We’ve generally been of the opinion, at odds with much of the wider a cappella community, that we want to sound exactly like we do on stage on our recordings. However, many of us have being doing this for a long time – for me it’s been 12 years, and In the Smoke has now been going for almost 8 years (a good chunk of us have been there from the beginning) and in that time have recorded 4 CDs.

So, we thought, why not give a more technological approach a try? This time we recorded people’s voices one at a time, carefully edited and tidied up each layer of the texture, and spent a good bit of time mixing it – with all of the production toys such as EQ, reverb, compression and a teeny-tiny touch of autotune (but only for creative effect of course).

Some things to note:

• This is Nine Inch Nails – we deliberately didn’t go for an ABBA classic for this – we wanted the music to be intricately constructed and a little dark, to help fire our imaginations
• At the time of writing there are 17 people in In the Smoke, and all of their voices feature – it’s going to sound dense (and intense) at times!

The song starts with an gradually building and thickening intro, which cleverly moves from 3 to 4 in a bar, then it kicks into 2 verses, punctuated with the refrain ‘tried to save myself…’, which pervades the texture throughout in one way or another.

Then into the second half it breaks down to some quiet sustained chords before swelling into a chaotic, cacophonous section which hurtles towards the final iteration of the refrain.

You won’t get Pentatonix recording a version of this – we deliberately set out to try to make something that people haven’t heard before, so open your ears, strap on your headphones, crank up the volume, and enjoy.

– Michael

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, it won’t have escaped you that we’re doing a gig – a Summer Extravaganza, to be precise – THIS Friday 31 July at the Greenwood Theatre in London Bridge (get your tickets here!).

Whilst the programme for this one has already been arranged, rehearsed, memorised, and (almost) polished, the ream of new songs we’ll be airing has left us wondering what our audience (that’s you) would most love to see us perform next.

And that’s where you come in. We want to hear your suggestions, thoughts, feedback and general banter – good or bad: what have you enjoyed seeing us do before; what would you like us to do more, or less, of? Send us a tweet or post to our Facebook page, using the hashtag #WhatIWant, and you could see your message hilariously worked into one of our skits, live on stage…

Get involved:
@inthesmokeuk
https://www.facebook.com/inthesmokeuk

With only a month to go until the Voice Festival Community Competition in Birmingham on 12 April,  we are busily* preparing our highly secret 12-minute set. The ideas for the set ranged far and wide, from offering to do requests (a bit too much like a tightrope act without a safety net – or, frankly, a tightrope), to some sort of Gabarek/Hilliard-esque mashing of Renaissance polyphony and the latest tchoons.

What we’re actually preparing is (of course) a highly guarded secret**, but we can tell you this for now:

• