcome to the new home of the Darkroom website
os, Jan 2008
Recording for TV
On Sunday (6/1/2008) Mike & I did some recording for some music we've been asked to provide for a TV show. More details later, when we can reveal what show it is.
It was a slightly hectic session, as we had to record in about 4 hours all of Mike's parts for some fairly varied pieces. (Not to mention actually coming up with the music too!) The bonus side was that, unrestrained by any consideration of portability or live robustness, Mike was able to get out a lot more pedals than usual.
More on this later. There should be a web-viewable version of the final TV piece, and the music will most likely make it out on our podcast.
os, Jan 2008
Darkroom photos on Flickr
I'm a great fan of the photo sharing site Flickr. I've started tagging up all the photos of Darkroom with the tag 'darkroomtheband', so you can see them all in one handy place by visiting this address:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/darkroomtheband/
os, Jan 2008
Vintage Darkroom photo
I just came across this old photo, taken at the Portland Arms, Cambridge UK, on the 29th of April 2000. Don't we look young? I'm not sure I have any of that gear any more, either.
Full res photo on Flickr here.
os, Jan 2008
Welcome to the new Darkroom website
As well as just looking nicer, there are some useful new features. E.g. the reviews page has been implemented as a blog, so it's easier to add new ones (there will be new ones one day, I'm sure), and you can filter them by tag e.g. here are all the reviews of Freefall.
There's actually a bit more than usual going on in Darkroom-land these days, so stay tuned for more news over the next while. Why not make use of the RSS feed to keep in touch?
os, Jan 2008