Hit The Moon

Writers

Original song 'Cry John' by Vesty & Wishart; rewritten by Bemand, Falcone, Pattison, Sabatelli & Wishart

Performers

Bridget Remembers

Cry John was written with Michael Vesty after I recovered from a hefty breakdown. It tells the story of how I stowed away on an aeroplane at Heathrow in 96 and what happened. The original version has samples of Tannoy speakers, footsteps and doors. Don's sample of the woman at the end gives this version a strange similarity but only the vocal melody was kept and resung for Hit The Moon.

I recorded my EWI...(Akai 4000 electric wind controller)... a synth that you blow, using Martin's tone port choosing heavy guitar amps, cabs and effects so it really sounds like a wild guitar. With Steve's layers of guitar on here its hard to know is which but I think it sounds great!

Steve (Bemand) plays guitars on this track, we have been in bands together since 1979. Myself, Steve and Rich Chadwick were all in the Demented Stoats, a mad space punk festival band. Other shared bands with Steve are Spiral, Star Nation, Hawkwind (Steve replaced Dave on the European Tour of 1990) and Techno Pagan.

For this track I recorded Jasper bass jamming in different styles and we picked and mixed and matched the best of the best.

Don Remembers

For me, this song changed the most from inception to completion. The first version with Bridget and I sounds more Caribbean and tribal, with the percussion loops and vibes giving off an island airy celebration. But still very modern. It’s very cool. Then, came Jasper’s funky bass, and its rock inflexion. Still cool. Then, the funky guitars, and its rock inflexion. Still cool. Really, it never lost its coolness, but it definitely became heavier and less of an ambient electronica piece. It kind of went from Eno’s third album to Eno’s first. And they’re both cool too.

The drum loops were a chopped up mix of 100 and 117 BPM loops, which I incorporated into a 98 BPM session. There’s also a very effected 117 BPM that was added for the intro. This was before Pro Tools Elastic Audio was on my machine, so I used the TCE Time Trimmer to stretch a 4/4 bar of a loop in one BPM to 4/4 in 98 BPMs. The quality of files produced with the Digidesign Time Shift plug-ins is incredible. In the past, I had to use more expensive pitch and time plug-ins, or steer clear of this type of rhythmic experimentation if I wanted to maintain the sound’s original resolution.

There are a number of field-recorded samples on this one. Some very hidden, others like the woman at the end exposed (albeit in a quiet vein). There are birds and planes captured when Karen and I went to the San Francisco Zoo. Some of these sounds were then affected to sound like synths. The woman at the end is tied to a pic of me that was used in an Expose interview in 2007. The shot shows me sitting at a spring training game in Arizona (in 2006). In my hand, is an M-Audio MicroTrack that I use for field recording. In this case, I was with Karen and our friend Rob. (Karen and Rob were actually engineers for two different versions of Spirits Burning in the 80s). We were watching a game and a woman seated close by started talking. I imported the recorded results into this piece; I then shuffled her words and trimmed a couple of syllables to produce a different conversation.

Hmm...How much do I want to give away? Well, let’s say that she wasn’t really talking about heavenly creatures and her mental needs. Instead, it was all baseball talk, centering on a key position player wanting to get an extra edge by visiting the psychologist where she worked. But, she really did say "cat-person".

Don's Timeline