From 2009-2010 I recorded my album entitled 'In Cloud Cuckooland'. At that time it was the best album I'd ever recorded. Maybe not for the songwriting which I still believe 'AFTER. THE. RUSH. HOUR'S. GONE' has better, or for the guitar riffs, but for the theme and for the quality and for the sound.
When recording the album 'AFTER. THE. RUSH. HOUR'S. GONE' I had only used the recording programme Making Waves. This means all the music is recorded in both left and right speak outputs. Recording each layer was complete guess work, which means bits are out of time and there was no way to mend that. So 'AFTER. THE. RUSH. HOUR'S. GONE' is a very raw, gritty sounding album.
'In Cloud Cuckooland' however was the start of experimenting with Making Waves and Audacity. The first song I began to experiment with was the first of the In Cloud Cuckooland songs, 'Spitting Feathers'. This song set the tone for the rest of the album - an idea which I had been wanting to do for years, about mental health, dreams and the mind. I wanted to make an abstract world. This album was it. Very dark, raw and gritty. I had the ambition to make a dark dance industrial record. The album was not to be as structured as the 'AFTER. THE. RUSH. HOUR'S. GONE', with each song being weird and complicated.
'Spitting Feathers' developed and set the tone. The layered vocals coming from left and right outputs at different times. The dark riffs and keyboard tones. The use of the echo machine pedal, producing horrible jerks and stops and starts. The dance beats and wacky lyrics. From then on I came up with song titles or music and wrote them around one another. I had never written or recorded like this before. I tended to have the songs done on guitar with vocals and add to it. Two songs for me really set the tone and created the dark aspect for the album I was looking for: 'One Billion Dollar Nuclear White Elephant' and 'Putting the Monster in the Box'. Both songs are complicated and mixed up, the former for the mix of beats and weird atmosphere and the latter for the layers of vocals which creates the solo near the end. There are 7 layered vocals and no music, and it works tremendously well. This was also the first song where I used extremely deep tones for the backing vocals. Works amazingly well. And so the album developed this way.
I had got to 17 songs and was going to finish it at that, even though I had numerous other songs incomplete that I could have used. However not once, or twice but three times I got a virus on my computer, which destroyed the audio files on my computer. This ment that the 'In Cloud Cuckooland' album was lost. Apart from the odd song I'd save here or there on soundcloud and cd, I had lost pretty much all of it. Songs I had recorded, I'd never hear again. I was raging. 2 years of work, pretty much all gone. I had until recently only managed to salvage 7 of the 'In Cloud Cuckooland' songs: 'One Billion Dollar Nuclear White Elephant', 'House of Mirrors', 'Spitting Feathers', 'Putting the Monster in the Box', 'In a Wilderness', 'Trip to Mars' and 'Art Imitating Reality'. 'Art Imitating Reality' wasn't suppose to be an 'In Cloud Cuckooland', it was more a go between that album and 'Anonymous', however it fits well and so I decided to put it amongst the 'In Cloud Cuckooland' songs.
I had lost 10 songs and was raging. Some of them were fantastic (in my biased opinion), and I'd have done anything to get them back. So only a few weeks ago, my friend George messaged me saying he'd found a bunch of my music on his external hard drive. I enquired about 2010 (as that's when the album finished), but no, nothing in it apart from one song that wasn't an 'In Cloud Cuckooland' one. I was annoyed. But then I thought maybe it'd have been in 2009. I asked him over Facebook and eagerly awaited his reply. Surely he'd have some of the missing songs? He replied, and he did. He had songs 1-10, which are: 'One Billion Dollar Nuclear White Elephant', 'House of Mirrors', 'Spitting Feathers', 'Putting the Monster in the Box', 'Dream Analysis - Leopard and the Polar Bear', 'Convincing Mask of Sanity', 'La Rue. Noir. Paris (A street scene of Paris at night)' , 'Dream Analysis - Ames Room (When the Moon Implodes)', 'On the Verge of', 'Dream Analysis - The Girl in the Red Dress'. I was delighted. I wanted to listen to these songs so badly it is unreal. I still haven't got them off him, but I will. And that means I can put 'In Cloud Cuckooland' up as an album the way it should have been on bandcamp instead of as an e.p. It was never suppose to be an e.p.
That's a short explanation to 'In Cloud Cuckooland'. Over time I will get round to putting it on bandcamp and may add some onto soundcloud too. I really want to get the songs soon, because I haven't heard them in ages...and don't even remember what some sound like...
Watch this space,
Wullae
www.myspace.com/wullaewright
www.wullaewright.bandcamp.com
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