--- STRANGE devotion ---

my half life

2008-11-10T22:01:00.009Z

When I recorded the video to Half Life (which can be viewed in in the previous post) my marriage was in the process of falling apart and I wasn't much in the mood for playing music, but I decided to try and forget it at least long enough to record the video of myself trying out that song with the vocoder.

That was the second last time I went to the rehearsal room and the following week, the last time, I didn't bother taking the video camera as I had a feeling I might not feel like doing much playing at all. As mentioned below, I worked out a live version of Dead To The World, but I ended the session early and have not been back since (sorry Richard, but I will be back again one day).

The Last Time

Despite the current lack of activity, I do have a number of songs ready to record and a number of songs to prepare for any future live performances.

I intend 2009 to be Strange Devotions busiest year for a very long time and I am hoping to play my first Strange Devotion gigs since 1982.

Until then, here are the lyrics to Half Life:

Like setting sun my self belief left
one day it fell away
into the bleakness of some strange dream
a strange dream from the day
I tried to keep myself from falling
but things got in the way
I felt normality was crawling
and sliding over me

No spotlight
in half light
brings half life to me
and half life is not the place to be

when you can't see a way out

Behind the wall of hidden feelings
a small flame can be seen
it leads me back to 1980
when I was seventeen
I went to see bands like Vice Versa
TG and Human League
I thought I knew where I was heading
but I just got lost at sea

No spotlight
in half light
brings half life to me
and half life is not the place to be

but spotlights
through dark light
brings dark life you see
and dark life is were I want to be

so that I can be.........

half life

2008-10-15T23:45:00.003+01:00

I've recently taken up a weekly slot at True North Studios to start preparing some material for possible future live performances.

The first few sessions were taken up trying to re-learn songs that I hadn't played since 1982. I started off with Again The New Formation and after preparing a quick backing track (with a fair few mistakes in it) I videod my frst full run through, and it can be seen here.

I also had a go at a new song called Half Life, which I haven't yet recorded a studio version of, and put that on the myspace page also.

Last week I decided to take my Korg MS200BR along instead of my Korg MS-10, as I hadn't got around to trying out the vocoder part of it yet. I had another go at playing Half Life in order to try it out, and the result can be seen hear.

Last night I spent the evening working on a live version of Dead To The World, which came out better than expected, but I didn't have my video camera with me so that will have to wait for another time.

A Gig.

2008-07-07T10:48:00.003+01:00

Well not exactly, but the next best thing.

Last Saturday afternoon and evening the theatre group Theatrebox performed a play at the Harrogate Royal Hall that had been specially written for them by Terry Deary (author of the Horible Histories books). The cast was made up of around 180 children/teenager aged between 4 and 19 and the show they put on was amazing. I helped out with the musical scores for some of the songs and was also lucky enough to be asked to play with the band. It kept me pretty busy for most of this year, so I haven't managed to get much done for Strange Devotion, though of course the single was released in May.

This was the first time I have played live for over 20 years and I really enjoyed it and can't wait to play live again. Maybe I will be able to do a few Strange Devotion gigs in the future.

My trusty Korg Prophecy in the corner of the 'pit'

It probably would have been a better idea to have written about this before the event rather than after it, but I guess I can just blam that on being so busy practicing.

I shall now be carrying on working on my latest Strange Devotion track Half Life, which will be put onto the myspace page as soon as the recording is complete.

Further Release Update

2008-05-09T17:10:00.002+01:00

The Strange Devotion single is now up in Anna logue's Shop (just below Störung's great single) although possibly not quite available yet as the price is currently shown as €TBA.

Release Update

2008-05-02T14:49:00.005+01:00

A few weeks ago I received a copy of the mastered version of Again The New Formation in mp3 format and was amazed at how great it sounded compared to the original reel to reel version it originated from. Sven Mühlender has done a fantastic job of the mastering and I am now really looking forward to hearing the uncompressed version for the first time.

This shouldn't be too far away as. although the release date is now going to be in May 2008, judging by this latest news update on the anna logue records website it looks like it should be in stock sooner rather than later.

I don't want to give too much away about the cover yet, as it has not yet been shown on any websites, but I should just add that Thomas Pargmann has also done a fantastic job with it. I am really excited that after 26 years the tracks are finally being released in such a great package.

Strange Devotion Debut Single

2008-02-06T10:20:00.000Z

The tracks Again The New Formation and Danger Line are to be released as a 7 inch vinyl limited edition on the Berlin based Mauerstadtmusik label. The release is currently set for March or April 2008 so it will come almost 26 years to the day after the tracks were recorded.

