The guitar in the IMbM song is indeed slightly off-tune (I buggered up the recording a bit as well, there's some unwanted compression on there). However, by the time I had that take, I had lost two perfectly good takes to audacity crashing on me, and I was glad to get what I could. The singing is generally a problem. I need to invest more money in recording equipment. For example, a better microphone: one of the reasons the singing is off is because I can't really record voice and guitar at the same time, especially as I don't have a properly done up studio: I record in my bedroom so the soft furnishings tend to eat up my voice unless I have the microphone right up to my mouth with a wind shield on. Plus it is only a ?20 cardioid. I really need a decent microphone, a microphone stand and a pop filter, not to mention my own four track so I can record in a more acoustically satisfying space, ie my bathroom. That said, there is something I very much like about that take of the song, and I may even leave it like that when I come to produce my first album, which is pretty much written, though not at all recorded. I've written some quite complex songs with parts for bodhran, tin whistle, electric guitar, violin and harmonicas in various keys.
As for Halo of Flies, that note cut-off is a general problem with the sequencer I'm using. On newer tracks I've been splitting up the synth lines across channels in order to prevent it. All those tracks are about a year old, except Huxley Orwell Overdrive, which is about six or seven months old and represents a direction of attack I've kind of moved away from again, as it didn't quite work like I wanted it to. As for the other tracks, Endless Pagan Forests doesn't actually use many downloaded samples at all, in fact I think there's just one and some stuff off a 909. The rest of it's entirely composed of loops of me playing my bodhran, bashing sticks together, scraping knives over each other, knocking on my desk, bending low notes on my harmonica, chanting etc. I've never actually encountered the criticism that any parts of it sound out of place before, in fact the opposite. The idea that my soundscapes don't mesh is probably something that you could level at the whole project at that point. After producing a pretty cohesive little EP mainly concerned with ambient synth loops, soft static and shitloads of radio-astronomy samples (Solar Symphony), I was returning again to some ideas I'd been working with more at the start of the project, which is basically the idea of embracing an aesthetic that sees a sort of sci-fi/fantasy collision of past and future with lots of literary elements and whatnot, trying to work with the idea that although the forms of things have been radically different throughout history, and will continue to be, there are still essential underlying elements to the human experience, and also reflecting my personal philosophy, which tries to embrace both science and magic. To bring this out in the sound, what I was doing was bringing a lot of disparate sound ideas together, and also playing with some ritual ideas and whatnot, since it's about the time I started listening to Coil.
I'm surprised Death Throes has got such a positive reaction. Actually, people generally seem to like it the most out of my music. I probably need to do some more work on it. I've actually had a good few ideas to it. I wanted to go back and incorporate a lot more clever sampling and real guitar work in it. I also want to kind of veer of from making crazed songs about Iain Banks novels, shooting chavs, eating people and and soaking tampons in vodka and sticking them up your arse, and return more to the serious side represented by The Descent of Man, but with a more mature approach. I've been working on this cohesive music/art aesthetic that will make it more the musical side of my art, kind of like some horrific Banksy meets Whitehouse. I've already known for ages that the first album will be called 'Death Throes Seriously Harms You and Others Around You', and I've collected various other future album titles on the same theme. The idea of unifying music and design really intrigues me. Though I've been using a definite aesthetic on my projects, it has kind of been a bit slapped together, though I like some of it (like the cover of Death Throes - Signal Decay which no one will ever have noticed, having only seen tiny reproductions, shows an oscilloscope monitor cross-haired right over the first plane hitting the twin towers).
