Topics

Good eve Frosties!

I thought I would give a small news update on how things are going with the new album, which is called "Life In The Wires".

The majority of it is written... well I say that... the majority of it is ProTools sessions with interesting stuff in. I'm still trying to hang it all together into something cohesive, but making Milliontown was very much like this too so don't worry. That turned out fairly presentable... 

The band shall be the usual "classic" lineup as Nath likes to call it - me, him, Connaught and Blunders. I have no plans for additional guest musicians. The others haven't really heard anything so far, it's not time yet. Besides I can't afford the consultancy fees these days.

I have more than a single album of material written, but as with all these things, that doesn't necessarily mean that a double album is a good idea. Much as I love The Lamb, I still think it would have been the GGAOAT if they'd parked a few bits. I always tend to start looking at my inbox halfway through side 3...

That said... I'm not ruling anything out at this stage. If it demands it, I'll do it.

Sound wise...well that's a tricky one. This is the 5th and possibly final album on Inside Out as I genuinely don't know what will happen after this. This will conclude our second recording contract and nobody's pencilling in any lunch dates thus far.

I'm not doom mongering. Simply stated - IO have recently shifted their opinion that "physical" (as they like to call CDs/DVDs etc..) are finally starting to wobble a bit, having been robust up till now. This could be due to many recent global events so I'm not saying this is gospel. But life moves on doesn't it? I'm fine with that if so, for every door that closes etc...

So my feeling right now, sound wise... is if this is the last one for a while, let's remember where we came from and have a bit of a party.

Back soon!

Jem

Hello all,

I've not forgotten about you honest. I'd just forgotten how time consuming it is to run this thing when it's going full steam.

What with the day job, finishing the album, sorting the gigs, doing all the promo and dealing with my dad's death in January, it's been a pretty intense 7 months. The response to the album has been fantastic and I want to thank everyone here who's helped spread the word, I don't think we've ever had as much exposure before or indeed as much love from the wider world. It's been amazing.

Thanks also to everyone who's come down to see us thus far. We've had a great time playing and all 4 of us are keen to do more having forgotten how much fun we have when we do eventually get together on a stage. The boys have astounded me nightly with their efforts and I'm honoured that they take the time to make space for this thing as they're all so super busy all of the time.

The next 4 shows will be an evolution of the first 4 as we've now had a chance to get a bit more comfy with the new stuff. I'm back down to a single keyboard for starters and the MIDI ironing board is restored and ready to go.

Once this run of gigs is done I'm going to take a bit of a break as I've been on the Frost* ride-on mower since May '15 pretty much and I'm finally feeling a bit jaded now. However I plan to get back at it with the remainder of the material I have here over this coming winter and then we'll be back out again, this time focussing on the EU next spring.

Before that though we have Ramblin' Man in Kent on the 23rd of this month (on at 2pm I think), Thekla in Bristol on the 29th, London on the 30th (Sold Out) and The Portland Arms in Cambridge on the 31st (5 tickets left).

Come and say hello if you're coming down to any of these. We do potter out afterwards looking for people to talk to.

Thanks again for being brilliant. We (and I) seriously appreciate everything you do for us.

Jx

Hello chums!

First off, thank you thems that have already pre-ordered the thingy wot we made. You're all lovely and fragrant and this means I can now order the tour t-shirts.

Secondly, I wanted to ask you what you wanted to do. Obviously the new site is now up and running, do you want me to link the forum up to it? Or do we prefer being a little shining castle of unique and lovely biscuit obsessives floating in the interwebbular soup?

Lemme know and I shall make it happen. Or not obviously. 

Ta. Jem

Just treated myself to one as I've been a good boy this year, eez really good.

I blow a bit hot and cold on Moog stuff, both my Voyager and Little Phatty had tuning issues, but this little chap is marvellous. 

Jolly good. However, if you want to access the 4 voice polyphony you can only do it via MIDI. Using it via CV is a monophonic only experience. I think this is a bit s**t considering it's designed to sit in a Eurorack as you therefore have to leave a small gap in the rack to get a MIDI cable in round the back.

