ANUBIS 230503: THE BLOG

Robert, Steve and I rehearsing the songs very early in 2005

INTRO

The passing of time has created a haze over the minutae of creating what turned out to be a marathon run, an album that has still yet to make it into the hands of those people who have patiently waited nearly five years to hear it.

It's something of an old chestnut now, but the concept was germinated over a bottle of vodka at a mutual friends house back in 2004. Rob and I had gotten completely into The Mars Volta, and my desire to push music further than I had been able to or allowed to in Department had grown to an extent that I was looking for an outlet, a very ambitious outlet that would let me explore my own musical development and to help purge some of the lingering grief that had resided since my pal Evan had died the previous May.

It is a simple fact that Evan is not the protagonist of 230503. I think that it would be disrespectful to use his tragedy as a means to inspire a prog rock album. Although it is impossible to deny that the grief that the tragedy created was the catalyst in both Robert and I to start writing. As time went by, obviously the fact that the story parallels Ev's story to the point of the lead character's disappearance meant the storyline is indelibly tied to my connection to Ev, which stays very strong today. But the 'fantasy' on side two (using vinyl equivalents) is entirely based on the fact that as searches for Ev never managed to find him (and to this day his exact final resting place is unknown), the immediate fantasy is 'Well, what if he isn't gone?'. I think anyone who goes through a similar situation trys to question themselves this, and even if the know deeply it's not so, they still question it. Robert noticed this in me after Ev's passing, and it became a vital part of the storyline.

The initial plan was much much more convoluted, and crap. The change comes at the end.
Boy, unhappy with life and loneliness, meets young lady on the internet, flys to be with her, shags her, gives her a gift of a silver pendant, falls off the boat and seems to drown. Awakens with some sort of amnesia on a foreign shore, and stumbles into town with nothing but the shirt on his back, and meshes with other vagrants, falling in with a drug dealing nutter who in return for shelter and santuary, has these poor minions do his bidding. OK, yes, I know that is the story of the first half of the final record. Stick with me here...

So this dealer, aka The Doctor (the pharmacist sounded far too stupid, although I sort of wished we'd called it the Alchemist now...), has our hero, over the period of years running around doing nasty things like selling evil potions and herbs and powders and what have you to nice little schoolkids. Not the hero he is cracked up to be I guess. So, malnourished and delapidated, he collapses from an overdose in a respectable foriegn high street. People walk by unmoved.
An ambulance duly arrives to take our cretin to hospital, and upon arrival, he notices a silver pendant on the neck of a nurse who looks vaguely familiar.

The difference between the first draft and the eventual plan came here. Our initial plan was the character would see the pendant, trigger off long dormant memories and pave the way for the Hollywood happy ending with the big symphonic climax. I don't actually know what posessed us to even consider that now. It's so unbelievably bad.

So we decided to be bastards and get tricky. The penultimate song, The Collapse, has these references back to the family of the main character, the fading photo in the frame, which is a wonderful image, and Rob's best lyric I think. This lead us logically to the Inspector Morse ending, with requisite twist.

All the events, the nurse, pendant, recognition were merged together into a long piece called Disinfected and Abused. This basically culminates in the very last chorus of the album, where we're thrown back to the living room, and the realisation that the whole thing has been an ellaborate and not very believable fantasy by a still-grieving sister, and that the character had never made it out of the water, effectively anulling the whole story past track four. Tricksy, eh?
Needless to say, it made the whole thing very dark, and much more downbeat than the original. It also made it a lot better, and gave it realism and integrity.

Me at a song writing session at the softball fields, sometime in 2005.

ALBUM TITLE

Fact: The albums title was Nick Antoinette's idea. We had begun the whole thing under the umbrella sort of working title of Technicolour Afterlife, the afterlife bit is sort of obvioius; the idea of the parallel existence, the protagonists amnesia induced descent into depravity, all that bollocks. Technicolour is merely a word that sounded nice in front of it and it enhanced the cinematic scope a bit. Rob has since derided it as sounding like a Lloyd-Webber musical title and I see what he means.

The title 230503 is significant, but not in the way some may think. Evan died on the 21st May 2003, which was a Wednesday night. I found out in an SMS message (of all things) sometime on the Friday morning. 23rd May 2003. If this had been the same day, I would have resisted using it. Particularly as the album is NOT about Evan. Merely about grieving in general. Since the date represents my finding out, it suited the album in a very strong and poignant way. Not to mention, it sounded very bloody cool... 'twenty-three - o - five - o - three'...

ALBUM COVER

The album cover was shot and brought to life by Matthew Buttsworth, a mutual friend of the band, and who was one third owner in the aforementioned vodka bottle that started this whole thing. As the album idea came up, Matt volunteered to do the artwork for the album. We spent a few long weeks in 2004 getting shots done and as the album idea began very big and gradually receeded, so too did the artwork. At one point we had several different images to use, that thankfully receeded to the simpler three, as the budget allowed more comfortably.

The record cover itself, was, as I recall Robbie's concept, as he pointed out these two rather forlorn looking phone booths next to each other in Windsor. The phone itself is a powerful presence throught the album, (partially in reverence to my finding out about Evan by phone, but also on the concept that the phone too can be a harbinger of doom... sometimes the phone only ever rings with bad news) and the site looked great, the symmetry reminded me very clearly of the cover of Pink Floyd's last album, 'The Division Bell'.

The original version featured Robbie as the Protagonist, and Matt stripped two pictures together using sophisticated digital tomfoolery. Matt's strength is in taking a little idea and running with it. It still looks amazing. But Robbie, rightfully, wasn't keen on being seen, especially given his position as the singer, as the central character, so we subpoenaed another friend, Pat Rowlands to play the part. Given he looks like a slightly shorter, slightly more athletic Robbie, he perfectly fitted the role and as an army boy had the discipline to stand there and not complain whilst Matt took endless photos in Windsor at 2am.

