Reap by uk heights

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This was the quickest we have ever made an album - at just under eighteen months it beats our previous record of two years ("So Far" - 1995) by six months, and is well inside the five years it took us to make "Welcome to Life" (2005). This is in no small part due to the input of Sam Green, who bravely stepped in to fill the unfillable gap left by our drummer Nigel Vargeson. No-one else alive could have done that. Thanks Sam !

In the two years previous to making this album, Mike and Sam had been doing much reading on the subject of music - its interaction with both the spirit ("The Music Lesson" by Victor L. Wooten) and the psyche ("Music and the Mind" by Anthony Storr), the history of recorded music ("Perfecting Sound Forever" by Greg Milner) and the neurological aspect of how music works on our brains ("This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel J. Levitin). In recording the album, we wanted to put some of what we had learnt into practice. Once we had learnt and played through the tracks together acoustically and Mike had made a time-based template from these sessions, we recorded the drum track on Sam's kit for the entire album in one sitting, playing the tracks in the order they would appear on the album. Once the tracks had been built up from the drum parts in the studio, Mike sang the lead vocal in the same way - at one sitting, from the beginning to the end of the album. We tried to always give 'vibe' precedence over 'perfection'. The 'presence' referred to in Dan Levitin's book above was our goal. For the music to be heard in the iPod world of today, and for it to survive the Loudness Wars referred to in Greg Milner's book above, we have had to compress it quite heavily, which has (as in much modern commercial music) robbed it of some of its dynamic range. If the mood takes us we may one day re-master an audiophile, non compressed version, perhaps on vinyl or some new audio format yet to be discovered. If you are a muso (even if you are not for that matter) you should check out the books above - music is one of the most powerful forces in our world, and we are only scratching the surface of what we know about how it affects us and what it can achieve for humanity. Music has also been around longer than speech in the history of our species, so its function in our evolution must be important... go read for yourselves !