Ruby for a Pearl
LNTWYY
It all begins with an idea.
Effra Road
Effra Road is funny one. The tune/lyrics itself were started about 2015 after a stroll around Effra Road and finished a few weeks later during a slow day at work in a Martello Tower out in Seapoint, County Dublin. Sounds a bit wanky but thats how it happened. I put it aside for years , including it as a quieter song in my live set. The recording of it though, started with a beat and it was now 2020. That beat was from a Yamaha PS -55 - a vintage home keyboard which doesn’t seem to get a lot of love even though its packed with great features and has a superlative build quality. In the years between I had enough of America and Americana and traveled back to the 90's where I had treasured tapes of One Dove, Slowdive, St Etienne and those amazing compilations of Volume/Trance Europe Express (these pre-date full blown Britpop and were described in various terms at the time but the one that stands out in my memory was NWON- New Wave Of New Wave). I made steps to record something outside my comfort zone and wondered what would come of marrying a quiet ballad like Effra Road to a beat and wrapping it in growing collection of cheap synth-y keyboards.
The Slow Set Revival
The Slow Set Revival started as a kind of dreampop song that I wrote for The Sky At Night. It lived on in my solo live set as something of a damp squib and I rarely play it now as acoustic doesn’t do it justice. Just a simple song I wrote about a night out in Dublin with my wife and some friends but I wanted to give it some Cigarettes After Sex like drama. I started with an off kilter live beat from the Yamaha RX-15 into a TL Audio compressor and some Boss RV-70 non linear reverb gently mixed in. Then came a scratch vocal and acoustic after which I laid down a deep bass with the Akai Timbre Wolf with a little phaser on it courtesy of a Russian EHX Small Stone for movement. It came out a bit like Berlins "Take My Breath Away" , but how bad ? That's a cracking tune! The synth lines following the bass (yep!) are from a Yamaha PSR-36 which I sadly no longer own. I ran it through a Washburn Chorus on a slow vibrato and a Boss RV-6 on the modulate setting. The gentle guitar picking is the superstrat again through the RV-6 on a very wet modulate setting. For the solo I used a Boss DS-1 into an overdriven Coron practice amp. I was going for A Flock Of Seagulls "Space Age Love Song" type guitar sound. The intro sound is probably the most interesting -its an alternate take for a reverb/delay guitar line crushed and filtered by a Bruel and Kjaer 1613 bandpass filter. I kinda wanted it sound like a crowd from a distance and it worked- and it didn't work. Like most things I do I'm back and forth on it but it was fun to try it out ! I wanted to drag a Love Lies Crushing vibe into the tune but at that stage it was more or less done .....maybe some other time.