No Side Effects have completed the master of their new album ‘Reinventing Failure’, due out next year. Listen to Tom and Ade chatting about it.
It’s been a long journey, but the wait is nearly over. The album CD should hopefully be released in 2018 if they can scrape together enough cash to make it happen.
We are really pleased to release our brand new single Dark Light which will feature on our upcoming album. We also found time in our busy wildlife schedules to record our very first music video.
Both Tom and Ade feature in the video trying to pretend to look serious while they are blinded by strobe lights and attempt to throw themselves down some staircases.
Watch the video here:
Dark Light is one of Tom and Ade’s favourite songs and Tom has gone as far as saying that it his is favourite song he has ever recorded. So it just had to be a single, didn’t it?
The B-Side includes a demo version of an album track called ‘Turn Right and You Have Reached Your Death’. This demo was recorded by Tom while in a cottage in Norfolk and was referenced in his recent blog about solitude.
Download both tracks for free from our music store (and the other two singles):
Please do join in the black and white fun on our Facebook page where we are posting images of black and white objects.
https://www.facebook.com/No-Side-Effects-1377458802530315/?ref=hl
Tom recalls the development of No Side Effect’s new song ‘In Your Brain Right Now’
It is Spring 2014. I have just moved house from Newbury to Swindon. I feel a haze of tiredness most days because of a very intense conservation project I am working on and trying to unpack into our new home. It’s the weekend. I’ve just returned from leading a wildlife walk and I am exhausted, but the sun is shining and everything feels tranquil.
Adrian is standing on the drive as I arrive home in the car. He has a purposefulness in his eyes that I haven’t seen before. He’s arrived at my house so we can work on a new song.
He sent me a demo of this new song the week before. The demo was titled ‘A New Conversation’ and it was based around a sample of a Sam Harris lecture titled ‘Death and the Present Moment’. I’d never heard of the guy. When I first played the demo I wasn’t sure whether I was comfortable with it. I was worried we would end up sounding too much like Public Service Broadcasting.
Adrian and I go up to my little recording studio and I play through some of the guitar riffs I have been messing around with and Ade is pretty firm on which ones he likes. This song means a lot to him, I can tell. He sets himself up at the recording desk and tells me to start playing the guitar.
I play the guitar with complete freedom. Ade has control over the recording process so I don’t need to worry about doing it myself for the first time in years. I just dive into the repeating drum beats beneath Sam’s voice. I play for about two hours. Sweat is pouring off me and I feel a new type of exhaustion. Ade gives me a thumb’s up to tell me he is satisfied with my guitaring. I let out a sigh of relief and drop my bulky electric guitar to the floor.
‘Do you want to do some drums now?’ Ade asks.
I look at the drum kit in the corner, wondering where I can find the energy.
‘Give me second’ I say and I go downstairs to get a drink and wipe away some of the sweat.
‘How are you getting on?’ asks Ruth.
‘I think he’s trying to kill me.’ I say.
‘You could always have a break’ she says.
I consider it for a moment, maybe just stopping for the day, I have done quite a lot of stuff for one day. The wildlife walk seems like a distant memory.
‘No, I’m good, I’m good.’
I go back upstairs and leap onto the drums. Ade is still at the computer. There is a serenity about him, but an excitement beneath it all. You can almost see this song being created through his neural pathways.
‘Shall we do some more?’ he asks.
I re-adjust my posture and give him a nod. As the song starts I manage to find a beat that doesn’t really feel like it should make any sense, but I stick with it and I become lost in the drum kit. I don’t really have arms anymore, I just have drum sticks. I look to one side and Adrian has a camera. He’s leaning towards the drum kit taking pictures. It distracts me for a second, but I keep on the beat. I can feel the walls of the world opening up and I am not too sure what is happening. I have become Adrian’s instrument. He is somehow playing me.
I have played the drums for about an hour when Adrian gives me the thumbs up with a big smile. It’s done, it’s over. I feel my back crack as I get up from the drum stool. The room is warm and thick with sweat. I open the windows and doors and I stand for a while, panting, taking off my shirt and towelling myself down.
Adrian listens back to a few sections and he looks incredibly satisfied. He has a quick coffee and packs up his stuff and leaves the house. I stand at the doorway trying to understand what just happened. I think someone just dragged some music out of my chest.
The next time I hear the song it is nearly in its final form and we have renamed it ‘In Your Brain Right Now’ and I can’t remember playing a lot of the things I play. I hear elements of jazz in the song, which originally sounded more like a slow burning Underworld track and I don’t understand where these influences have come from. How the hell have we started playing jazz? I discuss this later with Ade and I discover that his Nan use to play jazz records to him when he was a kid.
