News & Updates

Jan 1st, 2007

We've signed up for a service that lets us sell MP3s off our MySpace page. I put up the new album and purchased a track myself to test it out. It's a bit of a hassle to sign up, but once you're registered with Snocap, you're home free. The MP3 I bought was high-quality and there's no DRM or anything to mess with.

PLEASE NOTE that the previews you hear in the Snocap store are lo-fi, but the tracks you purchase are CD-quality. If you want to hear a more accurate representation of what you'll be getting from the Snocap store, check out the CD-quality samples in our downloads section.

December 31st, 2006

Thanks to everyone that wrote in the last couple days. We really appreciate the support and I'll try to reply when the holidays are over.

December 30th, 2006

The finished version of Monument and 30-second samples of the other six tracks were uploaded to the Downloads section, along with Wallpapers and a new banner.

December 27th, 2006

That distant, piercing cry of joyous rapture and celebration you heard a few hours ago was the sound of me, myself and I celebrating the agonizing completion of The Living Fields. Yes, after two long years of frustration, procrastination, computer meltdowns, ProTools misery, recording, re-recording, sore fingers, cussing, swearing, slamming, jamming and remixing to near-deafness, the beast is finally slain. Seven songs spanning 47 minutes and 24 seconds of time and moving from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. At this point, I no longer know how to classify our music, but it's nothing if not epic. The new material is different from the demo, but it's still us. Hopefully you'll like it. We certainly do.

Now that the hard work is done, we have to find out if anyone wants to release it. Hopefully, someone will step to the plate and do it justice, but if not, we'll put it out ourselves. I imagine it'll take a few months to see actual CDs in our hands, but it'll be worth the wait.

For those of you that have been putting up with this album the last two years – everyone from Jon and Chad to my wife and friends – thank you. It's appreciated more than you know. The next one will be easier!

June 19th, 2006

The album is rolling to completion! I've finished re-recording all guitars and bass, so all that's left to do is final mixes & mastering. I've set July 1st as my deadline and it looks like we might make it. Very exciting!

April 14th, 2006

I feel almost dirty doing it, but The Living Fields now has a MySpace page. I've put up the new song, Monument, along with the other three tracks from The Miseries Never Cease, so folks can hear those. Remember that MySpace severely downgrades the audio quality, so what you hear is definitely not what you get if you buy the demo! Finally, if you'd like to help us spread the word a bit, be our friend.

February 13th, 2005

Egads! We now have a damn-near-final mix for Monument which you can grab in the Downloads section.

Note that this is an unmastered track, so it's a little quiet, but crank the volume up and it crushes quite nicely. Headphones will bring out subtle details like piano, timpani and choirs. This is one of the simplest songs on the album (only Feast for the Earth is simpler) but it's still got a great feel and the sound is a lot better than it should be considering the equipment we're working with. Enjoy the song and let us know what you think!

February 12th, 2005

And of course, the plans laid out in the November 8th post completely fell apart. Nobody's fault, just life. Part of the delay is the realization that things sound much more powerful if all the bass and rhythm guitars are re-recorded with Chad's live drums as a guide. That requires relearning material written almost two years ago, rehearsing the different tracks, hours of tracking, etc. The good news is that the end result is well worth the effort as the songs sound much heavier. Things are progressing again and it feels great. I'm mixing a new version of Monument this weekend and hope to have something to share very soon.

On a completely unrelated note, while talking to Chad and marveling over the speed of the double bass patterns he's written for The Overview Effect, he mentioned that he took 2nd place in the 2004 Summer NAMM World's Fastest Feet competition. Pretty damn cool!

November 8th, 2005

Not much happening lately, as Chad and I battle life in general. We talked the other day and figure that we'll have the album wrapped up no later than the end of the year and should have an actual CD out some time in February. About six months later than I would have liked, but I don't think any of us realized how difficult this would be when we got things underway. We've learned a lot though, and the next one should go much smoother.

