By the time we got to Paris in late September 2011, we were pretty worn down with too much luggage and the wheels of our cases beginning to fall off. After a period in cheap hotels we finally secured an apartment for one month and arrived to meet the chic Parisian owners feeling really rough, grubby and scraping our cases along the pavement as the wheels had now given out.
The song "Purple Paris" didn't come until we left Paris and arrived in Berlin a few months later where our apartment there had a big picture of Paris on the wall. The lyrics (so far) for the song came from our experiences in Paris and how Paris has always energetically affected both of us in the brow (third eye/purple) chakra area. Musically we would like to really bring out the groove of this song.
Just finished mixing "Karl-Marx-Allee" today, the 17th of February. So many times we do a mix and then realise it's on a date with the number seven in it. It was another all-nighter. Mixing seems to mean staying up all night for us. We had been putting this one off for a while and then last night got the feeling to start. Once you're in it tends to be a case of seeing it through all the way or possibly not getting back to finishing it for months.
Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin
Mixing is the hardest part of what we do because of a few things. It means staring at a computer screen for hours, usually sitting in a hunched up uncomfortable way in whatever makeshift 'studio environment' we find ourselves. This doesn't allow the energy to flow freely around the body and begins to irritate both physically and mentally. Our equipment is super lo-fi. We use €15 computer speakers to mix (difficult to judge the bass frequencies when you can hardly hear them!) along with better quality headphones, which you can at least hear the detail of the mix on, but are tiring to wear constantly.
Once you've gone through this process with a few songs it gets harder to motivate yourself each time. We love working on these songs and we love to see them past the finish line, and usually there is a point somewhere in the mixing process where it can become enjoyable and things start flowing. It's something we haven't quite mastered the balance of yet. There is nobody else to do the task and I feel somewhere along the line someone else who enjoys it far more than we do could take over but for now we are still trying to do it without losing our balance.
We are pleased with how this one turned out. It feels like this song has been through a long journey. It was the first brand new SoulJahm song when it came into being back in Budapest, March 2011. Now it's out there and ready to do it's work and we can keep moving on.
We have just finished and released the video for "Why Do You Run". Kate has spent the last few days creating the video from various footage taken during our travels.
This song was the first song we played and recorded as SoulJahm, back in Budapest, March 2011. The melodica part came there with only ukulele to back it up. In Milan later in the year we were able to record a piano part which became the foundation for the rest of the song. Various other tracks were recorded as we moved on and when we were able to... in Nice, Paris, Berlin and finally Budapest in 2012 where vocals, guitar and melodica were added and the song was mixed.
We released the song in July 2012 as the first SoulJahm single from the our forthcoming 'Sketches of Europa' collection.
This is a song about how it is the human mind itself which is responsible for the creation of countries and all the conflict and separation that comes with them. In seeing that clearly, it is then pretty stupid to try and solve those conflicts and bring peace with that same human mind.
The song was written back in Edinburgh in 2008 around the same time as "Spitting Out The Shit", "Nobody Wants You To Be Free" and a few others we have still to release. This version is part of a live recording we made in Bologna in January this year. We'll try for a proper recording one day.
Our most continual frustration over the last year as we push on with this Music is that we have this build up of songs which we can't get out quick enough. It feels like they are pushing to come out but with only two of us to do everything - play all instruments, sing, record, mix, create videos, look after the website - we feel a bit jammed up.
We have only managed to release about half of the 'Sketches of Europa' tracks, which were mostly written in 2011, there are some demos I made in 2007 intended for a follow-up album to 'One Way Ticket' which were put aside and they have started pushing to be worked on, as well as some songs from 2008 and just recently even older songs from more than 10 years ago which were never released have started to surface. Not to mention new songs which are still coming. We really feel we must get all these songs out sooner or later. You can't control the order in which they demand to be worked on either.