If you look at the final artwork, there is much additional detail that Matt added. Firstly, adding the mirror image of the wall on the other side to give the phones that 'boxed-in', claustrophobic feel. The drainpipes too give the whole thing a slightly surreal clinical feel, but the relatively simple act of mirroring is made very different by Pat's differing stance, the fact that both phone boxes are obviously not mirrored, and the fact that the paving stones along the forefront of the image are in no way mirrored. This took ages, but still looks brilliant.

The back cover was of the seedy looking alleyway about halfway down and this again is another one we had re-done. There is an old '60's style light on the wall overhanging the alley that oozes character and once we stripped out some of the more contemporary features (like the bright supermarket at the end of the alley), we had our back cover. It reminds me of 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' by Genesis. Simple but totally effective.

The picture on the inside is collaborative. Matt sparked it off with commenting on how he'd like to experiment with unnatural depth, like a vortex on the side of something that was essentially flat or not very wide, with a very long tunnel in it or something. The third picture, 'Tunnel Vision', was something we picked up on from that. I cannot remember who's idea it was to use the eye now, and it may well have been me, but I'm not prepared to back that up. So Matt, being a trooper, set up a camera to effectively photgraph multiples of Robert's eye. Having nicer eyes than myself, naturally.

Once we had got our eye, we took a trip to some old storm water drains filled with graffiti near to Rob's place, where Robert layed accross the bottom of the drain and Matt took multiple pictures of different positions and what-have-you. Putting the images together was something Matt got done fairly quickly and as such in nearly 5 years we haven't touched it. I always thought this was by far one of the more effective avant garde ideas in that you wouldn't know if you didn't look closely that there was anything funky about the eye. Classically understated.

We took several more pictures which may or may not get used in the future. Some still look good but five years has made some look less effective, not unlike the songs or musical parts

themselves. One we had for The Doctor was a gory one taken in the kitchen of the Pizza Hut where we all used to work, and involved surgical instruments, welders mask, a doctor's coat, a meat cleaver, loads of red food colouring and some uncooked pizza dough and minced bacon. The end result was my own severed hand. It looked great but as time went on, it became apparent that a lot of the work we'd done would be jettisoned. Likewise a cool shadow and chalk outline holding hands with no actual body present. I loved the idea but the feet always looked stupid on the shadow. I know thats how shadow feet look with no body there to meet them but it just looked better in theory. There is a cool drip of red liquid, a psychedelic trashed-bathroom with tree roots and a rather 2 dimensional looking eye. Looked great in '04, and a pendant that looked great against stainless steel. But there was not enough room and our favourites have been chosen.

FACT: On a day off in March 2009, I happened to walk past the site we shot the cover photograph to find that one phone box has been removed. Slightly poignant as I have seen it several times and now the site is totally unrecognisable.

THE SONGS

The Deepest Wound
First came about in late 2004. Working title was 'Polo', due to the fact that as we wrote it, late one evening at a local softball field, I was happily munching down a packet of Polos (English equivalent to 'Life-Savers'). Rob had already got a simple bass riff and I had the chords, and we later adjusted the rhythm to make it 'bounce a bit'. It's actually simpler than it might seem, and the first demo was done on 8-track cassette in my garage by Rob and I. Later Steve took it and made the drums a bit more technical. Doug added the solo later, and Nick added his own takes to the riff. Lyrically, the song is about not fitting into what people percieve is normal or right, or not being like all your friends. Read: Isolation and loneliness. It emphasises the polar opposites in the protagonists life to that of his peers, to his family. The sense of dislocation. He never had 'it', but what 'it' is he never says. But it's his deepest wound. Is it just a 4 and a half minute rant about a young bloke saying he hasn't gotten a shag yet? Is it about love? Is it about a sense of belonging to somebody or something? Is it none of the above? Lyrics by Robert, so very probably.

The arrangement for this song was subject to a number of changes. The Original 8-tk demo had a really ballsy edge to it that felt completly 'live', and when we got into the studio, we seemed to water that ballsiness down and down and down, substituting it for technical wizardry. There was, eventually, a piece that sounded completely removed from the original with a King Crimson/Discipline take on it, with polyrhythmic guitar punctuation. It sounded really technical, and really really good. But, it just wasn't right for the song. So Dougie, Nick and I re-recorded the backing track and went back to the original arrangement. And it worked perfectly. Sometimes, you can't top the original. And sometimes the simple ideas are really the best.

FACT: When we recorded the lead vocal for this one with Dean Bennison, due to my perfectionist, critical nature (read: confidence destroying arsehole), and Rob getting increasingly flustered with words, pitch and delivery (mostly down to my sniping from my papal chair), I was dispatched to Picton (30 minutes return drive at least) to buy some menial things, and banned from going back into the studio until they had a take. Without me, they nailed it in one, and although I hated the take to begin with, I have completely warmed to it's ballsiness. I am constantly reminded of this, and will probably be apologising to Rob until I die. Which I have been informed by both Dean and Robert will occour sooner rather than later if I happen to attend another vocal tracking session with any 'critique'.