In the meantime, I'm building a 3rd batch of demos, as we sold out of the last set. It's a lot of work to build these things, but they look great when they're finished, so it's all worthwhile. I can't believe my printer hasn't gone belly up on me, though...

On a totally unrelated note, I ran across a great Martin Luther King quote that might end up in the album jacket:

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. You may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. You may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate, nor establish love. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

November 7th, 2005

Got a short and sweet review of the demo from Daniel over at Tortured Soul Asylum, today. You can read what he had to say at http://www.geocities.com/torturedsoulzine (we're on page 11 of the reviews section). Thanks, Daniel!

October 9th, 2005

Found a very nice review for the demo at HMXtreme.com today. This is the site I did an interview with a couple weeks back, but the review was still a pleasant surprise. Thanks, guys!

October 8th, 2005

I spent most of the afternoon working on Feast for the Earth and it's shaping up. It's a much, much simpler song than What is Left Behind, so the mix is just exponentially easier to deal with. After figuring out all the settings in What is Left Behind, Chad's drums took all of five minutes to get up and running, and they sound great; lots of doomy double bass in this one.

The only thing that's really taking a significant amount of time is sorting through seven tracks of vocals from Jon. He originally recorded four passes, then went back and did three more. I've taken those tracks and moved the different lines into new tracks based on the typed of singing he's doing: clean, rasp, death or scream. For the verses, He's singing a 4-part harmony with a couple notes doubled, which amounts to six tracks, total. All together, I've got 16 tracks of vocals (6 clean, 4 rasp, 2 death and 4 scream). Maybe I wasn't supposed to use all seven tracks he sent me, but it sounds pretty sweet all together, almost like a poor man's Blind Guardian or something.

In addition to the drums and vocals, I'm also touching up some guitars, tweaking the string arrangements and re-recording the bass. The original bassline was sloppy and distorted and doesn't sound very good to me anymore, so I'm reworking it and using the new tone I stumbled onto the other day. Also trying to add a couple lines that take advantage of the fact that I'm playing a fretless (ie: sliding around in the upper register); should sound pretty cool if I can nail the notes. All I can say is that after playing a fretless bass for over a year, I have nothing but respect for violinists.

Last, it's a bit strange to be working on this song with lyrics about the violent power of nature on the same day an earthquake killed over 30,000 [updated] people halfway across the world. For all of our advantages, we're still a very frail animal in the grand scheme of things.

October 7th, 2005

I've taken a few more cracks at the "What is Left Behind" mix and it's starting to gel. I gave up trying to compress the master bus (that's what the mastering engineer will do when we get it mastered), so the mixes are really quiet compared to a mastered mix, but everything seems to feel right and have its own space. A few more days of tweaking and all the settings will be figured out and I can just bang through the other songs.

Chad's CD o' drums for "Feast for the Earth" arrived last week. I haven't had a chance to put the whole song together just yet, but I loaded up his stuff and it sounds great.

Jon's DVD o' vocals arrived yesterday and will be dug into over the weekend. On average, I've got 6 tracks of vocals for each song, so if I can't make something good out of all that, there's no one to blame but me.

While quickly recording a new riff so I don't forget it, I stumbled onto a new bass sound that might end up being the bass sound for TLF. It's a bit wonky, so I'll have to fiddle with the EQ a bit, but it sounded really good on this first try. Heavy bottom, but with enough high mids to hear some string detail (pick, finger scrapes, etc.). Hopefully it's a winner...

September 28th, 2005

Chad's drum tracks for "What is Left Behind" arrived in the mail last Friday and I've been mixing ever since. It's the first time I've had real, live drums to play with, so there was bit of a learning curve to deal with, but thankfully the tracks were recorded very well, which made my job a lot easier. It's spooky how good they sound for a simple home recording. The kick drum is giving me fits (I can't get it to sit right in the mix), but every other drum sounds surprisingly good. They don't sound like the crystal clear, heavily processed & edited drums you hear on most metal records these days, but rather like a real, live kit sitting smack in front of you, which is exactly what I wanted.

