After a wee bit of a hiatus while we concentrated on our summer gig Black Cherry, which focuses on live music and inventive covers, we're back in the studio creating new music for our net-based project Species 8472 once again. We've spruced up the playlist and thought you might like to know a bit more about the songs. More will be appearing soon...as soon as we finish them, that is.....!

Dissatisfaction is a song with lyrics & vocal by Clare, channelling a dark and distinctly adult version of Tinkerbell.  There's always an adult story lurking under children's tales anad folktales, and stylistically, this one is as much Angela Carter as J.M. Barrie.

My Heart's Hung Over is a song by Alasdair about how it feels to be drunk on fresh air. We live in a beautiful and wild region of Scotland. 'Nuff said.

Species 8472 doesn't often do covers - that's Black Cherry's bag - but here's a complete reinvention of Audioslave's anthemic Shadow On The Sun, recast as a traditional Scots lament. Local music teacher Beth Hunter contributed a gorgeous vocal and played the gaelic harp, or clarsach.

A Tripwire features Clare's lyrics set to an old 6/8 musical figure - and an old title - which Alasdair had stuck in his head. It features Irish singer Susanna Wolfe and is all about those weird hinged moments when a door opens and a new phase of your life begins. It can feel like being tripped up.

Clare says Scarburst is about old wounds, old blood which rises to the surface when you least expect it. Alasdair got a bit Nine Inch Nails with it.

Finally, Green Sky is a seven-and-a-half minute epic, a Russian short story by Natalia Kutsepova set to music by Alasdair. Natalia's shimmering vocal performances are far too rare, but she also takes beautiful photographs.

Would you all please do us a favour? Pretty please?

Species 8472 are one of ten bands from the UK and Ireland with a track on the fantastic new AQA Greatest Questions Album. Some of the UK's best unsigned bands were asked to submit songs based around some of the most common questions that get submitted to the service, and the best 10 were selected for the album. Our question was the mysterious "Can You Cry Under Water?" and we made it into something which casts a sideways look at the changes global warming might bring.

Click on the banner below and listen to the tracks - and then we would be endlessly grateful if you would vote for us and give us the chance to win the top prize of £5,000!!


You need a UK or Irish mobile phone number to vote, but it won't cost you anything if you vote from the website. And you get the chance to ask AQA (it stands for Any Questions Answered) a free trivia question, too!








All the best and thanks a million,
Clare & Alasdair, Species 8472

Species 8472 has been part part of ITSOM for a while now; ITSOM has transmogrified itself into IT'S ON and we played the IT'S ON stage at the Isle of Skye Music Festival last Saturday.  And it was COOOWULL! 

Well, I say, 'we'.  Actually Clare couldn't make it so I played the gig with just a piano and a laptop for company . . . and found it really worked!  At least the piano and the vocal was live and I really got into it and so did the audience.  I played mostly new stuff that's still in the works (mainly cos I could remember the chords as I've been recording these songs recently!).  Some of these new things have already appeared on the MySpace page - stuff like 'Chewing My Leg Off' and other new stuff'll be up there soon - I played a new one called 'Scale Model' which will be finished soon.  It was nice to see oldies like 'Scarburst' worked well live too.  I always thought that was one of our wackiest songs and I've been amazed at the positive reaction it's had and the way it got used as the ITSOM theme-toon.  I was genuinely flattered by that.

It was good to meet up with Alex MacLeod from IT'S ON and Cuillin FM - had a laugh and talked again about doing a radio sesh - must get on with that.  Alex tells me the ITSOM remit has now expanded from just the west coast to the whole of the Highlands, so I guess there'll be more Species 8472 gigs in the near future.

And after all that, this week I gotta finish this new song we've been commissioned (how cool is that ?!) to write for the AQA album called 'Can You Cry Underwater?' so I'd better rev that computer up.  Even if I am having to do it with only one reverb working cos one of my Alesis Midiverb's went on the fritz again last week and had to be sent back to Digital Village (AGAIN!).  Still, I'm probably guilty of putting too much reverb on things anyway so I guess I'll just have to slum it with one Midiverb!

Anyway, thanks to anyone and everyone who came along to the gig.  I had a great time.

Alasdair

Our unreleased "celtic" cover of Audioslave's Shadow On The Sun featuring vocal and clarsach from traditional Scots singer Beth Hunter of Gairloch (currently to be seen on the BBC's TV documentary series When Love Comes To Town) was to have appeared on a "Tribute To Audioslave" CD covers compilation, scheduled for release internationally in summer 2007 on US label Versailles Records.

Sadly, due to the recent breakup of Audioslave, the compilation has apparently been cancelled. Funny, you'd think the end of a band would be quite the best time to release a tribute to them. But what do we know of big business out here on the perimeter where there are no stars?

On a brighter note, Species 8472 member Clare O'Brien is now running the new Chris Cornell Fan Page. 

An unreleased Species 8472 track called Green Sky features on an unusual new download compilation called Falling from Earth Monkey Productions. It features tracks from all kinds of artists, all of which have a spoken word element as well as music. Check them all out - you can  stream or download them here.  The very wonderful Earth Monkey Productions have even made a separate web page for each artist featured on the compilation - you can see our Green Sky page here.

Our track features a spoken and sung vocal, mostly in Russian, from multi-talented Siberian writer, photographer, designer and singer Natalia Kutsepova. Natalia recorded her work at her home in the USA and e-mailed the recording to Alasdair, who set it to music.  Natalia describes the piece as "about finding someone who kind of fell out of the sky/nowhere and onto the pavement, you know, 'The Man Who Fell To Earth'-like. It starts with him just lying there sleeping, you wake him and there is this long perfect day, and after the day is over you fall out of grace by losing him again."

You can visit Natalia's MySpace page here.

Just a shout out to the nice blokes at ITSOM (In The Shadow Of Mountains) for making us their FEATURED BAND OF THE MONTH!! Species 8472 thanks you.

Go to http://www.intheshadowofmountains.com and click on "bands".....check out all the other great Scottish west coast artists while you're at it......

Clare, Species 8472

http://www.subba-cultcha.com/vote.php

We'd appreciate anyone who'd like to vote for us on this - it's a sort of competition between all the bands that have appeared on their "unsigned" podcasts in recent weeks.

Cheers

Clare

Two blogs in one day - got to be some kind of record for us.

Got some very good news today - our cover of Audioslave's Shadow On The Sun is to appear on US label Versailles Records' upcoming tribute to Audioslave, to be released in the summer of 2007.

Most of our music is original material, but we do some covers - and we thought it would be interesting to try a cover of this song as a traditional Scots lament. Chris Cornell of Audioslave is of Irish parentage and we felt that buried inside the rock song Audioslave recorded, there was something else - something very Celtic. We tried to bring that out in our version, which features a female vocal, tin whistle and clarsach (traditional Celtic harp) as well as other instruments. For this track we used a guest singer, Beth Hunter, a local traditional musician and a teacher of music at the local school. She had never heard of Audioslave or heard their version of the song. We taught the song to her orally, and she gave her own performance which was completely original. Tin whistles were played by local musician Alex Urquhart-Taylor. Alasdair and I produced and arranged the track.

More news on this as we have it!!!

Clare, Species 8472