Winter Again & Blue Planet (1994 live cassette tape demo)

Picture by Itxaso Díaz. Audio replaced 13/06/21 - 'slightly remastered' ..Cause here lies dexdexter... and why not. Bass and guitar were originally recorded slightly left / right, off center, as per G's advice in order to get my Boss BX16 keyboard mini mixer, with mini faders, mini buttons, mini knobs, mini-everything, to cope with the complete band signal / amplitude th/ump/th. So it is what it is - recorded in my Bayswater living room, with am early 90s Boss drum machine as a drummer, though fully programmed via early MIDI-only Cubase v.1.8, running on a -f*ing classic- Mac SE HD which couldn't really handle complex hi-hats & triggering busy syncopated percussion samples, and with my mini Boss mini mixer handling it all too. We blew -I blew- Gage's Trace Elliot amp twice, cause impedances und amperages just did not agree with. We were lucky to get these demos done before the whole set up just blew up lol. Plus my cat waiting his turn to jump on my Juno 60 as it warmed up. We had entire songs recorded with the last few seconds featuring Pilchards, having decided to take a walk / nap across my warmed up Juno60. Priceless. Whenever Juno 60 pads sounded extra dense, it occasionally was cause Pilchards was switching chorus modes while napping atop the fan area. What a legend Pilchards was. Bad White Cat! Xav softly screamed often, while giving him a treat and learning how to say it in Spanish too - so Gato Malo Blanco was Pilchards' street name from then on. And I guess fair to say, all of these demos are produced by him, cause entire live band takes were deleted, whenever Pilchards decided they weren't good enough, by slowly walking across my keys. Producers can be subtle, and they also can be brutal. Feline ones don't really give a sh*t about artists' feelings lol. Those noises upfront are Xav and G intervening with crisp bags, standard plastic bags, and whatever else, atop my intro sequence. The effing nerve lol. That's how bored we were of recording these demos til they sounded like this, basically. It also meant Xav's vocal cords were sometimes fairly strained up by the time we got to record sort of 'the one' - and that's sometimes latent on these demos, and that's not fair either, cause no matter how tired I was, my moog lines were gonna sound the same - well, thanks to G, who always kept me on track, riffs wise, cause I was known in the band for digressing rather a lot with my keyboard lines. Winter Again, like Rosa Mystica, and April 31st, were song titles that Mónica, the guitarist Gage and I had worked with in Spain pre-dex, had come up with, together with lyrics. We never changed the titles.