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Check out the EP and listen to samples here.

Check out these great reviews of our new “Incision” EP:

Zillo Magazine

Blackvector.se

The EP is limited to 200 copies by Deathwatch Asia and 300 copies by Infacted Recordings (recommended EU distributer: Infrarot).

One year, compressed and summarized in 24 folders on an outdated notebook (no, it isn’t windows 98, it’s XP, I just like the 98 skin because I don’t like change, damn it!)

Of course, not all those folders turned into actual tracks. Many a tune is started and turns to nothing, we do have a ‘quality-control’ department. By that I mean we aren’t famous enough to be getting away with releasing b-grade tunes and still being worshiped as gods… yet. We are working on achieving that mystical level of fame and we have a whole lot of Jewish folksongs we’re dying to cover. Some of those folders have just a few sketchy ideas in them but others have gigabytes of recordings. Of those gigabytes of recordings, most have not, nor will, ever see the light of day, much to the joy of the ‘quality-control’ department, but much to the woe of the ‘the-track-is-due-this-weekend’ department.

So a handful of those recordings were mixed, rendered, sent around to the other side of world (hence the temporary ‘transfer’ folder), mixed and rendered again, sent to the other-other side of the world, mastered, sent to another other-other part of the world, and ending in mass produced runs done by third-world, perfect pitched children transcribing the music by ear to cdr with chisels, or however cd plants work.

I created this folder the day I got back from visiting Virul3nt over NYE 09-10. If click and enlarge, you get a nice slice of Shiv-r life for the past year.

There are a few sensibly named folders which look a lot like the names of other dark electro acts or track names from other dark electro atcs. Those are remixes, and by my count there were six of them this year. If that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, you have never produced six remixes, an Ep, half an album and held down a fulltime job in just twelve insanely short months. Admittedly, I write slower than most. It usually takes at least one month per track for me to produce something close to quality noise, and I would prefer about two. You never get much notice on remixes. The quick turnaround means, to be honest, a lot of my work on remixes has been complete shite, though I’m consistently surprised at how Virul3nt can come up with top notch material at short notice. I was well pleased when the idea that Shiv-r should stop remixing until the next album is finished was floated.

You will also see a few folders with very silly names. That means it is a tune I kick started. The DAW I use needs a new folder start a tune, so the folder gets named after whatever is running through my rat-nest mind when firing up the sequencer. “caincappedable” means I was in a religious slash gangsta mood (I like Cain, he capped that guy for having a pretty girlfriend, that’s how insecure yet masculine men roll…). also, I misspelt Abel, coz I isn’t one of dem educated Sunday School types. I seem to remember “Techwoe” was a tune started when my Virus TI was having a hissy fit and intermittently losing its USB connection, which it still does, but I have no longer given it the honour of naming folders after it. “202” was a tune I tried to start using our Roland MC-202, which is both a non MIDI-retrofitted 202 nor sequencer bypassed 202… an original condition 202. Turns out to be annoyingly cumbersome to use, even after downloading and printing it’s stupidly thick and confusing manual.

Finally, you will see folders that actually look like Shiv-r tunes that have been released this year, or will be on the next album. If Virul3nt started the tune, and as Virul3nt writes all of the lyrics and has scratch vocals recorded at the least when sent to me, these folders have far better names and might actually resemble the title of the song once released.

You can see the last few months were spent on the Incision Ep, which, as of writing this, was released about a week ago, and the screenshot was taken a couple of days before the release. New tracks were being started and finished before the Ep even went to press, because we are hard working eager beavers that never ever stop grooming our hair.

On a side note. I realize the taskbar reveals a few embarrassing things, and I am far to lazy to crop the image.

No, I don’t think that off-blue-green and purple are clashing colours, all my computers use the very same scheme. I also like eggplant.

Yes, I work and think in 24 hours time, just because my work hours are so erratic, I have such bad insomnia and my apartment is kept in perpetual darkness, so I need polite reminders.

Yes, that funny blue one is some kind of dongle crack for Cubase, because I don’t like paying money for things.

And yes, windows security is disabled and I don’t have an anti-virus. Don’t listen to your teachers in sex-ed, riding bareback IS better, go forth with the wind in your hair and freedom at your loins my children!!

