Freefall

[Mikey]

& there I was thinking they'd returned

We are happy and excited to welcome extraordinairy Swedish rockers, FREE FALL, to the ever-growing Nuclear Blast family! Commented the band: "We believe that the deal FREE FALL makes today with Nuclear Blast will be a significant step towards our quest to liberate people through Freedom Rock; World Domination through Power and Volume!" FREE FALL features well known Swedish musicians Mattias Bärjed (guitar, SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIVES) and Ludwig Dahlberg (drums ... Read MORE!

//http://www.nuclearblast.de/label/music/band/news/details/2719982.2719345.free-fall-ndash-sign-with-nuclear-blast.html

[sigod]

Just in case you wanted to know what we hairy arseholes looked like back in the day, the first seven photos on the link below are of Freefall (the last being shots of Jem and singer JP Orr recording tracks for Thrown). I should mention Jem was not a well bunny at all throughout the recording of the Thrown album but his legendary ability to knuckle down and simply do the job was evident even then. If you want to know just how sick the poor bastard was, have a listen to the song Hellstate and in the background of the quiet bit in the middle you can just hear the poor bugger's laughter breaking into a hacking, chesty cough.

The other thing I should say was there was not a lot of cash floating about back then and he was working with incredibly some cheap equipment even for the time. I think there was Yamaha DX27, a Kawai K1 (a cheap Korg M1 clone which Jem totally reprogrammed and made his bitch), a Roland D-550 (the rack version of the D-50), some strange Yamaha 12 bit sampler and a Roland R5 drum machine. These instruments were hooked up to a hardware sequencer Jem had dubbed 'Aubrey' which being made by Yamaha, was incredibly complex and took an age to program. There was a really cheap Itallian made FX processor which he put all the intruments and vocals through via a nasty plastic patchbay and the results were recorded onto a borrowed double speed 4 track cassette recorder, the make of which escapes me.

The fact that he was able to create anything listenable with this stuff is a huge testament to his already considerable creative and technical skills. Jem wrote, produced and engineered everything on the record and the bastard was only 20 years old!

//http://www.tinyfish.org/gallery/0-1987-2005/index.html



Simon.

[rogerg]

I love those pictures.  and what a great bunch of guys.  I wish I'd known you then.

[Pedro]

Thanks for that Simon. Top insight.