[Music] Tapewolf - The Heresiarch's Breakfast (LP)

[Tapewolf]

If anyone's interested, I have just released my thirteenth album of progressive rock, recorded in 2016 - 'The Heresiarch's Breakfast'
Thanks again to Merlin for the cover!



The album itself can be had for free here:
http://dougtheeagle.com/thb.php

There's also a Bandcamp page if you think it's worth paying for:
https://dougtheeagle.bandcamp.com/album/the-heresiarchs-breakfast

This is the second outing for the 2" 24-track machine.  After some of the tracks last time were marred by noise, I added 24 channels of noise gating, and also replaced the mixing desk.  In addition the output daughterboards on the multitrack were replaced with new ones from Brian Roth.

The Heresiarch's Breakfast' has for a long time been the working title for the next album, at least as far back as 'The Mythical Creatures Exhibition' so in some ways it's kind of cool to finally use that title for real.
On the other hand, it made designing a cover really awkward. Kudos for Merlin for managing to cook something up, combining the concepts of 'Little Big Cat' and 'An Angry God' to produce something which is quite arresting.

Hope you enjoy it.

All songs written and performed by J. P. Morris, Copyright (C)2016
Recorded using the Old Ways at The Lab, Cwmbran 2016
Mixed 17-18 Nov. 2016. Mastering by Alex Balzama at Swift Solutions, Feb 2017

Greetings go out to Keaton, Ren, Wuff, Chaosmage, Sofox, Merlin and co.
Also Flaviu the lynx. Thanks go out to the Rosegarden team, to Brian Roth and all at Pyral, ATR, MRL and co for keeping the analogue dream alive. Apologies to Thomas Campion.
Ian's Industrial Breakfast courtesy Dr. I. Morris. Cover by Merlin Missingham, logo by Luke Turner. Organ recorded at St. Grod's.
Recorded on SM900 tape, mixed to ATR Mastering tape.

The PDF booklet can be found here:  http://dougtheeagle.com/thb/heresiarch.pdf

Track Breakdown:

1. Little Big Cat
Folks in the UK may remember the escape of Flaviu the Carpathian lynx, which caused a bit of hysteria in the media for some reason. Reports of his size varied considerably, including amazingly helpful 'bigger than a cat but smaller than a lion'.

Anyway, the fuss inspired me to write this song, which is one of my favourites on this album.

The organ section in the middle quotes from 'What if a day?' by Thomas Campion. Hopefully he won't rise from the vengeful dead because I arranged it into waltz-time.

2. Born Without Wings
A few years ago I did a song called 'Born With Wings'. This time I had the idea of taking the same theme of persecution from a different angle, someone who has enough magical creature blood in them to register as 'probably evil' even if they aren't.
I think the lyrics and vocal performance could have been better, but I do like how the melodies came out.

3. The Heresiarch's Breakfast
This is an instrumental I've been working on for a while. It took an odd turn at the end when I decided to incorporate some samples and drum loops I helped my brother create 16 years ago for an abandoned project called "Ian's Industrial Breakfast".
It took a lot of fiddling to get the loops to sync with the song as laid to tape, and it's still a little more sloppy than it would be if I'd done the project in a DAW. But that would have been very boring.
A debt is owed to Pink Floyd, since both this and IIB are inspired to some degree by Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast.
The song proved a bit of a nuisance to mix, and in the end had about three tape splices joining sections together where something needed redoing.
I rather like how the string machine came out on this track.

4. Transfinite State Machine
I've done a lot of 1970s-ish stuff lately so I thought it might be fun to do something more in my earlier style, with greater use of 1980s synth textures such as the MicroWave's PPG noises.
The lyrics nagged at me for a few weeks and the song kind of fell together like an explosion in reverse. It was one of the later songs to be recorded for the album, and I think my favourite part is the vocoder stuff at the ending.

5. Prodigal Son
This is something I started writing in early 2010 but abandoned, recently unearthed and finished. Which I will often do if the song I'm working on prior isn't panning out.
Finishing the music was a bit of a nuisance since I'd already cannibalised some of the better parts and put them into 'This is a Triangle' (the section starting around 5:30) on the 'More songs about Demons' album.
But even writing replacement melodies was only part of the problem since I had to try and figure out some lyrics for it, which I did at about 1AM about a month before the album was due to be mixed. The first multitracks were laid down on 13th Sept and the demo mix was done on the 4th of October.
The demo was a total bitch to mix, but amazingly the final stereo master was done without any splices.

The Mellotron chord slide was done by recording part of the chord on the A807 and adjusting the varispeed for the notes which needed to be bent. The intro lyrics were completely improvised and slowed down to make them sound trippier.

6. An Angry God (Tears of Joy)
I don't usually do songs of political commentary, and I'm not sure this is one either. I guess it's more an observation that it's relatively easy to get people to do horrific things in the name of a god. And that if he/she finds out, they might not be very pleased about it. Before you ask, I'm not sure which god it is. I didn't really have one in mind.

This was the first song laid down for the album, and it's also one of my two favourites, the other being 'Little Big Cat'. There were a couple of songs on a similar theme I was writing around the same time, so like many good progressive rock songs, I took them and smushed them together into one big song, and fiddled around with the lyrics until it fit properly.

Recording-wise, I'm rather pleased with the way the chorus came out. It was tracked over four tracks on the TASCAM, allowing for three-part harmony plus the guy at the back chanting 'tears of joy'. The harmonies themselves were recorded with the machine running 15% slow so that they sounded sped-up and a little creepy when played back at normal speed. The first chorus was totally improvised and as such the harmonies are quite strange - in the later choruses I used more conventional modes of harmony by going back over and over again until it sounded best... one of the times I could have done with some formal music theory.

I was tempted to go back and redo the first one but I asked around first since I'd probably not be able to get it back how it was originally if I decided it was better. People liked the creepy, odd harmonies so I kept it. This is also one of the few times I've played around with 5ths on the minimoog. I need to do more of that.

The final version contains two edits, one at the start of the last verse, and also one for the last line, which had a bit of noise in the original mix.

[Foxx Trotter]

I still have to listen to the rest of the songs, but it sounds pretty good so far.

[Tapewolf]

I still have to listen to the rest of the songs, but it sounds pretty good so far.

Thanks!