Today we release our first single from Notes From the Universe, “Are You Better Now”.
This is the first video that we did 100% ourselves, from the animation, to the filming and editing. We’re super proud with how it turned out…we hope everyone loves it!
Watch it here
Yesterday was a big day. We pressed the button! Hit submit. Turned in everything. Artwork and songs...written, mixed, mastered, sequenced and done.
Letting go is always hard for us—it involves intensive listening over & over again and doing all the artwork & re-checking the artwork over & over.
For Notes from The Universe we also did all of the photography as well. So if anyone ever wonders why each release takes awhile—it is because we are completely DIY and every detail takes time.
By the time we are done, we've poured everything we have into the album.
Thanks to each of you for being here. It means so much to us.
We are so excited to let you know that after over two years, endless hours, & some blood, & some tears...we are ready to announce the upcoming release of our latest!
We bring you our new album, Notes from The Universe!!!
The official release date is 2.22.22
2.22.22 sounded like a nice date that we could remember!!! All orders will ship on, or before that date.
We are really, really, really excited about it, and think it is one of our own personal favorite releases in our entire history, and we hope you will love it as well.
Pre-orders start now! and the first 200 people to order get some special extra things added in their orders!!!
Notes from the Universe will be released as a Special Edition Digipack with 11 songs, as well as a strictly Limited Edition (250 copies) 2CD Version with a bonus Instrumental CD which will only be available on our website. We also have 2 new limited run T-shirt designs to go with the release.
We are fully independent, which means we are 100% self-funded. We decided not to go through a fund raising site this round, but our Collide website takes all sorts of payments including Paypal.
Come join us on Facebook, or Instagram where we will be posting lots of new photos and thoughts about Notes from The Universe.
Any help in getting the word out is deeply appreciated!! Liking, sharing and commenting on posts help…Every bit helps!!
Much Love,
Collide
We know it has been awhile--but we have some exciting music news that we will be announcing very soon!!!!!!
We have been super busy getting things ready and we are getting excited to let the cat out of the bag!!!!
To make sure you get the news--please sign up for the newsletter on our website--that really helps us as we can no longer count on having a reach through socially controlled media.
Meanwhile speaking of cats--this is Mittenpaws!!! She is new to the Collide family!!! She was a neighborhood stray cat who decided to adopt us!! She is very special!!!! Barkly however is still adjusting.
Soooooooo stay tuned for news coming up!!!!
We U
Happy Halloween and Happy 21st birthday to Chasing the Ghost. Now it can have a drink!
Sunday @ 12pm PST, Statik will be live with AL1CE on Zoom, for the premiere of the Collide remix of the song "Electrical". Scott Landes, who has played guitar with Collide for a long, long time, is one of the founding members of Al1ce. Feel free to drop by and check out the song, and ask questions to either Scott or Statik, or others in Al1ce who will all be live!
We had Kai Kurosawa come play bass on a song today. Even Barkly is amazed by how many strings he has!! BTW, we were doing fretless bass, which is just the middle section of strings.
We're getting ever closer to finishing up all of the vocals to our new album! So that's exciting!
In the meantime....here are a couple of tracks that you may have missed. One is a song that kaRIN did with Shikhee of Android Lust last year, "Are You LIstening"
https://www.collide.net/areyoulistening
and another from 2012 with Dean Garcia, who we did the Secret Meeting Project with. "Your Blue Heart"
https://www.collide.net/yourblueheart
Our full discography with all of our collaborations is on our website, if you've never checked it out.
(Click on the Throwback title, or picture to read the entire post)
In case anyone missed it, Statik posted a couple of weeks of throwback memories the past couple of weeks on Facebook. Statik recalls his early career in music leading up to the beginnings of Collide, and up to the release of Chasing the Ghost. It’s a bit of a read, so sit back.
Also, we are working on new music, so no one fret.
A Special Download
Hello awesome Humans!!!
Wow!! 2020 has been such a crazy, challenging year, we hope you all are doing well!!
We wanted to wish you a very Happy New Year!!! We are so extremely appreciative & grateful to each and every one of you!
We have a special gift for you. It's a new remix of "Shimmer" done by our friend Katarrhaktes. We LOVE it, and we hope you will too!
It is available on our Bandcamp page for FREE , or a donation.
https://collide1.bandcamp.com/
The original versions was on Some Kind of Strange, and Katarrhaktes was nice enough to send this remix as appreciation for our recent Special Edition Re-Releases. We thought it was too special not to let everyone hear it!
Katarrhaktes has contributed to previous Collide releases: “Tears Like Rain” (Cloudburst Mix) on our Bent and Broken Remix album, and “Changing the Concept” & “Blurring the Edges” (Zero Meaning Remix) on our Mind and Matter Remix album.
Katarrhaktes own releases can be found here.
https://katarrhaktes.bandcamp.com/
We are busy working on new music, but it still will take time!
Wishing you all the best for the new year!!
