Alchemeon: Born Of Stars

Born Of Stars by Alchemeon has finally been repaired and added to Alchemeon‘s Winter collection. Born Of Stars was the last track that needed to be finished, so the Live In Session – Winter 2008-09 album is now complete.

This version of Born Of Stars is an amazing track. Weighing in at over fifteen minutes in length, it is epic in scale, as well as subject. There is a lot of improvisation around the themes and the overall sound is extremely psychedelic.

The whole song is held together by Iggy’s relentless virtuosity on the drums, and whose amazing energy propels the track joyfully along. Pok plays a wailing Marsha Ibanez guitar. He sings the main vocal and narrates, with Jim Vizible ably backing from behind his enormous banks of keyboards. George‘s bass thuds, clanks and weebles away, grounding everything on terra firma.

Repairing Born Of Stars was a truly horrible job as the waves were corrupted and had to be redrawn by hand in minute detail over many hours of painstaking work. At the end of the work the track sounds a little grungelised in places, like it was lifted from a scratchy old vinyl. In truth, the entire audio was filled with a terrible sound, not unlike Kenneth Williams tearing his trousers in a Carry On movie.

Two years ago, when the rest of the Live In Session – Winter 2008-09 by Alchemeon was repaired, Born Of Stars was the final track to be fixed. Being the longest, and the most broken, it seemed sensible to finish and release the others first.

Suddenly, when Born Of Stars was almost finished being fully repaired, the main Wud Records Studio One computer decided to mangle its own hard drive in horror at all the ghastly audio it was having to process. It was utterly ruined and we had to order a new one! Sadly all of the many hours of work done on Born Of Stars was lost, although everything else had been backed up. We simply had to grit our teeth, utter unspeakable phrases whilst reinstalling everything, and jump once more into this nightmare of dot-clicking.

All of the Alchemeon recordings were captured live. There were four mics around the room, mixed by a Tascam 244 portastudio onto stereo cassette. The cassettes ended up being recycled after use, so simply rerecording the audio into the computers was not an option.

What a job.

Anyway, it’s done now, so hooray.

There is another album of Alchemeon material waiting to be repaired and mastered, this time from Spring 2009. We shall be informing Alchemeon fans of its progress via our News service and on Twitter.

We are hoping that Pok will produce some artwork for both albums in the near future so that they can both be released for download to Bandcamp.

If you would like to listen to Born Of Stars by Alchemeon from their Live In Session – Winter 2008-09 album, please click here.

To listen to the whole Live In Session – Winter 2008-09 album by Alchemeon right here at the Wud Records website, please click here instead.

If you prefer to listen to the album over at SoundCloud, please click here.