The Blackout Argument

Archiv für Dezember 2009

Welcome to the first round of the BLACKOUT ARGUMENT SUPERSTARS! Today we got 2 contestants in the category “best song interpretation & performance”!

2nd place goes out to an amazing acoustic interpretation of one of our older songs: “FOREVER YOURS” (from ‘Munich Valor’, 2007):

1st place goes out to three crazy dudes from Austria (?) interpreting “SNOB REVOLUTION” (from ‘Smile Like A Wolf’, 2008) in their very own “special” way:

Thanks for the great support!

Our latest mail-out to all BOA-Supporters is on the road right now.So keep your eyes peeled for the new BOA stickers which might appear at  your youth centre, school or bus station next week!

Hey Fellas,

here’s the full amount of pictures we took at our songwriting isolation in Traun. We uploaded them to Flickr, so feel free to spread, rate or comment them. There you go:

Day6? Well actually it’s day 7. Seems like I kinda missed one day somewhere, somehow hahaha! Anyway, we’re down. At this very moment eric and schwede are driving the first car to munich, picking up a second car, driving back to Traun, and around 19h we’re all gonna be on the road back home to Munich.

We managed to finish all things that were still left on the schedule. Here’s the final compendium of what we have accomplished in these 7 days at the Brachial Studios:

- Reworked 5 older songs
- Rewrote 2 semi-old songs
- Wrote 8 brand new songs
- Fleshed out a crazy cover song
- Recorded drumtracks for all 16 songs
- Recorded a shabby sounding live demo for all songs
- Recorded a better sounding pre-production demo for of these songs

Apart from that we:
- froze our asses off
- fought and laughed together
- had to face old and new habbits of everyone
- cooked food and ate together
- drank shitloads of black tea
- learned how to use protools (well philip knew it already)
- gave philip about 15 completely ridiculous nicknames (list is going to be published soon)
- watched a very special movie at least 5 times
- took some amazing new bandpictures

But most of all we learned how to let creativity happen instead of forcing it. For the band, but also for our new songs this was a crucial and formative experience.

Thanks for following us on this one!

See Ya.

B-O-A (Chris, Raphael, Philip, Schweder & Eric)

Who would have thought that seven days pass by so fast?! Well actually we’re only through 5 days but the two remaining ones are already filled up with shitloads of stuff to do. But first here’s what we rocked today:
- writing an opener/intro-song (No. 15)
- recording 6.5 more drum tracks
- finishing vocal recordings for 2 songs
- recording guitars and bass for 5 songs

So what’s left to do:
- 8 more drum tracks
- vocals for 3 more songs
- packing, weird logistics and driving home
Once again I am not quite sure if this is all gonna work out but hope is the last to die, that’s what people say, right?

C-sharp

Unbelievable but we finshed everything we had on our schedule yesterday. Unfortunatelly today was not even half as productive. We wasted way too much time on internal discussions, drawing posters and talking about “what would be” instead of really working on our to do’s. Actually we wanted to write the last song (an opener) and then start recording drums but after half a song this plan completely failed, so “we” decided to let go and start it all over tomorrow… Hopefully we’re more lucky then!

C++

We had a bad and a good start in our third day. Bad was that out of 5 alarm clocks only one did its job. So the bigger part of the band woke up late and started working sleepy. However we managed to finish 2 new songs in our first songwriting-period.

One song (Song12) is a fast, straight forward hardcore track with huge mosh and a heroic endpart. The other song is a thoughtfully composed pop-song with a strange “5.5 tone” (philips tab-system).

We have scheduled two more songwriting-periods for today and 2 more songs planned. Ambitious, we know….

Later!

C.

Today we realized that the amount of songs we scheduled for this studio isolation week is far bigger than we originally thought. After finishing another new song and re-arranging an older one we had a long discussion about how to make maximum use of our remaining time here in Traun. The bottom line was that we need to give it some more the next few days to reach at least our 2 top prio goals of which one is recording all drumtracks for the album and the other one demo’ing guitars, vocals and bass for the biggest part of the songs. We set up a tight schedule for tomorrow, and I am damn curious if we can keep it up to.

Talking about today’s songs: The new one (Nr. 10) was mainly composed by Schwede and it’s a straight up stadium-rock-anthem. The older one (Nr. 7) is a revision of a song we wrote 2 months ago. Fortunatelly we still had a rough demo of it on our crucial ghettoblaster-tape and I was genius enough to bring it to Traun. Yehaw! Song No. 7 sounds a bit like older Evergreen Terrace, it has got mosh, groove, shakey harmonies and a long hymnic final part.

Apart from writing songs we ate penne arrabiata, went shopping, eric played the trumpet, wrote about 10000 new riffs, brought a dead coffee-machine back to life (eric preferred turkish-style coffee, though) and became friends with garage band.

As I mentioned above, we’re not really satisfied with today’s outcome concerning new songs, so we’re trying to increase our output tomorrow. Good luck to us.

Over and out,
Chris a.k.a. Sporto

We arrived at the Brachial Studios in Traun (AT) at half past 11pm last night, not much time and energy left to do something intelligent. At least I managed to light up a warm and comfy fire, 100% Neanderthal-style. Everyone was sitting around with their high-tech homerecording equipment and taped some last minute ideas. That’s it for “preparation”. The last note was hit around 4 am.

We slept ’till 12 and woke up freezing (!) and hungry. It was Eric’s and Schwede’s Job to take care of the fire at night but they fucked it up. Everyone was suffering because of them, useless hobos!! Anyway, “heating” is one of our top prios (besides writing songs of course) so we bought some wood and coal, as well as an electric heater that eats up 100000 megawatt/hour. Perfect.

It took us another 5 hours to finally get our recording/songwriting-setup running. Here’s what we do: Philip has got his own room for his drums. Everything is mic’ed since we plan to keep his drumtracks. The guitar and bass-amps are situated in another room, also mic’ed but just for demo’ing. Schwede, Eric, Raphael and me are in a third room, sitting in a circle. Everyone has got a rough mix of all instruments on their headphones while we’re playing. When we’re done with a song we simply have to press “record”, that’s all.

Tonight we wrote and demo’ed 2 new songs. It all came pretty natural and it didn’t take us very long to finalize the basic structure. There’s still some work to be done concerning leadguitars and vocal-lines but we’re pretty happy with the result so far. It’s a mid-tempo rock-hymn (Song9) and a pretty boysetsfire’ish hardcore track (Song 8). We already brought 7 songs to the studio that only need to be revised, that’s the explanation for the strange count.

The plan for the rest of the night: Food, internet, relaxing & working on lyrics.

Chris - The Jock