Pok: big progress

Big progress of a highly significant and positive nature has been achieved regarding Pok‘s Anthology album. This is tremendous news and everybody concerned is delighted with what potentially can now be achieved.

When we left the uk in 2017 (see also this post), only a couple Wud personnel remained within driving distance of our new location. Being spread far and wide across different European lands created a new set of challenges. Fortunately, the development of modern technology has rendered these issues theoretically negligible.

Pok is still based in the uk, whereas Wud Records has no collective intention at all ever to return to that ruined land. Life quality here by the Czech/German/Austrian border is massively better than anything we ever experienced in the uk, so why would we?

The question is, then, what has actually happened? Well… one of the biggest issues we have faced with regard to working on Pok’s material is his lack of reliable and regular internet. Pok is an exceptionally well educated man and remains a highly analogue creature, who has no particular interest in technology like computers or mobile phones, which therefore tends to make modern long distance communication quite tricky. Sometimes we manage to have a Skype session when he is staying with a friend, and once in a blue moon he might venture into a cybercafe and send us an email. But mostly not.

The specifics of the recent glorious progress are thus – Pok has discovered how to share files with us using our dropbox. He has managed to use a track we shared with him to record some audio and then share that back with us. We have managed to put it into our machines and then share the mix of the new audio back. Everything worked!

The fact that Pok has managed to record and send us some new parts for his songs using digital techniques is a massive breakthrough. It took a six-hour Skype session to put it all together and was worth every single second.

After Pok had become ‘played out’ towards the end of the call that we shared whilst he was visiting friends in Scotland, we had a good listen through everything that is currently in progress for the Anthology album and decided what needed to be done with everything. As such, on a surging tide of post-success musical activity, a number of songs have been developed further, each along their individual roads to completion and release.

In terms of tracking, a lot of songs mostly only need the things that Jim used to do, i.e. keyboards and backing vocals, such as It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain, Born, and Finale. There are a few that require odd bits of guitar and bass as well, such as Crazy Mandy, Centre of the Cyclone, Fire Burning Fever and She’s Beautiful.

There are still a few songs that require a fair bit of tracking, such as The Winged Man, Orb, Alchemical Transformer and Set the Marks. We shall probably focus more on these once some of the others are released.

Johnny Wake Up requires some special treatments before it can be finished. Midnight Under the Tor requires a collection of special effects. Love Is My Purple Bicycle only needs backing vocals and Don’t Let It Pass You By just needs a little more in the way of keyboards. We are hoping to finish and release this one very soon!

A number of other songs have not had much development and they may end up forming a separate album, if we manage to get that far.

All the same, we are very pleased with the progress achieved recently with regard to Pok and his growing Anthology album. This enthusiasm has resulted in a surge of progress at our end as well.

As previously mentioned in an earlier News post, there will be more remixes and remasters coming soon as well.

The Lecher is sounding absolutely fantastic and is very close to being re-released. It may even be finished this weekend.

Wanted to Be a Singer, however, is proving more tricky to remix, due to an issue involving corrupted audio files. This one may take some time.

In between all of the work we have been doing with Pok, we have also managed to progress a lot of Flicker‘s music for their HappySad album. More news on this will follow presently.

As if that were not all, we are approaching the end of a huge and awesome development regarding The Bastard Sons of Dennis. This has remained largely secret, but there will certainly be an exciting announcement or two in the near future.

Whilst we are indeed very excited by all of the progress achieved towards finally completeing Pok‘s Anthology album, there is still a fair way to go. We recommend you bookmark our News service, or join our mailing list (which you can do by clicking here), joining our Bandcamp community, and for what it may be worth (probably not much these days), following our socials, which you can find here in our linktree.

All of the remixed and remastered Anthology works of Pok are up at SoundCloud, and you can enjoy listening to those by clicking here. The playlist will grow as more work is completed.

To listen to the whole of the incomplete and growing Anthology album as it stands right now, please click here to go to Pok’s Anthology page at Wud Records.

If you prefer to listen over at Bandcamp, and even support our work with a download (always greatly appreciated), you can do so by clicking here.