echotel

November 30th, 2009

Sometime in 2006 my friend Aaron Nielsen and I started recording some music in the basement of the house I owned at the time. Aaron had brought his drum kit and a couple of synths/keyboards over and we set up a makeshift studio. We’d acquired a Fostex VF80ex without an instruction manual, but we quickly figured out how to record tracks onto it and were soon experimenting with a sound that fused analog synth, bass, guitar, drums and vocals into an electronic “new-wave” pop/rock sound reminiscent of the late 1970s. We called it echotel.

Basement Recording Space

It wasn’t long before we successfully recorded and mixed down our first demo – Not Easy. We didn’t have a proper set of studio monitors, or enough cables either, so we mixed it using the headphone-out to my home stereo speakers. The sound quality definitely wouldn’t have won an award for production value, but we were pretty chuffed with the result.

By the end of 2006 we had recorded quite a number of pieces, many of which remain works in progress. I selected 3 songs – Not Easy, Like to Know and I Don’t Wanna Know – and burned them onto a CD which was duplicated and given to a few friends. Feedback was positive.

Over the next three years we continued to record material and put out another demo CD – Satellite 07, which contained two of the 3 songs from the first CD plus another two – Satellite and Games. After some time we discussed releasing the 4-song EP Games with a scrabble board on the cover spelling out the name of the songs. This idea remains, well, an idea, as we never got past the Satellite 07 cover with the purple and green dudes on it.

Today Aaron is in Texas and I’m in Toronto so we don’t get to hang out too often. The basement studio is gone too, but I’m still recording tracks at home using a MacBook Pro and Garageband. We haven’t played any shows yet, but it will happen at some point. Until then I’ll keep working through the material, the goal being to release an album/DVD by summer 2010.

Until then, stay tuned!