Their story, in their words…
Our Mark Evison Project was to produce, write and record our first EP as a rock/indie band consisting of four songs representing the start of new beginnings.
Our challenge was exceedingly demanding for us, as we had very little composing background especially in the rock-indie genres. The song composition process started around the beginning of the summer for the vocals, guitar (both backing and lead), bass and drums. This involved brainstorming through various different ideas, motifs and chord progressions for our song’s basic foundation. Despite it being completely new to us, listening to other pieces of music and songs really helped us to develop these ideas into more complex sophisticated phrases and melodies.
The first problem we encountered was that originally, our songs were supposed to be fully written in Japanese, as a lot of our inspiration came from many popular Japanese bands such as Creep Hyp and Kana Boon. However, this proved to be too difficult as learning a new language and speaking it whilst playing instruments was impractical; it pushed back our set recording date very far back which gave us about a week to write a song. In the end, we still managed to have Japanese in one of our songs, but the rest were in english.
Unfortunately, two days before our recording date, our desired studio had troublesome issues with their sound channels which would’ve made the recording process exceed the time-frame we were booked for. We were challenged with the task of time, at this point, so we contacted a local studio – echo7 – for a session but we were unable to book a slot for us in time. Instead, we decided to home record our songs as it was our only option due to the lack of time we had available to us. This was challenging because we had no suitable technical equipment for studio recording so manually we had to find the ‘sweet spot’, in addition, this was our first attempt at recording.
Once we had recorded our songs successfully, we reflected on the journey we had made to complete it. Throughout our journey, the hardest process was keeping in time with what we originally proposed in our plan, as it caused us to change schedules and resultantly got us to record ourselves. Additionally, writing songs from scratch also posed to be a challenge. However, as a group we all enjoyed playing music with each other, and gained various skills to help push us further in our musical debut. We learned that next time we should be more responsible for planning our events.
In exchange for being unable to professionally record our songs, we will perform our songs at our upcoming concerts set later this year and we intend to fundraise money through the audience’s donation.
We thank you, Mark Evison Foundation, so much for providing us with an invaluable experience that provided us with challenging skills, perseverance and irreplaceable memories.
