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Certain dates hold a lot of significance for us all. We know that December 25th is the day Jesus was born, and we know that he was raised from the dead on one of the Sundays in March or April (we keep on changing our minds on that one!). February the 14th sees us celebrate St. Valentine's Day (my favourite day of the year), Diabetes Day is November the 14th and on July the 1st we dust off our Maple Leafs (leaves?) for Canada Day. But now there is one more date, perhaps more momentous than Diabetes Day and Canada Day combined and multiplied by ten or twenty… Monday, November the 27th sees Panda Kopanda release only our second EP ever. It's taken some time, but finally the CDs are in front of us and we're raring to go.
Now, if I were asked to describe Panda Kopanda in three words I would probably say we are 'impatient', 'pernickety' and possibly 'sexual'. The last one is more of an underlying, subtle characteristic, but the first two are the important ones, and the ones that have often made the making of The Ocean of Fire EP a frustrating time for us. Being proponents of the DIY culture (I like to think of ourselves as the Handy Andy Kanes of indie pop) every note of our songs, every frame of our videos and every pixel of artwork has been analysed and okayed by each member of the band. This has inevitably led to a long time without much perceivable progress for our loyal legions of fans. So, in this blog I shall try and explain some of the pains we went through to getting this EP on sale, in your stereo, and massaging your lovely lugholes.
(I'll try and make sure it's not just a thousand words of self-pitiful moaning, but that's probably how it's going to turn out.)
Recording for The Ocean of Fire EP began many moons ago at the family Mills' cottage. I won't disclose all our unique techniques that give us "the Panda Kopanda sound", but washing machines were recorded along with the sound of a Hammond organ not being played, and mics were placed down the barrel of a shotgun and pointed at guitar amps (not the same shotgun that was pointed in anger at Jonny in an earlier blog entry). So, after recording children's toys and salad spinners on our previous EP, I'm glad to say the tradition of recording various stupid things continues. Moreover, I'm sure if you turn up the CD really loud you might well be able to hear some shouts of children here and there, as it wasn't the most soundproof of studios. Although that was certainly more of an annoyance to the Mills family than us. And the kids proved a welcome distraction for us as we often went for a kick-about with them after some unsuccessful takes. Nothing takes your mind off a frustrating recording session like taking round three or four children and scoring an absolute wonder goal!
Mixing and mastering were again handled by John Mills, who probably came within a few inches of suicide doing this. We had everything sounding spot on, then the problem of the Ford Focus continually reared its ugly head. Phil Spector used to listen to his mixes in a car because that's where people would hear it on the radio, but I doubt he ever listened to anything in a Ford Focus - that car has acoustics unlike anything else. Our songs would sound perfect on any other stereo and then in the Ford Focus we heard horrible overtones, undertones, sidetones… basically it sounded like a shit sandwich. So, countless 'final masters' were made before we hit upon a mix that Focus drivers would be pleased with (we hope they all appreciate it).
Asides from just sounding good, we here at Panda Kopanda like to think of ourselves as a multi-sensory experience and our CDs must also 'look' good, 'feel' good, 'smell' good, and 'taste' good. We dabbled with the sixth sense, trying to get the CD to 'predict' good, but our experiments proved unsuccessful. Getting the CD to look and feel as good as it does was largely down to artwork handyman Andy Henry….
Crossing the 'T's and dotting the lower-case 'j's
The artwork for The Ocean of Fire EP is something we're all very proud of, and I think it really suits the music. I'm sure John would like me to point out that a lot of the ideas for the artwork were actually his (Gavin nearly got a death threat for claiming part-authorship of the video in a recent interview we gave, so I won't make that mistake), but it was Mr. Henry who slaved over a hot computer to get these ideas into existence. Considering our rather paltry form of recompense it was certainly a living hell for Andy as we frequently rang him up, or paid late-night visits to his house to say things such as:
"We need to fix the full-stops. We can't have 'E P dot', it has to either be 'E dot P dot' or no dots at all."
"I'm not sure about that 'A' there, it looks too much like an anarchist's 'A' to me."
"I know I keep saying this but I think it would look so much better if we did the whole thing in biro and not the felt-tip."
"Do you reckon that rip looks a bit too much like a face."
"You could do with a haircut, Andy."
Thankfully Andy's patience never let up and eventually we couldn't find anything wrong no matter how hard we looked. An important piece of advice we would give to any other budding DIY musicians out there is to take complete advantage of your friends – just make sure you stay the right side of exploitation.
Making the video
Jonny has a little digital camera, and one day he found out he could create animations by taking various still frames and creating a sort of quick slideshow on the computer. Initially this was just used for our own amusement, making animations of assorted toys and household objects floating around the room (I think these can still be found on YouTube somewhere). Again the DIY bug bit us and John thought it would be a good idea to make a music video using this technique. 'About My Temper' is quite a jerky song so pulsing still frames would probably suit it quite well, and John, being John, obsessed over this idea – sitting in his room for days and nights splitting the song into hundreds of half-beats and getting the exact syllabic sound for each line of vocals. When it came time to shoot Gavin was told to make a "kkkk" sound, make a "wwww" sound, make an "eh" sound, make a "sss" sound, etc. and this basically took us a few hours. Thankfully we amused ourselves by gelling Gav's hair in spikes for the "Boh!" section. He looked a bit of a tit, but it worked well. The nut cracking wasn't actually done by Gavin, he raised his arm and lowered the hammer slowly until it was on top of the nut, then we removed the nut, smashed it for real, spread the shell about the table and put the nut back under Gav's hammer.
If only one of these days we could have an idea that's actually quite simple and quick to do!
So, as of November 20th The Ocean of Fire EP has been available for pre-order (get in there quick to avoid the Christmas rush!) and on Monday, November 27th it will be available for instant purchase. Please buy it, I had to type this blog in gloves because we can't afford to pay for heating! (that's my excuse for any spelling mistakes anyway)
I think that's enough self-pitiful moaning for one night!
Our thanks go to: Simon Rand and envelope, Andy Henry, Stuart Sloan, Gareth Andrew, as well as The Millseses, Comptons, Rabbitts and Reid.
Our apologies go to: Edward Slater, (Jonny's and my new nephew who lives in Cardiff) who we couldn't get over to see because of the horrendous workload involved in making this EP. I'm sure he wasn't that fussed, but we were!
David
To buy the EP: http://shop.cableattack.com/
To watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKyhfMu4Vkc
The Handy Andy Kane of DIY: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viNmZK5WERU
7:59 PM
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