Journalist George Monbiot has suggested that if the rich nations don't curtail their annual emmissions of Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 90% by 2030, then Britain could end up like a "very poor third-world country", not to mention what could happen all across the globe. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a rise of just over 2% in global temperature, as a result of man-made climate change, will expose between 2.3 and 3 billion of the world's population to water shortages. Add to that the dangers of flooding, famine, and disease, and the projections do not improve. The British Government's target for reducing Green-house gas emmissions by 2030 is 60%. If the target were 90%, as some including Monbiot have suggested it should be, I would have used my entire year's individual carbon quota within my one return journey to Minneapolis - and that's before I'd even plugged in my reverb. This in itself is an oversimplification, as the altitude of emissions by planes and the associated condensation trails, which themslves greatly magnify the impact of aviation emissions, have not even been accounted for.

We all perceive the line between luxury and necessity at a different point. I was offered a chance to indulge myself in an exercise that I could feasibly think of as a luxury on one day, and a necessity on another. However I doubt that this would temper the suffering of those in the world already displaced and tormented by man-made climate change.

Send a message by the interweb, fewer 'banter miles'

Tonight, on our only night in the full-on Minneapayard, we selected a gig at Nomad's bar based upon the fact that it was free and it was to be headlined by 'Mel Gibson and the Pants'. We turned up, with low expectations, and preceded to have a fairly mind blowing night, and watch some fairly amazing musicians, including solo loop drum Rhodes laptop supremo 'Dosh' (You English guys know Andrew Bird? I'm his drummer) and the aforementiond MGATP who were an immense drum 'n' bass hip-hop extravaganza. Somehow, word seemed to get out that there were some guys from England who had come over to make an album, and everybody wanted to be our friend.... I have no idea who any of these people in this picture are, but I have never felt more welcome anywhere ever.....

Send a message if you want, we'll probably be home before we get it....

Today, our last full day at Pachyderm, was spent by John making rough mix downs of all of our tracks to take away and listen to.... this did not involve us, and so the five us wandered off along the trail by the stream to see what we could see. There are animal tracks everywhere, but beyond the sound of a woodpecker or the ocassional wake of a startled duck we saw very little wildlife. The trail by the stream is fairly treacherous when hidden by the snow, with the boundaries between the water and the land undefined in places, and I nearly fell into the ice cold stream one too many times. The snow itself was fairly useless for any kind of snow based combat, as it disintegrated when you tossed it in the air, but that didn't stop Tom from repeadedly trying, only to shower himself in the confetti-like powder as it misfired on him. All in all it was nice to spend some time away from the house and studio even though the risk of cabin fever in such an uberyard is minimal. 

When we returned John had done full proper mixes of two of our tracks, and then rough mix-downs of the rest. One of the full-mixes was the acoustaboon, a fairly chilled out ambient track that we finished off in the studio. To my ears, it sounded awesome. John is a brilliant mixer and producer, as we were reminded across the week as he told us stories of working on some amazing sounding albums that we know pretty well by Explosions in the Sky and the Appleseed Cast.

And now it's all done - we need to finish packing up in the morning, and we've got one day left to spend some time in the city tomorrow, but this is our last night at Pachyderm, and our last night with John before he heads back to Dallas tomorrow. The man is a legend, he has exceded all my expectations.

  Enticing words required to facilitate leavage....

Today, with our album (or at least the recording part) in the can, we tidied the live-room and packed up our amplifiers and drum kits so that Billie from Total Music could come and take them away. The blanket of snow that framed the scene as we loaded the equipment out of the studio into the back of a truck to be ridden away forever made it feel like some kind of tragic anti-christmas.

For the first time so far we listened back to the whole session, to do a final check for things that might need retaking, and to explain to John a bit about how we'd like it mixed. As predicted, some things needed to be tidied up - a few vocals and synth parts needed retaking, and some parts were chopped up and tried in new places. The combination of scrutiny and surgery brought us to the end of today, where after some fairly incendiary food from Lee and Tim, and a bizarre and chilling documentary from John's DVD collection, my bed is calling my name......

