Wild Light Decade #08: Taipei (Studio Demo) (Patreon)

Oh, Taipei...

Back in 2011, we were lucky enough to be able to go to Taiwan to play some shows. Due to a quirk of touring travel logistics and festival scheduling that would have normally been insurmountable, the only way for us to make the shows work was to account for three off-days between our Taiwan shows. The cost of these days - crew wages and hotel rooms - would have be entirely impossible for us to cover. But rather than have to cancel the whole trip, our wonderful crew at the time decided that, coincidentally, they all wanted to take an unpaid 3 day holiday in Taipei in the middle of the tour. And our equally wonderful promoters over there were able to squeeze a few more nights at a hotel into the budget at their end.

And so, thanks to the kindness of the extended 65 family and people who are passionate about getting weird noisy music to more people, we somehow managed to pull it off. (65 really couldn’t have held on for so long without this kind of wider behind the scenes support network).

Anyway. It was during this downtime that the song Taipei, in a hotel room in Taipei, came to life as some polymetrical piano loops. They are the ones that start in the background at around 01:30 in the version you can hear here. If you listen, you should be able to pick out a repeating refrain of 6 notes even though the song itself is in 5… A 6 and a 5… WOAH. Pretty high concept, huh. Not as high concept as the time we hid some morse code in the rhythm section of a song off The Destruction of Small Ideas… but the less said about that the better.

AND SO.

We carried those piano loops around for the next two years, gradually building the rest of the song around them. Tony Doogan, the guy who mixed the final record, really pushed his particular boat out for the mix of this on the album. At its climax it sounds like a volcano erupting, but instead of erupting lava, it is erupting more volcanoes which are themselves erupting rocket ships. Made of lava. And so it is fair to say that, by design, some of the subtlety is lost.

In contrast, this studio demo version was recorded at 2fly Studios, Sheffield, probably at some point in 2012. It will have been helmed by Dave Sanderson, who has been mentioned here plenty of times by now. He has worked with us ever since One Time For All Time, usually as co-producer, but also all-round engineer, demo-recorder, pep-talker, etc. He owns a pair of golden trainers that he only puts on for the really serious mixes.

This mix of Taipei will have been deliberately utilitarian, so we could figure out how everything worked together. It is hopefully interesting in how it reveals the various intertwining melodies, and how they all play off one another during the climax of the song.

One big difference between this studio demo and the final song is that the final song has an extra guitar part during its climax that starts low with the bass but keeps on ascending. It would start at 03:22 on this demo, if it existed (it starts at 03:48 in the album version, not that you’ll be able to pick it out). The climb is like a slow shadow of the piano melody, a smudged mascara to the piano’s glitter, playing catch up, echoing back a softer version of the melodies as it spirals up into noise.

It’s ended up being a curiously important guitar part. It isn’t designed to be heard - when the ending tips over to the big melody all ears are on the interplay of Joe’s soaring guitar notes and the piano motif. But this second guitar part somehow acts like a rising scaffolding, pushing everything else upwards whilst the bass and drums take care of the low end. And so because of the work that guitar part does, playing this live has always been a little complicated. Because Paul is playing the piano, so cannot also play this second guitar part.

Fortunately, for the forthcoming shows in September, we have unofficial fifth member of the band Frank joining us, with his dexterous fingers and fancy guitar pedals. So we fully anticipate that Taipei is gonna go off.

Here’s a photo from one of the days at Chapel Studio where Joe, Paul and Dave all got the plaid shirt memo:

That’s your lot.

See you next week, friends!

65.x