Leaving Here Tonight
The original idea for this song was a completely spontaneous thing where I picked up a portuguese Laoud, Rob picked up a 12 string guitar (with only the two lowest strings left on it) and I began playing the chord progression and Rob's bass line just fell out. Totally Organic. I was always concerned about the similarity to Pink Floyd's 'Dogs' in the strumming pattern, but figued that since Department had already had a song that sounded a little too close for comfort to another section of that song (Codename Velvet), I might as well not care either. In fact the similarity between Floyd and Leaving informed the lyrics a little as Rob got all Roger Waters and made a little list, like the lyrics to Eclipse (All that you touch, all that you see, etc...). There is very little melodic variation in this track, as it's remarkably simple harmonically and in terms of form. However, we achieved our variation by constantly increasing in dynamics, layers, lines of vocal harmony until the last verse where it's very thick and quite tricky, with Nick down on the bottom, Rob in the middle with the melody and me soaring somewhere over the top, as is my want to do; before the whole shebang winds down into the post-coital atmospherics. This song, lyrically, is about our hero leaving his home and family and life behind in search of' the 'it' from the previous song. It seems to be a girl, with whom our hero is quick to indulge in his more carnal instincts. This song has one of my favourite Rob lines in it: "I'm cleaning out my closet, like some homeless ghost". Whether this is about our hero leaving his old life behind or just experiencing some new animalistic tendencies is up to you. I'd likely say the former. I love the imagery of the homeless ghost, by the way. And having pondered upon it's meaning for nigh on five years, I have to say I still have no bloody idea.

FACT: The original version of this song had a two minute funk jam on the end with additional lyrics that WERE about sleeping with the girl in the story. Beginning with the chorus re-sang in a different style, it concludes thus "Heart and mind, brewing, numb/ I never thought it'd be this much fun /and silence breaks this lightning pace/ as my seed is sewn in some fertile place". Musically, again with the Floyd, it sounded not unlike some hyrid of latter stages of Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Close to The Edge (verse two) by Yes. But not quite as good as either. The whole piece was concieved under the working title of 'Erica'.

Breaking Water
Breaking Water is direct narrative, and is the first reprise of The Deepest Wound. Musically, it's very simple, with an old-sounding piano chiming the chords accompanied by a hammond organ and some wheezy sounding Mellotron. The first section of the song has Rob's vocal about the character's final moments, and is some of the finest and most emotive singing on the record. The second half of the song is a haunting chord sequence that Rob knocked up on the mellotron and I put bass notes to. The seagulls were recorded at Wollongong Beach at 3am in the morning as where the waves, and Dean Bennison added the 'reverse wah' on top.

The demo arrangement of this song was two accoustic guitars, a piano tinkling and the aforementioned 'tron, but we changed it in case we got accused of ripping off Genesis. Not that every other prog band in the last 20 years hasn't in some way or another, but we wouldn't dare compare ourselves to Genesis, so we decided to sound like Anubis instead. The final arrangement was much, much, much more haunting.

FACT: When we were playing back a rough mix of this song at Razorback, I had to leave the room in order to gather myself. A ghost visited me during the playback and the words were too poignant to deal with. I had found myself, over the course of the previous four years, seperating this album from the original muse, potentially as a result of the creative period closing and the techical 'getting it right at all costs' period starting. The Muse came through very strongly and I reconnected with the spirit infused in the words and the music and it has stayed there since. I'm not sure how I shall perform this one.

OTHER FACT: These three songs were originally part of a bigger epic, a super-epic called 'The Life Not Taken'. In itself, the pieces were very good, and the segues where strong but it dawned on us that it was not organic long-form writing, more a gratuitous and potentially commercially suicidal ploy to have a 22 minute track staring you down side one, band one (there's the vinyl again...) For anyone who cares, here's the low-down on 'Life'...

Part I: Old Pain, New Wounds
Essentially an instrumental by rob and I that changed weekly. We have had more intros for this album than Cher has had wigs. The last one was a spooky modern King-Crimson/Electronica thing that Doug played a crazy atonal solo over. Set the right mood, but I found myself fast-forwarding it to get to the song proper. Never a good sign that you've created a classic.

Part II: The Deepest Wound
Exactly the same version as above, in fact the backing track for the album version of Deepest was edited out of the multitrack for Life Not Taken, as were the subsequent pieces.

Part III: Circular Roads with Straight Lines
Was a 4 minute instrumental featuring a guitar solo from yours baldly. I liked, and still do like the basic idea, but it tends to noodle on, and when Doug joined us, it seemed unworthwile re-recording a track we weren't fully happy with. So it got chopped.

Part IV: Leaving Here Tonight
The album version with the additional sexually explicit verse.

Part V: Worlds Apart
I regret losing this, although it's not really compatible with the rest of the album. Remember what I said about ripping off Genesis? Well this was our full-on Neo-Prog extravaganza with the Mellotron Choirs, the rolling toms, crashing cymbals, the complex bass runs, the Taurus pedals, Hammonds a-plenty and a climax of true symphonic proportion. Sounded awesome, but was so derivative it hurts.. Originally written by Steve and myself in 1999, and Rob added little bits in the writing. The death knell for this piece (as with 'Life' as an entirety) is that when we wrote Disinfected and Abused, a real epic with shape and scope and recapitulation, it rendered 'life' obsolete and exposed it for what it was. Overworked bollocks.

Part VI: Breaking Water
Essentially the Deepest Wound reprise section of the final Breaking Water played in the Genesissy folk style. Sweet and accomplished but too flowery and pretty and not stark and melacholic enough.

Waterfall
Waterfall began life in my garage with me and Rob just jamming ideas over a very morose B minor guitar thing. Took on the mantle "The Drowning Song" which informed both it's place in the album and the direction it's lyric would take. The original arrangement was very Pink Floyd 'Dark Side' era, but nowhere near as good, with a totally different and completely dreadful guitar solo. By me.

The final version was recorded in it's original arrangement, and then one day, possibly after too much Mike Oldfield, I re-worked the first verse, and liked the result. I later wrote a piece of music called simply 'A flat mellotron chord thing' that had one of my stock standard 'aching chord sequences with rather lovely guitar melody', not unlike Department's They Breed Them For The Credit, that I rearranged and replaced the original solo with with a crafty modulation or two. The drums on the album were played to the original piece and the new section literally developed it's feel as a result of the original section's dynamics. The fact it worked so well was down to luck.

