New Phideaux album "Number Seven" now out

And wait a minute...you direct General Hospital (and other assorted soap operas)?  

Six degrees, You are right to be sad.  I seem full of ingratitude by my post.  I am not.  I am humbled and overwhelmed by people giving my album 5 stars.  It really does mean a great deal to me.  I guess I let the outside voices get to me where people say I've had all my friends sign up to vote for the album. 

I am grateful for every person who buys the album and takes the time to listen to it.  I guess, like a kid with a new toy, I just want to know what people think about it -- if they like the transitions, if they notice the way certain themes recur, if they notice the bit of lyrics from Doomsday, if they like the instrument sounds we used for this album.

I wonder if people pick up on the geometric keyboard patterns in "Prequiem" that pay homage to the geometric keyboards of "Candybrain".  All these types of questions one can find out from a review or a buzz.  One spends months/years making an album and then you release it to the world and there isn't all that much feedback (unlike a live performance).  When a band is as unknown and low as we are, there isn't a lot of media attention or reviews at the beginning.  It starts to trickle down through word of mouth.

Anyway, Six Degrees, that's where I was coming from, but I should rephrase it so I don't seem an ungrateful git.

Phideaux wrote: Please do write some reviews.  I noticed that two of the reviewers only have ever reviewed 2 albums, each on this years docket.  Additionally, some of the raters vote seemingly every album they've ever heard as 5 stars.  As much as I'd love our new album to be rated 5 stars, I'd rather see what people really think.  Luckily, nobody that I know has rated it yet...

This post maked me a little sad.

I really love music, it's a very important part of my life.
But I never wrote any review. Why?
1. My English is very poor.
2. I don't think, it's necessary to talk about the music. Listening music i have some feelings, impossible and needless to explain with words.
So I don't write reviews and I don't rate albums. Even so, sometime it happens to be very impressed by an album (5 times in 3 years) and I decide to rate it with 5 stars (sign of my gratitude). That's what's happened also with this album.
("some of the raters vote seemingly every album they've ever heard as 5 stars"... hm. I'm not resentful, I understand your reasons.)

I think this is without any doubt (for me), the best album of the last years.
Sincerely congratulations! (And excuse me for my English.)

Looking back, I can hear that. You should let her do more solo spots. She sounds great!

So Phideaux, any live DVDs in the plans? 

Edited by Slartibartfast - July 15 2009 at 15:38

Exists already a "date" for the release of 7 1/2 ?

I recieved my copy of Number Seven from Amazon about a week ago, and I've been listening to it ever since. It's fantastic! I've been working on a creative project of my own comprised of seven short found footage films in the style of 60's public education films, but dealing with really absurd concepts in a deadpan way. The documentary-style narration at the start of "The Search for Terrestrial Life" inspired me to come up with a similar style of narration I'll be using in one of the films. That's a great song by the way, can't get enough of it.

^ well shoot, I won't bother waiting then :)  Looking forward to seeing you next month.

Avestin, it's a long story, and I'm going to write a long winded thing that I will repurpose as a blog on my site as well:

In 2007, Phideaux, the 10 piece band, performed at Festival Crescendo in beautiful France.  We paid for a four camera crew to record the performance on video.  When we got the audio tracks from this production company we saw that 75% of the tracks were corrupt and had drop outs every 3 seconds.  The only track intact were the drums and vocals and guitars (but the acoustic guitar was submixed with the electric guitar which was waaaaay too loud).  So, in order to salvage something and try to create a passable soundtrack for the video (as well as to remember the arrangements for these live performances) Gabe and I had the members come back to the studio to re-record their parts over the intact drum/vocal and guitar tracks (although we replaced the guitar tracks as well ultimately).

ANYWAY....  After one of the sessions we had an extra day of studio time booked as we'd gotten more accomplished than we thought.  So I had Rich the drummer come and record some new material.