Once I had Chad's drums shaping up, I brought Jon's vocals in and did a quick mix with those. They need a lot of attention because they're so densely layered (he typically has 3-4 tracks of vocals going on at any given moment), but there's no sense in doing that until I get his final tracks, which should be coming soon.

With Jon's vocals in there, I re-recorded the bass and rhythm guitars and the mix has a lot more punch, now. I'm going to do the bass one last time because I really overplayed the verses, but that shouldn't be too tough. With any luck, we'll have something close to a final mix for this song in next week or two.

In the meantime, drums for Feast for the Earth are in the mail and should be here any day.

September 22nd, 2005

We're launching the new version of the website today. It not only looks a lot nicer, but it should be faster and search-engine-friendly, as well. Please don't hesitate to Email us if something's not working for you...

September 21st, 2005

Okay, so what's been going on the last 9 months? Good lord, I can't believe I let the site lag for so long. Big thanks to Max for Emailing me a swift kick in the ass and getting me back to work. There's no excuse for letting things get this far behind, so I won't even offer one. But, we have been busy (the new album is getting done) and I'm going to back-log some of the more important events below.

September 20th, 2005

After working on From Miseries to Blood-Drenched Fields - and even more difficult song than What is Left Behind - for a while, Chad moved on to Feast for the Earth and banged it out in an afternoon. Ahhh, progress! 'tis a very good thing.

September 19th, 2005

I've found a string quartet. A complete fluke, but I actually found a friggin' string quartet that would play the arrangements for the new album. The only hitch is that it'll cost us about $600-1000 for the musicians and an evening at a studio. If I can swing it, I will, but it might have to wait for the next album.

September 10th, 2005

An interview I did with HMXtreme.com has been posted. Their site is brand new, so it might be down from time to time, but they're worth checking out.

September 4th, 2005

Jon Emailed to say that he's re-sung the entire album and will be sending files in a couple weeks.

August 30, 2005

The first song Chad tackled was What is Left Behind, a ten-minute epic sprawler with tricky time signatures. I've heard rough MP3 mixes and his playing is quite good, and he added a little cymbal riff that makes one part of the song much better. He also did the final recording in one take with no overdubs, punch-ins, etc. We're still going back and forth with files, but things are looking very good so far.

August 23rd, 2005

Sent Chad the latest mixes for all seven songs. He now has rough vocal mixes, instrumental mixes w/ drums (my programmed drums, just for reference), instrumental-w/o-drums mixes and intrumental-w/o-drums-w/-click mixes. That should keep him busy...

August 13, 2005

Jon's given me rough vocal mixes for all of the new songs and they kill. He's definitely gone above and beyond the call of duty this time. His typical stuff is as good as every, but he's learned to sing clean and these new songs are 10 times more powerful for it. Not clean in the "let's be melodic so we can get played on the radio" style, but just really good ethereal, emotional, multi-layered clean vocals. Not sure how else to describe it, but it's effective. He's also unleashed his King "Ripper" Halford scream and it's a killer. Some will hate it, but that's fine by me.

August, 2005

Chad's home studio is finally up and running and he's started working on drum tracks for the new album. He has three of the new songs and I'll be sending him the rest as soon as I can.

July, 2005

We've been planning to call this album By Endurance We Conquer, in refrence to Ernest Shackleton. Unfortunately, I made an off-hand comment to Jon that we should do a concept album about Shackleton's doomed Antartic expedition. It was just a joke, but it stuck in my head and the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a good idea. I've decided that I want to save the "By Endurance We Conquer" phrase for a future release.

Unfortunately, that leaves our current efforts title-less. We've gone over lots of ideas for a new title, but still haven't found the "one" just yet. We have one phrase that we all kind of like, but I don't want to put it out there until we're 100% certain. Worst-case scenario, it'll be self-titled...

July, 2005

Since I'm freezing the song-writing for the album, I won't have a chance to finish the track called The People's Sores. So, we're going to switch titles and call the new album By Endurance We Conquer, which I got from reading about Ernest Shackleton's ordeal in the Antartic (if you have no idea who I'm talking about, do a quick search and read a bit about him; it's an amazing story).