Cheers & Much Love!
kaRIN & Statik
Collide
Yesterday the Just Plain Folks Music organization announced their 2020 Music Awards.
Collide won “Best Alternative Album” !!,
and won 2nd place for Best Alternative Song with “Clearer” (Shades of Red Mix) (Remixed by Alyssa Finnivan), and 3rd place for Best Electronic Song with “Head Spin” (Lg Vela Dance Mix).
J.P.F. is a worldwide music organization, which every few years allows any band or musician to submit their music for their awards. These particular awards have been delayed for a few years, do to covid and some health scares from their founder Brian Whitney. After screening over 17,400 albums, and 240,000 songs they announced their winners yesterday! These albums were submitted before Color of Nothing or Mind & Matter Came out, but we were happy to have Bent & Broken in their awards.
Thanks to Brian Whitney for his continued work with a worldwide music organization, and to Alyssa Finnivan, and Lg Vela for their remixes!
This Sunday!!!!! We are super excited to be having a chat with our very good friend cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy, Download). Our history with cEvin Key goes way back to Beneath the Skin where he was nice enough to do a remix for us, which we released on Distort. We later met at a party, and we have been friends ever since.
The chat will ONLY be on cEvin’s patreon, so you will need to sign up for his patreon to view the chat. Just $2.00 gets you in and cEvin has tons of great content on there and he interviews new artists weekly!
Thanks so much to Simon Paul for doing this fun artwork.
Thanks to Adam at A Model of Control for helping to get the word out, and naming our Special Edition Releases, as among the best of the year.
Collide are a defiantly independent band – they have been releasing their material on their own label, Noiseplus Music, for well over two decades – and that has allowed them to plow their own furrow, having built their audience with a string of striking releases and a long-time internet presence, perhaps being one of the earlier independent bands to realise the importance of the internet, and indeed crowdfunding too. This year – and I suspect this was in train pre-COVID, anyway – they announced lavish reissues of their two greatest albums, Chasing The Ghost and Some Kind of Strange, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the former. Rather than just a quick brush-up of the mix, they went all out.
Included alongside a new “2020 Mix” of each album on CD – basically a very nicely done remastering, they’ve not fucked with the songs otherwise that I can tell – is a Blu-Ray which contains (deep breath) the original mixes, the 2020 mixes, instrumental versions and early demos, as well as a handful of previously unreleased tracks and a video of one track from each. So that’s a lot to get through. But it’s also interesting to listen to the demos, and see how they became the songs that they did – clearly there was a fair amount of reworking and retooling that went on, and it’s not something that we always get to see – a peek behind the curtain, if you will. Really, though, the re-release of these also gives the opportunity for them to reach a new audience, as they deservedly do – Collide stood apart from other bands of the time for resolutely doing something different, taking ethereal goth and harder-edged industrial and even trip-hop that even now still sounds unique. A trip down memory lane that’s well worth doing.
kaRIN has put lots of new designs on the Collide store: Earrings, Necklaces, Mens and Womens shirts, Purses, Bracelets and more!
She’s been working hard on new music as well, but check out these great new designs.
Yesterday, everybody’s order was sent out!
Now that they are going to start listening…some people have asked what exactly is different with the 2020 Mixes on each album….
It’s a bit of a technical question, so here goes:
To make the 5.1 Surround mixes on the Blu Ray discs, I wanted to have the basic stereo mixes as a starting point. Since the songs were mixed so long ago, just recalling them wasn’t totally easy. There were different things to fix, or recall on each song, such as re-recording some of the effects (which weren’t originally recorded, and just playing live during the mix), and semi- re-balancing the whole mix into Pro Tools. When originally mixing, I was essentially mixing with stems onto a 32 channel outboard mixer.
Also, now I wanted to split all of the tracks, so that I had complete control of front to back and left to right (for surround). I didn’t want the mixes to be completely different sounding from the originals, but if I heard something that I thought could sound better, I wanted to be able to fix it…so a little level or eq, or re-balance here or there. It was a lot of A/B-ing the original, and making sure that what I had sounded as good, if not better than the originals. The differences are more noticeable on some songs than others, and maybe for some listeners, they might not even hear any thing different…but they are, in fact, completely new mixes, and we thought that they should be labeled as such.
For the Early Versions of the songs, as a starting point, I went through literally 100’s of CD-Rs that I had made at the time, while working on the album, and listening to an equal amount of ADAT tapes that some of the songs had been recorded on.
I love listening to songs where you can hear both the starting place of the song, and what’s not there when the song was finished…. (different vocals, or different arrangements, or missing guitars or keyboards), and comparing it to where it was when it was finished…it’s a chance to see where the songs were at, at an interesting point in time before they were finished. Some of these Early Versions I was able to find in mulit-track format, and some were just stereo mixes, so finalizing and mixing them differed, depending on the song, but in the end, we think all of them offer a cool look into the songs and where they started.
We hope you enjoy taking everything in, we’d love to hear from you after you get them and have had a chance to absorb everything!
-Statik