Adrian also doesn’t fully understand where some of the influences came from, which leads me to conclude that this is the most No Side Effects song that we have recorded. It seems to transcend the two people that made it.
In response to the underwhelming demand for our debut single we’ve decided to clog up the ever expanding and overloaded internet with another mediocre piece of musicianship*. It seems we can’t give this music away, but we try. You can download it for FREE from the ‘Music Shop‘ or have a listen:
This time though, on a more serious note, we are very grateful for the kind permission from Sam Harris for the use of some audio from a lecture he gave for the Atheist Foundation of Australia in 2012 called ‘Death and the Present Moment’. The track uses samples from a sequence where Sam talks through how to attain an ‘in the moment’ mental state using mindfulness meditation. It is a fascinating introduction to meditation and really resonated with us. If you would like to listen to the full lecture then we include the YouTube video:
This single includes the main track itself called ‘In Your Brain Right Now’ along with a B-side called ‘In Your Brain Right Now (Naked Mix). This B-side is an early draft of the track that includes the whole mediation sequence from Sam Harris with a simple repetitive and hypnotic beat.
We hope to share and explore some of the themes that underpin this track in some writing and another podcast shortly. These incredibly interesting themes include meditation, the urgency and value of life and the ability to enjoy each moment and the influence of religion and how it has played a part in our lives. We’re also pretty sure we’ll again make little sense and get carried away with delusions of grandeur.
*Tom is apparently offended by the comment about mediocre musicianship. No Side Effects are not able to reconcile this issue, because Tom is part of the band.
The first single by No Side Effects is now available for listening and/or downloading. The single is called ‘Isolation Explosion’, the themes of which we have rambled at length about in our ‘No Side Effect Podcasts‘ and written about in our ‘blog’ entries.
There are two B-sides included with the single called ‘Isolation Explosion (Industrial Slavery Mix) and Isolation Explosion (Replacement B-Side Mix). The Industrial Slavery Mix was an early incarnation made during the development of the single which we both ended up liking. It is interesting how far some of the songs we’ve worked on have changed since their original rough sketches.
The second B-side ‘Replacement B-Side Mix’ was recorded in Tom’s studio during a rehearsal session. There was going to be a different B-side but we had a few difficulties getting permission from the BBC to use a sample that was used in the track. Well, we could not afford to include it, should we say.
It has been a long journey since we first chatted about doing a collaboration over 2 years ago over a pint in a local pub. Have a listen and download for free if you wish and send in your comments, keep them clean though!
You can listen and download via the Bandcamp website for free. You can also click on the ‘Music Store’ tab on the right hand column of this website: Have a listen here:
If you prefer Soundcloud, you can stream the single here:
We having been mixing the final tracks for the new album over the Christmas and New Year holidays and continuing into January and February. The final selection of 9 songs have almost all been mixed and hope to start mastering soon. We’ve also been exploring images, logos and other ideas around the themes in the album.
We have now released a preview of our forthcoming album due out towards the end of this year or early next year. Listen now on SoundCloud and feel free to make any early comments.
An incredibly hot day of recording, listening and creating music on Sunday. We experimented with synths and drums to try and lay a base for a new track, along with recording lyrics for Isolation Explosion and waffling around the subject of Ideals.
A new track called Final Forecast was added to the selection of tracks. The development of most of the tracks is generally done by one of us working a rough and taking it as far as we can then handing it over for the other one to work on. The tracks sometimes change completely and other times it undergoes a few tweaks. A track like Breaking News was worked up and completed in a day and Isolation Explosion, one of the first tracks, has been nibbled at since October 2013. We will now move to complete the tracks we have done so far.
We got together for an enjoyable evening yesterday, the first time since our weekend session in May, to catch up and generally move forward with the tracks. A large amount of time was spent working on recording vocals for Dark Light and Isolation Explosion, recording each verse and chorus in batches of three, overlaying two tracks to give a richer sound and the third as an enhancement. We have both been working on lyrics, some of which were used to replace the ‘holding’ lyrics on these two tracks along with a page of spoken words used on The Sun Implodes (pfft!).
We also continue experimenting with vocal effects (many hours spent twiddling virtual knobs!) and recorded ‘found’ sounds, including Cable Avoidance Tools and broken boilers! There have also been a few more tracks added, giving us around 15 to 16 tracks to develop and select for the album.
A new track called ‘Dark Light’, the ninth that will be included on the album, moved fairly quickly to its completion. The listing so far is below.
No Side Effects 