Previous releases by Mauerstadmusik include "Die Welt Ist Schön!" by Alexander Von Borsig, "Oi! Oi! Oi! / Butzmania" by Chris Lunch & Frieder Butzmann and the Soundtrack LP for the Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2 films.

New Strange Devotion video on youtube

2007-11-26T14:19:00.000Z

A new video has been made to go with the song Confusion.

It can be viewed on youtube here.

It was recorded using an old camcorder over a period of about 1 week on the way to and from work and also at a bonfire party.
A total of about 90 minutes of footage was shot and this was edited down on a MacBook Pro using iMovie.

I wrote an earlier blog post at the time I started recording this song back in 2006, which can be found here.

The lyrics are based on this poem

In 1982, when Strange Devotion was going the first time around, a friend gave me some of her poems saying I could make use of any that inspired me. I particularly liked one called Confusion and became determined to write and record a song to go with that poem. I kept revisitting it and trying to come up with some musical ideas that might go with the poem over the following years. By the early 1990s I had a rough song formed and I recorded the music to go with the lyrics at least a couple of times with different arrangements, but I never recorded it with vocals.

When I started Strange Devotion up again in 2006 I thought it would be great to make this one of the first songs to record. I worked on it for a while and ended up completely rewriting the chorus, but, apart from that, I still think I have managed to keep the lyrics fairly close to the poem I was given in 1982. So you could say this Strange Devotion song took 25 years to write. It would be great if the poem's author could one day hear the end results, but, unfotunately, I don't have any current contact details for her.

Another Radio Play

2007-11-19T15:09:00.000Z

The song Danger Line was played on last nights (18th November 2007) Minimal Electronic-Plus show on East Village Radio.

The show and full playlist can be found here.

radio transmission

2007-11-09T15:13:00.000Z

It may have taken over 25 years, but Strange Devotion has just had it's first ever radio play.

The track Again The New formation was played on East Village Radio, Sunday 4th November on the Minimal-Electronik Plus show.

The whole show is availbale for download as a podcast and full details of that and other shows playlists can be found here.

skip to the end

2007-11-08T15:26:00.000Z

It is a long time since I posted anything here, so here is a very condensed update covering the last 18 months:

When I last posted I was working in Scotland and had a very nice flat in a village called East Calder. I used to fly up from Leeds/Bradford airport to Edinburgh on the very early Monday morning flight and back on the more reasonable Friday mid afternoon flght. I had decided it was time to resurrect the Strange Devotion project that I had originaly started at the end of 1981. I had a few synths and a laptop in the spare bedroom and was busy writing and recording whenever I got the chance. However as the IT project I was working on got nearer to the go live date I had less and less time in the flat and then once the project did go live my time in Scotland was over.

I moved all my stuff back home and joined an IT project based in Leeds. As far as Stranged Devotion was concerned this was not good news as the latest addition to my familly was now sleeping in my old studio and there wasn't (and still isn't) anywhere else in the house I could use instead. So for the last year and half my synths have been stuffed into wardrobes, attics and drawers with very few chances of them getting to see the light of day.

While Strange Devotion was in this limbo period I was still thinking about music all the time and decided if I bought another bass I might be able to get more chance to play it than I my synths. So some months later and nice new Sandbrg made its way from Germany to my house and I did get to play it ocassionaly and even managed to record a brief demo track with it.

Not much happened after that until I got back from a nice relaxing holiday in Spain, this summer, to find that I had had a number of emails from people saying they had heard the original Strange Devotion demo tracks.

It's always nice to get such emails and I realised that not only had I been neglecting Strange Devotion from a musical point of view, but the website I had registered while still working in Scotland still only had a holding page and I had also done nothing about transfering the 2 videos I have made from tape to disk.

So, spurred on by those emails, I bought some software that would help me get my website up a bit quicker then having to type html straight into vi and got to work getting the videos onto disk.

The website is now up and running (although still not finished) and both the videos are finally up on YouTube.

I am also in the process of filiming a new video to go with the track Confusion, which I recorded in Scotland and mentioned about in the previous post.

Towards the end of my time in Scotland I was thinking of buying a reel to reel tape recorder so I could see if the master tape containing the original Strange Devotion demo had survived. I didn't know whether it had been recorded on a 1/2 track or 1/4 track reel to reel, but I felt pretty confident that it was most likely done on a 1/2 track and had even, unsuccessfully, bid on a few Revox's on Ebay.