We are not highly skilled musicians and although we can get these songs across with what skills we have, for a long time now we have known that we must bring the technical aspects of playing up to the required standard to match that intensity of feeling we have for them and help realise the full potential of these songs. So we've had to purposely focus on practice and put all ideas of recording aside for now. Eventually we should be skilled enough to record the songs at a quicker pace and a higher standard but that will take time.
For now, that is our sole aim, to bring ourselves up to a higher level of playing, from which everything else we do afterwards will be built on. We might still put out a few songs and would like to keep the 'Sketches of Europa' songs coming but the priority must be to practice regularly. What we have decided to do while this is going on is to occasionally release some of our unfinished works as sort of 'teasers' of what's to come. That is a lot less work for us than having to record, mix and master finished songs. So over the coming weeks/months look out for these tracks which we'll post up on the blog, Facebook, Youtube, etc...
These unfinished works are in various forms from the initial rough acoustic recordings as the song or idea was actually coming through to little basic demo recordings we have started work on. The first one below is a song with working title "Patterns" and which came to our attention again in January 2013 while we were in Bologna. It's actually a full song originally written in 2002 and it was called "Chasing Gold" back then. When we heard it again we immediately saw potential in it and how it could be re-worked with new lyrics and a different feel. One night in Bologna I ended up staying up all night putting together a rough demo and then singing the vocal at 10am in the morning. This one still has to be worked on but we are pleased with the atmosphere it has so far.
We've been in Ventimiglia now for over a week and so far it seems the right place at this time. We first came across Ventimiglia on a train journey from Torino to Nice in August 2011. The train stopped at Ventimiglia and as I looked around I was sure we would stay here some day and said so to Kate. During our time in Spello through August last year we began to look into how we might move through Italy over the coming months. One thing we were certain about was that we'd end up somewhere along the north west coast during the winter months. We'd spent the last two winters in dark, cold, grey environments like Berlin and although that felt right for that time, for some reason this year we strongly felt to spend the winter months somewhere with a lot of light.
The Riviera ligure seemed the perfect environment. When we reached Bologna in October 2012 we were eventually left with a choice of two apartments we could spend a few months in. One was this very apartment we are in now in Ventimiglia and the other, which took us by surprise, was an apartment in Bologna. We decided to stay in Bologna for 3 months, which wasn't what either of us had anticipated. Towards the end of our time there we knew again we had to move on but felt it was most likely to be Milano next, although we didn't particularly want to stay there long. It just felt the easiest and most practical place with all our luggage. At one point it looked like Milano or San Remo and then we just didn't have a clue at all where to go or what to do. With a week to go this Ventimiglia apartment came to our attention again and when we enquired were surprised to find it was available for 3 months. With days to go in Bologna it was arranged and booked up and the piano couriered off on a round trip from Bologna to the UK and back to Ventimiglia.
We now have the piano back with us and are in pretty much the same mode or routine as we left off in Bologna, pushing on with the development of this Music. It definitely feels good to be in the light and near the sea so hopefully some of that will rub off over the next 3 months. Animals are all around us. We have a black and white cat from the ground floor apartment who comes up the stairs to visit us (they also have a pet duck but it hasn't managed to get up the stairs yet), there are pictures of a giraffe, an antelope, and a dead pheasant in this apartment. What does it all mean?
Throughout June 2011 we spent a couple of weeks on the island of Giudecca where a few songs were born - "Italian Saturday" and "Giudecca" being two we have so far managed to see on their way out into the world. We recently found this video filmed from our apartment which happens to capture the very early stages of the song "Giudecca" being developed.
Once we got to Milan a month later, the song moved to piano and eventually turned into this...
By the time we got to Paris in late September 2011, we were pretty worn down with too much luggage and the wheels of our cases beginning to fall off. After a period in cheap hotels we finally secured an apartment for one month and arrived to meet the chic Parisian owners feeling really rough, grubby and scraping our cases along the pavement as the wheels had now given out. 
