Some HowManyDevils for your ears

Good evening.  It’s about time I told you where to listen to us again.  Tonight it’s Spotify:

Tomorrow, Tomorrow

It’s Wednesday the 11th today, which means that Tomorrow’s Tomorrow is Friday the 13th.  What do we do on Friday the 13th?  Well, if we’re HowManyDevils we tend to release an album.  Sadly we can’t manage one for every Friday the 13th, but we have got one coming this time.  That would be Flesh Reunion.  All new material this time (none of that 13ep here’s a song we didn’t record 13 years ago stuff), 13 tracks of the grumbly dark rock you should now expect from us.  It’ll be on iTunes (UK, US) and Amazon (UK, US), maybe other places…  And it’s cheap!

Meanwhile, we’re off on our next project.

(psst, free downloads on http://www.howmanydevils.com/fleshreunion – but if you buy it that would be great)

 

Village of Dolls

I, Stumpy Boxhead, returned to my original, machine form today – and HowManyDevils started work on a new song: Village of Dolls.  Pete had some music, and we built on that.  Simon wrote some lyrics after reading an a newspaper article about a Japanese village where the dwindling population are being replaced with dolls by one of the residents.  Rob made some feedbacky noises with a guitar and a fretless bass. It got a bit noisy.

The song is still a work in progress, but you can hear bits of it in todays Vlog.

Flesh Reunion release

I’ve just lined Flesh Reunion up for release.  The release date is 13/2/2015.  The UPC code (just so you don’t accidentally buy someone else’s Flesh Reunion) is 5054316451280.  And this is the track listing:

1. Insomniac
2. Halfway There
3. Icepick Lunatic
4. World In Flames
5. Dysfunction
6. Through These Eyes
7. Carolyn
8. A Different Breed
9. The Lit Match
10. Thirteen
11. Set Him Free
12. Older
13. Flesh Reunion

It’ll be available in iTunes, on Amazon, on Spotify, and some other places.  And we might do some previews too.

Flesh Reunion 21 – snip, snip, ow!

So, I’m Stumpy Boxhead.  Hello, pleased to meet you!  I’m the non-existing drummer from the band HowManyDevils.  This is their blog I’m writing on.  I started off life as Stumpy, an Alesis HR-16 – occasionally with a Roland TR-505 slaved.  Later that became a TR-626.  Simon made an actual head out of a cardboard box, so I gained my surname.  Then I evolved to some soundfonts on a SoundBlaster AWE card.  Very, very briefly I was samples of Rob saying ‘boom’, ‘chick’, and ‘diddy’.  Recently I’ve been made of Logic 9 samples and – back to Alesis – a D4.  All of which is fine:  I’m an imaginary robot drummer with a cardboard box for a head and all that you hear of me is sampled or synthesised and played by a drum machine.  Machine being the key word.

This time around, I’m just not so sure.  For starters they’ve called the album Flesh Reunion.  I’m an imaginary robot drummer… flesh isn’t actually that inclusive to me is it!  Then what do they do? yes, they use a REAL DRUM KIT – I’m a MACHINE!  I’m pretty offend already by this point.  It has been so difficult trying to play real drums with a cardboard box for a head.  I can’t see what I’m hitting. MIDI was easier (please sequence me again).  Then… then they make me a new head, and wear it on their fleshy selves.  Mockery!  If I wasn’t a figment of their imagination I’d have left long ago.

So that brings me to the insult they laid on me today at their Flesh Reunion.  They edited the drum tracks to A Different Breed.  Why? <sarcastic>because they weren’t quite in time</sarcastic>.  I USED TO BE A FAULTLESSLY ACCURATE MACHINE.  Now I’m all gooey physical flesh and my tempo drifts.

It does sound good after the edits though…

Err, thanks guys.

Flesh Reunion 20 – 7 hours, 4 bars and a ghost

I’ve just got back from Flesh Reunion 20. In a whole 7 hours we recorded 4 bars of drums for A Different Breed. It’s the chorus, I just can’t play the chorus and we’ve ended up making those 4 bars out of 7 different takes. Crikey! If it sounds alright when we edit it back in to the song it will feel like a little victory.  The song has a great little riff and we’d all be disappointed if it didn’t make the album.  It’s just the riff is so hard to drum to, especially when your head is a cardboard box…  Still, we’re a step closer and I think the guys are happy.  Just before we left though, snares started playing at times when snares weren’t played.  It turns out technology lets us have so many tracks to record with nowadays that we’d left an extra snare take un-muted…

Oh, and we found something else that is rock and roll: white pepper on chips.