News

It’s about time we gave Dark Company fans the band’s 2011 autumn news as the boys have been hard at work.

As you may already know, Pete’s health is not very good so we have been trying to work around his medical issues. We are trying to finish up the last few things from Dark Company’s back catalogue. As such Pete has been singing his vocal parts for the Drift of Stars album recently. This is more than half-way finished, at the end which there may be the odd bit of touching up of things that could be better.

Beyond that, we are looking into an uncertain future that may contain new songs if the health of Pete will stand up to it. He has been composing drum loops to go with the new songs he has written which may result in another new sound and direction for the band although obviously these are very early days.

Progress has been made with their Bad Habits album. All of the extra mixes for Buick Visions have been mastered and uploaded and now the next song, Nightshifters, is being tweaked rather a lot. We anticipate that the finished version of Nightshifters will sound somewhat different to the beta version currently available on the Bad Habits playlist. We have also been looking at sleeve design for the album and have some interesting and fun ideas on that front.

We have been upgrading the alpha mixes of the Alien Heat album and have completed ten of them so far, although there is still much work to be done towards the finished alpha stage. We are currently working on the drumming and synths in Easy Street and Wonderlust and the remaining four songs need extensive editing in Studio Two. These things will come to pass soon.

A few years ago Pete wrote a novel called Cello and we are looking into publishing it online in a blog format with all of Pete’s extras, such as maps of the galaxy and so on. We are also considering the music that may have been existed in that world and may attempt to create some with Dark Company.

More Dark Company news will be published soon. If you would like to follow the Dark Company Twitter feed you can do so by clicking here, and if you would like to see or join the Dark Company Facebook page you can click here.

We found, prodded and uploaded an archive collection of songs Live in Session Autumn 1985 from Laughing Sun. This collection of songs was the second half of the set they would play at their first live performance, at Exeter College. Unfortunately the first half of this session has not materialised, and may in fact never do so.

The cassette this was taken from had no title or markings on the spine and a track list written faintly in pencil. Only the acoustic version of Cosmic Dancer was identified on the B side, so to find the two subsequent tracks was a surprise.

If you would like to hear just the songs that were played by the whole band, you can click here.

There is a further collection for specialists, which include the moments between the songs and the other bonus tracks. If you would like to listen to this full version, please click here.

Today our 20 000th visitor arrived at the Wud Records website as wudding continues to proliferate and expand around the world. At the current rate of progress we hope to wud our 25 000th visitor in mid-February, or thereabouts. Our 20 000th visitor was from the Bristol area of England – maybe it was you? :-)

If you are on Facebook, come and ‘like’ our page by clicking here.

If you are on Twitter, please follow us by clicking here.

The Essential and Red Rug Demo collections from Alien Heat are scheduled for remastering following on from our recent and extensive digging through the archives. All of the Alien Heat material that we have has now been fed into the machines and will be processed soon. There may be some new material made available as a result of this.

Fans of Alien Heat who bought their songs whose contact details we have will be sent upgraded sound files and new CDs free of charge when the work has been completed. Once we have finished the remastering, all of the song files both here at Wud Records and at Bandcamp will be upgraded and we shall let you all know about this in our news feed.

We will offer all the current Alien Heat downloads at a discount price until the remastering is finished, although we will not be sending free upgrades to Alien Heat fans who buy songs during this discount period (d’oh!). :-)

Over the past couple of days we have raided the archives for some material from Sirius Rising. We believe we may now have fully exhausted all the possibilities in the archives for Sirius Rising material.

The next job is to process it through the special machines and to find out what is good – or at least reasonable if nothing is particularly good. We shall let you know when the machines have done their work.

There are three other old Wud Records bands that still have no music available to listen to here. They are Fooog Dinboffin and the Release, Now, and The Masters of Drone. We will take the necessary steps to fix this in the near future.

Some of the Now material has been fed into the machines. The Masters of Drone‘s material is proving harder to find. We have located some material by Fooog Dinboffin and the Release and it is still waiting to be assimilated.

Smile, one of the oldest songs from The Bastard Sons of Dennis, has been completed and added to their Cherry Smoke Empire album, which you can hear by clicking here. We have also included Smile in our default music player, which is available on many pages at the Wud Records website.

Smile is also available as a single download or as part of the (incomplete) Cherry Smoke Empire collection at Bandcamp. If you would like to support the band by downloading their new song, you can do so by clicking here.

Smile was originally written and recorded by Terry Bickers and his band Levitation on their 1992 album Need For Not. Mr Lijkkes and Mr Bickers were at university together and there was some collaboration in the creation of Smile. Mr Nejsan had never previously heard the Levitation version and created his guitar parts independently.

We love this wonderful song and hope that you will enjoy listening to it too.