June, 2005

I've quit writing new material for the album. I've got seven songs 100% written and 90% played, and I've turned them over to Jon to start writing lyrics and working on vocals. I wanted to have more songs, but we're already pushing an hour and we all agree that any more is just going to be overkill. Save it for album #2.

So, for this album, we're going to have these seven songs (in alphabetical order):

Burial at Sky
Feast for the Earth
From Miseries to Blood-Drenched Fields
The Overview Effect
The Soil Giveth
What is Left Behind

Three of those are pushing ten minutes and there's some pretty bizarre stuff going on in the rest. It's nothing if not ambitious and I can't wait to see what Jon and Chad do with it.

February, 2005

We are officially a band! After a few weeks of going back and forth between the three of us and our attorney, we finally have a band agreement which lays out how any money made will be divided up between us, how decisions are made, what happens if one of us quits, who owns the name, etc., etc. Cost us about $400 in legal fees, and at times felt like a huge waste of energy because the likelihood of us ever seeing a dime out of this is slim to none, but we made it and we're comfortable with it. If nothing else, we're prepared for the best.

January 23rd, 2005

The first 50 copies of The Miseries Never Cease sold out, so we just built 50 more. Still hand made, but they're in color this time and look and feel great. Took forever to find the right paper for the printer, but after a few experiments, it all worked out. We're keeping the price the same, so if you haven't bought a demo yet, now's the time.

January 17th, 2005

We've enlisted the legal assistance of Heraty Hall, to help us work out a band agreement and go over a few things that recently fell in our laps.

August 27th, 2004

Work has begun in earnest on our full-length debut. Tentatively titled Those Caught Between. It's shaping up to be an even more diverse album than the demo, but still rooted in melancholy doom. The sound is more natural and organic, and with the additiona of Chad's drums and a new bass rig, it should be ground-shakingly heavy, to boot. With luck, we'll find a label to release it, but however it shakes out, the songs will definitely see the light of day.

Some working song titles include:

Those Caught Between
Apathy : Murdered in Your Sleep
Burial at Sky
The Soil Giveth...
Thickening the Fogs of War
The People's Sores
...and the Soil Taketh Away

We're shooting for an early 2005 release. Hopefully, we'll be able to post some some work-in-progress as the songs develop and make them available to people on our mailing list (hint-hint...joing the mailing list).

August 26th, 2004

Initial feedback to The Miseries Never Cease has been amazing. People really seem to like the material, and we're looking forward to seeing some reviews filter in over the next few weeks. We'll post whatever we get, good bad & ugly.

August 17th, 2004

Finally! The Miseries Never Cease is 100% finished and about to be released into the wild! For whatever reason, I just couldn't bring myself to touch this stuff for a few weeks, but after some time away, that weird mental block is finally gone and the machine is in motion once again.

I'll be shipping out promos next week for review. If you or anyone know would like to review it, just get in touch.

You can download CD-quality MP3s of all four tracks in the Downloads section. Please feel free to share them with anyone you know that might enjoy what we're doing!

July 17th, 2004

CD-quality MP3s for the final mixes of both A Leveling Spirit and Empires Fall are now available in the Downloads section. The remaining songs will be posted after some last minute tweaks to the mix.

In related news, I've been busy finalizing the CD layout and promo materials and will begin shipping copies out for review early next week.

July 11divth, 2004

Today saw the final mixing session for The Miseries Never Cease and I couldn't be happier.

High-quality MP3s will be on the site in a few days, and then work begins on getting the damned thing out for review. Hopefully people will like it. We certainly do!

June 8th, 2004

Jon's vocals arrived a couple days ago and they sound great. All that's left to do is pull the vocal tracks into the mix, polish up the guitars a bit, and do one last mix and master. The demo should be out in the wild by the end of June...

