Guest Starring...

This week we've been working on 'Black Cloud' and have been ably assisted by the shadowy sixth member of Dresden, and one of the finest guitarists of his generation, Paul Morrison.  Moz popped into the studio just to hang out and have a listen to what we've been working on before he heads out to the Middle East for work - several beers later, we managed to persuade him to lay down some guitar.  The results were pretty astonishing - very psychedelic and strange.  The sort of thing Paul does best, in other words.

Here's some pics of us and him hard at work:

Paul

Karl

Marc

We've also made some fairly significant progress with 'Cold Hands' - again, it's sounding quite trippy.  Loads of tape loops and samples of orchestral noise being stretched, reversed, speeded up, chopped and spliced...  I have a funny feeling that there's going to be a very weird vibe on the next record, whenever that might be.  I'm thinking 'Sgt. Pepper's...' meets 'Mezzanine'.

Ryan
x

Back To The Lab...

We have one more show in the diary, then after that we'll be heading back to the studio to work on various bits and pieces of new material.  We have around eight tracks in various stages of readiness - here's a look at some of them:

'Homeless' - This is basically 'broken' disco music.  We've been playing it live for a little while, and it seems to go down well.  We expect to release it at some point.

'Cold Hands' - A sort of desolate-sounding epic (it's currently seven minutes long, but we'll probably chop it down a bit...) pop song.  It's quite slow, and sounds like the bastard child of 'Vienna' by Ultravox and 'Atmosphere' by Joy Division.  It's very electronic, as is most of the new material.

'FIBUA' - Richard Wagner-meets-Giorgio Moroder.  It's about hooliganism.

'Black Cloud' - Has an almost North Indian feel to it, due to the use of drones.  Sort of psychedelic, but also doomy.  It actually sounds a little like Oasis, but relevant.

'Stand Up' - Again, quite doomy.  Fractured sounding.  Intense vibe.  Reminds me of 'Cracker' or 'Prime Suspect'. 

'Bovine' - Fuck knows.  Doesn't sound like anything I've heard.  That said, it DOES contain some of my favourite lyrics that I've ever written.

Some or all of them might make it to our next record.  There's other stuff, too.


Ryan x

English Gentleman's Drinking Club, Preston.

So we played EGDC in Preston last night.  What a smart little venue!  Really cool vibe about the place, and probably the best onstage sound we've had so far.  The night was running a little late, so by the time we got on it was nearly last orders and the crowd had thinned out a little bit.

Fine by me.

I just tried to make sure that the people who DID stay (who are always the best people, in any case...) got a good show, which I did in my own inimitable way by generally just jeffing around and antagonising people.

Pretty good response, too.

Ryan x

Green Bohemia 7th Birthday Party

So last night was the gig at Green Rooms in celebration of seven years of Green Bohemia.  Green Bohemia is generally regarded as a Good Thing by all members of Dresden.  In a way, it harks back to the time when promoters would simply book bands that they liked, then promote the night as best they could in the hope that people would come to check out bands of real quality.

A shocking anachronism, I know!

Stuart Avery, the guy who puts Green Bohemia on, is one of the Manc scene's 'good guys' - he genuinely believes in booking bands that he likes - Green Bohemia is an ideal proving ground for this sort of thing, as it's on a Saturday night in the centre of the city.  And it's free.

Like many bands over the last seven years, Dresden pretty much got its start at Green Bohemia - when Marc and I were road-testing many of the songs that eventually made it onto the record, Stu was one of the only blokes in town who would put us on.  In light of that, we were delighted to be asked to play at the 7th birthday celebration of this brilliant little night, and jumped at the chance to do so.

The gig itself was pretty good - the GB set-up is ideal for acoustic acts, but obviously we use a lot of digital tech stuff on stage, and so we struggled to hear what we were doing at certain points in the set, which was as follows:

The Life of a Wife

Enough is Never Good Enough

Annihilation

Pressure

Homeless

All things considered, I think we played fairly well, and the response from the audience was great.  Because the stage at GB is up on the mezzanine floor, and the event itself was very busy, the crowd was practically right on top of us, which made for an... 'interesting' experience, particularly for the poor chap who I almost knocked over as he was trying to sneak out.

Serves him right, if you ask me.

Ryan Magee x

Where To Begin?

Here, I suppose.

It struck me that, as our other on-line presences were fairly narrow in their scope, it might perhaps serve us well to create a blog.  Perhaps that might make everything a little neater.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Who are 'us'?  Good question, glad you asked.


'Us' is Dresden, a modernist alternative pop group from Manchester, England.  We've been in existence in some form or another for around a year, and last October we released our debut album (conveniently, if unimaginatively self-titled...) after spending a fairly hefty amount of time writing, recording, producing, mixing and mastering it ourselves.

Why Our Band Is Weird.

We seem to do everything 'wrong'.  That's not to say that we are unsuccessful in all we do, rather that 'normal' isn't a word that would crop up with any regularity in the overall narrative of Dresden up to this particular point in time.

• It is not normal to spend a year putting a record together, only to simply give it away once it's finished.  Unless you happen to be Prince.
• It is not normal to have an album before you even play any gigs.
• It is not normal to use as much Mellotron as we do - in fact, it's probably not healthy either.
• It is not normal for a band that has performed only 5 concerts to date to have their record downloaded more than 10,000 times by people all over the world.  In a week.

We are not normal.  We are Dresden.

Stay tuned.




Ryan Magee x