It's amazing what you can acheive when you're supposed to be doing something else. I'm supposed to be working on tweaking the current batch of Betika recordings and making demos of a couple of new songs I've got floating around my head, and what I've actually done over the weekend is compile a twenty-two track album of all the random tunes that I've started but never quite finished over the last five years. Many of them are complete songs that I never managed to write words to, some of them are little more than disembodied riffs that never got attached to songs and some of them were written as instrumental tunes but never saw completion because they clearly weren't Betika songs. They do however work reasonably well as a collection in their own right, with a certain amount of tidying up and a few finishing touches, so I'm going to make a few copies of it for personal consumption and for birthday presents for friends. I might put some of the tunes up on the Betika site in the next week or so, I need to live with them for a while to make certain whether they're they're any good or not.
Songs brewing up at the moment include "Pink Hulk" which (wait for it) is kind of a blues-folk / hiphop thing (I realise how crappy that sounds) that came about as a result of listening to Iron And Wine and A Tribe Called Quest in close proximity, and one called "Bent to the timetable" which has a kind of Talking Heads / Broadcast / Neptunes vibe to it. Those two are at the point where the bulk of the lyric is done and I'm trying to fill in some gaps, there's another couple ("Goggo" - flamenco-disco with impossible guitar and "Theme from SLAGS" (both working titles, obviously) which is a bit like a russian folk tune forced into rapid and repetitive slave-labour) which are in desperate need of words to save them from appearing on my next volume of false starts, wrong turns and dead ends.
My copy of the Bloc Party album is still somewhere in transit.
Dave
