Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09

Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09

The recordings of these songs by Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09 were all taken from their Depot X sessions. These took place in Exeter during December 2008 and January 2009. There was quite a lot of snow at the time, especially for Devon, where a millimetre of snow would be enough to cause panic and widespread disruption to everything.

This particular selection was chosen by consensus of Alchemeon band members, including in the old and now disabled Wud Records forums.

All of the tracks were recorded live on December 12th and December 17th 2008, and January 13th 2009. The songs were all recorded using four mics into the mixer section of a Tascam 244 portastudio (state of the art in 1986 and still has a lovely warm sound) and then into a cassette machine.

The cassettes were played into our computers using some rather dodgy technology, which we have long since abandoned. This abandonement was due to the enormous number of unnecessary technical issues it created.

By not transfering the audio to digital format correctly, the files ended up languishing in our vaults for quite some time. All of the files were plagued by many instances per minute of a sound similar to the sound one might hear when someone bends over and rips one’s trousers during a Carry On movie. This was very annoying and required a lot of work and redrawing of the corrupted wave forms by hand in minute detail, which was extremely fiddly, tooth-gnashingly tedious and horribly time-consuming.

Subsequently to the discontinuation of our previous in-site mp3 player, we took the opportunity to master these tracks before re-release. Despite the somewhat furry sound in places and general technical difficulties assocaited with 1960s technology, the tracks are sounding pretty good by now in comparison to what we salvaged from the cassettes.

If you would like to own a copy of this magnificent collection of live music by the mighty Alchemeon, it is available for download from Bandcamp. Click here to go to the page.

01 Born
02 The Winged Man
03 The Centre of the Cyclone
04 Celestine
05 It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain
06 Castrol GTX a Go-Go
07 Born of Stars
08 The Freaks (Shall Inherit The Earth)
09 Orb
10 Finale