The last couple weeks has been pretty hectic. I spent a week at 5th Street Studios in Austin, TX mixing “Silence Collide,” “Hands Up,” and “Perfect Day” with our engineer Craig Sadler. Craig did a killer job mixing the three tracks, in what seemed like record time! The next day I flew to New York to join James to record vocals, guitars and bass on “As Far As I Can Go” and “Sin Is In” for the next Ep at James’ place on Long Island. We made a make-shift studio in his place and spent 12-hour days recording all the parts before I was back on the plane to Austin. We’re now mastering the songs with Joe Lambet (who mastered our Elected and See Me Comin’ releases) and working on the artwork.

With this being a digital-only release it’s easy to skimp on the artwork, but we feel that images are a big part of the recordings; digital or physical! We get the tracks back from mastering later next week, and if the artwork is done at the same time, it looks like we’ll be in iTunes in November. If you can’t wait until November, everyone on the Atomic Brother mailing list will get a free download of the 5-song EP. If you aren’t on the mailing list, enter your information in the side bar. We’ll let everyone know how to get their free copy before it’s in stores.

- Sebastian

Since we’ve been on Twitter, we’ve been a little lax updating the news/blog portion of this site. So, here’s what’s been going on. We wrapped up recording all the demos and moved on to recording the final versions of songs. It looks like we’ll be releasing several EPs over the next few months. The first one is being mixed this week. The EP is called “Silence Collides” and features the songs “Silence Collides,” “Perfect Day,” and “Hands Up.” These tracks have James on vocals and guitar, Sebastian on bass with drums by Robert C. Kelly. The guitar and bass were recorded in my old studio in NJ, while the drums were recorded at the university Rob is currently teaching at in Seoul, Korea. We are mixing at 5th Street Studios in Austin, TX.

While all this is going on, we are working on the next EP. This one will feature the songs “Bullet From My Brain,” “Sin Is In,” and “As Far As I Can Go.” The bass for “Bullet” was recorded in my old NJ studio, while the bass for “Sin” and “As Far” were recorded in my new studio in Austin. We’ve got 2 drummers on this one. Rob returns for “Bullet” and Pat Aeby (who played on See Me Comin’) is on “Sin” and “As Far.” I’ll be packing the laptop and going back to New York this weekend to record James’ guitars and vocals to finish this one. Release dates for both these EPS, and how you can buy them or get them free will be coming soon!

In the meantime, follow us on Twitter to keep up-to-date! http://twitter.com/atomicbrother.

- Sebastian

On Saturday, April 4, we were back at my studio to finish recording Hands Up. The plan was to record the vocals and some acoustic guitar, but things took a different turn. Even though we had been recording and performing the song the way we recorded it, James wasn’t exactly happy with the overall “feel” of the song; that the guitars were a little to loose. So we ended up revisiting the guitar parts and came up with a much more slamming version of the song. The new part we came up with locks in tighter with the drums and bass, instead of wandering around, and adds a lot more thump and crunch. But, this meant re-recording all the guitar parts we did the week before. No big deal, just an hour or so wasn’t too much time to get something we were much happier with. After that, it was on to the vocals.

We had been recording demo vocals for all the songs, so it was just a matter of James rehearsing his part during the week, finding the perfect mic, and recording the performances. I dug out a bunch of mics and we did a mic shootout to pick the best one for James voice and hit it. After we were done we took a few listens and decided to ditch the acoustic and go with the heavier version of the song. The next week I’ll be cleaning up the tracks and getting the song ready for mixing and mastering.

For the techies: We used the same guitar setup as last time. The vocals were recorded using a Carvin CM-87S condenser mic through a Focusrite TwinTrack Pro with a touch of compression. Everything is recorded into Logic 8 Pro using a Mackie Onyx 1620 and MOTU 896HD.