released March 18, 2011
Our pal Tim Pak scored himself a brand spanking new 24 track digital hard disc recorder for the Woodshed..
not wanting to jump right in and start recording his paying clients to it, he allowed himself a learning curve of a few
weeks during which he invited us and others to stop by to play and let him figure his way around the device..
so we showed up, set up, improvised and he recorded.. we finished and he did a quick mixdown and sent us
off with it.. the result of that session can be heard on 3 tracks of the Merrin EP (Cold Hands, Merrin Vs. Pazuzu
and Destroy All Yokos).. off to Mount Doom we went with the roughs and started the overdubbing, editing and
sampling process... in typical The ChristPunchers fashion, it was worked on heavily and then shelved.. sometime
later the tracks were found and we were all "heeeeeeyyyyyyyyy!".. we had a couple of ambient pieces that had been
floating around that sounded pretty good..so we weaved them altogether into one giant 30+ minute magnum opus.. for
those who were interested in the technical aspects of the recording, here's a few notes: the original mixdown
we got from Tim was on 2 track Minidisc.. those were imported into ProTools Free (that was a free version of
ProTools that you could download..it was limited to 16 tracks, but it was hacked to allow 32).. main synth used
was an Alesis QS6.2..a roll of duct tape was placed on the keyboard and the feed was sent into distortion and
delay pedals.. distortion and delay are a synths best friend.. SG and Les Pauls were the guitars...they were fed
into various devices..mic'd and direct..rat pedal galore...bass used was a cheapo Squire P-Bass through a Bass
Rockman...everything was fed into an allen & heath mix wizard and recorded into a G3 mac computer... the final
mixdown was all fed back through the mix wizard and re-recorded as a 2 track into the G3.. weren't very savvy with
computer plug-ins and such at the time so any effect sorcerery was done with pedals via the buss... Cold Hands
wound up being the side-A of our first release on Unfortunate Miracle Records..