This solo shows off just what Doug brought to Anubis and how much his interpretation of existing material, allied to his own sections that he injected into that solo, enhanced the group. I think this is perhaps the biggest instrumental goose bump moment on the record. Certainly one of my high points.

The rhythm loop on the start of the song is an african drum that is pitched shifted down two octaves. This sound immediately conjures up a dark picture, and layered with a droning pad as opposed to banks of organ and mellotron, it's a stark contrast to other tracks.

The end of the song marks the introduction of the Garageband Philhramonic Orchestra. I had aquired the Garageband Symphony Orchestra Jam pack, which allowed me to score the orchestra part. Having done orchestration at University, as well as for my Pink Floyd show, and back in Department, I felt I would be able to create a good orchestral part, and it worked very very well. Sounds like 80 excellent musicians had sat in studio one (my bedroom) and played their hearts out. Bravo!

FACT: The final section of lyric is by yours baldly and is perhaps the hardest thing to hear on the record for me. Dark and Alone/ Flesh, Water and Bone. Very evocative. Maybe too much so.

Anonymity
We wanted Anonymity to represent the lying in an unconcious state and then the awakening to realise that you have no idea what the hell is going on, and you've no idea who you are. So there's three sections... the floaty warm fuzzy bit, the pure unadulterated terror and then the suspense, eerie feeling of 'what am I going to do?'. Compositionally, it works perfectly.

Anonymity is a horrible thing, really. Absolutely terrifying to listen to if you don't know whats going on, and thats probably exactly what it needed to be.

The end section features a sample from George Street in Sydney that Rob and I recorded one busy afternoon. The riff was cooked up at our regular haunt, the softball fields in Glenmore Park, and features the drummer from my Pink Floyd show, Lachlan Rankin, an extraordinary guitarist, playing a lot of the guitar on it. The main of the lead guitar was improvised. It's a different style and sound to much of Doug's work which balances out the sound. However, for fans of our most excellent fretmeister, he does play all the riffery on this piece so there is still much ginger guitar girth to enjoy.

FACT: The end of the song is a recorded improv between Rob, Lach and myself, all abusing instruments. The tron chords are the only tonal thing, and the little boy you hear is a child's voice. Which is, in actual fact, a pitch-shifted Robert. The spoken lines are thus: When I am gone, release me/Let me go/ I have many things to see and do and I don't think you've noticed/ I don't want to be found. The former is a quote from a poem in the booklet (programme?) for Ev's memorial service. The first lyrical clue that the character may not actually be with us any longer. The latter is a quote from Department's Codename: Velvet that was a bit of fun, but had a deeper meaning and resonance in this context. The child's voice is particularly eerie.

The Bond Of Mutual Distrust
The Bond Of Mutual Distrust first came together right at the start of writing sessions for the album, and was, I guess a rather contrived effort to write something in an odd groove, with a odd metre. This felt really alien to begin with but later began to feel far more comfortable. The first demo that Robbie and I ever did was in Dec 2004, where we did the song sections and then left a long section open for ambient sound effects. A far more interesting idea on paper. Using two 4-track tape machines, we knocked up a mass of tape effects that were a load of fun to do but not a very listenable exercise in music making - more of which later. When we came into developing the song with Steve, a second middle section took shape, but that was not all that exciting either. The final one came together during the sessions for the final record with Steve basically improvising and me cutting his improvisation into a usable shape. Rob came up with the riff, Nick modified the riff, and I did the chords, and Dougie did the solo. I still think this is one of the best bits of ensemble playing on the record.

FACT: The weird percussion sounds throughout this section were influenced by 'The Gates Of Delirium' by Yes. We set up microphones in the Pizza Hut where we used to work and set about banging all these metal benches, Mezzaluna knives, Throwing cups at brick walls, making as much noise as we could. We later cut and edited all these sounds into the multitrack, and it added the requisite chaos.

The lyrics were written by Rob and I. One of us would write a draft, and then we passed it to the other who rewrote it, and then passed it back and so on. It was an interesting way of commitee lyric writing. The melody changed a lot from intital conception through to the recording, and the lyrics are complex in the sense that they accomodate a 5/4 metre, which adds an extra beat. The actual words themselves tell the story of the character finding a derelict building to squat in, and sharing it with a group of other squatters, all of which are taken advantage of in the same way by The Doctor, the aforementioned bastard who keeps them 'well medicated' in return for their running his operation.

The intro of this song is played on a portuguese laoud. The sound effects you hear were recorded on the Great Western Highway at Glenbrook in the Blue Mountains. You can hear the automatic door of a service station going off if you listen carefully.

The Doctor
The Doctor began life as a riff that Rob wrote at home and brought to me. Recorded, as I recall onto his telephone. It had, certainly, a nasty attitude to it, and was very buzzy and distorted (possibly through phone speakers) and that appealed to me. The chords were easy, the verse chords were already written, implied by the arpeggio bass line. The whole thing screamed crazy mexican punk. The chorus chords fell out very very easily (too easily in fact, and have as such been heard countless times before), but it's the melody that takes this one into cool places.

The slow, sinister section in the middle is a partial lift, chordwise, from an old old Dave song called Absent From The Neck Up. Fantastic title for an ordinary song. But the chords were brooding and ominous and in the right key. I believe in recycling.

The lyrics and melody for this song is all Rob's. I think the vocal is one of the album's best and most aggressive, and the lyrics are packed full of opressive imagery. A step back to Rob's punk roots. When I listen to the finished masters, despite it being one of the shorter songs, sonically, I am perhaps proudest of The Doctor.

