TRACK 2: WHERE THE WARP-ZONES ARE
Based around a guitar riff of mine that I had been playing for a few years, and married to a Massive Attack style drum beat and bass, the recorded version of this song had one foot firmly in electronica (which is odd because songs don't have feet!). While we were doing the band style rehearsal sessions this song became a rock anthem, hitting hard and big. The bass line Paul came up with made it to the album, and the vocals were also shaped in those sessions.
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| A visual representation of a warp-zone, made with love and photo editing software |
The lyrics are about the chaos of life filtered through computer game metaphors (mainly 2D side-scrolling Italian plumber mascot based ones) and electronic robot logic. I am a big fan of the imagery of retro gaming (having grown up with it), the simplistic A to B logic and crippling difficulty of early gaming. The main element from Mario that inspired this the most was of course the green warp-zone pipes, you know the ones, they lead to secret little rooms with treasure and a couple of guard turtles. Sometimes they have tiny 'Audrey 2's spitting fire at you (just bop those bad boys on the head and down the warp-zone pipe you go).
I guess I wanted to use that odd imagery to construct a metaphor for life's strange twists and turns, the ones you can't plan for, but hopefully you can fight off the mini boss and come out flashing with star power. Strange metaphor for life, sure, but somehow relatable? Maybe?
Originally this was going to be much later in the running order of the album, but it found a warp-zone of it's own and jumped the queue right to number 2, lucky little biscuit. Macey played around with this one lots, mixing the sounds around, trying to give it more of the punch of the live full band version, and he did a damn fine job wouldn't you agree? (Please agree in comment form)
As this had been a riff I had played on guitar wandering around our flat, it only seemed fitting to try and do an acoustic version of it, so that's what we did, and would you ruddy believe it! It's right here! On this blog about Cosmic Bos music? Yes, look, it's just underneath these very words you are reading right now...press that play button, go on, you know you want to (winky face)
From the live rehearsal sessions Warp-zones changed more then any other song, we never recorded the rocky heavier version as it didn't fit with the template Macey was working off of. A song that did take some nice juicy rocking up was Kiln.
But that's a story for another blog (the next one in fact)
Peace and infinite love
Andy Jackson (Cosmic Bos)
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