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The story begun in early summer 2000 when my friend Dimos presented me a tape and asked me to have a listen. It was the jamming session where he and a couple of friends let the tapes rolling. At the time, this guitar/bass/drums combo was looking to achieve a ‘fuller’ sound by adding a fourth member. The sound of the material certainly got my attention and when Dimos asked me to join them, I gladly agreed.
A few days later I joined Dimos (drums), Ioannis (guitar) and Costis (bass) in studio and we begun jamming over the material they had been working on. Around that time the band was christened The Looney Fumes by another friend of ours.
The stuff we were rehearsing were long instrumentals based on simple melodic concepts and extensive improvisations. The sound was as gimmicky as possible, achieved with an ample use of effect pedals and unconventional playing techniques.
A couple of months later we felt confident of taking some of this material to a proper recording studio. Due to our limited finances, however, the long improvised sections had to be trimmed down. As a result, the arrangement of the songs became more disciplined, based on previously agreed structures.
As our hometown Larissa was lacking proper recording facilities, I looked for a studio in nearby Thessaloniki. I was in search of a studio with reel-to-reel recording equipment which would give our recordings this ‘professional’ saturated sound. We finally settled for Rock Sound Studio where I booked a few hours of recording time.
In late August of 2000, we recorded the backbones for two tunes, ‘Ultra voodoo rhythms’ and ‘Bill and Kiki (digging to the centre of the earth)’, at Rock Sound. Unfortunately, one of the recording rooms was undergoing a refurbishment and we could not record the keyboards. We thus made mixes of the guitar/bass/drums recordings and decided to get by with a little help from our friends: a ring to an old acquaintance of Dimos and mine solved the problem. Costis Drygianakis , an electronic/free improvised recording artist and manager of Edo label (distributed by Ektopia ), had a studio in his residence in nearby rural Volos. He agreed to help us out and Dimos and myself paid him a visit. Over much discussing and beer drinking, we transferred the stereo DAT master on Logic Audio, overdubbed my synthesizers, and mixed the whole lot back onto DAT. Although we lost the analogue character of the backbone recording in this process, we nevertheless thought this was a worthwhile compromise.
Over the next few months, we brought to our rehearsal studio more material to work with. In April 2001, we booked Rock Sound Studio for three days to record and mix three more tunes: ‘Lady luck’, ‘…and he met his fate’, and ‘Sometimes you remind me of whom I want to be’. We used the first day to lay down the backbone guitar/bass/drums and the second day to record the keyboard/guitar/percussion overdubs. During the third day, I was left to supervise the mixing. For some reason the others were not present for the mixing (although I managed to get Costis with me, sort of as a way to strike some balance).
Although we were not entirely happy with the end result (for my part, I thought the sound was too ‘polished’), we made several promotional copies of the recordings (I am not sure of what was our aim really). Although we have not actively sought to be signed with a label, we managed a deal with the newly established Musicography company. Musicography was a clever crossover between the iTunes Store and Myspace launched about one year before either of those. It nevertheless sunk without a trace about a year later (too ambitious probably although it worked for both iTunes and Myspace). We then decided to make our mp3’s freely available on Audiogalaxy and later, Soulseek.
Soon, however, our initial enthusiasm waned. I got busy with other things, the rehearsals became sparser… we drifted apart. Ioannis, in the meanwhile, built a home studio and kept recording under the band’s name. At several occasions Dimos joined him, overdubbing drums, guitars, basses and loops. Ioannis is now recording as NiO and Dimos joined friends Vagios and Antonis in forming Bored Witch .
Enjoy!
Kostas