  Sympathy required to combat amplifier withdrawl......

We finally finished recording today. We've spent eight days tracking even though we'd hoped to have been done in five. Listening back though, its easy to see why. We've layed down so many layers of guitars and loops and voices and synths and electronics and drums and other instruments that there was never going to be enough time. Tomorrow we need to start mixing, but John is sceptical. Having got to know us fairly well this last week he suspects that when we review what we've done tomorrow morning we'll want to re-record some bits..... he's probably right....

Today we did the last of the guitars, some synths, some more vocals and then finally moved onto to tracking the piano. I'd been looking forward to this all week, because Pachyderm has an in-house Bosendorfer baby grand and it sounds fantastic. When it came to it though, I nailed all my piano parts first take, and before I'd got comfortable on the stool, it was over and we'd moved on......

Lee did his piano parts after me, and we hooked it up through his pedalboard and recorded grand piano with live delay - which sounded pretty special....... 

We leave here in two days, which is a little dismaying to contemplate. Two more days though - still plenty of fun to be found..... 

  Message for the band? We need things to occupy us during mixing...

Three more days to go and perhaps we should be further along than we are, but I think if we'd tried to do any more than we have then we would have exhausted ourselves by now. We've tracked drums, bass,  electric guitars, acoustic guitar, vocals, electronics, synths, organ, glockenspiel, piano, more drums, and Bob Ross -and we've still got plenty to be doing. We had hoped to be mixing by now, but we've still got to finish the vocals, finish the piano, and touch up various other bits and pieces. But its all fine really, John has said that even if we can't do all the mixing here, he has the time and facilities to do it back home in Texas and in a way it might be better to leave him to it, without all five of us leaning over his shoulder asking for 'a sconch more of me' or a 'queef more reverb'....

As with every day, we got to know John a bit better, and this evening he told us about he how got his initial breaks in making records. Turns out that when he was but a teen, after having just dropped out of music college, he wrote to Steve Albini, initiating an endearing and regular corresponcence that led to him being invite to help kit out Albini's 'Electrical' studio as it was being completed in Chicago. From there, after working for a pittance, living like a pauper, and earning his stripes with Albini, he was able to return to Texas, with a fairly substantial letter of recommendation and instantly land a job in the biggest studio in the state. After that, its easy to imagine how opportunities will have arisen, and with hindsight its looking like it was fairly good fortune that when we contacted him earlier in the year he was having a quiet time and was available to work with us. He's got some fairly awesome projects lined up for the new year, with some more artists that I really love, but I can't say who just now....

The picture however is not John, it's Martin. Isn't he lovely......

   Tell him just how lovely you think he is....

Today was Saturday, and the first day since we got here that I've felt we took it easy.... We still got plenty done, we all did overdubs of various sorts; guitars, drums, vocals and a bit of glockenspiel (which we rented from the local school), but we didn't hammer it today. We had a leisurely breakfast, a leisurely lunch, some leisurely afternoon snackage, and John's girlfriend came to stay and we all had a leisurely dinner before watching an episode of Twin Peaks, which I have never done before....

Today was a treat within a treat, and as with all other days, I laughed a vast amount and made some really nice music with some exceptional people.

And Tom tried to blend soup without the lid on.....

   Make fun from afar....

Even to a hardened cyber geek like myself, the realities of instantaneous global communication are a bit of a head blag. I woke early this morning, before everyone else, and after staring out of the windows of this beautiful cabin at the everpresent scene of snow covered woodland for far longer than I probably needed to, I set about my allotted task. We'd rather carelessy forgotten one or two important samples needed for one of our tracks, specifically an 808 snare and a fully mashed up kick drum. I contacted Szymon back at home over the internet using Skype and asked him to get them off my hard drive and email them to me, it was 8am over here and 2pm at home and he was just back from lunch. We bantered briefly, as time was short, and then he located and messaged me the files, the whole process took minutes. Is it just me, or is that completely insane? The signal, a representation of my voice instantly translated by my computer to binary code, has to travel 4000 miles, presumably across lines suspended above the trees and cities of America, and then through old telephone cables resting on the bed of the Atlantic ocean across to England, through various wires all across the country, into Szymon's place, and then his computer, and then be translated back into a representation of my voice and out of his speakers, with his reply then doing the same but in reverse, and all in less time than it takes to lick a stamp....

We finished tracking today, having left the 'Big Nod' (Need I say, another working title) till last because it requires two full drumkits at once. We could have overdubbed the second kit, but we wanted to play the whole song together, two kits, two guitars and bass, to capture the dynamics and feel of a live performance. However John needed to put two enormous baffles inbetween the kits to prevent the sound from each set getting into the mics for the other set, and so Tim and Lee couldn't watch each other play to stay in time. We overcame this by carrying an enormous ornate mirror from the master bedroom of the house into the studio and placing it so that each drummer had a clear view of the other. Even though he'd only just had a shower that day Tom exerted himself so much moving the mirror that he had to have another one....

Then this afternoon we moved on to overdubs and vocals, which we'll do across the next couple of days, before we spend our last few days mixing and putting this baby to bed......

   Send us a message - 4000 miles in under a second....

We're kind of in a bubble here at Pachyderm - we do the same thing every day, we see the same faces, we play the same instruments, we haven't left the yard since we got here, and if it weren't for the internet I might have completely lost all sense of the outside world. I wonder, with good reason it seems, how interesting it is to anyone but me and the band, but the truth of the matter is, that despite being in an absurdly beautiful part of the world, with an endless supply of interesting people and places just around the corner, we spend pretty much every day from breakfast till supper in one of two rooms recording and scrutinising the various components of what will eventually amount to about an hour of music.

The few people we have met have been awesome, there are the interns Grant and Corey - Grant seems to be about our age, he lives in Rochester further south of here, he's studying music-tech at Uni and  he works at Pachyderm for free. He tirelessy strives to make us happy, he goes to the shops for us for our food and supplies every couple of days, he clears the paths every time there has been snowfall and tomorrow he's going to drive in to the city to find us a glockenspiel. Corey doesn't appear to speak unless absolutely necessary, he's on the Pachyderm payroll as an engineer and technician and he can apparently fix anything. And then there's John Congleton, producer extrordinaire, he's come from Texas to make our record, he seems to be able to match Tim for the seemingly inexhaustible ability to know facts and have rational opinions about any band or musician that you mention, and he makes me laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh. He's produced some fairly incredible albums like 'Peregrine' by the Appleseed Cast and 'All of a sudden I miss Everyone' by Explosions in the Sky and we were watching some music videos on youtube on a break the other day including one by the Minus Story and he walked past and said 'Oh, I produced that'.... I call him 'Congleboon' and he has yet to question it......

Tomorrow I'll try and get some video onto the page, although its proving to be a bit of a technical uberquest.... I tried today, but on all the footage we've shot in the live room you can only hear the drums, because the amps are in isolation booths, but I'll figure it out.......

  Send messages - otherwise we might never come home

Today, with most of the basic tracking complete, we turned our attention to some unfinished material that we had intentionally left that way, to see a) what would happen in the studio, and b) what John would make of it. In the morning we tracked the 'Acoustaboon', which is a bit like a Vessels remix of one of my solo tunes, built upon a fingerpicked line that I wrote earlier in the year combined with some lovely vocals that Tom has added. I was half expecting the song to get neglected due to time constraints, but sure enough, this morning we tracked the main parts and put together a pretty tasty arrangement. The song is exciting for me, because it's the first Vessels tune to be built on one of my ideas, and the combination of glitchy electronica and acoustic fingerpicking is sounding fairly sweet to my ears.