Other than that though it's a keeper, especially when you put other audio through it. The filter is luvverly.

Just wanted to share that as nobody else anywhere seems to have mentioned it.

Hello!

There is a fair to middling chance that we might wheel the old gal around some venues next year once the album's out. If we were to pick, say 5 UK, 5 EU and 5 world destinations, where would you suggest?

I'm not saying we would actually arrive at all these places, but it'd be nice to get an idea of the scope of what's out there and who might rock up.

Ta innit.

Jem x

Being delivered today.

Total Sequential fanboy. It's all Tony Banks' fault.

Awrite loves?!

First off, sorry for not getting on here sooner, I've been stationed in London these last couple of days doing Gospel songs in German, long story...

Anyways, I just wanted to say a personal and truly heartfelt THANK YOU to everybody who came down, Nellie gave me me much feedback about what happened with the get in and I do sincerely apologise to those who didn't get in in time. It was ambitious with a 7pm door call and a 7.30 stage call, but Sunday was the only day we could get at The Scala. As it turned out, with It Bites appearing as well, my initial idea that hiring a venue 3 times the size of The Peel (having taken on board last year's comments!) would be big enough turned out not to be the case... I am sorry about that.

Obviously, just as bad would be us hiring something too big (Hammy O?!) and us all rattling round it slightly embarrassedly, thus destroying the atmosphere, so I can only hold my hand up and apologise for underestimating the event. I would genuinely welcome suggestions for suitably sized venues going forwards. Us and IB are considering doing some more double headliners next year so do please get involved in the plans, you are THE most important part of these things after all!  

I have much news to bring you very soon. I just have to do some legal stuff first with one piece of news and try and quantify the rest, but rest assured there is much goodness to bring.  

In the meantime, again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for being such wonderful, kind, supportive, loving people. I wouldn't and couldn't do it without you. 8-)

Have a peaceful Xmas and see you bright and early in the New Year. New Frost reports will quickly explain why.  

Jem xxxx

[our]

Hello all!

Right... finally back from the G3 thing. Huge gigs, great fun. Am now proud to count Steve Morse and Dave LaRue as my friends, indeed  I shall be going to the Flying Colours gig in London in Sept to catch up with them so I'll no doubt see some of you there?

Mr Vai was a gentleman. Playing "For The Love Of God" in the grounds of a 14th century Italian castle on a summer's evening just as the sun was setting is a memory I shall take with me to my grave. It was awesome.

Satch was, as last time, both a joy to work with and an inspiration. He also had me in stitches regularly. He was intrigued by Frost, mainly as a result of watching a few of the Frost Reports and that he completely got the humour and then built on it with a variety of glorious (but sadly unrepeatable) ideas for the future of the band, I think, speaks volumes. He's completely aces.

All the members of the G3 bands - Dave W, Eric Valentine, Phil Bynoe, Allen Whitman, Jeff C, Drew, (PLUS the fabulous crew who bust their arses night after night on our behalf) were also fantastic company and very welcoming to the Brit with no track record on the road. It was a very happy tour throughout and that I both miss it and and am glad to be home in equal measure I think is the perfect result.

However, that's in the past now and we've got the Frost*Bites gig to sort out plus finally finally getting cracking on F***. It's our turn now!!    

Jemx

[that]

Hello loves,

Sorry for the never ending apologies about my shoddy attendance record. 2012 is turning out to be the busiest year I've ever ever had as a professional musician.

Obviously you know about Radio 2 now, it's been 4 years in the planning and has been the holy grail dayjob gig for me ever since the charts and I fell out. Blunders played a blunder, sorry, blinder last week and everyone was blown away by the manner of the man as well as his formidable chops. Sadly not mutton chops...

Then there's G3. The good news about that though is that as with all touring and almost entirely unlike my dayjob (26 days straight working without a break and counting, 12 to go!) there is a great deal of hanging about doing nowt therefore I have plucked the fatted MacBook from the Apple tree and filled it with many goodies to enable me to fill all the waiting about time with writing. For Frost. I'm looking forward to that as much as I am to playing decent venues with decent hotels, decent fees, decent catering and not a splitter van in sight.

