andrew booker

Darkroom to play at the Antwerp Loopfest


It's official - we're off to Antwerp this May to play at the Antwerp Loopfest. Or, to give it its full title, the EUROPEAN LIVE LOOPING FESTIVAL ‘09 ANTWERP MAY 30.

The official festival site is here.

Once more we'll be joined by drummer Andrew Booker. Apparently the whole festival is going to be recorded, so watch out for details on that sometime after May 30th, I guess.

See you there!

Os, March 2009

Improvizone at Switch - video

Os and Mike performing with Andrew Booker (drums) and Simon Laffy (bass) at the recent Improvizone gig.


Improvizone at Switch, October 7th 2008 from Andrew Ostler on Vimeo.

os, Oct 2008

SOTNMS - the drummer's perspective

I've just posted a review by a certain Andrew Booker. The attentive will recall that Andrew is the drummer that we recorded for the new album. As he says though, he was adequately uninvolved in the actual process of creating the album that his opinion on it is fairly impartial.

It's a nice review anyway.

os, Oct 2008

Improvizone at the Woodford Festival

Darkroom will effectively be playing at the Woodford Festival on October 7th, as part of Improvizone. We'll be playing with Andrew Booker, the drummer on Some Of These Numbers Mean Something, and bassist Simon Laffy.
More info on the event page on Facebook or the Improvizone site.

os, Sept 2008

Drums!

16th April 2008 saw an unusual (though not unique) event in the Darkroom calendar - a drum recording session. I'd identified a need for some proper, acoustic drums (you know, real things that a real person is beating hell out of, rather than something programmed) on the new album, so we enlisted the fine drummer that is Andrew Booker to help us out. (We've performed with Andy many times recently, both at the Improvizone gigs and the Darkroom one-off at the Green Dragon recently.)

Andy did us proud, recording some excellent grooves for about half a dozen tracks.

For the gear-heads reading: we used four mics in total. Andy's Blue Ball was in the kick drum. The snare was covered by a dynamic mic of some sort, which I think was the rehearsal room's. Probably an SM-57. We had one half of a matched pair of Rode NT5s as a close-ish overhead, somewhere over the hi-hat. For some reason we didn't use the other one of the pair. Finally we had my trusty Rode NT2-A as an other-side-of-the-room overhead-cum-everything mic. We've been able to get a very nice sound in the mix from this, somewhat random and thrown-together, selection.

os, May 2008