The line up that recorded this was again including Lachlan Rankin on guitar and he performs all the lead guitar and the melodic (perhaps not the right word for it) in-fills in the verse. This orginal approach to guitar layering also appeared on The Collapse with Doug avant-garding it up, so to speak. On The Doctor, Dougie plays the Rhythm guitars and I play the Brian May style lead harmonies. Steve also overdubbed two tracks of percussion on this track, bongoes and cowbell, and it all sounds dementedly good. There's a certain neurotic intensity to it that comes off quite well, I think. The keyboards are quite simple, but having that insistent rasping Wurly throughout is a trick not often employed by me. For that reason it stands out in my current canon. The half speed mellotron in the breakdown is possibly the darkest sound I have ever used.

FACT: The ambient section at the beginning is a direct lift from the demo and was completely improvised. There is an ARP Prosoloist synth in there, some weird processed sounds, and me chicken picking on my strat. The washiness is a combination of about 100 delays and reverbs (significantly less really....) We have never quite replicated it's claustrophobic atmosphere, so we used the demo version on the album, cut straight out of the mixed demo's audio file and faded in and out, with clever editing. And it's all the better for it. Further proof that you can't top the original.

The Collapse
The Collapse was the first Anubis song I felt really had something. The chord progression to the opening section of the song was originally a Rob bass riff (without the swing) and it later evolved with the addition of Steve's part (he made it swing).

We were hopelessly stuck at where to take this great verse until I stumbled onto an old demo of a song called A Good Future's Past, written by Steve several years ago. The majority of the song is fairly innocuous and pleasant, and then it went into this quirky little section in 7/8 that never seemed to fit. Thankfully, it fit perfectly into The Collapse.

FACT: The final arrangement to Part One was finished sitting on a picnic table at the University Of Western Sydney at 3am on a Wednesday morning in the middle of July in 2005. Bloody freezing.

The Collapse, fundamentally,is like a great patchwork quilt made up of loads of really good surviving bits of old patchwork quilts! It's as close to musical reincarnation as one gets. The guitar solo in part one consists of a chord progression of Robert's that came from an earlier song (in an earlier band). The 17/16 time signature was just Steve showing off, and in truth was happy accident! The whole of the middle bit is a reprise, chordally, of the Bond Of Mutual Distrust, before breaking into the second part of the song which is a total rewrite of an old song of mine from a past life called Around In Circles. A song that had some really great ideas but never quite made the grade. With a brand new, soaring chorus, it gave it lift and direction, and turned into a rather beautiful piece. The ending section is all new, and heavily influenced by Pink Floyd from 'The Wall' era. That relentless, grinding riff with the orchestra following suit. A very big musical high for me. The original demo of this piece was done on 8tk cassette at home, and then I took it around to Rob's where he added the bass and wrote the vocal melody.

Vocally, the second part of the song has become Robert's best part on the record. An absolutely killer melody, and stunning lyrics. Of course, well sung as well. There's a real melancholy and yearning in that vocal that really allows the spirit in the music (going back to it's muse, again) to present itself. I am phenomenally happy with it. The lyric of the chorus, going back to the fading photograph in the frame, the metaphor for the fading memories, still treasured, is one that I come back to again and again, and still love. It breaks into that wonderful guitar solo, and then into Dougie's big moment at the end of the record where it all goes a bit menacing, with the big riffs, the orchestra and the guitar widdling on the top.

As a part of the story, The Collapse refers to the inevitable 'crashing down' of the whole scenario. Whether that be the character from the story collapsing in the street from either an overdose/illness/whatever, or the more estoteric idea of the whole fantasy of the character still living somewhere finally being extinguished, or collapsing, if you will, as a result of 'the' phone call or some other means of the sister being dragged back to reality. It's a weighty concept, really... And a brilliant lyric that switches between the lead character's internal monologue ('In my dreams it was a different story....') and that of an impartial narrator (and worlds away, he fades away, tomorrow's gone and turned it's back/No help for him, he lived in sin/left to dream in white and black/he's frozen into one pose/as every heartache never mends/the final page of this forgotten tale/Is this the way his story ends?), which aptly demostrates the two levels on which the song was intended....

FACT: The Collapse was the first thing that the current line up of the band ever played together from 230503, (the very first thing was Department's Lightfoot) and it seemed to live up to it's namesake. It was quite a horrific collapse. In fact, this song is so complex that to this day we've never attempted to play the whole song from beginning to end, preferring to play the two parts, in a slightly modified arrangement to suit it to the stage, seperately or back to back.

FACT: The sound of the ventilator came from a sound effects library, but the 'beeeeeeeeeep' at the end, was done on a Korg MS-20 analogue synth. In the story, it's the death of the darker, post-amnesia character, and the conflict between the ideals of the two sides of his personality, which is triggered off by seeing a Nurse wearing the same (or similar) silver pendant to the one he gave his lady friend in Breaking Water.

Disinfected and Abused
From a literal point of view, most of Disinfected and Abused is referring to the above conflict, the attempts to escape this 'second skin, and find the one one who's free of sin', but it's also the end of the whole saga, the sister finally realising her brother is gone, is not coming back, and the realisation that 'all this never happened'; as if listening to this record has wasted your time... it ended ages ago!

As I said before, the ending was initially very different, but when we adapted the story to make the ending more bleak (avoiding the Hollywood happy ending, which would make me puke in hindsight), a nice, sweet, sad piece like the song Technicolour Afterlife would have completely failed.

Disinfected is anything but nice. Robert came up with the initial idea to have a 'speed-prog' piece on the record, and came up with a bass line that sounded like 'Sound Chaser' from Yes. The demo of the song still has this over the 7/8 intro, but the intro itself was very different.

The inital ideas for the intro, the first verses and choruses, the Just Another Corpse bit, the 11/8 section (You tell me so many stories...) the 'habit of eating my fill' bit came from our initial jams with me, Rob and Steve. These were refined over the weeks and eventually took a form closer to what you hear now.