I had written the two long songs that were to comprise the album "Infernal" (Infernal and Eternal) which is the third part of the Doomsday Afternoon trilogy.  However, this was not something I wanted to get into right away because it too complicated to do in a day.  But, there was another song written called "Waiting For The Axe To Fall" -- about 12 minutes long.  This was considered an outtake and not something I had a vested interest in, so we could experiment and knock it about a bit.  Therefore, we spent the day putting down and piano/drum track for 75% of that song.  At this time, we had two songs "In the bank".  One was Tempest of Mutiny (8 min) which had been recorded with Rich Mouser the previous winter and the other was Out Of The Angry Planet (9 min) which we'd played live in France but had now been "re-recorded" over the bones of that live performance.  I thought these two songs should be released.  And now that I had another pretty good 12 minute song shaping up, it seemed a good idea to put together an album of odds and sods.  I decided to call the album "Number Seven" a neutral title that I hoped wouldn't seem like it was the third part of the trilogy we had begun in 2006.  I knew I didn't have the psychic energy to undertake that album at this time.

Later, I went to NYC to rehearse the remaining portion of Axe with Rich and ended up writing some extra bits to take the song into a more dynamic direction.  At the same time, we rehearsed some songs that were in the early stages of development (Gift Of The Flame, Have No Fear, Infinite Supply, Search For Terrestrial Life/Fistful).  By this time, I decided not to put Tempest on the album because it was a different producer and different musicians, so we needed needed new stuff to compliment Angry Planet and Waiting for The Axe.  Rich and I recorded, as we normally did, the basic tracks for the rest of these songs.

Now, I also had an outtake from Doomsday Afternoon called Darkness At Noon which was orphaned from Infernal.  So, Number Seven was going to be comprised of:  Waitin For The Axe, Darkness At Noon, Have No Fear (which is like Prequiem but heavier and with drums), Gift Of The Flame, Search For Terrestrial Life/Fistful, Out Of The Angry Planet and Infinite Supply.  Have No Fear was going to kick in right after Darkness, like Prequiem now does.  But with the drums and the tempo change, it sounded too strange.  It also sounded like an "end of album" song and that slot was to be Infinite Supply.   So, then Gabe and I recorded a more mellow and slow version with no lyrics which came to be known as Prequiem.

FLASH FORWARD:  Overdubs.  As the various members came and made their contributions to the album, I realized that there were many wonderful things that people brought to the songs and they were being pulled in a thousand cool directions.   There was a lot of opportunity for members to own a little piece of the album and make things their own.  As the tracks were shaping up, I felt there was something missing.  I also felt that Out Of The Angry Planet, because of its live/unlive recording history, wasn't up to the snuff of the rest of the album.  So, now I had another 9 minute hole in the fabric.  I called folks back to L.A. to do our first ever live recording with most everyone in the same studio at the same time.  For this purpose I composed, with some help from keyboard player B (Johnny Unicorn), the song Love Theme From Number Seven (including Storia Senti).  Everbody heard the demo, but we all rehearsed and recorded the song in the same weekend.

Now, the album was complete and there were only final overdubs and vocals and icing to put on the cake.  It was during a guitar session that I improvised the Dormouse instrumental theme.  We recorded it and then as the day wore on I'd keep playing this bit in between takes.  I wrote humourous words about Dormice and we recorded the Interview with a Dormouse track live.  Overnight I wrote the Dormouse End track and we recorded it the next day. 

While pulling together the lyrics, I noticed a flow to the theme of the music and realized there was a story happening, a hero's journey as it were.  Axe was about someone being trapped in a cult and their loved one leaving them behind (in order to save themselves).  Darkness saw a person being carried away on a boxcar to their death but claiming their soul/mind as their own.  Gift dealt with people who give up vs. people who fight for their lives.    Search is about waking up from insecurity/addiction/ineffective living and claiming the abundance that is available to all people if they want it.  Infinite is an extrapolation of that, perhaps from the perspective of a person who has come through it and realizes that the universe is so immensely wide they are but a speck -- but a speck that is a part of this amazing whole.

So, I saw a story arc and then seeded through the various elements I needed to pull them all together into one strand.  I always knew the basic structure and we were conscious about how one song would end and deliver us into the next, but we did record it all in bits and pieces...  Once the Dormouse pieces were written though, I had decided to organize the album around those pieces (which are a tongue in cheek reference to "Peace - A Theme" from The Wake Of Poseidon by King Krimsun).

I wonder if that answers your question, Avestin....

Hi Phideaux,

As I was listening to the album while driving yesterday, I was thinking about how you recorded the album. Did you it act by act? How did it go? if you don't mind me asking.