Recording hand claps is not as easy as you might think, and, as a band who have somehow developed a penchant for that particular sort of percussion, we decided that last night was probably the time to tackle it.

Now, we attempted simple hand claps, as, y’know, that’s what they are! But, that sounds crap. So, like all budding self-producing artists, we referred to the endless resource that is The Internet, and found some excellent anecdotes of some old Motown techniques for producing the perfect hand clap. Apparantly banging two planks of wood together creates a nice percussive tone, as does hitting a phone book with a stick. So, if it was good enough for the Godfathers of Clap, it was good enough for us. Will and I then proceeded to follow this advice and I must admit the tones were fantastic. I did have a bizarre moment where I realised that, in the absence of a phone book at my disposal, I was actually hitting the face of a poor unsuspecting model on the front of one of mother’s clothing catalogues. Nonetheless, the whacked book creates quite the percussive tone.

As mentioned in my last post, we are planning to doff our caps to The Stills – Snakecharming the Masses for the climactic outro of Invisible Lives. So, not content with the sounds created by wood banging and catalogue bashing, we then tickled a tea cup, thumped a drum stool, rattled a radiator and pounded a carpet covered bass trap. These created an array of sounds that we will come back to in another session to arrange appropriately. If we can get anywhere near the intense poly-rhythms of the aforementioned Stills song, we’ll be happy.

We also filled our time with imbibing some curry, adding some pianock to Reels of Light, as well as having honorary listens to Heartmachines, Spider Days and Lotus. We are quietly confident that the songs we have begun to record are now at the fine tuning stage, so we now need to turn our attention to writing… ahem, I mean recording the middle of the album.

I ended the evening with a fascinating chat with Nick (the 6th Hour) about the lack of anything exciting and enjoyable in the current music scene, and a realisation that the new music of 2004 and 2005 was of such a staggering prolificity and quality that the subsequent years have not come close to matching it. Seriously, take a look at your music collection and I’m sure plenty of it will be 04/05 vintage. Incidentally, if you know of anything out at the minute that is particularly inventive or enjoyable, please tell, as we are all complaining of a new music enjoyment deficiency.

Until next time, stay cool won’t you.

Luke