The ambient section was improvised in the studio, with Dean B on guitar doing the whole floyd bit, as was the 'Wait for your turn in the Sun' which came from a bassline Rob had had knocking around for ages. It was Rob who had the idea of using a modulated recapitualtion of the chorus from The Deepest Wound (the second reprise of the song overall) to link the end of the 'Corpse' section to the 11/8 bit, which involves some tricksy time changes. But it flowed like water and we loved it.

The missing links were are the 5/8 section and the soft section following it (I broke so many hearts). The latter was actually an accoustic guitar piece I was working on that was never intended to be part of this song. The former was done by cutting a loop of the intro into 5/8 and improvising a riff to it. I did in on Christmas day 2005. I showed it to Rob who thought it sounded like Rush. I thought it was more like Yes. With the final chord of this section being g, and the whole thing being loud and nasty, the juxtaposition of the softer acoustic edge was appealing and it worked chordally with the bit before and after. So I edited it in to the piece, and at least we had our first 15 minute + epic that wasn't a medley.

Rob and I constantly fiddled with Disinfected. We were really proud of it from a compositional point of view, but felt it needed some tweaking. One of the first jobs when we recorded all the songs for the final record was to change some of the arrangements. The 'speed-prog' disappeared under the weight of it's own pretentiousness, although looking back at a distance of 3.5 years, I rather like it again. Replaced by a different line and a chord sequence. The 5/8 section was enlivened by having Steve actually play it, as opposed to some loop from something else. Vis-a-vis the Deepest Wound reprise. (This section for me ties the album together, and really conjures up memories of the Abbey Road medley by the Beatles with the huge reprise of 'You never give me your money' at the end of Golden Slumbers) The Acoustic section got reworked into the now familiar synth/guitar wash punctuated by Nick and Steve's stabs. Nick reworked huge sections of bass work, including the intro, the verses, the 5/8 riff and his biggest change was in the guitar solo where he and Steve now tend to go off on rhythmic tangents and take the piece to other places. This section has Nick on bass playing his own riff, and Rob playing arpeggio chords underneath, and me on bass pedals. Too much bass!

Doug wrote the melodies at the start and end of the song, which in turn informed the harmony I played on the synth, which on this track is Lachie's MS-20 analogue synth. The big solo was crafted by Doug and I, he taking the vital themes from my original and adding his slant on them. Truly collaborative. Incidentally, for trainspotters (and to have read this far, you'd have to be....), the synth solo is played on my beloved ARP Prosoloist.

Lyrically, Disinfected comes from three sources, two from different sets of lyrics that Robert wrote. The other from me. We mashed these together and made neccesary changes and it came out very effectively. Personally, I really hate the title. But others are known to really love it. So I conceed to their better judgement. I still prefer it's working title of The Recollection. We decided against on the basis that the last three songs on the album would all have had a definite aritcle on the front.

Having read the original lyrics back recently, they were truly awful. How we managed to scrounge anything from them is totally beyond me. I think one of us has a scavenging bird somewhere in our bloodline.

FACT: The voice over just before the 'Wait for your turn in the sun' is something I found on a tape that was recorded during the Falklands war, when I was 2. I have no idea how we happened to have an audio tape full of Falklands war News reports, but seeing as how there are sections on there of the 1981 FA Cup final, and loads of terrible 80's bands that you haven't heard in YEARS, there must have been a better reason to tape and hour and a half of 1980's radio. My Dad has forgotten why.

The tape, for a 27 year old cheap audio cassette, is in remarkably good nick, and sounded fairly good with some equalising.

The report was edited heavily to remove all the pertinent events of the day, and as such it really doesn't mean anything. It has more an air of meaning, when applied to the story. I like the idea of a newreader being so vague. It's surreal in a way. Also by heavily editing out vast portions of news you're left a 10 second audio segment consisting of several small samples of vague spoken text which is obviously not infringing anyones copyright. I had reconsidered using it, but it simply sounds too good, and is totally archaic. People just do not SOUND like that on radio anymore. It makes the whole thing a bit timeless.

Disinfected and Abused, quite rightly, has become our most recognisable piece. Musically, it's far and away my favourite and it's the first piece of music I have ever done that's truly been a long song that worked. It goes in so many directions, but always feels like it's meant to go there. Nick, Doug and Steve made it into something better than what it should have been, and the live performances of it represent a group that are truly proud of their work. Even now, there are sections that are 'poised upon a knife's edge' and feel like they could all come crashing down at any second. Steve and Nick in particular love to push us to breaking point and hold us there. Most of the time we hold on, white knuckles. Occasionally we fall apart. It's exciting and thoroughly energising to play.

Lyrically it's OK. I think as a collection of scenes in a film, as such, it works fairly well, but in hindsight the only section of any great importance beyond the basic narrative is the last chorus, the rest is just pure storytelling. There's not as much depth as The Collapse. As a piece of narrative, chronicling the end of the story before the Agatha Christie twist, it's perfectly good. I'm just comparing it to The Collapse, which has two sub-plots at play... which is tricky! I like tricky. The Collapse is more emotional. Disinfected is mood music, pure and simple.
It ends, as it began, with the phone ringing.

SOMEBODY ANSWER THAT BLOODY PHONE...

The more I write and talk about 230503, the more I understand about it. Some central conceits are only becoming obvious to me now, even though they've been there, subliminally, from the start.

The phone is something that began as a cool sound effect, and ended up becoming the biggest thing to set the story in any one place. The album starts with the phone call. His sister drifts off into a daydream. Of course, what the listener is actually hearing is her daydream, not the events themselves.

This is underpinned by the reappearence of the phone in a few moments during the course of the record, under Leaving Here Tonight's outro for instance.

