You Wait Thirty-Five Years…

In what will probably go down as the worst bit of release timetabling in the history of my musical endeavours, it looks like both Fusion Orchestra 2’s Casting Shadows and Broken Parachute’s Down is the New Up are going to be released on the same day. It seems that you can wait thirty-five years for a release and then two come along at the same time.

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Broken Parachute Opens!

Well we haven’t quite got the album released yet, but in the mean time Broken Parachute now has a new website.

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Sketch of a Day, and FO2 updates

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in this blog, but today I have finally pronounced my instrumental track “Sketch of a Day” finished and so it seems like a good excuse to update things.

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Fusion Orchestra 2 Video

Just a quick post to say that the David Hewitt, who came along to a Fusion Orchestra 2 rehearsal in November armed with cameras, has finished producing his video of us. At seven minutes, it’s only fractionally longer than our shortest song so makes an efficient way of getting a feel for what the band is like.

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Dband Disbanding

The ever-present difficulties of conflicting priorities and calendars and holding together a stable line-up has meant that Dband has disbanded. There may be some ad-hoc projects involving alumni at some point in the future but for now I’ll be concentrating my attentions on Fusion Orchestra 2, Broken Parachute and my solo noodlings.

Dband: Liar In Disguise

The result of my first recording session with Dband is now available. Liar In Disguise is actually something that we wrote on the first day I met up with the band in January. When I turned up James and Luke were warming up around chorused fingerstyle guitar riff and once I’d set up we jammed over it for a bit. I wondered whether it would work to stick a minor third key change in for a chorus, so we tried that and we also added a moody instrumental break in the middle to give the Hammond — new to Dband’s sound — a little chance to breathe. By the end of the session it felt like we had pretty finished the structure of the song.

Luke tweaked the lyrics over the coming months as we hunted for a rhythm section and I added a backing vocal emphasis to the chorus. Shemeck’s arrival on bass gave the middle section a new twist to the rhythm, and when the time came to book a recording studio this was first on our hit list.

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Joining Dband on Keyboards

Things are still reasonably busy with FO2, Broken Parachute and I’ve been doing more solo work again lately, but I’ve never been a believe in the whole Too Much On My Plate mentality. Recently Dband came looking for a keyboard to broaden their sound. One quick listen to their previous material and one jam later and it seemed that I needed to make room for band in my life 🙂