April 22nd, 2004

Just got word that Jon has booked time for his vocals at Bona Fide Studios for May 29th. Monsterworks has been consuming his mind, body and soul for the past few months, but that just means that his pipes will be in prime death-roar mode when he get to The Living Fields' material. Once I have his vocal tracks in hand, I can smooth out the final wrinkles in the guitar tracks and call it a wrap by mid-June. Ah, logistics...

April 17th, 2004

The Living Fields is now the proud owner of a beautiful fretless bass. It probably won't show up on The Miseries Never Cease, but I've got plans for it on the next one...

April 2nd, 2004

It's finally official! Chad Walls (Pustulated, ex-Brodequin, www.cptkilldrums.com) will be laying down drums for the follow up to The Miseries Never Cease (tentatively titled, The People's Sores) at his home studio when as he returns from tour in late July. If you've never heard Chad's work, suffice it to say that he's a terror behind the kit. The Living Fields will be a far cry from what he did with Brodequin and Pustulated, but hopefully the change of pace will be fun for him. To say that I'm excited about this would be an understatement.

December 30th, 2003

Ran all four songs through Spark again and got much better results. The fuzz is gone, and though they're still not quite as loud as a pro recording, it sounds pretty good.

December 28th, 2003

Dug around and found some more appropriate samples for Dim Prospects. No new MP3s just yet, but they'll be posted soon.

December 27th, 2003

Shipped off CDs to both Lee and Jon today. Not much will happen here until I get material back from them, but with luck, they'll have stuff before February.

Played a bit with Spark and found out how to get rid of the fuzz, but haven't ripped any new MP3s yet. That application still baffles me. Going to have to read the manual, I guess...

December 26th, 2003

Monster cables arrived! Haven't tried them out yet, but they sure look nice.

Spent several more hours on Empires Fall. The verses have been lengthened, giving the song a much better balance of fast and slow parts. The extra measures of verse gave me a chance to play with some different beats and it now builds to a nice climax before dropping out for the chorus. Aside from that, a couple of drum fills were improved, some string parts were edited, and the out was changed so the strings bow out one at a time, ending with a lone cello, which fades into Dim Prospects quite nicely.

After that was done, I ran both Empires Fall and Dim Prospects through Spark and burned CDs for Lee and Jon. It was exciting to hear all four songs blasting out of the stereo and crossfading into one another, but only then did I realize that the "mastering" I did in Spark left all the tracks with a subtle bit of fuzz on them. I thought they were clipping, but apparently, the preset I had used included distortion for some reason, so I'll have to go back in and figure out how to get rid of it. Shouldn't be too hard, but that was tough to hear after the disks had been burnt. Ugh...

New MP3s of both Empires Fall and Dim Prospects are in the Downloads section, complete with fuzz.

December 25th, 2003

More work on Empires Fall, spit-polishing the mix and making sure all the guitar parts are solid. It's really bothering me how short the verses are on this mix, so I'm going to try extending them tomorrow. It'll need two more lines of vocals, but I think I can cobble together what Jon put down last time just to get the point across.

Also spent some time working on Dim Prospects. I haven't worked on getting different samples in there (some of the ones I used are too inflammatory when heard out of context of the lectures they were pulled from), but I added a rather sinister sounding drone and found a way to get the cheap choir sample that ships with Reason to sound like a fairly convincing children's choir. It's subtle, but effective.

December 23rd, 2003

In light of the buzzing-guitar debacle last week, I ordered $130 worth of Monster cables today. Two 12' and a 21'. Should be here on Friday...

December 18th, 2003

I ended up disappointed with the playing on the December 3rd session for Empires Fall, so I re-recorded everything on the 16th, only to realize on the 17th that my guitar cable was buzzing like mad and all the tracks were ruined.

So, I took another shot at it today, and this time, some usable material was recorded. There are some new ideas, too, like unmuted picking on the tails of the verse riff, a new way of playing through the chord progression on the bridge (a variation on the tapping that the song used to open with), and a new melody guitar that snakes through the chorus, a'la My Dying Bride/Anathema. The mix isn't quite right yet, so the version posted in Downloads today will be replaced by a better mix in a few days when my ears are working again.

