We might not have a great deal to show for it yet, but we've been a productive bunch lately. The task that's been occupying the bulk of my time is the mixing of the first half of the songs from the studio album with Hubcap, our superhuman producer. He has reserves of patience that mortal men simply don't possess, he can spend hours working on fixing a detail so subtle that I can't even make it out, his quality control threshold is so high that we've been scrapping mixes that took us hours to achieve and doing them again from scratch, he has the most superkeen ears in the world, a complete mastery of technology and he's making us sound fantastic! Since completing the first batch of album tracks I've turned my attention to finishing off the second four-track kassette, which we meant to have finished in time for our gig with Dutch Husband at the start of May, but failed for lack of time and focus. The work I've been doing with Hubcap has caused me to raise the bar somewhat in terms of my own recordings, and I've been trying to apply his meticulous methodology to them as far as my restlessness and impatience will allow. You'll have to compare and contrast the two sets of recordings when they both find their way into the wild to judge whether I've been successful.
In between working on Betika recordings and rehearsing the next bunch of songs for the album I've somehow managed to find time to be in not one but two other bands. It was with some reluctance that I got involved with projects outside Betika again - the months since the Seemonsters-drumstick-handover that marked the cessation of my extra-betikular activities have been the most productive ever in the group's history, and I was fearful of getting side-tracked and losing focus. But I just can't say "no".
Actually, the first non-betika thing I started doing was mostly my idea. It came up in conversation at a gig about six months ago that Chris Catlin from True Swamp, Mooro from see monsters and I all had Casio SK-5 sampling keyboards. Chris' gets used quite frequently on Swamp recordings, and occasionally live, and mine has found it's way onto the odd Betika song, Mooro's lived until recently on top of his wardrobe. When I found out that we each possessed one of these rare beasts, I came up with the idea of forming an all SK-5 band called, rather cleverly I thought, "The SK-5". The original plan was to play once and once only, unrehearsed and in public, to record our collective noises and disband. A complicated set of rules was devised governing what would and wouldn't be permissible musical activity within the group. After talking about it for a while, I was persuaded to soften my stance and drop some of the dogma, and we eventually started meeting up for occasional sessions- I wouldn't call them rehearsals as such because we never played the same thing twice due to a combination of poor memory and attempts at spontanaety. We recorded these sessions, and we finally did a gig. We meant to record the gig too, but some dorcas forgot to hit the "record" button in his excitement about the imminent cacophony, so those particular sounds were lost to posterity. Strangely, we seemed to go down quite well with the audience, despite the fact that certain things we were doing were done purely for the purpose of annoying people as much as possible, and the day afterwards we got asked to do a set at the new "Pand 'a Flesh" electronica night. So I guess we're gonna do that, and possibly record it if I manage to keep my shit together and remember to hit the button, and then put everything we've done up on the web. And then stop.
The other thing I've found myself drawn deeper and deeper into is Sancho. I was involved in the project from quite early on, when Paul got me to play some very primitive trumpet on "Ball o'string", and I'd attempted to re-create the effect on stage with the group (which at the time was called "sea aunts") at a couple of trendy East London booze-holes as girls in wigs looked on, not sure if what we were doing was cool or not as an official proclaimation on the matter had not yet been made by the grand arbiter of these things. (when the proclaimation finally came, it was a year late and thick with ambiguity). I tried to keep my involvement to a bare minimum, because I knew that it would end up swallowing up all the spare time that I only had because I'd given up sleeping. For example, I never actually rehearsed with the band, I just turned up for gigs having learnt what parts I could, and the bits I didn't know I'd just jam along, which was a real education. I had to learn how to play in F# major during a song once.
Somehow, in the new incarnation of Sancho, I find myself playing not only trumpet but also bass guitar, cheesy toy electric drums, the right hand side of Charlie Sancho's drumkit and a couple of weeks ago I even sang a song when Russell couldn't make it to a gig. Chris is heavily involved too, even more so than I, and has been since the first version of the live band. He plays guitar through various effects that make it sound like a bass, a synthesier, a cyclotron and all sorts of other things, and sometimes he squats on the floor to play a very small keyboard. He's also in charge of shouting instructions at the rest of us. We've both taken to wearing our guitars really high for some reason, I thought it might make me look like an '80s session bassist in the "Rockschool" vein, but photographic evidence has shown me that it just makes me look like I have disproportionately long thin legs, like some musical wading bird. I think I'd better go back to the drawing board and reconsider my shapes.