So while I was busy on the website I also managed to find somebody who would be able to transfer my reel to reel master onto cd and finally let me know whether the recording had survived or not. The guy doing the transfer only had a 1/2 track recorder, but I was now 100% sure that is what the tape would be.

He rang me to say teh tape was in god condition and the recordings had transferred to cd with no problems.
The first time I played the cd I was astounded to hear something completely different to what I had recorded on it. My first thought was that the guy had put someone elses music on there, but as I listened I could hear my track muffled in the background. The second track seemed to have come out with no problems. I ended up thining I had lost my first track somehow, but posting a question about it on this forum solved the mystery for me and I am now the proad owner of a 1/4 track reel to reel tape recorder.

Akai-Guinea

The same forum helped me track down the make and model of drum machine I had used on the original Strange Devotion demo and within a few weeks I had picked one of those up on eBay too.

So,now that we are up to date I have decided that this blog will have a slight change of direction. I recently realised that the Strange DSevotion website didn't have a news section with full RSS capabilities. Adding one at this stage would be not only be time consuming, but probably beyond my abilities, but a blog already provides rxactoy what I would need. So from now on this site will just contain Strange Devotion news.

confusion

2006-02-23T19:53:00.000Z

Here is the latest Strange Devotion update.

The website I registered at the end of January is still not available to me so no progress on that front - but I will start work on it as soon as it is handed over to me.

To make up for this I have gone and set up a myspace Strange Devotion page.

Last week I brought my newly purchased second hand Korg ms-10 up to Scotland and spent the first couple of evenings of last week cleaning it up and trying to relearn how to use the thing. I connected it up to my guitar amp in the lounge while watching TV, but I had to juggle this with tidying up the flat as Adrian was coming to stay on Wednesday and Thursday nights.

On tuesday night I had tried connecting everything up and was thinking how I would work with it all. When I just had the Korg prophesy up here it was easy, but now I've got 3 synths things become complicated due to the fact that I don't have much desk space and I don't know how to use Logic to its full capabilities yet.

I just couldn't get my head round it all so I forgot about it and had a great couple of nights with Adrian instead. This ended with a top night out going to see Goldfrapp on Thursday (who were superb), but I think this something for critical mass rather than here.

So this week I was working evenings on tuesday, wednesday and thursday so it meant I had 3 days to try and get into action and start recording some new Strange Devotion songs. I have a reasonable back catalogue of fully or half written songs from the last 15 years or so and although none had been written or recorded as electronic music I thought a few might fit that genre fairly well and decided the one I'd like to try first was one called confusion. When Strange Devotion was going first time round (around 1980) a friend gave me some poems that she thought I might be able to write some music to. None of them had any rhymes or formal structure to them, but she had marked a couple of them as being more suited as song lyrics than the others. The longest of them was called confusion. I liked the poem and thought I could probably write some music to go with them, but never managed it and they fell by the wayside when I joined other bands and started doing other music.

After a break from music, during which time I got married, I started up again after seeing an early midi synth in a music shop in York and realised that with that and a computer the world would be my oyster. I soon got hooked again and started writing recording and buying as much equipment as I could afford. During this time I found my old Strange Devotion lyric book which still contained the poems on a couple of loose sheets of A4. So I thought I'd try and write something to go with the poem called confusion.
I eventually came up with a tune and managed to organise the poem into lines that rhymed and ended up with a first verse and a chorus. I never got around to recording any singing, but here is the tune as I recorded it back then.

confusion - version 1. This was probably recorded in the early 1990s.

I'm not sure what style this music is, but it certainly isn't electronic and certainly isn't Strange Devotion.

Here is a quick summary of how the week panned out:
Tuesday:
Decided to unplug everything put it on the floor and reconnect it in a logical way. If I didn't set it up so it was easy to work with it would give me a great excuse not to do anything.
So I moved a bit of furniture put things back together and I now have something I seem to be able to work with. My interface doesn't have many inputs, but I seem to be managing ok by swapping cables when I need to.
I even went through the process of re-initialising all the setting within Logic, but it didn't seem to leave me with anything different that I already had.
I ended the session by creating an empty project in Logic called confusion ready for for me to start recording the next day.

Wednesday:
Got up late due to not getting back from work until after 02:00 that morning, but soon got down to building up some of the tracks for confusion. I ended up with an intro and first verse so I had a go at recording the vocal for the first verse before going into work late.