In the afternoon, we revisited our most complicated math-rock nonsense tune, working title unrepeatable, and managed this time to get a solid take plus overdubs tracked and in the can - although after the fourth or fifth take I started to feel the spectre of the tendonitis that I suffered earlier in the year aching through my left wrist - not something I'm in a hurry to revisit.

Then this evening, after skipping dinner and powering straight through because we're so immensely rock'n'roll, we tracked the first two sections of 'Ornaboon' (working title only), another unfinished ambient elctronica journey, which again we're quite keen to see what John can do to tie together and bring to life. Although we'll have to wait till tomorrow for any kind of meaningful discussion on the matter since we finished so late...

Today we worked for fifteen hours from 10am till 1am with only a half hour break for a sandwich, but it was definitely well worth it - although now it's clearly time for a sleepy boony snoozy snooze....

  Write to us - we miss you....

When I woke this morning it was snowing. I've seen a lot of snow around the place these past few days but it was the first time since we arrived that I'd actually seen the stuff floating out of the sky, and it was a pretty special sight - just the kind of inspirational kickstart to a good day's recording that I like.

The picture shows John, our producer, sat at the mixing desk in the Pachyderm control room. This console is a pretty special thing, and not just for technical reasons. The board is a Neve 8068 32 channel analogue mixing desk, one of the last of its kind. It would have taken around 2,500 hours to make and to buy even one channel of this desk nowadays would probably cost a couple of grand - if you could find one to buy in the first place. This desk is from Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady studios in New York, although it was installed after his death, so the great man himself will never have tweaked its faders. However many other great artists will have sat and used this desk, with many a great record having been sent through its channels. It's even rumoured that John Lennon used this desk the night that he died, but a quick browse on the interboon makes that scenario seem unlikely (He did record at Electric Lady studios, but he seems to have been at the Hit Factory the night he died, although I can't find full confirmation either way). There have also been plenty of great records recorded through the board since it was moved to Pachyderm, with Nirvana's 'In Utero' being the obvious choice to mention, although the fact that 'Throwing Copper' by Live was taped through this board also tickles my biscuit. Either way I think the thing that's most special to me about this desk right now is how bad-ass it's making our album sound...

Today we laid down another three tracks, including some with electronics, which took us a bit of time to manipulate. Generally we had another awesome day, the highlight of which  was recording 'Two Words and a Gesture' whilst staring out of the floor to ceiling windows at the falling snow. Expect tomorrow's highlight to be much the same.....

  Telegram for Vessels....

(edit: I got a message from a girl who works here sometimes saying that ths board was moved from Electric Lady to the Hit Factory before it came here.... perhaps it's true after all...)

I've been told that magic things happen here at Pachyderm, and when I woke this morning at 7:30am and felt myself compelled and motivated to climb out of bed and practice guitar before breakfast I almost started to believe it. Half an hour later when I saw Tom 'Not before Noon' Evans doing the same thing I became a true believer.

We started early today, fuelled by good coffee, beautiful sunshine, and spectacular 360 degree views of the woodlands around Pachyderm we set about recording our album. We did six tracks, again all live, the five of us playing together in the same room, and I think we nailed some fairly special moments. The highlight of the day was recording 'Look at that Cloud' (the original EP demo is on our myspace page here) because the live room has three massive floor to ceiling windows, and as we played the song we could stare out at the snow covered trees for inspiration - I can't think of a more perfect place to record a band....

Again, its been a treat hanging out with John. We have a lot to chat about, and he's got a dark and appealing sense of humour. His attention to detail is noteworthy - "Tim, I think this particular track would sound a whole lot better if you just raised the pitch of your snare ever so slightly", and he has some great stories about working with R Kelly....... 

  R Kelly? Message the band....

Today we woke early, ate a hearty breakfast, and then set to work - Although so much snow had fallen that we weren't able to get from the house to the studio (pictured) until Conner and Grant (The two interns), and Lee (he's keen) had cleared a path...