By far the thing that has occupied my mind the most is ‘tone’. By tone, I mean the overall timbre (wiktionary, if you should be so chumpish) of the sounds, individual sounds and the complete mix. Examples of fine tone to my ear are

Wumpscut: “Bunketor Sieben”
Marilyn Manson: “Antichrist Superstar”
Haus Arafna: “Blut”
Infected Mushroom: “Classical Mushroom”
RZA’s work on the first two Wu-Tang albums.

Those discs have probably been some of my biggest influences. I don’t mean to say I like everything those artists did, most of them have fell off the pony since those releases. I also know that for a lot of these releases the ‘tone’ was as much defined by studio engineers and mastering, the titles are just meant as examples, not cocksucking.

To modern ears, all of those albums have poor production in one way or another, but me they all capture something in the sound that is special. There is a common denominator in all those discs, or at least an amalgamation I have formed in my scattered mind, that is sonic perfection.

My aesthetic is way off the money these days. It is the antithesis of the modern face slapping compression and crispy clear highs. Of course, I like it dark and dirty, but more importantly, I like it is hissy, hummy, scratchy and with those mysterious wobbly-warbling-fluttery-sounds I love.

Nobody seems to understand the term “wobbly-warbling-fluttery-sound”, so I have decided to take the honors and give it a proper name. It will be hence known “kongism” seeing as I seem to be the only one able to hear them, or want to make them, and I have a bit of a colonial streak in me. I don’t mean to take credit for the sound, I only mean to steal the credit, and I think I’m morally ok with that.

Anyway, all the hiss, hum, scratch and kongism sums to an overall sound that probably exists only in my head, but I do hear bits and pieces of it around in reality, and occasionally capture a piece of it myself.

Aside from the actual music being written, ie. melody, harmony, structure, I have gone through a world of different paths to get the tone I want, but have never quite made it. Starting with obscure Direct X plugins from my impoverished days in the early 00s, various cpu devouring softs that did their best to emulate analog inconsistencies, to the mighty Minimoog Voyager, which is analog and inconsistent, but still not quite right. It is not to say no good music came along the way, or that any of the mentioned gear was bad, but I have never happy with the tone I was getting.

This inflated, narcissistic introduction is supposed to lead to a review of the Sherman Filterbank 2, but to segue at this point in the article would make it sound like the Filterbank was the magic answer to the world’s woes, which it isn’t, but it is pretty damn close. At the end of the article I will give my usual list of gripes ie. why it isn’t quite the magic answer to the world’s woes, but really I want to point out the way the FB is special compared to all the other gear.

From what I can tell, as an end user only, it comes down to design philosophy.

The Filterbank is built around everything that other manufacturers seek to avoid. Case in point, the Filterbank manual has an awesome line in it, which doesn’t initially appear that awesome, until given some thought. To quote, “In low frequency settings, a week ‘eee’ sound can occur… audible as a crossing over between both filters”. That certainly doesn’t sound too awesome, the idea actually sounds pretty damn annoying, until you actually hear it, which is probably why other reviewers haven’t slammed it for it. The Filterbank actually has a lot more idiosyncratic, glitchy or bizarre behaviors lurking under its conventionally bureaucratic gray exterior than just the occasional ringing ‘eee’ sound.

In fact, if you are buying this thinking you will get some stock sweeps happening, think again. Even on the plainest settings, the Filterbank exudes unpredictable noises. Once the more complex modulations, slopes and resonance kick in, turning that cutoff wheel up won’t just be ‘opening’ the sound, it will be transforming it into something new. Some settings will make the sound hiss, others will make it scratch or give some of the coveted kongism, or any combination thereof, and that is how it catches the dragon like nothing else I have heard.

Most producers will tell you hiss is bad, hum is bad, scratches are bad, and that they have no idea what kongism is, but it is also very bad. They will scold you for living in the 21st century and wanting those things in your ultra-transparent 2x CD quality recordings. After all, we spent a good part of the last century trying to get those things out of our recordings. I was born in the latter part of the last century. I take crystal clear recordings for granted, and I want some real analog dirt, not the new school of crystal clear analog ‘dirt’ sweeping the audio market.

