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| Oct 2010 - Aug 2013 |
We immediately recognised these were different songs, directly describing moments of the journey throughout Europe so far. There was a simplicity to the words and music. One month later a third song arrived spontaneously - "Magica Fountain" - again with references to places we had traveled through. During April/May of 2011 we stayed in Salzburg and out of that environment came the song "Walking Through A Postcard" followed by "Italian Saturday" and "Giudecca" the following month on the island of Giudecca.
We began discussing the possibility of recording the songs somehow while on the move. These songs began to be referred to as 'Sketches of Europa'. The initial idea was to spend a month or so somewhere sketching out little demos for ourselves as a sort of reminder so when we came back to these songs further down the line we'd have something to work with.
By July 2011 we had a laptop, some recording software and one combined budget mic/audio interface. Somehow we ended up in an apartment which happened to have a piano in Milan and that became the backbone of these recordings. We were only there for 5 days and managed to record about 7 songs in an intense atmosphere.
In Barcelona during September we again found ourselves in an apartment with a piano and recorded a few additional songs. Circumstances began to take us away from our initial idea of recording quickly and moving on and we found ourselves adrift for a while. A few months passed where we were unable to find enough stability to finish the recordings like we had intended.
We wanted to move into a new phase of practice but by now the songs were beginning to look like more than just demos for ourselves. There was an atmosphere and vibe to the recordings that convinced us not to abandon them. Overdubs were added in the strangest places - maracas in this tiny attic sweatbox apartment in Nice, France in the middle of summer with no air conditioning. The ceiling was so low you could hardly stand up. Drum tracks being meticulously put together in an even smaller cheap hotel room in Paris while we tried to find more stable long-term accommodation. Slowly, whenever we could we'd keep working on them, sometimes not getting back round to working on a particular song for months or even a year. While this was going on our laptop was slowly grinding to a halt making everything more difficult.
By the beginning of 2012 we were in Berlin trying to juggle practice with finishing these songs and were now facing some extreme physical challenges making it difficult to get around. We still didn't know what we would do with the songs once they were finished but they felt worthy of making public in some form. Our intention wasn't to make 'Sketches of Europa' an album but we had enough songs to do so and began considering this. We used video footage we'd taken on our travels to make video clips for the songs and began putting them on Youtube.
By the summer of 2013, we had finished 6 of the 13 songs we started back in Milan/Barcelona two years earlier. Along the way many new songs emerged such as "Where Are The People", "Purple Paris", "Europa Spezial" and "Balcarres Street". Old songs from years earlier called for attention and began to feel new again, some of which we recorded live acoustic versions of, such as "Sunrise", "October Rose" and "That's How It Goes".
Once we returned to Edinburgh in August it was clear the cycle was over for those unfinished 'Sketches' recordings. So as it stands 6 of those songs have made their way out into the world for now. Four of those have been released as singles - "Why Do You Run", "Italian Saturday", "Giudecca" and "Karl-Marx-Allee". The remaining 7 unfinished songs may see the light of day further down the road.
