Written, programmed, produced and mixed by Matt Neal
Recorded at my Mum and Dad’s house, Ballangeich, in summer 1998-’99.
Here are some things about My Last Seven Breaths.
And here's a photo of me from roughly around the time of making this song.
Using an electronic typewriter, as was the fashion of the time.
- Sorry about the emo title. It sounds like the name of a mid-2000s band that wore too much eyeliner and fringes with absurd angles. I was trying to go for something profound and deep but dark, which I guess is how I thought the song sounded.
And how these guys thought of themselves.
We were both sadly mistaken.
We were both sadly mistaken.
- This is one of 50-100 electro songs that were thought lost forever following a serious hard drive crash on my parents’ computer. About eight or nine survived thanks to the fact I’d given a handful of songs to my friend Brendan Hoffmann, who happened to dig them out five or six years later when I mentioned they were all gone. The moral of the story - always backup your music. Either that, or just give all your music to your friends.
Good work, Hoffa. Way to save my musical bacon.
- The backwards talking at the start of the song is a sample from Encarta. For those of you who don’t know what Encarta was, it was like Wikipedia but on a CD. I didn’t have the ability to record vocals (or anything) so I just used whatever vocals samples I could find lying around. The sample is a guy talking about electricity. I flipped it around to see what he was talking about (because I couldn’t remember) and in the process discovered the song sounds pretty cool backwards (or so I thought).
- I’ve written a bit before about the influences on my electro stuff, particularly here where I talked about how big an influence The Matrix soundtrack was. Clubbed To Death by Rob Dougan was a big influence on this track (and a heap of electro stuff I made). Ditto Moby’s Porcelain. Or at least those are the two things I think I may have been influenced by - I can’t be certain as I don’t know when I recorded it. Oh, and The Chemical Brothers, because they were my electro heroes at the time.
- Sorry about the glitches in this track. It pops and clicks because samples were probably maxed out volume-wise and I wouldn’t have had a clue about such things at the time. Ignorance is bliss. It's probably best if you just pretend they’re vinyl pops and clicks. Yeah. That’s better.