By the time I alight at Gatport Airwick on Aug 6th, I should have much progress under my belt. I'm extremely excited by this as I have to say the winds of Frost (ahem) have truly gripped me again and I'm absolutely raring to get going good and proper. I expect the writing will carry on into Autumn and Winter with the serious recording starting next Spring. Drums, guitars and hopefully bass will all be recorded at Sphere Studios in Battersea. Franc there got me the most fantastic drum and guitar sound ever this week and I want that tone on my album, no question. Same for the guitars. There'll be none of this virtual carp...I want air moving.    8-)

Anyways, I can't say I'll b e back soon, but I shall try. Happy Jubidoo dear hearts. Enjoy the time off, have a beer for me.

Jx

JM just sent it to me. I've just listened to it.

It's f***cking amazing.        

You will LOVE it. I promise you.

You know I'm not one to swear, but holy j**** **CK*** ***TIN* F***!

You people floor me. I've just had a gander at the 24th on the advent calendar and...well what can I say?

Thank you SO SO SO SO SO SO SO much.            

You people really seriously should start a band! And I really mean that. It's an amazing piece of work. It's like an unreleased track from Selling England By The Pound, so many nice influences there. Lovely chord sequences too, and I don't say that coz I wrote a few of 'em.

What's also nicely relevant is that Google are offering an option for snowflakes to fall over the screen at the moment. Obviously, I had that on to add to the vibe!  :lol:

I'm blown away, flattered, honoured, chuffed and awestruck all in one big globule of thingy. Absolutely brilliant.

Merry Christmas everybody, not just to those involved. I hope you have a fab time filled with good stuff, but and also some peace from whatever's getting atcha right now. To those involved, I'm now going to go to Tunbridge Wells so I can buy a hat that I can take off to you. Genius' every one of you.

The Frosties are the best people in the world.  8-)

xxxxx

BTW, Ron, what can't you play?  :lol:  

Frosties!

You were AWESOME! Thanks so much for coming down and making it the night it was. I couldn't have done it without you.  8-)

I hope you had a good time, we certainly did. I've never known it so hot in there! It was  lovely to chat to everyone afterwards as well. Has it really been a year?

Thanks again from all of us in the band. Have the bestest Christmas and I'll get to work on putting this Frost report together.    

Jem xxxxxxxx

hello again!

dunno if anybody posted these at the time, but here are some YouTube films courtesy of Curtarist of me onstage with the Satch man. Seems like only last week. Shame really as actually, last week feels like about 10 year ago.    

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEf3fB7S2PY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZje2FEpoBk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01e9sKf1TAg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gni2fuPZr2I

Sorry about the sound, I was busy.  

I know that Jeff C ran a click all night to stop things from running away with themselves, so if needs be, just dub the actual tracks onto the footage and pretend it's me!

Hello loves! God I feel like TBE, suddenly popping up out of nowhere.  :lol:  :lol:

Sorry for the radio silence, I've had a bit of a year. Back now though and raring to go.

Thanks SO much for selling The Peel out. I was totally blown away that I'd not been forgotten. So touched by that, thank you.

I promise we'll have a right laugh. Some old old songs will be played and some not often played songs too. AND JM and I shall be supporting ourselves with some songs and banter too.

And then there's the new album.  

Back soon. Happy Wednesday everybody.

J xx

Frostingtons,

I just thought I'd update you with where we're at regarding the new DVD. As ever with this band, it's not been the plainest of sailing so far. Cut a long story short we keep being buggered about with dates. The problem we have is that as we only want 2 days, Rockfield are reluctant to commit to that in case they get a big name block booking in which in commercial terms is perfectly understandable. However, as a result, our initial dates of 9/10 March couldn't be confirmed. My good friend Rob Reed (who's being an absolute star in helping get this whole thing sorted) then suggested we go to a different studio also in Rockfield (How many cool residential recording studios does one town need??!) who had availability on the 14/15th March. So I checked with the band, bearing in mind everybody, especially Blunders, has a mad mad schedule. Miraculously we were all free so I gave Rob the big Yay! for that. Hurrah!

