In this post I’ll cover the Descent Into Madness’ Blindfold EP, released back in 2012. The EP consists of three songs: the title track, To Each His Own, and World Undoing.


The Writing

Back in 2006, I think, while I was gone to Brazil for a month, Alex worked on two new songs (which later became Century of Lies and Chains of Cruelty, but I’ll save those to other posts). When I was back in town, there were many riffs for me to learn. Later that year, Alex was gone to Bulgaria for a month, so it was payback time: I wrote the three songs on this EP!!

We always give codenames to new songs, so we don’t have to call them "new 1", "new 2", etc. The codenames are usually something that have nothing to do with the music itself. Here are the codenames for these songs:

Blindfold = UFO
To Each His Own = Dark Forest
World Undoing = Dump Truck

The Recording

We have played these three songs at rehearsal for a couple of years. We even played two of them (To Each His Own and Blindfold) a couple of times live. However, we were unable to get it properly recorded as a band. When we were short of both a drummer and a bassist, we decided to record the songs as well as we could. Alex recorded the bass guitar, and we hired Marc Norgaard to lay down the drum tracks. We had worked with Marc on one song before and were happy with the results, so we figured we could do that again.

With a click-track created, I recorded a guide guitar track, which we sent off to Marc, along some room recordings we had playing the songs as a band. Marc sent us his first shot at each song, we shoot back some changes we’d like to see, and after 2 or 3 rounds of going back and forth we reached the best results we thought we could with this type of set up.

The main problem of working remotely with a hired musician like this is that we lose the chemistry of all people working in the same room. That being said, Marc did a great job, even more so considering this is not even his main style of music. As with our previous experience, he was very easy to work with.

Most of the guitars were recorded at Alex’s home studio. At the time I had just finished building a new computer and getting me some gear that would allow me to do some recording, and I was able to record my guitar solos back at my home studio. I think those are the best leads I recorded up to that point.

The Artwork

The artwork for this EP is centered around the title-track, Blindfold. I’ll talk about it in another post, after I’ve talked about the song itself.

The Tracks

I’ll be writing individual posts to talk about each song in this release, and I’ll make sure to include some room recording versions, as well as live versions.