Winhara

You can barely walk through it, but we're getting things done. (click to enlarge)

I will be the first to admit it.  I like it when things are neat, organized, logical.  But there is a sense of finality to organization.  You clean up.  You say “There, I’m done”.  And then you go watch TV.  Progress, I have learned, is varying levels of chaos.  The same can be said for Creativity.  Now maybe this is not universally applicable.  I am quite certain that my university lab instructors would disagree.  But I can tell you that our ‘band room’ has been in a state of barely navigable flux for the last month and we have written more songs, come up with more creative and ambitions ideas and learned and programmed more MIDI than we have in ages.  If you are trying to make the song lyrics look pretty instead of just getting them down, you’re missing the point.

August has been, and will continue to be a crazy crazy month.  We are not playing any shows until September, but are busier than ever working on the set, live show, writing and all sorts of thing I don’t want to tell you about.  Just come to a show in September.  I promise it will be worth it.

H.

With Earth Hour coming up on Saturday, everyone is trying to ‘unplug’. As you may have noticed, a Winhara show is usually on the other end of the spectrum and is quite ‘plugged in’.

So how do we ‘unplug’? Enter the Battery powered set.

Okay so it’s not totally unplugged – we play using a toy keyboard and drum pad playing through a toy amp, all running on batteries – in addition to acoustic guitar and glockenspiel. But we’re getting closer. This summer we hope to perform running the electronic instruments on solar or human power (but more on that later).

So first there was our cover of Depeche Mode’s ‘Precious’ (check it our on youtube if you haven’t already seen it) and now below you can see us performing our song ‘Science’ on CFRB 1010AM’s show ‘Rock Talk’.

Rock Talk airs from 6-7pm on Sundays and is hosted by Blair Packham and Bob Reid. They had us on on March 8th, leading up the Mod Club show during CMW. You can listen to the full interview below as well as see video of “Science”.

Doing the show was very cool; Bob and Blair were great – made our job easy. Lesson #1 of the day: pay attention to when you’re ON air and OFF air. No major gaffs – this time – just a joke at Prevost’s expense.

Check out the full interview here:

And video of “Science” on the toys…

(Originally posted by Kent on February 27, 2009)

Check out the new Video Blog and remember if you’d like to be on the Guest List for our March 14th Canadian Music Week show at the Mod Club just e-mail your name to winhara@winhara.com.

Thanks!

A few months I discovered a site called Musebin (musebin.com) which serves up 1 line music reviews.  140 characters or less.  Music reviews for the Twitter generation.

Great.  More internet A.D.D.  Not only am I not going to spend the time to go pick up a music rag and read a whole review, I’m not going to read more that 1 line now?  Except that even when I do read full reviews they are usually crap.  They trash an album simply because it’s Pop.  Or rave about garbage because ‘nobody gets it, it must be genius’.  Or they’re so long-winded I have know idea whether they liked it or not.

I hate pitchfork.

Musebin works like this:  You log in.  You write a one line review of an album – love it, hate it, don’t care, whatever.  Now the part that makes it worthwhile:  Other people read your review.  They can then Agree or Disagree with it.  Multiple review of an album each rated by other people for accuracy creates a much more useful picture of an album than a page written by some dude with a beef against making music AND a living.

What’s the point if you end up reading a bunch of reviews anyway?  It’s the original one line that grabs your attention in the first place.  My latest discovery was an album by a band called Elbow…

(5 minutes later)

… And of course now I can’t find the original review I was looking for, but it said something like “Parachutes era Coldplay meets DJ Shadow”.  That sucked me in, I read more reviews, checked on the previews on iTunes and bought the album.  It’s Awesome.  Buy it.

Even better is that Musebin will send you an email with the 10 best reviews in it every week or so.  And if you have twitter their twitter feed is pushing out new reviews all the time.  I discovered Byetone via twitter post:

“As rhythmic as it is ambient, as gothic as it is dance, as lush as it is stark, this album is a masterpiece.”

The real strength of the site is of course in its membership, so check it out.  The more people who review and rate other peoples reviews, the more useful it becomes for all.  If the radio, Much Music or Pitchfork haven’t turned you onto anything good lately, Musebin just might.

www.Musebin.com

Some songs come easy.  An idea will spark a writing session, ideas will flow, and by the end of one or two sessions, a song will exist in very close to it’s final form.

15 Minutes was not one of these songs.

What eventually became the album’s dark, epic opening track began as a piano ballad called ‘Let Go’.  Dan showed me the song and I set out to put a bass line to it.  So far so good.  The intro/verse line came easily and remains essentially the same as you hear on ‘Hold Back Light Show’.  A few sessions with the full band and the song sounded pretty much done.