Then we get email last night saying "Unfortunately, another client has just extended their session by a week until 23rd March however I can offer you 3/4th March or 24/25th March as alternatives".

Now at this point, I'm getting a tad exasperated. To be honest I've not even bothered emailing the rest of the guys about this yet as I'm getting a bit tired of continually changing the goal posts. I know that Craig can't do the alternative offered dates so currently we're at an impasse.

I'm going to email round in a minute to check everybody's schedules (again) for April and May and then we'll have to take it from there.

Anyway, I just thought I'd keep you in the loop. This WILL get done. It's just a question of when! Ah, it never rains... :lol:

Jx

First off, minus several million points for the terrible name. How the f*** are we supposed to talk about it and keep a straight face. It's like "My-First-Prog-Metal-Band's-Name".  :lol:  :lol:

Howeverrrrrr, the spec does look (and it pains me to say this  :lol:) pretty impressive. Being as I am an ex-Oasys owner, I can see that 75% of the software is basically an expanded Oasys in a new chassis. The screens are the same and everything, but the 30 GB SSD drive, 2 USB drives AND the addition of what's always been the deal clincher for me which is seamless patch changing, not to mention the 9 different synth engines. It's certainly raised the bar. As long as it's not a million quid obviously.

Price will be the clincher, I can't see you having much change from 3 grand for the 61 key version. Lord knows what the big one'll cost. And it's a shame that the 73 key version is piano action only. That kinda rules it out for my weedy little digits on the shredding front.

I am certainly very keen to hear one in the flesh. And I kinda like the "M1-on-steroids" look to be honest, takes me back to '88.

Well done Korg.

Hello all,

I hate bringing bad news to the Frost*iverse, but this is bad news plain and simple. So I'll get to the point.

As you know, we recorded a DVD at Derby University last month. 162 of you battled through appalling weather conditions to get to the gig. Some of you were already there in the afternoon so God knows what time you must have set out...

Similarly, I met people after the show who would be driving for HOURS afterwards to get home. Some of you said you wouldn't get to bed until way past 3 or 4am after the show. I'm amazed and deeply touched that you love Frost* so much that you'd make THAT much effort to come and see us.  It meant and still means the world to me and also to the rest of the band. I don't think we can ever thank you enough. I really don't.

So it is with bitter, bitter regret and a fair amount of fury that I have to say that we can't release the show you saw filmed that night. A combination of events has conspired to mean that the audio recorded during the show is unusable. In particular, my lead vocal channel and my keyboards. Unfortunately, there was a sound curfew until 6pm, something we were only made aware of about 48 hours prior to the gig via text therefore the time for preparation was much shorter than expected. The sound onstage was terrible initially so we had to spend most of the hour we had sorting that out. We were supposed to record The Secret Song as part of the DVD extras package which is why some of you heard us running through it, however, the problems with the stage sound meant we had to abandon that plan in order to try and rectify the monitor problems. Inevitably we fell way behind and therefore we (well, I) had no time to work with the team on the Logic rig that was taking the DVD audio feed in the recording studio behind the stage. I knew there were problems, but I assumed a member of staff would be there to sort things out. As a result, we had no choice but to fly blind for the show. This, I now know, is never a good idea.

My schedule was set to start mixing yesterday. So I duly loaded up the session to be confronted with a sickening scenario.

My vocal channel is awash with hiss and what sounds like aliasing. The keyboards were recorded so quietly that I've had to apply nearly 150% normalisation, this has made them very hissy. One half of the audience ambience mic feed is missing, Craig's SPD-S channel is distorted and in stereo when it was only ever a mono feed, there are 2 or 3 channels with nothing on them at all, there's one channel of hiss and Nath's bass mic channel is full of crackles. In short, the session is unusable. If you like, I can post some examples of the audio so that you can hear how bad it is.

