recipe for awesome: just add eric espiritu.
yesterday afternoon we finished recording the new version of mosquito and it's unbelievable. not having ever done a high-quality studio recording as okay samurai, we were all extremely excited. more keyboard and vocals have added an entire new dimension to the song, giving it a much fuller and live-party feel. eric is in the process of mixing it now, which could take anywhere from this weekend to christmas. jeff and i have rough copies of the song on CD and mp3; i listened to it no less than 50 times last night driving back and forth from maryland. the final version will be put online as a free mp3 as soon as it's done.
yeah, mosquito is all about stealing. it mainly centers around the one infamous night in highschool that don, eugene and i were bored and decided to just go around the neighborhood and steal things. where do you think we got that fire extinguisher that you hear in the beginning of the song (and see at our live concerts)? actually, a high school assembly, but that's another story...
we've had an interesting run of recordings in this band. here's a short history:
The Basement of Doom Tapes, 1994-96: using a boombox tape recorder, don, andrew and i recorded over 20 songs in our basement. contained in these horrible-quality tapes are the only known recordings of such hits/cacophonies as grasshopper suicide, neither has root beers, ballad of the strange man, don't splash water on billy and my personal favorite, bird hats. i might put one or two of these online someday just for fun, but don't tell me you weren't warned...
Grasscatcher, 1996: recorded at or uncle's studio in linden, virginia. it was our first time in the studio (now with eugene), we paid our uncle in heinekens (seriously). 10 songs, recorded over a weekend, tapes manufactured at Lion Recording (which had hundreds of dave matthews' remember two things albums lying around). much better quality, but timing and tuning weren't quite there yet. still fun to listen to.
Find Your Own Way Home, 1998: our first studio recording. there are some rough spots here and there, but overall it was and still is pretty impressive coming from a high school band. finding the name from a flyer we saw in the twinbrook music and arts store, we recorded at rolling hills in damascus, maryland. run by two brothers, greg and don snider, we spent about a week recording and mixing songs (while all eugene did was play redneck rampage all day long). it was manufactured at discmakers.
Online Albums, 1999-2002: recording using a hacked computer program in our basement. although the quality wasn't that good, we recorded a lot of songs that fans became familiar with and could sing along to in concerts. mosquito was followed by south of the border, makesure and bottlerocket superstar. we called our online albums "codes to the zion mainframe" and "find them and destroy them." although we finished most of the recordings to disregard the trip on that, fake tobey maguire and good friend ronjomp, they were never mixed or released.
The Espiritu Sessions, 2002: over about 4 days of recording, OKS churned out one final version of mosquito with their high school friend eric espiritu behind the mixing board. with the band's uncertain future, this could be the last full band song recorded or the beginning of something entirely new...
Monday, August 5 at 11:49 AM
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