.

Shak: okay so for those of you who don't know, we are a band consisting of dave, andy, lloyd and myself.

Dave: Sometimes band, sometimes cult. (http://www.facebook.com/parkinglotexperiments) (Yes I say links in conversation)

Shak: lloyd's gone away to europe for three months and we all decided we didn't really want to play shows while he was gone. dave mentioned the other day that he feels like a quarter of an artist, and that's exactly how i feel too, so ..yeah...playing a show without lloyd is SAD. I AM SAD WHEN I PLAY SHOWS WITHOUT A BEARD.........ED LLOYDFACE. 

Dave: There's this bit in the Flaming Lips documentary where their guitarist leaves the band and then they kinda just say "well... let's do something else I guess..." and then their music changes direction COMPLETELY and is totally beautiful. This is only a little bit like that, but I did think that we could benefit as a group from trying new things and playing with limitations so yeah! We had this gig, seven days after liftoff. It was at Edinburgh Castle, with ii, Electric Jellyfish, and Treetops.

//Song one//
//Ambient//



//Song two//
//Feedbackdrone//
Dave: So yeah, there's this song codenamed Feedbackdrone, where we got your microphone plugged into the laptop, and going into a vocoder with a laptop synth attached. Basically the idea was that if Andy was to move the microphone closer and further away from the foldbacks, we'd be able to play feedback like a keyboard. Surprisingly it works! To start, I played some notes that I thought were nice, then we had a change where a casio chord came in, and then with fruity delay we made the feedback notes into a drone on the tonic chord with a 2 and a 6. Andy stomped his foot, clapped and sung lead as I started and stopped a distortion effect on the drone with a repeating rhythm. Then after a bit, soft guitar came in (On stage I actually couldn't hear it at all, and it was sooo my fault for not remembering to check it before we started. annoying!) with some nice casio chords and the whole thing sped up and there were some light drums and we all sang. The end.

Unfortunately we have no media of this one to show you, as the camera was being weird.

This song (live) rested somewhere between success and failure imho. We may repackage the ideas, or simply use the feedback synth in something else.

We were originally planning on doing a multiple vocal thing but after listening to a rough tape demo a couple of times I actually heard what Andy was doing and really liked it, so he sung the main thing. And it wasn't traumatic like last time!

PS. A slow song? A long chord drone? Where's Lloyd??

Shak: ...europet


//Song three//
//We Miss Lloyd//
Dave: On stage, before we started, we realised that we didn't have so much time, so we cut this one out of the set on the fly. As such, what we have for you is this tape demo:


Basically, this is Shak's song. We all wanted to express our missing of Lloyd, and we took our turns. Shak came to rehearsal with an improvised demo thing and we jammed it out and what we noticed was that it started in a minor key and ended in a minor key. I guess no-one was around to shout 'CALYPSO!'


//Song four//
//Warsong [Josephine Foster cover]//
He is gone, he is gone, and my hair is growing long
He'll be back, he'll be back, 'fore the day turns black
I'll be true, I'll be true, though my heart is falling through
To the land, to the land, that he marches to
See the sky, see the sun, see the yellow river run
See the stars, see the moon, see he'll be back soon


//Song five//
//YO!//
Andy: Tricky rhythms. Having just listened to Bitte Orca, we made this melody that tries to do a similar kind of dual-vocal magic that they do, and it sort of works, in a clumsy and enthusiastic kind of a way...

Also; I looked it up on wikipedia, and it turns out that yes, the bass riff does kick ass.
Rehearsal demo:

And the live version:



//Song six//
//Phoenix//
WE CALLED THIS SONG PHOENIX CAUSE YOU LIKE PHOENIX


Dave: Unfortunately, it didn't work on stage at all. We couldn't hear the laptop and it just generally didn't translate well at all. It's a living room song :P

Shak: we auditioned like eight iron players for the video and it was going pretty badly until the last one ...this amazing beautiful girl came in and just blew us all away ..but unfortunately she couldn't make it on the day so we just got tash to do it

..nah she's great. we call her ...tash.


//Song seven//
//Lloyd's Coming Home//
Dave: The triumphant return! This is the song where we revel in happiness, knowing that you're gonna eveeentually come back.

Andrew: This song tumbled out of us like an egg. It was almost fully-formed rightaway.
(DRUMSTUFF: I've kind of been wanting to crack out the 3/4 for years now ~ basically because I just really like it, but also because I'm really aware of the that English-speaking bands, when they use 3/4, have a general tendency to employ it as a novelty, and never venture further out into rhythmic possibilities than the most standard "frenchysounding" boom-ka-ka, y'know? There are just heaps of beat-possibilities in 3/4 that aren't heard that often. Less obtuse than 5/4, more immediate than 6/8... yeah. 3/4 has a good (and, to my mind, acutely humble) thing goin' on.)
More to the point, this is one of my favourite PLE songs ever.

Shak: SAME. It's gonna be weeeeirddddd seeing how i feel about this song when you get back. we'll probably all like it just as much, but playing it now and thinking about how we'll actually feel when we know you're on a plane coming home is soooo good. lyrically it was also REALLY easy for us. we were just like LLOYD'S COMING HOME and we all sat down and i wrote the first line and andy wrote the second line and dave wrote the last line but it was such a group effort and it was really fun and nice and awesome and we just listened to the demo over and over and blissed out. YEAH!

Dave: It's weird that you haven't heard this yet, because it's already one of my absolute favourites to play. So much fun. We hope you like it.

Lloyd's coming home, sitting on a plane, I hope that he can sleep

Cause there's a hole in the noise that we make
And if he's rested, he might remember our songs
Lloyd's coming home

//