Winter People are going to be packing our bags for a lot of touring in the coming months, with a national ticket confirmed for November. But in the meantime, we’re also crossing the state borders for a show down in Melbourne next month, for which I’ve designed the artwork.

Well its taken a year or two, but I’ve finally found time to completely redesign Riversend. This will be the tenth incarnation of the site (if you can believe it), and I believe the ninth year of its existence. Looking back over all the blog posts from previous years, the thing that strikes me is not how I’ve changed over the course of this site’s existence, but how strangely similar my essential state of mind is (to wit: frenzied ecstatic, explosively tangential, creative-work obsessed mania).

Riversend version’s 8 and 9 were running on the CMS ModX, but this time I’ve gone for the currently ubiquitous blogging platform WordPress. More so that I could develop professional skills (i.e. wordpress is a nice easy CMS for web design clients), than for its functionality. Though I have found the system to be easily extendible and the core code well documented, with a thoughtful and clear architecture.

I’ve just finished designing and developing a new Winter People website.

Winter People are busy recording an album at the moment out of BJB Studios with Tim Whitten (who has recorded with the likes of my favourite Australian band of all time Augie March, as well as mainstay Aussie’s like Powder Finger, The Panics etc).

Because of the tightness of the budget, we’re recording everything in about half the time I had originally suggested would be “safe” (i.e. drums in 3 days instead of 6). So the days of have been long, real long and real late. Fifteen – seventeen hours generally, and in consecutive blocks of 7 days. The first three days of drums were the most intense. I felt like a nineteenth century coal-miner collapsing into bed every night!

Also, I find it very difficult to ‘hear’ the qualities of recorded sounds in a studio environment. Whether its the foreign speakers, or listening environment, or simply not being in my own private world I can’t seem to discern the relative sonics of one sound against another, the way I can when I record through my own setup.

So to continue the categories of last years post (I can’t believe posts have been reduced to one a year! How terrible of me):

1] In Musical News: Winter People went on our first national tour around Australia. It was a pretty fantastic experience. Probably the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, period. The headliner sold out almost every show we played, so even though we were opening, we got to play to large and enthusiastic crowds – who were surprisingly receptive given the relative stylistic gulf between the acts. I got to see a lot of Australian cities I’d never seen before, I got to see the inside of many boring airports, and stare at the back of our hire van for hours on end. Touring is a little like I imagine heroin must be: on tour, all I want is a rest from touring, but back home, all I want is to get back on tour!

In further musical news: we start recording our debut studio album in five days. These past three weeks, I’ve been running myself ragged preparing our demo tracks, since the time we have in the studio is relatively limited considering the somewhat complex arrangements. The biggest news on this front is that we’ve been talking to Peter Katis, mixer/producer whose worked on all The National records, Sigur Ros, Interpol etc. about mixing the record. Now, we haven’t yet been able to have him commit / sign-on-the-dotted-line, because he’s still working out his schedule (and we don’t have a hell of alot of money to offer), BUT the fact that he has expressed his interest in our music is quite surreal. If I’d been told a year ago that we would be talking to him about it, I would have been highly sceptical of that eventuality. The current plan, is to finish all tracking in February and then I’ll go over to the States in late March to mix the record with Peter K.

Sideline Musical News: I am really hoping to get another Thomas North recorded this year as well. I’ve got songs that have been sitting around for weeks, months, or years; cluttering up my head, so I’m keen to get them on record and forget about them awhile. My engineering-mixing know-how has grown in leaps and bounds since The Life And Times, and I’m keen to apply it to the more idiosyncratic side of my song produce.

2] In Novel Writing: prose writing actually goes quite well. Time and other creative commitments are the central enemies of writing. During the intensive rehearsal period before tour and tour time itself, I decided it would be prudent for my mental health to take a break from writing every morning. Thus, the deadlines I have previously set myself have invariably swelled and fallen back, but after tour, I did finish the second major section and have since been re-editing and re-writing these passages. The manuscript will be of quite an unholy length for a first timer (somewhere in the 200, 000 – 250, 000 words range I think) – but I’m confident that with enough hard and precise revision it will be a thematically-stylistically cohesive, if epic, work. My current plan of attack is to wait until the tracking for the Winter People album is complete, and then settle down to editing and rewriting Part Two until I’m satisfied with the flow and structure, and with the safety of an integrated and flowing Part One and Two behind me, I shall begin my frontal assault on Part Three!

3] University: finished, degree complete, confirming my first year’s impression: “What a waste of time”. Its not that I didn’t enjoy the environment, I just think I am not cut-out for institutional learning, and more importantly for me, I generally found university to be an unwanted and disruptive distraction from creative work. I am only glad I attended University for the sake of a few brilliant, engaging and mind-expanding philosophy courses.

4] Riversend: Riversend is sore need of a redesign. Version nine it’ll be, if you can believe it. My visual web skills, while they’ve never my strong suit, have certainly improved these past years (and its probably been two or three years since Riversend received a makeover). The new site, whenever I get around to designing it, will be less content heavy I think. A quality over quantity approach. Chucking my juvenile creations into the offline archives and presenting only the best of the best.