I double checked with Steve Gurney, Reef's sound man, who did our live sound on the night and he concurs. He said to me in an email –

"For the recording they took a direct split from the stage box giving themselves independent control of all their own channels. At no point did they come and say they had a problem with any of the signals being received in the control room. My main issue at the front of house was a 5k air/noise coming off your vocal channel. This only appeared after sound check when they re-patched looking for a cleaner recording line. For me a notch filter seemed to do the trick in-between songs and during quieter moments.  My bass channels were both fine but i predominantly ran the di as it had a great tone. Terrible clicks would point at a cable and as my line was clean it must have been the line to the recording room. A white noise channel has to be an issue at their end ........ alarm bells would have been ringing for me and you would have seen me on stage looking to fix."

I've also spoken to Russell Cherrington who was the organiser of the event and director of the filming. He's understandably aghast and will be heading back to Derby Uni this week to try and find out more. I shall report back on that when I have more info from him.

What I do want to say is that I don't in any way blame the students who helped out on the day. They were there in a learning capacity and mistakes do happen. That said, I appreciate that this whole thing was supposed to work as an event. Myself, the band, our crew and yourselves have a level of expectation that when we agree to something and make a commitment, the proposers should be able to honour that agreement with the correct level of professionalism. For some reason, that has not been possible on this occasion. That said, I'm sure that the frustration is being just as keenly felt on the part of the staff of Derby University. I'm just so sad that this has been at Frost's (and your) cost. I can assure you that this will NEVER happen again.

And so to what happens next, the video footage is apparently great and barring keyboards, bass, SPD-S and my vocals, the remainder of the audio is intact. Therefore we're working to save Hyperventilate and the "Checkmate" section of Milliontown from the Derby gig. It'll equate to about 15 minutes of footage that will be included as a bonus feature on a new DVD that we're planning by way of a solution so the Derby show won't have been a complete write off.

After the events of Derby, I'm sure you can understand my reticence to repeat such an "in concert" scenario, therefore over the course of a couple of days soon, we plan to set up and record a new and different DVD. Kind of Frost* "in session", it'll feature us in the studio playing the entire Black Live Machine Tour set plus some additional songs and will also include a behind the scenes documentary chronicling the entire event. Similar to a Frost report, but with a full 90-100 minute music set included.

The set will be (although not necessarily in this order...) – The Dividing Line, Falling Down, Pocket Sun, Milliontown, The Forget You Song, Saline, The Other Me, Dear Dead Days, Secret Song, Hyperventilate and Black Light Machine.

We're going to film it at Rockfield Studios in Wales in the spring. Rockfield as some of you may know is a legendary residential recording studio where Queen recorded Bohemian Rhapsody. It's also played host to many prog bands over the years, most recent of which was Magenta who went there to mix Metamorphosis. I feel it has the correct heritage and gravitas, plus it has a kick arse Neve desk that I want to have a play with...

In this way, I feel we can deliver you a visual feast worthy of the band's name and a proper recording of the band at this stage of our career. I know it's not quite what was promised, but those who came to the Derby event will still be credited on the new DVD as was always the plan, plus we'll produce a special limited edition signed CD of the new DVD soundtrack available only to the Derby attendees. We'll also send you a messaged and signed photo from the Rockfield session.

I hope you will appreciate that we really are victims of events beyond our control here and that I'm trying to make amends as best I can. I really am very sorry.

In the meantime, I'll keep you posted with any more news I have about what happened at Derby and thank you very very much indeed for keeping the faith.

With much repect,

Jem  

I got this too, interesting certainly, but I wish she'd documented more of the making of the songs. You get a snippet of Earth when it had drums which is very tantalising, but I can't help thinking there could have been more footage of her writing the album.

Still good though. And nice to see Tim Exile in there.  

I finally got the DVD yesterday. Interesting to hear poor Ray Wilson referred to as "the other guy" and how he couldn't hit any high notes.

All in all though, although I've seen the doc before, the little nuggets available around many of the songs were very entertaining and interesting.

Phil doesn't seem to be a very happy human anymore though. Shame.