A larger company would lock their engineers back in the lab to get rid of that “eee” sound. They would scratch their beards and do whatever engineers do to make sure the cross over between filters doesn’t become audible. At the same time they would inadvertently kill a good part of the filters character, but in the companies mind a dead filter is better than a filter with an ‘eee’ issue, so a dead filter is what you get. It would be truly analog, it would be advertised as truly analog, you would want it because it is truly analog, and it would probably sound no better than any half decent digital filter. Forget leaving any hiss or any scratch in the design, that isn’t 21st century. And that mysterious kongism sound would probably get the engineer’s feet tied to heavy bag of kittens and tossed into a river.

I don’t really blame the manufacturers. They have to bend to a market that demands analog ‘warmth’ but with digital predictability. This is a market that demands voltage controlled oscillators stay perfectly in tune, yet won’t buy anything with digitally controlled oscillators out of misguided principle (DSI… ahem). The engineers have done their given job well, and now we have true analog synths that often sound more stable than their digital counterparts, yet only marginally less sterile.

Instead of doing their best to tame the circuits, the Filterbank revels in everything that is ‘bad’ about analog equipment. After ten years of chasing the dragon with digital audio, I can appreciate how amazingly cool this is. Thanks to Herman for sticking it to the man and making this box.

Now, for some small objections (if you wanted a proper review, you should gone to a proper tech site, silly, though the following in boorishly techy).

- The tube gets into audible distortion often before the level is high enough to trigger the gate, even with the trigger being set to “sensitive”. The trigger problem can be worked around, but having the amount of drive being applied to the tube a little more tweakable or subtle would widen up the kinds of sounds the unit can process. I was hoping to be able to use this for some simple low-key tube processing, but that won’t be happening. Perhaps making the unit double as a tube processer would be the same as sorting out the filter cross over issue, by which I mean it would kill some of the magic for the sake of user friendly-ness.

- The sensitivity of the gate is on a three way switch. It would have been nice to have a pot here to sweep between ‘ridiculously sensitive’ to ‘ridiculously in-sensitive’. There are other options for triggering the gate through MIDI or CV, but that is fiddly and I am lazy. Also, I like pots.

- Quite a few of the pots are notched to centre positions. On some, this makes sense, such as the mid point between sending + or – modulation to the cutoffs. On others, it is just weird. The craziest ones are having it on the LFO and the input level. The LFO is supposedly notched at the point the frequency gets high enough to become an audible pitch. I don’t see how this is necessary, due to me having ears and all. The input one is more bizarre. Seeing as it will be tweaked according to the input material and desired drive, where it is relative to the centre point of the pot, or whether it is being cut or boosted is irrelevant. The real issue with these pots is that if you want a value very close to the notch, the knob will sometimes slip into the notch by itself.

- All of the three way switches are vertical, except for the LFO shape/trigger switch which moves horizontally. This is easy to forget and begging for a confused heavy hand to break it by pushing hard up or down, rather than right or left.

- Overall the pots feel a little cheap, or at least not as good as something that sounds so good should have. This especially so for the harmonics dial, which is so bad I don’t want to touch it. Sherman themselves (or himself) say that 99% of faulty Filterbanks are from bad pots… doesn’t that figure strongly suggest something to you? I know it would increase the price, but I would rather pay the extra dough now for something that will last longer.

- The MIDI control is annoyingly flexible. You can tweak the MIDI controlled parameters manually at the same time as they receive MIDI, meaning the real value of the parameter is somewhere between the MIDI CC and the actual front panel position. Everyone seems to think it is cool, but I hate it. I want MIDI to trump front panel every time, because if I am using MIDI it is only because I don’t want to record something with live tweaking. “Keep your grotty hands off the knobs then” I hear you say. Well, I would, but the side-effect of this is the 0-127 doesn’t seem to sweep through the full values of the pot. Worse, the front panel position of the knob, even without tweaking, changes the max and min values of the MIDI range. Worst, I seem to get an audible jump when the MIDI CC passes through the point of the real knob position, which is frustrating enough that I even thought that my Filterbank might be faulty.

