BAND HISTORY

RECORDING AND DISTRIBUTION

Occasionally recordings were made using two cheap microphones and a cassette deck. Bringing a deck to a gig usually resulted in the sound guy forgetting to switch it on, or not checking the recording level, so only a few tapes remain.

Once they felt they could play their songs reasonably well, the band decided to do some proper recording and release a cassette, so studio recordings were made at a place called Oktopus, a punk-oriented bar/venue/squat on Herengracht. Their low-budget studio was exactly that. After fucking up the first take of "Wals", the tape was spooled back (to save on tape costs...) and the second take was recorded over it. On listening back it was discovered that the first take did not get wiped properly, which resulted in the weird echo that can be heard in this track. It was decided that it was OK for that song, but fresh tape was to be used for all subsequent takes...

To lower production costs, Erik bought a whole bunch of extremely cheap cassettes of extremely poor quality. He then took out the crap tape and spooled in bits of good quality tape of  the needed length. Copies were made from one cassette deck to another, one by one.
A booklet with some lyrics and nonsense accompanied this first release. Distribution was done by the band themselves, mainly to record shops in Amsterdam.

Inevitably, a vinyl release had to follow. Recording for this was done at Stichting Pop, a heavily subsidised foundation that offered studio time relatively cheap. Their studio had quality equipment including a 16-track recorder. Included in the deal was studio technician Bart Hermelijn, who unfortunately did not enjoy hardcore punk music at all, but did a good job anyway.

Seven songs were initially recorded. Four were then chosen for the EP and subsequently "properly" mixed and mastered for pressing. For the sleeve, Jasper's girlfriend Mariëlle shot photos of the band during rehearsal (they had left the garage for a better place by then). They also had a tumultuous photo-shoot to create the picture on the front of the sleeve which shows Erik dressed up as a tourist lying in a flower bed with a knife in his back. Stan and Erik, the "designers" of the band, did the sleeve and labels.

500 EPs were pressed by Disco-Press in Herk-de-Stad, Belgium. Originally meant to play at 45 rpm, it turned out that at that speed there was not enough room on the 7" record so the speed was changed to 33 rpm. The labels, stating 45 rpm, had already been printed... Time was spent to correct this (at first by sticking little "33" stickers on the labels, later on by correcting this mistake with a pen), but some were released into distribution (De Konkurrent) without this correction, causing worldwide confusion.

Most buyers initially played it at 45 rpm anyway. As the first song starts off in a slow tempo, playing it at this speed doesn't sound wrong at all. Even the vocals don't sound too bad. But as the fast stuff breaks loose, it becomes clear that it should be played at 33 rpm, only now the vocals sound wrong -see the review in Maximum Rock'n'Roll.

One more "release" was to follow. To accompany an interview with the band in Chainsaw, the EP track "Possession" appeared on the flexi disc in the last edition of this English punk mag.