We recorded ‘Let Go’ during sessions for our an independent album we were working on at the time.  We got all the way to mixing the song, but it became obvious that it just wasn’t working.  The chorus was falling flat and the song overall was too much of a ballad.  An honest friend of ours laid it out; “Well, it will probably get you girls, but ‘meh.’”

Now sometimes in this situation a song would just be left to die, but we dug the verse and melody.  ‘Let Go’ was stripped down and rebuilt.  I think in the end we probably went through 4 or 5 fully written chorus’ before arriving at one that fit.  Of course with the new musical direction of the song, the old lyrics no longer fit.  What Dan came back with was dark and edgy.  Gone was the piano ballad.  15 Minutes was born.

In the recording sessions for H.B.L.S., Byron pushed 15 minutes to be even bigger, even heavier.  It ended up being one of the hardest songs to mix, with so much going on that needed to be tamed.  I lost count of the number of times the question “Hey Byron, how’s it going?” was met with the response of “Oh, not bad.  Just tried yet another mix of 15 Minutes.”

The song you hear on Hold Back Light Show is the result of over two years of evolution, some easy, most not.  In the end, some songs are worth fighting for.

Check out 15 Minutes on our myspace.  Let me us know what you think.

I read somewhere once that less people take high school physics than get tattoos. The writer’s theory was that you should therefore express your individuality by taking Physics. So I took physics. I didn’t feel like an individual. I felt like a nerd. Not surprising since I like physics and am, in fact, a nerd.

I also like tattoos. I have been talking about getting one (or several) for a long time, but a less than friendly relationship with needles, among other things, has held me back. I think most people thought I was all talk. So finally, with the impending doom of my 25th birthday looming in the all too near future I got inked.

The words “Gardez Bien” are now permanently drawn on my chest. The Montgomery Family originally came from Scotland and this was their family motto. It means “Guard Well” or “Keep Well”.

My first tattoo experience taught me a few things:
1. It doesn’t not hurt, but it’s nowhere as bad as I thought it would be.
2. It takes a lot longer than Miami Ink would have you believe.
3. Don’t mention Miami Ink to your tattooist, unless they are, in fact, Miami Ink. If they are not chances are they consider those guys as being in it for the celebrity and not artists in it for the art. They will become agitated. You do not want someone who is about to spend the next hour or more stabbing you with inky needles to be agitated.
4. It really is addictive. I am already planning my next one. It will be much bigger, with lots of colours. Lets just hope it doesn’t take me turning 50 to finally get it done.

I got my tattoo at Talisman studio in Mississauga-Streetsville. They were awesome. Really great about explaining the whole process since it was my first one. Their artwork is amazing. And they are super crazy about being clean – they show you everything coming out of the sterile packaging to start and then chop it up and put it in the bio-hazard bin when you are done.

You can find Talisman Studio at 212 Queen St. South in Mississauga- Streetsville, Ontario, (905) 286 0786. They don’t take walk ins so give them a call. I highly recommend you check them out.

As you may or may not have known, we spent last Friday at Canterbury, a studio hidden away at the base of Dufferin St. The goal of the session was to rerecord bed tracks using our prerecorded tracks as a template. Why rerecord? Experience has taught me that (at least for this band) there is no such thing as simply recording some songs and being done. The process of writing songs and capturing them to some recorded format always takes time; not an issue in itself. Over that time however, the project never stops evolving. Exhibit A: a planned 1 month recording of a 4 song demo which 6 months later had morphed into the full length album We Are Not Normal.

Rehearsing, playing and recording the current batch of songs has caused them to evolve to a point where the original bed recordings didn’t capture all that we wanted them too anymore. I hope this doesn’t make us sound spoiled. We were lucky enough to have a second chance at it. You only get to make your debut album once, right?

Our day at Canterbury was more than worth it. The size and isolation options of the studio allowed us to play together, while still keeping all the audio discrete. This time we really captured the energy of the songs. I also witnessed some of the most awesome noise I have ever heard coming from the room where Kent was locked away.

I’ve posted some of our photos on flickr.

Now I know that there are at least one or two people with the following question on their minds: “well Hugh, that’s all good, and we’re happy for you, really. But when do we get to hear a finished CD?”

Let me side step that by saying this: I was listening to old Linehaul recordings yesterday – right back to stuff from The No Itacifaxes Sessions, and up to We Are Not Normal – and let me tell you, you can hear the ideas, or at least their beginnings in those recordings. But we have definitely come a long way in the past 4 years. Stick with us a little longer. I promise it will be worth the wait.