All that might seem excessive, but they are minor issues. If my Filterbank were lost or stolen, I would have a new one coming to me within the day, even if I had to do some bareback porn with a junkie transvestite to get the money together (No, that is not a Freudian invitation to come steal my Filterbank, I genuinely don’t want to do the tranny porn).

Oddly enough, I have not seen any youtube clips that do the Filterbank any justice. The best one I have seen is straight from the Sherman website, here.

December 10, from Infacted Recordings and Deathwatch Asia.  Pre-order now available from distributers worldwide.

There had been months of protests, bombs, grenades on public transport and random sniper attacks. There was a serious party on April 10 which I wrote about here. After that things stalemated. The entire downtown of city was in lockdown. The protesters controlled the inner city and had barricaded themselves in with tyres and bamboo pikes. Surrounding them was the military, trying to keep things contained. Every night there would be skirmishes with the army v. protesters v. police v. unknowns (nobody really knew which side any which-one was on), including the leader of the protesters militant wing taking a sniper’s delight straight in the head during a live press conference with The New York Times.

Surprisingly, despite being only about ten minutes from the party, my part of the city continued to be fairly safe. That said, nearly a third of our staff were missing and caught in the barricades with constant grenade explosions and gunshots stopping them setting foot outsides their apartments. Most of them managed to slip out during the ‘quiet’ time, around the crack of dawn, when all the warring parties agreed it was nap time. There was one crazy man who came to work with torn up pants from climbing through the razor wire just to get to the office. We organized a hotel for him in a safer area, but he insisted on heading home that night. Should have given him ‘employee of the month’ or something, if such a thing existed where I work. In contrast, we had another untermensch employee completely disappear on us, only to get an email from him in the USA, a few weeks after things went back to normal, him having fled the country, asking where his last fucking pay was. Anyway, obviously things couldn’t continue, and eventually the army came in hard to sort it out.

The morning it kicked off I went to the office early and found the Thai staff streaming videos of the live action happening just down the road. The army had APCs crushing the barricades, followed by infantry massing down the streets shooting at any of the protesters that didn’t have the sense to head in the opposite direction. The protesters in turn lit fire to the barricades and buildings across the city and fought back with whatever hardware was available, including M-79 grenades (again) and automatic weapons. I wouldn’t call it a ‘war’ or anything too exaggerated, but it was pretty damn bad (see photos at the end of the article).

There was a curfew and we closed down the office early for two nights in a row (though, somewhat insanely, we tried to run as normal during the day). On the first night I volunteered to stay behind in the office to take of loose ends caused by the curfew. A co-worker called to say the 7-11 was being mobbed and was running out of food. Everything else was closed already, so it was the only food around. I ran out into a haze of black smoke from all the buildings and tyre barricades burning down the road. The protesters had torched everything, including one of the biggest shopping complexes in SE Asia (Central World, ironically, formerly known as the “World Trade Centre”).

I bought the last of the two minute noodles and stocked up on as much beer as I could carry, decided the office could get fucked, and headed home and worked on, guess what… Incision. More specifically, I remember programming the piano and theramin sounds in the breakdown that first night. This was time I would usually spend in my suit and tie taking one up the ass for ‘the man’, every stormy cloud has a silver I suppose.

I was living in a fairly tall apartment complex at the time and my studio windows faced the city. Between recording layers I went out to the balcony to watch the city burn and listen to the distant rumble of explosions. I live on the Northern edge of central Bangkok (in between Central Ladprao and Major Ratchayothin for those who know or care), and the army had started their push from the South, which made us Northerners a little uncomfortable. All ended well, the protesters melted back to wherever they came from, and now we just have the the obligatory weekly bombing in Bangkok to remind us we will have the same party next year, and next year, and the year after that…

And that’s how you know a slice of Shiv-r is a slice of genuine anxiety.

The following are a small portion of the pictures I have from the protests, in no particular order. Most are from the actual day of the crackdown, though some are from the week preceding it, and others are from the aftermath. I would like to restate I have absolutely no opinion on Thai politics. It is not my business, and point of view I might have would be marred by my my own ignorance. I would also like to throw some 2c I am qualified to talk about, which is that the Western coverage of the events was grossly biased. Just check on some of shit CNN came up with. They clearly chose a team, the first and greatest sin of journalism. For the squeamish, there are some bloody shots and some dead bodies.

