31 Mar 2025
Click here to listen to the EP! 2013 is an EP based on sketches I recorded in 2013 in Mexico during a
very tumultuous year. Juggling owning a business, figuring out my future, dealing with massive amounts of stress, yet at the
same time having on of the most epic years of my life, led to a lot of interesting and weird compositions during this time.
I wish I had more time to post about the creation of it, the process of recording, what instruments were used, but it is hard
to find the time and energy right now, as I struggle as-is to release each EP on time; juggling full time work, lots of things
going on in life, as well as recording, refining and mixing 5-6 songs per month really takes a toll. I need a holiday. I’ll
try to do some album breakdown sessions soon at least, video format might be easier than blogs in any case.
Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy it!
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26 Jul 2024
When you keep moving around and you don’t have a studio (or most of it is locked in storage for over a year), it can be quite difficult to record an album, let alone keep momentum high and deliver it in a reasonable timeframe.
This is the backstory for FRUTAL, coming out on the 9th of August.
In early July 2022, Pyrathee — who’s been a friend of mine for over 20 years — had me over to his house. As I was getting ready to leave, he told me, “Dude… we don’t play music anymore. I’ve got all this kit and yet we never play. We used to play all the time.”
This really got me thinking. We had a band for about 5 years until everyone moved to different countries, and eight-or-so years later, here I was, just 20 minutes away by bike, with no excuses.
I was planning on moving to Ireland a few months later and was going to start selling a lot of my equipment in September. So, I thought — why not get together, write a few songs, make a small EP, and wrap it up before I move away?
We agreed to meet a week or so later. We moved his drum set, tube amp, and guitar from the house to the garage outside, and we jammed for a bit.
Not content with just jamming, we started trying to find some structure, some riffs that worked, and soon we were pitching random ideas: What about metal with odd time signatures? What about Rammstein-inspired heavy riffs? What about double kick drums with weird patterns? What about fruits? Yeah, what about fruits?
He dived into a story about how he got stopped at the airport in the Dominican Republic trying to take a few dragon fruits through security. They had to scarf them down (with plastic knives and forks) to try to make it past security in time for their flight.
I was like, “Man! That’s amazing, let’s write something about that.” So, we started coming up with ideas, which I scribbled down on a notepad. We also recorded a few drafts on my phone just to remember them afterward.
After this initial session, I went back home and finished writing the other parts of the songs. I wrote down some lyrics, and we had a chat about making it a four-week project. Two sessions to practice, two sessions to record. Four songs in total: Cherries, Dragon Fruits, Strawberries, and Guanabanas.
We recorded them a few weeks later at a house I was renting. It was three stories high, and on the top floor, I could usually play without bothering the neighbors too much, as they seemed to use their third floor for storage. These are Belgian houses, so very thin and tall, with somewhat scary steps to climb down.
The session went well, so I fiddled around a bit with quantization, trying to get the drum sound right, trying to get the guitar sound right, and so on. I recorded the guitars on a small Fender amp, which didn’t really have the tone I was looking for. So, I left the songs incomplete for months, partly working on them every now and then but never really satisfied.
After moving to Ireland towards the end of the year, I bought a new guitar. Shortly after, I found a DSP VST for guitars that had a tone I fell in love with: Ampbox by Mercuriall, using the U530 Preamp. When I compared it with what I recorded using my Fender amp through a (probably badly placed) Shure SM57, the tone was miles away. This sounded professional, wide, grungy, and powerful, exactly what we needed.
So, I re-tracked all the guitars, added a few solos, and started double-tracking the drums.
But once you get started, it is so easy to get sidetracked. I thought maybe I could add a random spacer between each song, maybe hire voice-over artists on Fiverr to narrate the description of fruits and place a weird glitchy track in the background, or mess around with the voices, making them stutter or glitch out.
And soon after, I realized maybe I could add a few calmer tracks, because guttural screaming isn’t for everyone. Maybe the sound of the songs could be reflected in the type of fruit, or maybe sometimes the inverse to switch things up and make it unpredictable.
It’s funny it took so long. You can write a song in a few hours, but sometimes life gets in the way. When you pick the project back up, the scope increases, and you realize you want to make something much larger than what you originally intended.
Over time, I started adding more and more fruit songs. At some point, I became dead-set on the idea of making a song about every fruit. But I’m glad I backed away from that… it turns out there are a lot of fruits! But hopefully, the series of albums will be interesting, even if the idea behind them is a bit silly.
A year later, I had over 10 tracks down, including the Fiverr voiceover ones, and then I moved back to Belgium… To a flat, which made it a bit harder to record. Now I really had to pay attention to avoid bothering the neighbors. Slowly but steadily, over the next year, I wrote another 12+ tracks, and I reached the point where I noticed it was going to take me a long time to write a song about every fruit.
I’d take all the fruits I had, plug them into ChatGPT, ask which ones I was missing, and it would always come back with a massive new list. So during a run on a random weekday, I had this sudden stroke of inspiration: Let’s split the album and cover some interesting fruits, but not all of them… maybe 2 or 3 albums of 15 tracks each.
Finally a plan.
So, I chose the 15 songs for the first album and tried to mirror them with the second so that the same style of song lands in the same place. Whether it is a description, a calmer song, or a heavier song, the first two volumes would be mirrored in a way.
The mixing and mastering process during the following month was hell. A lot of listening to reference songs, then listening to the album and noticing I was missing lower end, then going out for a walk and listening on earphones instead of monitors or headphones and noticing it sounded weak. Then adding a lot of compression and noticing it sounded oversaturated. Then diving into LUFS and hearing about headroom and trying to lower things a bit.
Finally, I found a sweet spot that I liked. It is still very, very loud. I used as much of the frequency spectrum as I could. I love things sounding heavy, with boomy lower ends, but also very fresh and bright on the top end. I think I’d get a slap from any mix/mastering engineer, but I went my own way for this one. Maybe someday I’ll learn.
Why is the album called FRUTAL? The idea behind the name was because we wanted to make something heavy, brutal, like very intense. So brutal, but about fruits… How about FRUTAL? And the name just stuck.
I’m really looking forward to putting this out and listening to your feedback. So stay tuned for more updates, you can visit lemiffe.com/subscribe where you can subscribe to the newsletter if you’d like to receive
an email the moment it drops. Otherwise I’ll likely be posting videos and promo material on YouTube, X and Threads along the way.
