Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009

Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009

Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009 were the last burblings, thuddings and wailings to be heard from Alchemeon. These versions of the songs were recorded during live sessions at The Sound Gallery, Exeter between late February and mid April 2009.

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 February 22nd and 23rd, and April 6th 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, glorious 1960s technology.

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 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 to redraw the corrupted wave forms by hand in miniscule detail, which was extremely fiddly, tooth-gnashingly tedious and horribly time-consuming.

Subsequently to the discontinuation of our previous in-site mp3 player, the FlamPlayer, we took the opportunity to master these tracks before re-release. Despite the ghastly cassette hum, the somewhat furry sound in places and general technical difficulties assocaited with digitising old 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 Crazy Mandy
04 The Centre of the Cyclone
05 Celestine
06 It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain
07 Castrol GTX a Go-Go
08 Born of Stars
09 The Freaks (Shall Inherit The Earth)
10 Orb
11 Finale