And of course again at the end. I think, in terms of the effect, my growing up with The Dark Side of The Moon and that Heartbeat were really, sonically and conceptually a huge influence. Not that I would dare compare us to Pink Floyd either....

The album cover was serendipity, but now looking back, it was absolutely perfect. Two identical phone boxes, two identical people, representing two lives, two realities, a possible and an eventual. The fulfilled and the un0fulfilled. The living and the dead. This duality beats at the heart of the image which is why it's so striking and so perfect for the record. And of course, the phone being the key to the whole thing.

THE RECORDING
The recording was done in stages. Rob and I began on our own in 2004, writing a concept, organising it into chapters and getting enthusiastic. Then at Christmas 04, when I had an empty house, Rob moved his gear over and we recorded rough demos of 'Old Pain', 'Polo', 'Erika', 'Drowning Song', '5/4 Nasty', 'Doctor' and 'Technicolour Afterlife'. The first demos were done absolutely just the two of us, on two 8tk tape machines. The arrangements were still forming and the playing way ropey at best, but there was enough balls to get the whole thing off the ground. I actually have tremendously fond memories of doing this session, and taking the tapes to Matt B who was, at the time, absolutely Anubis-crazy, and we sat and listened to the whole lot and it felt remarkable. One part that was significantly different was the middle of '5/4 Nasty' (Bond of Mutual Distrust), the two of us slinked off the drums and bass and had a pint of beer each. After downing the pint, we went back and finished the song, having left the tape machine running. In the 4 minutes of silence, we did a collage of tape effects that, although nowhere near as cool as the insanity in the middle now, sounds delightfully quirky and atmospheric. it was a new experience for me, as I had never thought about tape manipulation as a means of making music before, in fact, to the contrary, ahd always treated it, and other exercises in dissonance and choas with a measured air of cynicism. This proved a liberating experience. I am surprised how little, on the other hand, Leaving Here has changed, and with the exception of being transposed down a semitone, it's exactly the same arrangement-wise, except I am nowhere near the drummer Steve is.

Next step was to re-record all these plus The Collapse with Steve on drums. This was the point where things began to sound good. Having a real drummer re-write and re-interpret all my attempts at rhythm were consummately successful. Although I haven't heard these recordings since we did them, I am fairly confident they will sound quite interesting on my revisiting them.

By the end of 2005, Steve, Rob and I had most of the songs complete in enough form to be able to record the stuff for what we foolishly expected to be the final product. The process was fast, and Rob and I spent every night up until 4am in the studio working on it. By the time we got to April 2006, we were having doubts. The stuff sounded OK but was not right. The arrangements sounded too flabby, the recording (especially the drums) was amateurish - it was my first ever recording, to be fair - and there was just too much going on. It was sonic soup. Like wading ankle deep through treacle. Too many tracks, too many sounds. Not enough discipline. Plus my project management skills are marred by my initial rush of enthusiasm countered by my lack of self confidence that allies itself to the complete and total boobery that I indulge in from time to time.

In hindsight, the mix would have been improved dramatically by Dean Bennison just mixing the damn thing, but at the time I probably didn't give a good enough account of what I wanted to hear and it would have confused the hell out of Dean. So we finished it off roughly, and called it 'The Demo'. Perversely, my earliest attempts at mixing, before I started farting about with compression and limiters and stuff, actually sounds OK. With those multitracks (long since erased) one could concievably put together half way decent alternative 230503. Some of the takes have more power than the final versions. But none are as precise.

This decision to can 6 months of work was not lightly taken as some sections of music on that CD were purely improvised, and would be impossible to replicate. We both scratched our heads until we resolved to lift out anything that we wanted to keep and use it in the re-recording. The nicest thing about recording to digital is that it's fairly easy to recycle audio tracks later.

Moving ahead to the final product, and the drums were set up by my then work collegue and friend Bek Anson who is a diamond in the studio herself. She helped me set up the mics and levels at home and get a good sound. I'm indebited to her for this. We recorded the drums in the Garage which explains the 'big' sound of the drums. When we compressed them, the garage sound was really big. I credit Dean B for getting the most out of what I had given him. And that was not a lot.

Again, Rob and I built the thing up from the ground, but a chance hearing of King Crimson's 'Thrak' album in October 2006 made me realise that we needed to use all the technology possible. We did a lot of doctoring to the existing drum tracks, adding extra percussion, effects, etc. I wanted something grand. We changed the arrangements totally to The Collapse and Anonymity, not to mention Disinfected and Abused. I created a new mid section for The Bond Of Mutual Distrust out of a drum solo Steve had done. I edited it all together and Rob came up with the bass riff. It sounded exceptional.

Just as we got to this stage, the line-up changed. With Dougie and Nick added to the ingredients, there were new colours being constantly added to sweeten the overall taste. Which meant a lot of re-tooling the songs to accomodate what our new guitarist and bassist did, and to reflect their style in the album. Some pieces changed little, others, especially Deepest Wound and Leaving, were completely different. Having Robert, who stylistically as a bassist, is not too dissimilar from Nick helped the changeover, but seeing as how Nick (once a proud pick player) is now almost exclusively as finger player changed the tones somewhat. We found a happy medium and some EQ'ing helped to get back some missing Rickenbacker frequencies.

This goes some way toward explaining the abnormally long gestation. Writing in a studio, then getting in new players and rearranging is a time-consuming process. Do not try this at home! One experience I shall not repeat. Next time, we write first, then record.

In April 2007, we booked rehearsal time and began putting the arrangements together. The first Anubis rehearsal was a spectaularly dreadful affair and filled me with unparallelled terror at the the prospect of trying to sort the mess out into something vaguely resembling the artistic vision.

