Halfbreath Redux

Among the hard drive detritus that piles up, you sometimes find things that just fell through the cracks. For every project that just flowed from beginning to end, there are five or so that just didn't come together for whatever reason. Now that I've been doing this for as long as I have, I know that it's usually just a temporary lack of perspective that keeps something from getting finished - spend enough time away from it and things will eventually come together.

I've recently found an attempt I made at updating an old song of ours called 'Halfbreath'. The main problem with the original - apart from the dodgy recording - is that it just sounds dated. I made some lazy decisions about drum programming on this song mainly because I had considered it a demo. It was never intended to be released. The trick to redoing it is to deal with the 160+BPM tempo. Drum and bass is something that really doesn't interest me at all, and I suspect it's quite out of fashion nearly a decade later. An even less inspiring idea is to cut the tempo in half and end up with some coffee table electronica bullshit.

Listening back to what I've done, I think I was going back to early Warp Records stuff - not all the way back to acid house days, but to Seefeel, in particular. Their album, Succour, still has a lot to offer and, I think, was quite ahead of its time. Anyway, my memory of that clearly drove what I was trying to do with this particular track and I thought I'd just post a bit of it up here. Who knows if I will ever complete this...

Halfbreath (2005) (short instrumental clip)

- Ryan