News

We have created another new page for The Bastard Sons of Dennis. This one will be home to recordings of their live performances. Seven songs have been uploaded from their recent show at The Old Firehouse, Exeter. Thanks to Hum for recording these songs. You can visit the page by clicking here.

Now that the studios are working well enough to actually be useful again (loud outburst of cheering) we have done some work on improving the look of the Wud Records and Explicit Music websites.

You will notice that the news feed for each act works properly now, and the CD image in the top margin has the names of the different bands of our site when you are looking at any of their pages. The look of the lettering for internal links at Explicit Music has been improved as well. Thanks to the team at Darfuria for all their work in making this happen.

There has been some recent studio activity here as well. Flicker have been in to record some of the track called Minnack from their HappySad album and will be back for more of the same in the next few days. We are planning to release some alpha mixes of HappySad when we have a little more of it at alpha stage.

Dark Company have been busy as well, with Pete returning to do some singing on the song Damaged from the Benign Inquisition album. We hope to complete this in three weeks or so as we are all very busy right now.

In more Dark Company news, Maxx has been laying down some breathtakingly beautiful bass guitar for Amanita Alice from the Bad Habits album. There was a thunderstorm right overhead during the recording of his parts and we had to pause and wait until Thor’s angry javelins stopped causing the recorders to crackle!

Our design team are making Rough Terrain’s Exit Stage Deaf compilation album artwork and we shall be selling the finished product in our shop.

A trip to the archive vault has unearthed some ancient Ug Brothers recordings which we plan to remaster and upload for you soon.

There have also been some more developments regarding our forthcoming TV channel which we hope you will enjoy. This is top secret for now and we shall release some more information soon. A number of other things are developing behind the scenes as well right now. How exciting!

We have uploaded an original song by The Bastard Sons of Dennis called Losing Feeling. You can listen to it now by clicking here.

This song contains some bad language, so beware!

This is just one of several different versions we are planning for this song, this version being the full-length acoustic version which is faithful to the way it is performed by the duo live. It is also available to hear in the Wud Records default music player that you will find on all the non band-specific pages.

The other versions of Losing Feeling that we plan to release are a full band full length version, and a full band shortened radio edit. More information on these mixes and their releases will be announced in the future.

The uploading of Losing Feeling has prompted us to separate the recent recordings of The Bastard Sons of Dennis into two albums.

The original songs will be added to an album called Cherry Smoke Empire, which derives its name from a serendipitous event involving some fridge magnets. Click here to go to the page. Versions of the songs Good Times and Smile have begun being recorded and will be included here before long. You can hear some early recordings of The Bastard Sons of Dennis playing Good Times and Smile in their session from May 1998, which you can listen to by clicking here.

All of the first wave of Blue Oyster Cult covers will be added to the album we have called Cosy Lube Turtle, which is an anagram and which you can hear by clicking on this link. There are several other Blue Oyster Cult covers by The Bastard Sons of Dennis in varying stages of completion in our studio memory banks right now and we anticipate that it will not be long until some more tracks are added to the Cosy Lube Turtle collection as well.

We have also updated all of The Bastard Sons of Dennis’s mp3 player playlists on their pages here at Wud Records and we have also begun to scribe some pages of lyrics and information concerning their songs over at the Explicit Music website, which you can visit by clicking here.

Please remember that The Bastard Sons of Dennis will be performing long sets on May 26th at The Oddfellows and May 28th at the North Bridge Inn. As they have already recorded Then Came the Last Days of May we are considering calling this two-date tour ‘The Last Days of May Tour’.

The latest edition of Reflections includes three pieces of Pete’s artwork from his special gallery here among Dark Company’s pages. His works can be seen on the inside front and back covers and the back cover itself of Issue Nine of Reflections.

We have also uploaded the 20 or so newest creations from Pete’s deranged mind’s eye to the gallery, which you can see by clicking here.

We are pleased to let you all know that The Bastard Sons of Dennis will be playing two shows towards the end of May 2011.

The first will be at The Oddfellows, New North Road, Exeter on Thursday May 26th and the second will be at the North Bridge Inn (NBI), St Davids Hill, Exeter on Sunday May 28th. Both shows will begin at around 9pm.

It is possible that they might perform the topical song Last Days of May at these shows.

You are advised to arrive early as both venues are fairly small.

After a considerable amount of messing around with difficult digital conundrums that have caused our technical boffins to tear out their hair, cry out unprintable words in rage and frustration and generally behave in a rather irritable and disgruntled fashion for several weeks, we have finally repaired Studio One to the extent that the things that are still broken now mostly seem to have work-arounds. Hooray!

As a result, we have been experimenting with our mastering tools and the result was a cleaner, less hissy, less boomy, sweeter, clearer, louder version of Mark Drower and the Everyones’ Blaze Tape.

This was recorded tape-to-tape onto a particularly cheap and nasty cassette way back in 1982 as it was the only cassette available for this recording at that time, unfortunately. All in all it is remarkable how well it has cleaned up.

There is a little distortion here and there, especially in This Time Tomorrow, and some cassette drop-out can be heard near the start of The Mirror. You can also hear a couple of bassy booms during the songs when some hapless backing singer comes into contact with a mic stand and when Mark has the odd particularly pronounced labial moment.

Removing all the horrible yuckiness from the recording has also resulted in a faint sonic residue in places that is reminiscent of somebody pouring a sack full of boiled sparkly magic beans through an obsidian funnel into a cotton-lined tin pit containing a medusa with a bad case of influenza. Other than that, this is not too bad and we’ve added it to our default playlist as well.

These recordings have generated some interest across the internet so we are considering putting them together as a saleable product. If any members of the cast of the Everyone play would like a copy, we will be happy to send you the mp3s if you contact us via the email.

To listen to this wonder of ancient technology meeting modern technology, you can visit the Mark Drower and the Everyones Blaze Tape page by clicking here.