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.
