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Back in Vienna

Hey, we have decided to tell our stories from a first person perspective from now on, using squared brackets at the beginning of each part to indicate who’s speaking.

In late September we started working in the studio again. After all, we haven’t recorded any new demos since Spring 2020! Back then we wrote all of the songs for EP1 and EP2. In the meantime, we didn’t only gather lots of new ideas but also made some progress with production software, plugins and recording techniques. Besides that, we had a tiny photo shoot for our first merch collection (more info soon) and were featured in a print magazine for the first time. Yay!

Also, we have decided to move to Tenerife for the winter, a small Spanish volcanic island in the Atlantic, close to Morocco. The weather there is usually warm and mild, which is kinda what we’re looking for. We’ll be surfing and running outdoors every day. To capture some of these moments, we thrifted a Sony HDR CX450 camcorder which makes everything look super old school. Might also use it for livestreams, let’s see 🤪

[Louis] On my tiny looper pedal (a must have for guitar players imo, boosts your creativity a lot) I’ve recorded more than 90 melodies and also Emil wrote quite a few new pieces in Ableton. Also, the new tube amp sounds absolutely killer! Imagine a stormy ocean of sound, huge waves of distortion crunching everything that comes in their way – that’s about it! Together we sat down and listened to all of these ideas and fragments, writing down our favorites and drafting a timeline for our upcoming releases. 

The beginning of September was pretty chill in Vienna. I was out a lot, meeting friends I haven’t seen in a while and exchanging stories. Fall can be beautiful in Vienna and I often found myself walking my parents’ dogs (one of them is the most annoying animal on earth while the other one is a true angel) or going for jogs in the woods. Even though I often feel like running away when staying in my home town for too long, it’s nice to catch up with my friends and remember the school days and my roots. One of my best friends even got engaged! Made me feel quite old lol. 

Some of you might not know this but I’m quite the guitar freak and love to experiment with different sounds and pedals. Even though most of these pedals only involve a few simple electronic circuits, they can be super expensive! I’ve already spent too much of my modest savings on these toys and I can’t afford to buy more. Therefore, I decided to learn how to solder and build these pieces of metal myself (super interesting right?). A few YouTube tutorials later I already had a good idea of which equipment I’d need and soon I bought a pretty neat soldering machine for little money second hand. Capacitors, diodes, resistors, input jacks, foot switches and much more … all ordered from Aliexpress for little money as well. I’ve already started my first build and I fucked up some parts instantly. Anyway, I’ll let you know soon about my progress! Maybe we’ll create some peach pedals in the future 😉

[Emil] Even though I didn’t live here for the first ten years of my life, I would still consider Vienna to be my home town. It’s not my happy place though, in fact, it’s quite the opposite! [WARNING OPINION HERE] To me it seems like people are always stressed out, mainly because they work a lot during the week and then drink too much on the weekends so they never get to recharge their batteries. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing since we returned from our last trip.

At first I had a bunch of energy stored from our adventures in Spain that I harnessed into my creative flow, helping us write and record our new songs, but that energy slowly started decaying until it recently disappeared altogether. Now I feel tired, sluggish and lifeless. A lack of sleep is the main contributor to this strange mix of feelings. I’ve been eating clean and exercising, so those parts should be in check. One of the things that are keeping me going is the thought of leaving Vienna mid November. We’re moving to Tenerife and that’s exactly what I need right now – after all, I would have to go into hibernation over here and that’s not a suitable state to make music in, let alone to exist in. Of course I am being dramatic, but in essence that’s how I feel right now. 

There certainly are underlying issues that make it hard for me to be happy in Vienna and I am running away from my problems to some degree, however, I recently was able to solve two of those issues instead of turning my back on them: One, I finally finished my internship in software engineering and twooo, I officially finished my degree at university! I honestly never thought I would see the day, but it’s really here and that makes me happy. Once again, I always thought that I would somehow feel different after graduating college, but I don’t and I’m still the same old Emil, stressed out over tiny issues that nobody would even think about. When we were living in Spain earlier this year, I felt alive, even though on paper I was under way more pressure than I am now, juggling four rather large tasks at once. Now I’m pretty much only working on peach tinted with Lou, but I feel a lot worse than a few months ago, so my big hope is to regain my spirit down in Tenerife and to go back to feeling alive.

Some of the moments in my life during which I felt the most alive were live performances with my old band. I recently started looking into planning our live show for peach tinted and that has been another much needed source of joy and excitement. The technical side of playing a show with only two people on stage is quite complex, but as you can imagine that’s exactly my cup of tea. We’re pretty sure that we’ll be using “ableton live” as the soft(ware) heart of our performances, aided by a piece of hardware called the “ableton push” – a metal box with buttons and knobs that lets us control what is being played by the computer vs. what we want to play live on stage. I’ve also started looking at other more boring equipment that we’ll also be needing, like stage headphones and various stands.. yikes. Both Lou and I are huge proponents of buying gear used, so I think we should be able to afford the stuff we need.. at least for now.

Lou on guitar, talking to friends
Emil recording some fire lol

2 replies on “Back in Vienna”

good luck with building things louis!! also emil hang in there, i hope you feel better, im sure everything will be fine 🙂 im rly excited for the new things you guys will releasee, good luck guys and have fun <3

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