Here are a few of the comments we have to say regarding the Skinidin Sessions. We put our hearts and souls into the writing and recording of our home-made EP, and would love to know if any of you who have listened to it, feel some of what we experienced. If you'd like to comment on anything two-step algae, please do so here.
Listening to any genuine recording, you are looking through the eyes of a stranger into another time and place. Even the most contrived recording is a product of the culture and climate it was created in. Being written and performed by two people and captured entirely by those same two people mostly in under a week, isolated from the world, this particular quintuplet represents the culmination of years of song-writing and yet, a fleeting five days of recording.
For us, songs do not appear fully fledged, they are inspired bit by bit until ready to be delivered into an empirical form. However, the moment they are made concrete, after much rehearsal and despite notes on a score, is simply a release: extruded through the die of our own transitory perceptions, whims, location and situation.
If you think of how your own perceptions, tastes and views can - whilst broadly remaining the same - change over the days and months of your life, you can appreciate that doing something which takes up your heart, mind and body can be tinged with those transitory thoughts. Then you can appreciate that these sounds are both inadvertently and consciously influenced by circumstance and not just 'the songs that two-step wrote.'
Whilst we're both immensely proud of what we've achieved, we're also mindful of the fact that it could have turned out very differently. We've both said that we imagined certain things differently, perhaps because of what we'd taken our inspiration from, or the fact that working as a (hopefully) cooperative duo we may be led down paths we hadn't thought of...as it is, there's only one outcome; we like it.
What the songs mean for me:
Rod McFarlane on the "Skinidin Sessions"
It is bizarre when I listen to some of the songs on the Skinidin Sessions. These songs had their genesis around a decade ago, when I was very much a different person, living in a very different world. I guess over the years I have recorded many songs - well I call them songs, but really they were the doodles of one 3/4 size man, a 3/4 size acoustic guitar and a poor quality tape recorder. I would hesitate to call them poetry because they weren't as pompous and certainly not as refined as that, but neither were they songs. As I didn't have an audience or even intend any of them to ever see the light of day, I didn't feel constrained by the format of the conventional "pop" song or the need to make them palatable to the world at large. They became a tool, a way for me to order my thoughts and make sense of the world around me... with a guitar.
I remember as a kid sitting on a beach with a friend, banging big pebbles together to the sound of waves gently washing onto the shore. Rocks don't all sound the same, and the different sounds they made and the joy of being in time with each other is something I'll always fondly look back on. Most of all though, it was the sharing of the experience that was the important part.
When Rod asked me to have a stab at making some music with him I was excited at the prospect, but also a little nervous. Nervous, because although I've tinkered around on the guitar for ages, I don't really play it in the conventional sense. I don't know many chords and scales are something sometimes I can remember and sometimes I can't - but that is the way I like it! Once you go down the line of being taught anything, you are being taught more than the obvious: you are being taught a way to think, which in the framework of playing a guitar, might inhibit the way in which I express myself. Conversely, if I'd bothered to learn the guitar at a young enough age such that I had mastered it, it might have given me the launguage to express myself better - but that isn't a road I went down. So as I was saying, I was nervous; nervous as I can't play off the cuff, I need time to think and work in my own way. There were three of my old songs that I had never considered complete - complete in my world, not complete as in polished - and so it made sense that we used them as a tool to begin making some noise together.
These songs however, no longer belong to me. Rod has contributed enormously to the way in which these old songs now sound and for better or worse, he is as much responsible for them as I am.
As with any big project - and this has been quite some task, taking nearly a year to complete - which one has been intimately involved, I know where all the little faults are in these songs, the bits we didn't manage to get to sound quite like we would have liked (and a few glaring mistakes). But I don't want to dwell on these points, instead I want to point out a few of my highlights. So my top five in the order in which they appear on the "EP":
So for me there are one or two lovely moments that Rod and I have managed to capture and I'm excited about that. I'm excited because I've got loads of ideas for new songs: I walk down the street and everything is beginning to inspire me again, I want to sound like every good band I listen to, and I'm proud of what Rod and I have produced together.
I don't know what the future holds and if Rod and I will get the opportunity to do anything like this again - I hope so, because it really has been, amongst other things, fun. Not only does Rod have a great appreciation of music, which he has used to good effect in his immense contributions to Skinidin Sessions, he also has a good understanding of life. Like banging the pebbles together on the beach all those years ago with my mate, it has been good to spend time making music with Rod.
Anyway, this self-gegging is all getting a bit much, one might say yag, so I'm off...
Chris Ashton on the "Skinidin Sessions"
If you'd like to comment on our music, do so here.