This album happened on a spare of the moment evening when myself Mike Sowerby and Patrick Tobin were hanging out in Room Room studios and decided to record some jams....
We have quite a musical history between us, Paddy & Mike playing together in the psychedelic rock band The Last People on Earth. Myself and Paddy go back playing in metal and rock bands since 1990, those being Warp Spasm, Cosmic Juggernaut & Concrete Head. The three of us recorded several albums under the name Doomlord & Mike drummed on two previous solo albums of mine, namely The Wizards Bones & The Necromancer.
Tommy Concrete - Mike Sowerby - Paddy Tobin
At the point of recording this album, I was playing guitar for infamous punk band The Exploited and had for the past four months played only Exploited songs, so when we got to jam I was more than ready to relax and just improvise on some riffs totally at odds to what I was currently playing.
We recorded seven jams that night and if we may say so ourselves, it was absolutely happening... There is always a factor of hit and miss in improvisational music, but sometimes the stars align and they certainly did that night.
The plan was to come back at a later date and, trim some of the jams (they were great but not perfect), add vocals, solos and possibly some other instrumentation.... But disaster struck and due to a series of destroyed computers, the original jams were lost....
Studio footage from the original session.
Six years later, I find a memory stick at the back of a box, with no idea what was on it.... so I stick it in my laptop and am blown away to find all seven jams mixed to stereo wav files.... All I had to do now was finish it. I didn't feel like rushing it and really wanted to wait for the 'right moment' to work on it again. The 'right moment' occurred when I found myself with four days off at the beginning of November 2017. I was supposed to be going on tour with my band Psychotic Depression and Battalions, but unfortunately they had to pull out and the whole thing got cancelled at the last minute... So I figured, I had four days off work that I planned to be filling with music, it was a perfect time to make good out of a bad situation and I spent the four days adding vocals, solos, editing, mixing and finishing off the album.
Excerpt from Grotesque Wyvern
To keep with the spirit of the original evening, I didn't spend ages over the overdubs and went for spontaneous takes on the solos and vocals. Most of them are largely instrumental, just because it just feels like that is how they should be. What lyrics that are on them are based on the file names that the jams were saved as, I didn't want to make it sound like the overdubs and words were done so many years apart, and tried to utilise as much of the original vibe and improvisational spontaneity that the album was born from.
Trying to describe an album based around improvisation in terms of influence is sort of impossible by definition... It is simply a representation of myself, Paddy and Mikes musical connection and history unleashed into forty minutes of a power trio enjoying life and doing what we were born to do.....
It's a trip and a journey which I hope you enjoy.
Cheers
Tommy Concrete
