So uhh.. I'm in a band too... Links to music are at the bottom of this post; what follows immediately is a short summary of this thing.
Currently Simius is a 3-piece formation playing some sort of rock/grunge/metal/prog crossover or whatever. Classifying music is kinda hard, and it's even harder to classify your own music so that may or may not have been an accurate description. Anyway, we started around 5 years ago, then under the name Devolution. I play guitar, my friend from high school plays bass and sings, and his brother plays the drums. The drummer also did backing vocals but since he's having some health issues related to his lungs I've temporarily taken over those duties. It's going alright, so we'll be trying to incorporate all 3 of us singing soon.
We recently changed our name from Devolution to Simius, because that name was "stolen" from us late 2008 when some Austrian punk band put their songs on iTunes under "our" name. Explanation of the new name is simple as it's basically an extension of Devolution, humankind devolving into monkeys; Simius being Latin for monkey. The monkey might also be an animal associated with arts/creativity or something, I'm not sure.. I always explain it like a completed 'devolution'.
As Devolution we recorded 3 demos/EPs/whatever you want to call them. The first was total crap; poor instruments, recorded 3 songs in a day and the guy who mixed it fucked it up unbelievably. The upside was that it didn't cost us anything, because the guy who "helped" us with the recordings bailed on us 2 times before (so this one was free, as a peace-offering). Anyway, we figured we couldn't do much worse than that so we bought some of our own recording equipment and went to work. The end result was a demo with 2 songs sounding more crisp but still a bit sloppy and very raw, but learning a lot about recording, mixing and whatnot.
So we upgraded some equipment, software, instruments and set out to do an EP with 5 songs. While still on a tight budget we did manage to make something we still enjoy listening to, to this day, despite its imperfections. The cymbals are too present in the mix, and the drums on the whole take up a little too much "space"; rather than only impact peaks it's a band of drums. But hey, for something that's only recorded with a left and right input (all drum mics had to be mixed right there on the mixing table) it doesn't sound half bad. Plus the songs were getting a bit more mature as well.
From there on we wanted to really up the quality (mainly of the drums) so we invested in equipment that would allow us to record all drum sounds separately (and thus be able to mix them after recording, instead of on the spot) as well as some better mics. To test this new equipment we recorded an acoustic single, also because I felt the need to whore my newly acquired Ovation.
This is why we had to change our name, because we intended to put this online for sale. We're currently in the middle of recording a small album containing 7 songs with sexy-sounding drums, I'll start to lay down some guitar tracks somewhere next month. This album to will be sold, but we're intending to have a small number of cd's pressed and such, so that we will have something tangible and sounding nicely too. 
Anyway, blablabla. Music links.
The old 5 track EP can be heard in full on last.fm here. To whore myself, I'm mainly responsible for writing of all the solos (most notably of Mindfuck and Clone) and the full instrumental track Voyage.
The new acoustic single can be heard also on last.fm as well as on myspace. We're still working on a new website of our own (we have one now, but it's not been updated for a year
). These 2 songs will also be up for sale on iTunes in about a month, but they're already available via amazon and a few other webstores (I think napster is one of them). I'll spare you those links as I expect all of you to throw your money at Dev. Consider this as a background story about me (as this is my biggest hobby), and possible a source of entertainment for thine ears.
Thanks for reading (if you got this far). Enjoy the music, and if you don't then I'm sorry for having wasted your time.
Currently Simius is a 3-piece formation playing some sort of rock/grunge/metal/prog crossover or whatever. Classifying music is kinda hard, and it's even harder to classify your own music so that may or may not have been an accurate description. Anyway, we started around 5 years ago, then under the name Devolution. I play guitar, my friend from high school plays bass and sings, and his brother plays the drums. The drummer also did backing vocals but since he's having some health issues related to his lungs I've temporarily taken over those duties. It's going alright, so we'll be trying to incorporate all 3 of us singing soon.
We recently changed our name from Devolution to Simius, because that name was "stolen" from us late 2008 when some Austrian punk band put their songs on iTunes under "our" name. Explanation of the new name is simple as it's basically an extension of Devolution, humankind devolving into monkeys; Simius being Latin for monkey. The monkey might also be an animal associated with arts/creativity or something, I'm not sure.. I always explain it like a completed 'devolution'.
As Devolution we recorded 3 demos/EPs/whatever you want to call them. The first was total crap; poor instruments, recorded 3 songs in a day and the guy who mixed it fucked it up unbelievably. The upside was that it didn't cost us anything, because the guy who "helped" us with the recordings bailed on us 2 times before (so this one was free, as a peace-offering). Anyway, we figured we couldn't do much worse than that so we bought some of our own recording equipment and went to work. The end result was a demo with 2 songs sounding more crisp but still a bit sloppy and very raw, but learning a lot about recording, mixing and whatnot.
So we upgraded some equipment, software, instruments and set out to do an EP with 5 songs. While still on a tight budget we did manage to make something we still enjoy listening to, to this day, despite its imperfections. The cymbals are too present in the mix, and the drums on the whole take up a little too much "space"; rather than only impact peaks it's a band of drums. But hey, for something that's only recorded with a left and right input (all drum mics had to be mixed right there on the mixing table) it doesn't sound half bad. Plus the songs were getting a bit more mature as well.
From there on we wanted to really up the quality (mainly of the drums) so we invested in equipment that would allow us to record all drum sounds separately (and thus be able to mix them after recording, instead of on the spot) as well as some better mics. To test this new equipment we recorded an acoustic single, also because I felt the need to whore my newly acquired Ovation.
This is why we had to change our name, because we intended to put this online for sale. We're currently in the middle of recording a small album containing 7 songs with sexy-sounding drums, I'll start to lay down some guitar tracks somewhere next month. This album to will be sold, but we're intending to have a small number of cd's pressed and such, so that we will have something tangible and sounding nicely too. Anyway, blablabla. Music links.
The old 5 track EP can be heard in full on last.fm here. To whore myself, I'm mainly responsible for writing of all the solos (most notably of Mindfuck and Clone) and the full instrumental track Voyage.
The new acoustic single can be heard also on last.fm as well as on myspace. We're still working on a new website of our own (we have one now, but it's not been updated for a year
). These 2 songs will also be up for sale on iTunes in about a month, but they're already available via amazon and a few other webstores (I think napster is one of them). I'll spare you those links as I expect all of you to throw your money at Dev. Consider this as a background story about me (as this is my biggest hobby), and possible a source of entertainment for thine ears.Thanks for reading (if you got this far). Enjoy the music, and if you don't then I'm sorry for having wasted your time.
