VEP - Too Much Too Often

These days it is more or less exactly 10 years since I joined the then almost one year old band Vep. As told before, most of that time was spent without a guitarist.

At the time I joined, the band had no songs of their own, but played assorted coversongs. I wanted us to play our own material, so I brought some songs into the band, and rest of the band also started to write songs. Aud Sissel's second, and last, song to be introduced to the band was Too Much Too Often. Written on top of her bassline, she had the title ready (and thereby also the lyrics for the chorus), but left the writing of the lyrics of the verses to Karine (who also contributed to the band's repertoire of original songs with Delete as Required, which I'll return to in a later post).

The song being fairly bouncy, I figured I should do something different with the guitar than I usually did on my own "post-rock" like songs. Inspired by Jesus Lizard's fantastic Nub, I therefore tried, for the first and last time, to play with a slide (made of glass, not metal as JL's, which gives a bit softer effect). At rehearsals we usually started with half a minute of guitar feedback before the rest of the band kicked in - kind of like the noise heard at the end of this version. This song was one the funniest to play, and also one of those that sounded OK at rehearsals (unlike, say, No Offence).

The title is taken from a film by one of the most idiosyncratic movie-directors of the b-film circuit of the 1960s, Doris Wishman. Too Much Too Often is one of the "roughies" she made after the market for nudist camp movies and nudie-cuties had dried up. As usual with Wishman's movies, the title was much better than the actual film. It also makes a great song title (and song!). Perhaps somebody should make an album consisting entirely of songtitles from Wishman's oeuvre? The danger, of course, is that people would say that the song titles are much better than the songs...

Like the other VEP songs already posted here, the drums are programmed samples and the bass was meant to be preliminary (see why here). As time goes (now it is more than 7 years since work started on the demos), I guess it is more and more unlikely that the recordings will be finalized with proper bass and drums. Too bad, really.

VEP - Femina Ridens

Continuing with coversongs from the previous post...

One of the many coversongs that VEP played was an oddity from a little known and rather bizarre Italian movie from 1969, called Femina Ridens (aka The Frightend Woman aka The Laughing Woman), written by Stelvio Cipriani. A wonderful popsong, played by a typical italian-movie orchestra from that era, the original features complex drumming, strings and brass, and the thickest accent heard in any language outside a Banana Airlines song. We had a hard time trying to decipher the lyrics, which grammatically are very offbeat - probably a result of word-by-word translation, and we ended up guessing wildly a couple of places. After having played the song a while, I was able to secure it on CD. This version had a different mix, with the vocal mixed louder than the version featured in the movie itself, which we had used. The CD-version enabled us to fill out some of the missing parts, but not all, the accent and grammar were still just too weird. (Also, the "scrappala"-guitar in the intro/outro was mixed quieter, but as you can hear in our version, we didn't care to follow that...) . Although the song was quite hard to play, we played it rather well at rehearsals, and it was a fun song to play.

I spent many hours programming the drums for this recording, and although still not quite satisfactory, they do the job. The goal was to mimic the original, just as much to test the programming abilities of both me and the gear as for musical reasons. The bouncy bass is also very close to the original, and Aud Sissel spent a great deal of time finding out how to play it. There is very little guitar on the original, though, so I wrote new parts for the verse and chorus, trying to compensate for the the lack of strings and brass.

In contrast to the other recorded songs by VEP, the bass on this recording is played by Aud Sissel. However, she only played the first verse and chorus before aborting the recording session. For the rest of the song, I have cut-and-pasteed basslines from the parts she played (and added the odd note myself). The song features a couple of guests, Per F. from Softcocks / Fastened Bulbous is buried deep in the intro/outro chorus, and PG, also from Fastened, plays organ.

This movie, btw, is recommended wholeheartedly to those that are curious about late 60s/early 70s European cinema in the intersection of art and sleaze. It is available on DVD. The opening credits might wet your appetite (note, the youtube-clip is taken from a VHS-source, the DVD looks much better). We also tried to cover another tune from a 70s Italian movie (also written by Cipriani). I think we played it only a couple of times at rehearsals; not having keyboard made it difficult to get it sound right, though, so we abandoned it pretty quickly.

VEP - No Offence

This song stems originally from July 1995. It is something I composed mainly to preserve the main idea (that is, the guitarriff), and then filed away. As mentioned in earlier posts, at this time, I was not really interested in pursuing songs that seemed to be too "pop-like", and for me back then, this one fell into that category. Upon joining VEP a few years later, however, I picked up some of these songs/sketches and worked them into something that could fit into the VEP-catalogue. This was also how No Offence came about.