Nick was an absolute trooper. To his enormous credit, he learned so much complex music in the space of weeks, and whilst I was trying to find a way that Doug and I could accommodate each other's (then) diametrically opposed view of what the guitar's role in the band actually was, Nick had learned the whole record twice over, with pick, fingers, and any other method one cared to try (although I'm still reluctant to endorse the entire record as a slap bass odyssey...), as well as modified most of Rob's ideas to suit his own artistic ends. Nick likes to modify. He also likes phasers.

This process of rehearsing gave way to trying to transplant these new sounds into the existing framework of the record. Perhaps in retrospect, we should have stopped there and gone for 230503 'Mark III' and ditched the whole thing, but I was too bloody minded to trash almost a years worth of hard work and some very usable performances from that time. As it stood, Dougie and Nick's parts were transplanted into the existing record. Curiously, and thankfully, it sounded perfectly homogenous. But not without considerable effort to make it sound homogenous.

Once all the backing tracks were complete, we took all the multitracks to Dean B's studio nestled in the Razorback mountains. Razorback is Idyllic and Dean is very gear Savvy. He recorded Rob's vocals with top class mics and captured a different spirit up there. Sometimes a spirit not contained in the music. Some tracks also included some nice cameo spots from Dean, like his wonderful pedal steel slide in Leaving Here Tonight, an additional vocal on the same track, and a Pink Floyd-esque solo in Disinfected and Abused.

The process turned into weeks of tinkering, interspersed with rare flashes of genius from any one of the three of us. Wednesday night became Anubis night, and we spent hours and hours getting all the bits down and tied together neatly, ready to mix. When I think about making this record, it's these evenings at Razorback I treasure most. Having said that, it's the most recent and pain-free part. Effortless collaboration with the others and endless critiscism by myself. The boys all trooped in to add harmonies, observe life in the fish tank, so to speak, and to imbibe in the fun we were having.

The cameraderie between band and producer was productive and conducive to good performances. There's so much good work on the record, usually where the five of us are all going at it hammer and tongs, and Dean captured, for what was essentially a disjointed anti-performance constructed meticulously over a two year period, a sense of spontaneity that by rights had no reason being there. The sound of the garage, the place where we recorded the drums comes out and the whole record travels back to it's dubious origins, whist still sounding remarkably polished. Kudos to all involved.

By the end of Sept '08 (yes, 2008...) we had finished tracking and we began the mix. Strangely, considering the amount of rough mixing we'd already done, it took less time that I had anticipated. I remember the moment we finished the last mix, and it felt remarkably strange, as now the whole thing gets taken out of our control. At the time of writing, it still awaits it's date with Turtle Rock for mastering.

LIVE PERFORMANCE

The rehearsal process we began in earnest in 2007 was in full swing by the start of 2008. Robert took to recording every single second of every rehearsal, and knowing the tapes were perpetually rolling was conducive to some productive tension and some very spirited performances. By May, when Anubis went out live for the first time, we felt we were capable of delivering the goods.

The goods were duly delivered, but some valuable lessons were learned as we realised that what can be achieved once, in the comfort of a recording studio, is very taxing on the vocalist, in the middle of the set, when the songs where written before the vocals were added. Another by-product of the bass player who became the vocalist. The songs were too hard to deliver, in sequence, and although Robbie's effort was perfectly passable as a performance, were challenging him to the very limits of his perception of what he is capable of, and what his vocal stamina allowed. Consiquently, the few days immediately following the first show, Robert had absolutely no voice at all.

I had always been very anti-transposition. Seeing as how I can tell, just by listening, what key a song is in, it had always previously seemed a cop-out. But I warmed to the idea as some of my favourite bands were doing it on and off and for the most part sounded exceptional. So I went back with Rob and we looked at which pieces were too high, and transposed them to a key that suited him best.

The Doctor is impossibly high. The effect of the vocalist shrieking out the words is irrisitable on record, and unperformable live. In order to get through the rest of the set, the piece had to get dropped to a key at which it would be comfortable to sing, but not lose all it's menace. Likewise Deepest Wound, Leaving Here and The Collapse all of which where taken down by a tone in order to suit Rob's natural register.

When we got to 'The Harp' in November, having performed two short sets at Sydney University, we were quite road ready, and responded with a brilliant show to a wildly enthusiastic crowd where we pulled out all the stops and performed the whole 230503 album sans the two instrumental tracks. This show found the live arrangements fully fleshed out and rehearsed in, and the dynamic curve of the performance was marvellous.

AFTERWORD

Some artists make a record, and never ever listen to it afterwards. Even people in Anubis are like this. Nick, I know, has not listened to Department's LP of his own volition in years. Steve listens infrequently to his back catalogue.

I am not one of these people. I know it sounds like the ultimate egocentric indulgence to listen intently to your own work, but this stuff is indelibly part of my life and my memories. Like looking at photographs really.

If I return to 230503 and hear it with fresh ears, unjaundiced by countless playbacks of one song, or even in some cases, one bar, I am struck by what a water-tight concept and composition it is, and by how much I enjoy the dynamic curve of the record. I think it's by far the best thing I've ever done. Working with truly creative people, inside and outside the band.

Musically, it has some really gorgeous high points, some frightening parts, and some great ensemble playing from all five band members. Starting the project as little more than a throw-away idea, and finishing off in a fully functioning gigging band with some of the finest musicians and creative partners I know is the culmination of a journey that at times I was truly unsure I could even complete. To be rewarded with an empassioned roar at the conclusion of every rendition of Disinfected and Abused justifies entirely every second of head scratching and self-doubt. It's not been easy to control, even less easy to keep a lid on. To say it's already, artistically, eclipsed my (and indeed Nick's) achievements as members of Department is understatement in extremis.

If it's the only album I ever make, then I wouldn't be an unhappy man.

Although I'd love to make a better one!

All in all, the best bottle of vodka I ever bought.

David Eaton,
April 2009