The first is for the Of The Twilight blog and can be found here:
http://ofthetwilight.blogspot.com/2010/11/shiv-r.html

The second is for Voltage Media, in the lead-up to our performance at Under the Blue Moon festival:
http://www.voltagemedia.com.au/news/2010/10/18/dark-electronic-sound-shiv-r

New Shiv-r EP announced! Containing 4 new tracks, 4 remixes and a new “Director’s Cut” of our filmclip “The End”.

Head to www.deathwatchasia.com now to pre-order - only 1,000JPY (around 8.00EUR) incl. worldwide shipping!

“Incision” is the new full-length EP from Australian dark electro sensation SHIV-R, released by DWA/Infacted Recordings on December 10th to coincide with the Australian leg of COMBICHRIST’s “Monsters On Tour” – for which SHIV-R is the official tour support act!

Australian duo SHIV-R is one of THE new acts of the moment:

- one of the headliners of Australia’s largest underground music festival “Under The Blue Moon” in Sydney on October 30th (along with VLRK from fellow DWA/Infacted actGRENDEL)

- guest vocalist on the new REAPER single “Dirty Cash” (currently #9 in the German Alternative Chart/DAC)

- tour support for COMBICHRIST in Australia

“Incision” is SHIV-R’s first new material since the band announced their arrival on the dark electro scene earlier this year with the breathtakingly-powerful debut album “Hold My Hand” (DWA/Infacted: DWA111).
Combining solid club beats with eerie soundscapes, the quality and powerful production of “Hold My Hand” instantly established SHIV-R as one of the top new talents in the dark electro genre: leading legendary artist/producer Kolja Trelle (SOMAN) to comment
“SHIV-R is one of the very few newcomer projects delivering true quality”.

Mastered by Kolja Trelle himself, “Incision” features

- 4 brand new songs - including “Zeitgeist” made in collaboration with Greek electro act PREEMPTIVE STRIKE 0.1 (Infacted/Metropolis)

- 4 remixes: DETROIT DIESEL’s version of “Open My Vein” – currently also featured on the latest edition of the best-selling electro-compilation series “Advanced Electronics” (Synthetic Symphony) - BE MY ENEMY: side-project of legendary UK industrial act CUBANATE, plus individual interpretations of the title track from SHIV-R’s own Virul3nt and Kong

- All-new uncensored “Director’s Cut” of the music video for “The End”

Title track “Incision” upgrades SHIV-R’s sonic arsenal with an entirely new musical weapon for the dancefloor: slower, heavier than anything previously heard on “Hold My Hand”, “Incision” fuses depth-charge PRODIGY-style drumbeats with heavy guitar riffs, and a low vocal delivery reminiscent in places of MARILYN MANSON.

SHIV-R then up the tempo for both “Zeitgeist” – the product of a meeting of minds with fellow electro-industrial act PREEMPTIVE STRIKE 0.1 – and “Dead Eyes”: taking the club-friendly sound debuted so successfully on “Hold My Hand” and twisting it into 2 new instant club hits, before descending into the dark atmosphere that is “Hacker”.

And in addition to the 4 remixes that follow, rounding out the EP is a full UNCUT version of the controversial music video for “The End” - never before available on disc!

The “Incision” EP is presented in jewelcase, with 4-page gatefold booklet, in a strictly limited edition of 500 copies only worldwide between DWA and Infacted Recordings: a European edition of 300, and Japanese edition of 200!
Both editions are numbered and feature slightly different artwork from Kallisti Design(NACHTMAHR, DETROIT DIESEL, REAXION GUERRILLA, BE MY ENEMY)!

The DWA Japanese Limited Edition of ‘Incision’ will be released in Japan on December 10th 2010, priced at the special low introductory price of just 1,000 JPY (about 8,00EUR).
Pre-ordered copies will ship around November 26th 2010.
Pre-order inclusive of FREE INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING is open now.