Thursday:
Started work on the instrumentation of the first chorus. Things seemed to go fairly well so I thought I'd record the 1st chorus vocals, but just couldn't get on with the words I had written so decided I'd better write some completely different words and completely change how I had originally inteded the chorus tune to go. This took around an hour of standing in front of the mike with my headphones on and the chorus looping with a pen and my Strange Devotion lyric book in my hands frantically trying to come up with something before I had to pack up and go to work. My biggest challenge was the fact that the song was called confusion (after the poem) and the original chorus had that word in it so I needed to try and keep it in. I finally came up with something which allowed me to have one go at recording it before bouncing it to mp3 and coming into work.

Here is the recording so far. It is a rough mix and only contains the intro, first verse and first chorus. Hope you feel it matches the feel of the original Strange Devotion stuff.

confusion - Strange Devotion version.

The original Strange Devotion demo tracks from 1982 can be found here.

Back in Black

2006-02-07T12:17:00.000Z

I had come to the conclusion that there were a number of things wrong with this blog:
1) It looked messy with some of the customiseations I had done to it.
2) It took ages to load as I was using bits of some of my scanned photos in the background of it.
3) It didn't particularly go with 1980 retro synth music (although the photos I had scanned were taken in the 1980s).
4) The actual postings were a bit boring and possibly self indulgent at times.

I couldn't do much about option 4, but I have addressed options 1 to 3 by changing to an off the shelf number called "Minimal Black" or something. I will add all my links and stuff back on there and then see if I can think of any customisation that would be more in keeping (and within my technical capabilities).

In other news I have:
- failed to win a couple of Revox A77s on ebay
- suceeded on winning on a Korg MS-10 on ebay when all intended to do was watch to see how much it went for
- registered www.strangedevotion.co.uk

So now I need to:
- try and get a Revox A77 at some point
- come up with website for www.strangedevotion.co.uk
- try and design a strange devotion logo and a way of writing strange devotion
- see if I can come up with a strange devotion t-shirt design and sell it on www.spice.co.uk - and then buy one for myself :)

It's the 1980s all over again

2006-02-01T18:21:00.000Z

I have had a bit of a break from recording any music over Christmas, and still haven't completed Secret World yet. I have been messing around with it over the months and after listening to the latest version again recently I have come to the conclusion that the track levels have gone completely to pot with the drums way too loud and other bits hardly audible in the mix anymore. Also the marimba type noise that starts with the second chorus is really getting on my nerves now so that needs removing I think.

I got my new (old) Shergold Masquerader for Christmas along with a line6 amp which I am very pleased with and I began having guitar lessons with Master The Guitar after the new year. I have had 2 lessons so far and am already learning to play 21st century scizoid man.

However getting time to practice is another matter, as over the last week I have decided to reform Strange Devotion. This may sound a bit strange as this blog has been around for a few months and it is called Strange Devotion - but it makes sense to me anyway. I used the name for this blog as I liked the name that I had used in the 1980s when I played synth music, but when I started up my music again last year I had decided to do it in whatever style I fancied playing at the time and even intended bringing some guitar into the proceedings, but after getting a couple of encouraging emails last week from a couple of people who had stumbled on 2 Strange Devotion songs I recorded in 1982 I have decided that I don't think my music has ever been better than what I did back then so I am going back to my roots and will be writing and recording synth music in the old Strange Devotion style for the forseeable future. Last weekend I dug out the reel to reel master from the studio I recorded those demos in and also transferred the video I made to go with them onto DVD so as to preserve it from anymore degredation. I am now trying to locate a reel to reel tape recorder in the hope that the original demo tape has survived enough for me to get a decent copy of both tracks off it. The copy of the songs on my .mac website are from a 20 plus year old cassette so I hope I can improve on the quality.

To help bring Strange Devotion back to life I have just ordered a new Korg MS2000BR for my birthday which should go nicely with my Korg Prophecy. Neither of them are true anolog synths, but the prophecy makes some very nice analog style sounds and I hope the MS-2000BR will be even closer to a true analogue synth. It takes the MS from the original range of MS analog synths, of which I use to own a Korg MS-10, so I think it should be pretty good and I can't wait to give it a whirl. I plan to get a real analogue synth to go with these 2 at the first available oportunity. I managed to get a Shergold again, so maybe I'll be able to get an MS-10 again too.

My final step has been to register www.strangedevotion.co.uk so I will then need to sit down and design a site to go on there - leaving me even less time for getting on with my guitar practice and leading to the question - Will I ever finish Secret World?