Today was spent mostly setting up and sound checking; I've recorded entire songs in less time than it took to setup, tune, and sound-check the drums, although listening back to some of the takes this evening it was clearly worth it - after we had also setup and checked all of our guitars and amps we had a hearty dinner (to complement our hearty breakfast) and then spent the evening recording some of our tunes - all live takes, all of us playing in the same room at the same time, which even though it sounds fairly logical, is not how I've ever recorded before...

John, our producer, is enormously amenable, he's only a couple of years older than us and he's a treat to be around - there's only us and him here now; Matt, the owner, went back to Madison last night after he'd picked us up and the interns didn't stay past tea-time - and so the yard is ours, and boon it up we shall.....

  Message for Vessels?

Saturday 1st Dec 2007

After yesterday's shenanigans, I didn't think today could get worse, but when, after having been informed that a replacement plane would be leaving this morning at 9am, we went to check in at 6.30am, we were greeted by a 250 strong que of dishevelled would-be-flyers and a lady in a uniform handing out notices stating that the whole flight had been cancelled. The current plan it seemed, was to break up the stranded passengers, one group at a time, onto other flights from other airlines and even other airports across the course of the day - and we were at the back of the queue...

I still don't quite understand how he did it, but Martin, ever resourceful Martin, booned over to the business class desk and politely informed them of our situation, and that we were losing thousands of pounds a day because of our studio booking, and that we would be expecting the airline to compensate us for this, and within minutes we were at the front of the queue rather than the back and booked on the next flight to New York.

Again, we had to run to board, again we had to lug our 12 cases of equipment across the airport, but this time, the plane actually managed to break free of the earth's gravity and transport us through the clouds....

The changeover in New York was brief, and it was a little frustrating, being so close to Manhattan and not being able to visit, but once we touched down in Minneapolis (In zero visibility due to the blizzard) I had gotten over it...

This place is immense, Matt, the owner of the studio, picked us all up in his RV (A mobile home the size of a bus), and brought us slowly through the snow to Pachyderm, where we were finally able to put our feet up and chill out. We haven't even see the studio yet (its in a separate building a little further into the forest) but the house is beautiful, it was designed by a student of Frank LLoyd Wright and is in fact so luxurious and relaxing that we may well just hang out in the house for the next two weeks and not bother with the album.......

Its been a really long few days, I'm heinously tired and my bed is calling, and tomorrow we have work to do.....

Friday 30th Nov 2007

It all started so well..... We woke at 5am, we drank coffee, we loaded the van, we drove to Gatwick listening to 'Low Level Owl' by Appleseed Cast, and talking about Morrisey, we were in time for check in, despite our stuff being over the weight limit we were allowed it all, despite Tim's cymbals being bigger than the appropriate size for hand luggage he was allowed to take them through. We had to run for our gate, but only because we got side-tracked trying to insure our instruments over the phone, but nonetheless, we got on our plane, got comfy, listened to the safety procedures and prepared for take-off....

And here we are pictured, slightly drunk in a £200 a-night hotel in Gatwick airport, with Robyn, originally from Leeds with a penchant for 'Broken Social Scene', and Dr Matt Loveless, a Sociology professor from Memphis with a weakness for Rush who lives and works in Oxford but who should be in Atlanta now with his ma...

Apparently the Hydraulics weren't working, but nevertheless, even though we're still in London we had a good night, although our album will now be one day less good.....

Thursday 29th Nov 2007

I have been horrendously ill these past few days, but now that we're on our way I'm starting to feel better. Today we completed the first phase of our journey - Leeds to Cambridge, via Maumoniats, Booze Bin, Peter Chan's and the studio about fifteen times. It was Tom's 27th birthday, and to celebrate he drove a dilapidated minibus down the A1 for five hours in the dark. We were rewarded when we got to Tom's parent's house with food, Wine, Whiskey and Guiness cake.......