Ultrabeliever

Not letting up from the Swings and Contracter sessions Ultrabeliever was started shortly after SAC was finished. It was something of a time of change with the Amiga doing a lot of midi sequencing and such. I also designed a new JDB logo. Though initially we'd had the idea that this would be an album of remakes, there's only a couple of tracks on the final CD that are remakes. The title of the album comes from the I Can't Believe It's Not Butter adverts around the 99/2000 period. Something in a billboard advert looked at first glance like Ultrabeliever to me and I thought it a jolly spiffy idea for an album name. The album was recorded onto video tape for better sound quality and was entirely recorded in my bedroom. Most of the drums on the album come from the newly aquired Alesis SR-16 drum machine which was apparently made famous by Utah saints. I got it cheap from Cash Converts because a customer didn't come back for it after leaving it there. Not that he'd been paid any money but they had a rule that if something was left there for 28 days then it was the company's property to dispose of as they wished. I'm something of a drum machine fanatic for some reason. The machine was almost always sequenced by the amiga because it was a bugger to program. There's only one track where it isn't as I recall and that's Hope.

Body Balanced

We started out remaking Body Balance from the Axis Syndrome and it was a little unspectacular really. It was proving a too direct copy really. We were using the PSS-680 keyboard for drums to start off but I found something interesting when I switched to the SR-16 that the sounds were different but it still worked in a way. There was a mixture of the drums playing what should be bass notes as well as the rhythm part. All the rhythm parts were different as well because the SR-16 doesn't work on standard midi drum note patterns. With a bit of tweaking after that I started coming up with something beat wise that was a little more like the drum and bass stuff that I'd got into via David Bowie's Earthling album. A pretty nice complexish beat was then devised. The PSS-680 still did a bit of bass on this and Duncan played live keyboards on the DW8000 (another cheap Cash Converters purchase which features heavily on this album). This was a majorly exciting moment for us because it was a moment where we finally thought we were actually quite good. Finally we know how to write a good song. Even though I didn't actually remember as much words to Body Balance as I though I would the vocals still work. It really bears absolutely no resemblance to the original apart from those words. Pretty ace stuff.

Confusion

A bit of a DAF rip off this one. All programmed on the Amiga. The DW8000 providing bass and the drums are done by the PSS-680. The drums are very much in the style of DAF which is what I was aiming for. My lyrics here about the confusion I was feeling about a relationship with the woman that was eventually to be married to Ron. There'd been some kind of falling out with Ron accusing me of something and I really wasn't sure at all what I was feeling or what I was supposed to feeling. What is love anyway? I'm not entirely sure I know. I don't even know how sincere this lyric is or if I just used it as a useful subject for a song.

My Female Friends

Another Axis Remake. The Mp3 I'm listening to of this has strangely lost the drum track in conversion. Which is kind of interesting. For a while we had another track as track 3 on the album but I can't remember what right now. It was removed because it was a bit crap. I'm playing bass on this and you can hear something of a mistake in the intro where I go a bit too high and have to correct it. I still tend to prefer the Diary of an Unlabled Man version of this. Quiet simple and fairly effective, if slightly unimpressive.

Waiting

A particular favourite of mine it has to be said. A pretty old lyric by Duncan dredged up from the Lyric book. Even then I miss out some of the words accidentally. I try out my newly purchased Rocktek compresser pedal on the drums to see what it does. My guitar is being put through an also newly purchased Zoom 505 effects pedal/unit thing to create that nice phased guitar effect. Duncan was playing the DW8000 as I stood playing the guitar and singing. The fingering on the guitar wasn't easy for me but I did a reasonable job. I do like when it changes to major for the chorus type bit and my gradual build up in the rhythm programming is jolly nice. At the end we were trying to achieve a gradual echo away with the Zoom 1201 effects unit (the guitar goes quiet for a while because I'm fiddling with it) but there was slightly too long a decay on it so it wasn't really ever going to finish in a sensible amount of time. Okay so looking at it from a more outside perspective there's some mistakes in Duncan's playing and my vocals aren't exactly amazing. I still love the track though. Quite goth really.

Possibly the largest verse-length to chorus-length ratio of any JDB song.

What about the ones which don't have a chorus?

You get a divide-by-zero error.

