Shortwave Fade’s blog

Hi, just uploading a preview of  'Lost In A Hurricane', our new single due for release on 15th December....please take a listen and let us know what you think! We're back in the studio again this week to add a final (brand new) track to the album...it's been a few months since we finished recording and mixing the other tracks but we felt this one was too good not to go on as well, and so back to The Magic Garden we go :) We've been working solidly on the new track for the last few weeks now and we're pretty sure it's going to sound ace - we're certain in fact ;) !

We'll post a preview soon, we promise!! x

Yes, 'Leave' is finally released this week...you can now download it from iTunes, Napster, Amazon and many others. The release goes out with a fantastic remix of 'Cover My Eyes' by the ambient popsters Kyte, which we're sharing here - have a listen and see what you think!

We had a good publicity ahead of the release on 6Music last week where Steve Lamacq gave the single a play and chatted to Chris about the band and about the whole slicethepie thing. You can listen to it again with the BBC player thing here.   

To celebrate the single release, we're having a launch party in the form of a RoTa showcase at Notting Hill Arts Club this Saturday (13th September). It kicks off at 4pm and is FREE admission to all. We'll be hitting the stage at around 7pm but come down early if you can to catch support from fellow slicethepi-ers The Keyz, Themselves and Timothy Edwards!

As if that wasn't enough, when we recover from the inevitable saturday night drunkeness, we're heading over to Proud Galleries, Camden to join another afternoon showcase, this time in support of the hotly tipped Dirty Skirts....it's also FREE (apologies for capitalising that word every time) and is sure to be a great afternoon as there are a load of acts on the bill - we may be looking a little worse for wear by that stage though! 

Thought I'd better post this track today and give it a mention as it's currently free to download for one week only...finishing tomorrow - great timing, I know! :) This is an early unmastered version of 'You Were Right' one of the tracks from the forthcoming album 'Deletia', which is shaping up nicely for a release in a couple of months. This track is a sort of short, but very epic ballad if that makes any sense at all. As I said it's not the finished article but hopefully you'll like it anyway....and if you do, you can download it for free at slicethepie.com! But not for long (erm sorry about that)! x

 

 

We're kind of nearly getting there at last....We've spent some time back in the studio this month going over the final mixes of tracks for the album 'Deletia'. It's all coming together really well now although we're up against it trying to meet our planned release date - but so it goes!  :) Thought I'd upload something new from the album anyway and see what people think. This is a brand new track called 'Army Of Two'. It'll be the last song on the album.....and is quite short and gentle sounding compared to a lot of the stuff we've posted previously so thought it might make a nice change! The songs we've put down for the album itself are quite diverse, but hopefully this'll give some idea of the range of sounds we're going for anyway...Gavin did an excellent job producing this - thankfully he really knew what we were trying to achieve with the ending - which is always a good thing ;) Hope you like it anyway!

Another quick update to say that we've been shortlisted as 1 of 12 possible acts to open the main stage of this year's Summer Sundae Festival here in Leicester! Naturally this would be a fantastic gig for us as we'd be opening on the same bill as Supergrass among others. It'd also be great exposure ahead of the single release in September and album (hopefully now) in October!

But of course we need your help and support to win the slot! It's down to an online vote (isn't everything nowadays?) and so we need people to head along to the regional BBC site HERE, select 'Shortwave Fade' and press 'vote'. That really is it, no signup needed - you just click on the page and vote. It only takes a second....so please, help us out by voting TODAY as the vote closes tonight at 11.55pm GMT. Thank you!!

Right that's it - request over. In other news, the album is coming together now. Gavin has been working with the mixes and thinks are taking shape and sounding great! We're hoping to head back to the studio next week to tweak the mixes a little further and it should then be ready in a couple of weeks.... the release is going to be a little later than we'd originally planned but hey, that's always the way - right?! In any case, the 'Leave' single release is still going ahead on 8th September and we now have a bit more of a gap between that and the album release, which is actually a good thing...

We had a fun gig at The Purple Turtle in Camden a couple of nights ago. I believe that there may be some film of it floating around somewhere, which we'll try and track down and post at some point! We're also at Sumo in Leicester this Friday night for anyone in the area. It's our first hometown gig for.....so long - it's going to be great!

That's it for now. Going to post some mixes of the newer album tracks soon, hopefully after we return to the studio next week.....so erm, stay tuned!!

x
 

...we posted again - long overdue in fact! Well at least we have some exciting news to write about anyway. We've now finished the album...well recording-wise that is. It's currently being mixed and we're hoping to have it all ready in the next couple of weeks for a release in mid-late September - which is not much later than we'd originally planned so we've not done too badly! The party will be at Notting Hill Arts Club on Sat 13th Sept and we hope some of you can make it....but more on that later!

