DEMO OF THE MONTH
October 2008: "Beat the Noise (Joakim Raw Mix)"


Dear friends,

We had shows, we had troubles, we traveled and we worked. The studio needed some polishing, it takes a lot of thinking to make all those machines cooperate. And we listened to some forgotten tracks. Going through a box of general mish-mash the other day I found an audio CD with this track. Here's its story:

During the Skyshaper sessions we called in a few people to help us out. Andreas Radler was one of them and he generously gave us some magnificent noise loops. Actually loops is the wrong word, I should say tracks. He's even worse than I am when it comes to ear-splitting monotonies that last about as long as it takes for Hell to freeze over and then some. "Subterfugue for 3 Absynths" is cocktail music compared to some of his stuff.

Well, never the less he came up with some truly amazing noise and Eskil, being the ever-pilfering audio shoplifter that he is, found some juicy parts and started working on a track. He added a simple and mesmerizing French Horn melody line to it (the one that sounds a bit like a military call-to-arms and makes your hair stand up), wrote some words and sang them in his inimitable way. Probably late at night. It became a noise-pop song called "Beat the Noise" and we worked on it for quite some time without finding a way to make it sound like it belonged. So it got shelved.

As work went on with Skyshaper I decided to give it another try and made a remix. I first made a large amounts of beats and noise loops and mapped them out in a very nifty piece of software called Ableton Live. Then I took the vocals and processed them with filters, vocoders, some interesting audio buffer manipulators (actually the same ones used in "Sweet & Salty") and then I just played the whole thing "live" to make a basic track. I think it got a bit over the top and it's not planned right. The eq and the mix is out of whack, but when I listened to it again the other day it carries a raw energy that I must confess that I miss in many of the polished tracks that we release. It's a fine balance to keep the energy and still present something that is "primal". The refinement is also a form of degradation, in a way.

Well. This is "Beat the Noise (Joakim Raw Mix)". Some of you will probably like it.

Covenant trivia: the thunderstorm in the end is a recording that Eskil made in Berlin. I talked to him on the phone while he was holding our insanely expensive microphone in the window, telling him to be careful with it. In the recording (sadly not as audible under my evil treatment) you can actually feel the electricity as lightning strikes a few blocks away. Wonderful. It is our storm indeed.


/Joakim August 31, 2008