Gun

More classic type stuff. The lyric this time was written on the Typewriter by Duncan. Though he probably had less control over the outcome than the typewriter itself. He programmed the rather excellent beat initially but had failed to give it any kind of form for the sequence and certainly no chorus. I quickly changed that by adding the snare sections which as I recall Duncan wasn't entirely happy about at first. He was satisfied with the result though. I took over keyboard duties and my intention was to make things simple up to the first snare section and remain in minor up to there. The snare chorus (which has different lyrics both times) changes to Major as with Waiting. Then the next section was to be more elaborate and continue on that idea of adding more in the next section to the end. Duncan's voice sounds so much better than mine. His lyrics are better too. At the end Duncan started playing on the PSS-680 keyboard which was handy there at the time. Without any idea what each other was supposed to be doing on the keyboard we duet nicely with a good touch of discord at the end. A brilliant track and possibly the best on Ultrabeliever.

Gun and Hope are my favourite Ultrabeliever tracks; although as one reviewer pointed out, the lyrics can be unintentionally funny for their pretentiousness.
The lyrics for Gun were based on a weird dream I had. The Typewriter often had it's own idea about what words to put in.
A transcription is here.

(more)Nitrate Visions

Alex joined us for this and was sat at the foot of my bed playing the DW8000. I was crouched to his right, messing with the SH-101. Duncan was behind me, at the other side of my bed doing the vocals. This is another one of those moments where everything came together to produce a brilliant recording. It bears no resemblance to the original Nitrate Visions in any way other than the lyric. We still created an entirely new track. I love the floppy drum machine, the bubbling bass and the seagull like synth. Duncan's calm and sturdy vocals fit nicely with this treatment. It was also a good idea when the drums were dropped out in the middle. I often find whilst listening to it that the accent of the high note of the bass line tends to shift my perception of the start of each bar as it were. Sometimes the high note is toward the end sometimes it's the start. Remains a favourite track of mine. Wish I could find the story of Jenny Molloth though.

Insider

I'd like to apologise for this track. It's my fault it exists. This was the product of a moment were we all wrote some lyrics at the same time. I did mine whilst deliberately miss hearing the lyrics from the first Diva ex Machina album, which is a various artists compilation of females involved in dark electronic music. Duncan wrote the lyrics to The Within (No it's not called the Atlantis Mu anymore Kendrick, no matter how much you like that title) and I think Alex wrote Elvac Tracs. Or it could have been White Out. Anyway, I'm largely responsible for this music because I like strange beats. This is certainly a strange one. I think it's something like 11 beats. Something suitably daft anyway. In theory it should have been reasonably good. It just isn't as no-one's keyboard playing makes any sense because they couldn't follow it. Of course my lyrics weren't written to coincide with such an odd beat either so my cupped microphone distorted vocals are shoehorned in as best as I can. There's some lines too short and others too long. The end goes on too long as well. I was the only person enjoying it at the time really. I might go through the lyrics and Diva Ex Machina to point out where they come from. Not tonight though. In case you're wondering why it was called The Insider, it's because I liked the word which I'd seen advertising the film of the same name.

(another) Snake

Erm. Yeah. Okay so if I were to re edit this album, I'd remove this one as well. I'm sure Duncan doesn't like it being there as he doesn't like the lyric and really it's never really been that good a track. It wasn't when it was on the Axis Syndrome and it isn't now. I wish I could have managed to sing in time and play bass properly. It was recorded with me playing and singing at the same time you see. There's the mistake just after I stop singing first time as well where I change to a higher note on the bass too early. It's overly noisy and overly busy and underly interesting. It is better than the Axis Syndrome version though, even Ron would disagree with that.

Hope

The closest I'd got to singing on the album so far. A built in beat to the SR-16 this one. Put through vocal distortion on the Zoom 1201. I think despite my tonelessness on this I manage pretty good intonation if a tad depressed sounding to the untrained ear. That's not what I was going for really. More wistful. I like the bit where I speak 'She turns piously..' which changes the feel of the rhythm for a brief spell. I do it again with Hope She Dances as well. I know Duncan remarked at the time, about the bit at the end where you hear the drums fade in again (somewhat accidentally) without distortion that it sounded like Phill Collins. The bit near the end where the bassline goes high was an accident of Duncan's. He was controlling two synths after all. The Sh-101 was doing the bass and was triggered by the 707 which was linked to the SR-16 via midi. I recall the slightly confused panic stricken look on Duncan's face at the time. A look of ooh that wasn't supposed to happen but oh well I've done it now and I've got to get out of it somehow. Which he did. Admirably.