And just as soon as the heat goes away, it comes back. Hot days mean hot cars and hot monomyth rooms. Luckily I've figured out you can open the windows and bring up the shutters (my very simple brain previously didn't even think this was a possibility). I’m a little late but I pull open the Monomyth door to see a lad sat on the sofa. I almost close the door again but I soon realise - it's Ewan! I haven't seen him for a number of months and his once shaved head is now a chestnut helmet of hair - like a new man! Ewan is the bass player for No Sale and has been a big Contact Buzz supporter for a while now. If you can mentally flick through your Contact Buzz encyclopedia, you'll remember that No Sale (basically Hitlist rearranged with Ewan on Bass) was more of a nu-metal adjacent band, so I was expecting something along these lines for his solo project. Boy was I wrong!

Ewan came prepared to fuck around: multiple guitars, a bass, melodica, a mouthpiece for a saxophone, you name it. We laid out the plan, but this would mean going against everything I preach and starting with the acoustic. Sat right in the middle, our sun to set the stars around. Then came drums - Ewan admitted himself he's not much of a drummer, but for slacker rock, I think accomplished drummers are doomed to fail. We didn;t dampen the snare at all, so in the room it rang out like a bullet, but through the lense of the 4-track, it's perfect, right? One of my favourite songs ‘Hot Days’ by Flaming Lips, (never felt so fitting to mention that), has the perfect blown out sound and I think we got the closest I've come to that and that all started with the drums. We accompanied it by me sadistically hitting my leg with a tambourine. It hurts!

Bass was next, what I knew Ewan for after all and whilst he didn't have any solid part for it, after a practice run, he threw in some proper catchy licks that poke out on occasion. After that it was bouncing time. For as long as I've been recording on 4-tracks, when bouncing, the strangest thing happens that I've never been able to explain. If the level is too loud, it adds this layer of squeal to the mix that I can visibly see on the monitor. Because we were open to fucking it up, i purposely pushed it into this mode randomly throughout the song so the bounce would have this extra blown out ringing quality to it. It wouldn’t work on every song, but this was one track that we tried to slap around a bit.

Now with the three remaining tracks, we decided to have 2 panned channels with 2 instruments each on it. First it was slide guitar, perched on Ewan's lap with a glass slide. I'm shocked I've not recorded any before because it sounds tremendous. There can't be any quicker way to root a song in country. We stuck that together with a melodica that only came through when absolutely necessary - never give them too much of what the people want. By this point I had realised I'd been recording a brilliantly talented multi-instrumentalist. Then it was finally something rudimental again, a regular old electric guitar! A repeating arpeggio to keep the song ticking over was a much needed layer. Then we were right back to absurdity - a Saxophone mouthpiece. No keys or bow, just a severed saxophone head. From hums to squarks, we got every sound out of that bad boy.

All that was left was the vocals, just what Ewan was worried about. I’ve been lucky enough to have quite a few musicians come to me with great sonically engaging pieces who have everything but confidence in their voice. We chased the blown out, hot recording practices up until now… why change? I soaked Ewan's vocals in chorus, reverb, delay, all through the mouth of a BM88. Last couple of sessions I've been Ty Segalling around with those vocals. By the way, I'd love to know what you guys think about these sounds and practices. Please do say what you think, especially if it's constructive criticism, I'm always trying to get better. But overall, I'm mightily impressed with Ewan. The songwriting, the experimentation and to say I started the interaction thinking it was gonna be like Deftones, where we ended up one of my favourite drum sounds, favourite additional instrumentals. One I'll be revisiting for years to come.

For fans of: Flaming Lips, Smog and Beck.