We had a great time recording the album with Gavin who has possibly the widest knowledge of music/musicians/artists - ranging from the mainstream to the totally obscure - that any of us have ever encountered! He also has an amazing array of equipment, aquired over the years too including speakers that belonged to the stones, a vintage Neve that allegedly appears in Bowie's Space Oddity video (not sure if I can see it though!) and a custom Shergold once owned by Bernard Sumner that we got to use on a couple of tracks (see below)!

The album is called 'Deletia' and currently consists of 12 tracks (though that may change) including new mixes of 'Stay As You Are' and Cover Your Eyes'. We're really happy with the way everything sounds so far and can't wait to get it out there for people to hear.....In the meantime though, we selected a track called 'Leave' as the first single, which is now all ready and set for release on  8th September. You  can preview it below, so please have a listen and as always, any comments (particularly nice ones) would be greatly appreciated

Finally, just to update you on
some confirmed live dates for next month  - would of course be great to see
any of you can make any of them:

1st July - The Purple Turtle, Camden

Yes after much agonising we've at last settled on a producer for the album, which is a huge relief to say the least! We finally opted to work with Gavin Monaghan at his studio in Wolverhampton. We'd had Gavin in mind for some time, having heard about him through his earlier work with The Editors and The Twang etc....having met him, we were quite blown away to discover what a truly pleasant and positive chap he is - not that we should have expected him to be otherwise of course ;) .

It's nice (and reassuring) when someone you've just met seems to share the same ideas and perspectives on your music that you do...we found that straight away when when we met with Gavin for the first time, and we're now expecting some very big and epic things when we get in to the studio in May. We're really hyped up about the whole thing right now, and have already written about 3-4 new tracks since the start of the year, some of which are definitely going to be making it onto the album - and we thought we had the tracklisting planned out in December! It's looking like an early August release right now, so we'd better start planning a party.....any ideas would of course be very welcome!

Hope you are all good

x

...since we've posted anything on Vox - and that's probably because it has been! We'll try and keep things updated a bit more frequently from now on...

For now, a quick posting just to say that we made it into yesterday's Telegraph in a feature on slicethepie! I've tried to scan the article below, but couldn't fit the whole page under the scanner unfortunately, so have just got the main bit in that mentions us! If you want to read the whole thing (it's not a bad article) you can view it online here.

We recently did an interview for slicethepie as well which talks a bit more about our experience of the whole thing - you can view that on the site here. It's been quite reassuring to look through the forums and see that people on the site have been buying quite a few contracts in us already. It doesn't affect our status with the financing etc, but it's good to know that there are people up there ready and willing to start investing money in our album already!

Speaking of which, we're now moving swiftly onward with the album preparation. We've yet to make a final decision on who we'll be working with and where, but we have a pretty good idea at least - please get in touch with any suggestions or recommendations though..they're all appreciated. Our first step towards getting things sorted has been to move out of our old room (small, dirty, unusual smelling and with a large pole in the middle)

 

 

 

 

 

....and into a far bigger, cleaner, better-sounding rehearsal space. Though it's completely black at the minute, and too dark to photograph - why do we always seem to inherit rooms form metal bands? It's a good place to be though and is setting the mood nicely for working through the album tracks (which we hope to start rough-demoing in a few weeks time). Needless to say we're verrry excited about the new material we have lined up for now! We'll hopefully get some tracks up here as we go along, and see if we can get some early feedback from anyone willing to give their views.

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...we won! Woohoo! The Slicethepie showcase that is of course..and hence £15,000 to record our first album. It's been such a mad week that I'd not gotten around to posting it here, but needless to say we are all made up about it and looking forward to starting the album in the New Year :) Huge thanks go out to anyone and everyone who supported us by spreading the word and voting for us in the showcase - we couldn't have done it without you!

For anyone who is interested in the whole slicethepie thing (you can read all about how it works here), you can now buy 'backstage passes' in us for £5. These basically pre-order you a copy of the album, allow you access to our backstage area at slicethepie.com (for updates on the album's progress etc), and enable you to buy 5 'contracts' (basically shares in the financial success of the album) at a discounted rate for trading purposes. To be honest, I find the whole trading side of things pretty confusing, but it seems to be pretty popular with some users of the site, and there is money to be made through it all apparently....as long as the artists sell some records at the end of it all that is! :)

In any case, it's all good for us, and we're just happy to be able to put our energy into a whole album's worth of material without searching for money to fund it...or waiting for a recording contract. It was a nice pre-Christmas present to say the least!

In other news, we'll be playing at The Jericho Tavern in Oxford tomorrow night, which should be great as it's an excellent venue and we had a really good time there last time we played. If there are any Oxford people out there please come along and check us out if you can! Doors are at 8pm and it's a fiver to get in....

Happy Xmas all!! (to use the abbreviation that we all hate!)

x