After the tracks for Empires Falls were done, I quickly recorded some riffs for a new song that a handful of parts have been worked out for, and in spite of being a mess of dissonant strings and screwed up guitar parts, it sounds promising.

Barring a miracle, it probably won't make it on to The Miseries Never Cease, but will likely be the first song written for the second demo. It'll be long one, too - at least 8 minutes and possibly more, depending on how long it takes to work through the various themes.

Got an Email from Jon yesterday and he's threatening to have lyrics soon. Can't wait to see what he's come up with...

December 9th, 2003

Talked with Lee (my old jamming buddy from back home) about replacing my solos on Empires Fall. Once I have the guitars re-recorded and a decent mix, I'll bounce it out of ProTools as a .wav, burn it to CD and mail him the track. He'll import it into Cakewalk, record his parts, burn the files to CD and mail them back to me, so I can work them into the mix here. Should be fun...

December 5th, 2003

After a few days away from it, I can hear all the mistakes on the new Empires Fall stuff. It'll have to be re-recorded. Bummer...

December 3rd, 2003

Did some more work on Empires Fall today. The new strings in the chorus were conflicting with Jon's clean vocals and had to be removed, but since I like the arrangement quite a bit, they've been tagged on to the outro, where they sound quite nice. Also edited and extended the first bridge, so it now breaks down into drums/bass/vocals/strings for an interesting build back up into the noisy stuff. After that, I put down some truly horrendous guitar solos over the last verse as placeholders for some more competent lead playing after I brush on my that stuff.

December 2nd, 2003

Worked most of the afternoon on Empires Fall and finally got a usable bass track. The sound is huge, and it's certainly one of those things you feel, so it's all good. The intro has settled into a more gentle swell that builds up naturally into the first violin solo. Also got some more use out of the hand-bells and the whole thing has a subtle 'ethnic' vibe to it now.

Once the intro was down, and all the bass was re-recorded, I spent some time revamping the strings of the bridge and added a new string arrangement over the chorus. There's a few bum notes to dig out of the new stuff, but it helps pull the song in line with the others.

December 1st, 2003

Spent half an hour working on the bass for the intro of Empires Fall and got nothing usable. It's sort of in this amorphous liquid state where everything sounds wrong, but only because it keeps shifting shapes. I'm going to give it a day to solidify in my head and try again.

November 29th, 2003

Added two wallpapers in three resolutions to the downloads page. Sent a lengthy Email to Jon about lyrical direction for the two remaining songs. He wants to try some Aaron-esque clean vocals, which should sound quite good over some of the riffs.

November 28th, 2003

Got the bass rig hooked up again and did a couple rough takes for Empires Fall. Nothing good enough to keep, but the sound is infinitely better. Very punchy with a nice growl to it, so hopefully I'll get those parts nailed down for good tomorrow morning.

While I was in the session, I messed around with the quiet sections before each chorus. The plonky bassline that's currently heard really bothers me now, so I tried piano and choral variations of the progression, both of which were wretched disasters, as everything just took away from the violence of Jon's vocals. I ended up just playing the root notes on the bass, and once again, simplicity saved the day.

After that, I picked up a new piece based on an old My Dying Bride/Cathedral-sounding riff and tried to work out melodies for the two violins. It's a five bar progression, and so far three bars sound killer, with some nice folky harmonies starting to happen that really change the character of the riff. The last two bars are giving me fits, though, as nothing seem to make them happy. Time will tell, I suppose...

The site's been up for less than 48 hours, and 20 mp3s have been downloaded already.

November 27th, 2003

Added two wallpapers in three resolutions to the downloads page.Sent a lengthy Email to Jon about lyrical direction for the two remaining songs. He wants to try some Aaron-esque clean vocals, which should sound quite good over some of the riffs.

November 26th, 2003

Today, the official site of The Living Fields was launched. Some content is still in the works, but there's enough here to warrant looking around. Grab the latest MP3s from the Downloads section and let us know what you think.