Unreleased music from the Brainstorm Future Vault
symphony of atoms (2013)
Days Grown Short (2013)
Homecoming (2011) solo piano
Nursing Home Hippies 2035(2011)
Martian Revolution 2457 (2010)
Wires (unplugged version) (2008)
I can't forget (2008)
Afterlife (2007)
Theme from Tour of Duty - East Timor (2007)
Music written for a documentary called 'Timor:Tour of Duty' by Australian film maker, Sasha Uzunov.
Music written for a documentary called 'Timor:Tour of Duty' by Australian film maker, Sasha Uzunov.
On the Spot Pt1 (2007)
On the Spot Pt2 (2007)
Brainstorm 2012 - an update.
Following the 2005 release of Desert World the band again shifted operations, moving into a new studio at Craig's house, where the growing power of computer-based home studio equipment helped us to improve production standards and hopefully make better music.
During the recording of Desert World a number of new songs had been written which didn't appear on that album. This material, along with newer tracks written after the move, became the basis of ongoing studio work.
While remaining based at Craig's, home-studios were soon ubiquitous among the group, and the business of recording was becoming complicated as never before, as mixing, evaluating, re-recording, mastering, listening and then remixing again became a labyrinthine process, sometimes with multiple versions of the same song on several different computers, each with a different set of overdubs at a different level of completion.
This resulted in some positively byzantine jobs of audio hybridisation - not always successful! But these problems were offset by the amazing opportunities available to members of the band, where musical ideas could be written by anyone and bounced around among everyone, in a way similar to improvisation and jamming in the rehearsal studio but with more control, greater instrumental opportunities and - above all - more time, to think and explore the possibilities of a particular idea.
With all members writing, Brainstorm's sound became more eclectic, while the business of deciding at what point new material was done and finished, at the point of being ready to release on an album, became ever more problematic and uncertain.
The temptation to wait a bit longer, to do just one more overdub, became a monster stalking us in waking dreams. With different members working on different tracks, some songs were taking years to produce, while others were finished in a few weeks.
It was in this climate that the new album Planetfall was conceived. It was six years since Desert World was put together. The band appeared to have another album's worth of songs, with a sufficiently consistent theme, finished and reasonably ready for release.
The consistency of theme was unconscious, fortuitous, inevitable perhaps, but only evident after the fact, born of political and philosophical preoccupations of those writing the songs. Not to worry, though. We'll still take it.
Not least among the motivations behind Planetfall was the fact that it was six years since our last album, that we were not immortal, and the tearing-of-the-hair need to sign off on these damned songs, some of which had been around for years, being tinkered with here and there with no real improvement in their sound, and get on with new stuff again.
This was the downside of the virtual studio rodeo which home recording had developed into - there was no obvious final endpoint to a song, or even an album. New material could be - and was - posted on the web, if you're happy with mp3 versions, and could even be released as "virtual albums", without even the common sense of irrevocable completion which accompanies the existence of a solid, physical medium for the material.
So now we have Planetfall. It may even be that the whole "album" concept itself is dead - in a physical sense, anyway. Downloads now outnumber CD sales manyfold, and the imbalance is only going to increase.
Brainstorm still have hours of recordings in progress, some unfinished, some nearly finished, and some no doubt as-finished-as-they're-ever-going-to-be-but-we-don't-realise-it-yet.
These songs are largely the product of the new, looser dynamic of collaboration of recent years, creating a different type of song, and collections of songs, from different writing and recording processes, not created to fit into a single overarching album concept, or even within a period of creation that generally stamps works with elements of style, instrumentation and theme that can help different tunes coalesce, but which nonetheless hopefully still stand up in some virtual punch-drunk artistic multiverse at least as honest efforts, and reflect the real if jaded enjoyment of still making very loud music together, even after all these years, whose creation is still a lot of fun and worth doing as a group.
During the recording of Desert World a number of new songs had been written which didn't appear on that album. This material, along with newer tracks written after the move, became the basis of ongoing studio work.
While remaining based at Craig's, home-studios were soon ubiquitous among the group, and the business of recording was becoming complicated as never before, as mixing, evaluating, re-recording, mastering, listening and then remixing again became a labyrinthine process, sometimes with multiple versions of the same song on several different computers, each with a different set of overdubs at a different level of completion.
This resulted in some positively byzantine jobs of audio hybridisation - not always successful! But these problems were offset by the amazing opportunities available to members of the band, where musical ideas could be written by anyone and bounced around among everyone, in a way similar to improvisation and jamming in the rehearsal studio but with more control, greater instrumental opportunities and - above all - more time, to think and explore the possibilities of a particular idea.
With all members writing, Brainstorm's sound became more eclectic, while the business of deciding at what point new material was done and finished, at the point of being ready to release on an album, became ever more problematic and uncertain.
The temptation to wait a bit longer, to do just one more overdub, became a monster stalking us in waking dreams. With different members working on different tracks, some songs were taking years to produce, while others were finished in a few weeks.
It was in this climate that the new album Planetfall was conceived. It was six years since Desert World was put together. The band appeared to have another album's worth of songs, with a sufficiently consistent theme, finished and reasonably ready for release.
The consistency of theme was unconscious, fortuitous, inevitable perhaps, but only evident after the fact, born of political and philosophical preoccupations of those writing the songs. Not to worry, though. We'll still take it.
Not least among the motivations behind Planetfall was the fact that it was six years since our last album, that we were not immortal, and the tearing-of-the-hair need to sign off on these damned songs, some of which had been around for years, being tinkered with here and there with no real improvement in their sound, and get on with new stuff again.
This was the downside of the virtual studio rodeo which home recording had developed into - there was no obvious final endpoint to a song, or even an album. New material could be - and was - posted on the web, if you're happy with mp3 versions, and could even be released as "virtual albums", without even the common sense of irrevocable completion which accompanies the existence of a solid, physical medium for the material.
So now we have Planetfall. It may even be that the whole "album" concept itself is dead - in a physical sense, anyway. Downloads now outnumber CD sales manyfold, and the imbalance is only going to increase.
Brainstorm still have hours of recordings in progress, some unfinished, some nearly finished, and some no doubt as-finished-as-they're-ever-going-to-be-but-we-don't-realise-it-yet.
These songs are largely the product of the new, looser dynamic of collaboration of recent years, creating a different type of song, and collections of songs, from different writing and recording processes, not created to fit into a single overarching album concept, or even within a period of creation that generally stamps works with elements of style, instrumentation and theme that can help different tunes coalesce, but which nonetheless hopefully still stand up in some virtual punch-drunk artistic multiverse at least as honest efforts, and reflect the real if jaded enjoyment of still making very loud music together, even after all these years, whose creation is still a lot of fun and worth doing as a group.