Although being one of the first songs I presented to the band, and therefore one of those that we played the most, it never really gelled at rehearsals. It was something with the sudden change of pace when we went from verse to chorus that we never got right. Usually, the chorus just fell apart because we (and especially our poor unexperienced drummer) had a hard time adjusting from the mellow-paced verse to the more demanding and loud chorus. Furthermore, while the chorus has, and need, two guitarparts and me being able to play only one of them at a time made us miss a vital "voice" in the arrangement. Alas, in rehearsal, it was one of our more chaotic songs. I therefore think I speak for all of us when saying that we never thought this song had much potential.

After recording it, however, the song came into its own, and emerged as something that actually had real drive and energy to it. And, to our slight surprise, the verse and the chorus fit together nicely. All-in-all, I think it turned out to be one of the most extrovert songs of ours. And, it's not really that "pop" after all, is it?

VEP - I Know You Now - new version

I have uploaded a new version of I Know You Now. It only has a few minor changes: shorter drum intro, ride instead of hihat on the chorus, and, rather more drastic perhaps, I have followed up on Per's remark that the song was too slow and made it faster...

VEP - I Know You Now

I close the week with another unreleased song by VEP. Again from those hurried sessions mentioned in the previous post. When I joined the band, I listened to some tapes from the early to mid-90s filled with sketches and small ideas for songs. After all, VEP was quite different from Fastened Bulbous, which meant that most of my then recent ideas for songs did not suit VEP very well. I found this little idea that I had taped using Håvard Oppøyen's acoustic guitar. This dates the sketch to sometime in '93, as I borrowed his guitar for a few months back then. Thinking that the sketch was quite catchy, I developed it into a "proper" song (i.e., I added another sequence of verse/chorus and wrote lyrics).

This is, in a sense, my New Zealand song, with the strumming and all; no acoustic guitars left now, but its acoustic origin comes through in the strumming. Although I never intended it to, and despite the differences of melodic type, the song reminds me of The Bats, my 5th or 6th favorite New Zealand band from the 1980s (Softcocks used to cover Made Up In Blue). The influence is perhaps exhibited clearest in the minimalist guitar solo.

It is not only the solo that is minimalist. The verse and the chorus is built around the same three chords, played in the same sequence and in the same manner. Only the small bridge before each chorus breaks this pattern for a slight moment. The melody, likewise, is built around repetitions, with only small variations, and a chorus that echoes part of the verse. I'm not even sure it should be called a chorus.

I was about to post the song earlier, but discovered that the guitars were out of tune! Consequently, I have re-recorded them. So, this song is "fresh from the pressing plant", sort of.

We never managed to get this song as catchy as it had sounded on the original sketch, not in rehearsals and not in this recording. But it's a nice little song, in its inconspicious manner. In any way, it is the purest POP-song I've ever written, I believe.

Edit: A slightly different version has been posted, Per's comment relates to the earlier version. Description of the differences can be found here.

VEP - Sleeping It Off

First band out was last band in. VEP lasted about three years, but only managed to pull off 20-or-so rehearsals. The band was started in the summer of 2000 by Aud Sissel Hoel (bass) and Karine Kristiansen (vocal), primarily so that the former could learn how to play the bassguitar. To ensure a rock solid beat she could lean against, they enlisted Ståle Solvang to play the drums. However, he had never played his instrument before either, so it was off to a shaky start.

A repertoire of a few coversongs dominated the first few, guitarless, months. Roe Fremstedal stepped in for some guitarplaying at one point, but it didn't gel. I came in after that, probably towards the end of 2000, and for awhile there, we mangaged to rehearse as often as once a month. Over the next two years, the repertoire expanded: more coversongs (Pylon, The Alley Cats, Throwing Muses, Popguns, Siouxie and the Banshees, Peter and Gordon, and more), and finally, also some original numbers. For the last two or three rehearsals, Aage Asphaug did the drumming.

In the autumn of 2003, Karine announced that she was moving to Oslo. A hurried recording session was set up to immortalize the 8-9 songs that we had composed. Karine sang over a backing consisting of sampled drums (we had no time or space to record real drums) and some rudimentary bass and guitar, both instruments played by me. The demoes was never finalized, so this recording, like the rest, is marred by my "preliminary" basslines. Also, the sampled drums are still there.

This short song was brought in by me, meant as an instrumental (and with a different title, which I can't remember now), but Karine came up with some lyrics and a melody. Don't be surprised if more songs from this recording session turn up.


Edit: I have uploaded a slightly different mix - guitars are turned down a bit compared to the first upload. Must have been the MP3-conversion that cranked up the guitars in the first one...