Heart Monitor

Heart Monitor turns 10 today.

It was a little glitchy electronica thing originally, and had a weird time signature as the organ part stretched over 6 bars and not 4 like it does in the finished version. It was also an instrumental, and went through about 6 or 7 different versions before we settled on the one we released.

Anyway, it missed the boat to be included on Arrivals, the debut satan album, released about 6 months previously, so we hit on the idea to release it as a single. With that came the decision, in lieu of any other material to go with it, that we'd stretch it out and include an intro and an outro as seperate parts of the same big thing. Then we asked our buddies her.eyes.like_static (then comprised of Russell.M.Harmon and Jon Baker) to remix it.

We bundled it all together, and made up some fancy packages, and then that was that! We took it on tour around Europe and sold out fairly quickly I seem to remember. A year later, it was re-issued on lovely blood red vinyl by German label Denovali, and another remix popped up, this time from Greek sound designer and electronica artist Dalot.

A decade on, I decided to do what we did with Arrivals last year, for that album's 10 year birthday: take the stems and make something new out of it. So, earlier this year, I found a zip file of remix stems, and also found old folders still on my laptop with the vocals in, and got to work. 'HM 10' is a more ambient re-imagining of the title track, and also features something that was inexplicably cut out of the original back then: Chantal Acda's vocals. The track already had our old friend and collaborator Gregory Hoepffner as a lead vocalist, but the plan was to have Chantal to act as a more restrained counterpoint to Greg's epic screams. I've no idea why they were left off, as they're really good - her breathy coo is just lovely, listening back, and so perhaps it was a production decision rather than anything else. It's nice to resurrect something that got lost all that time ago though, so here it is: the expanded edition of Heart Monitor, including HM 10: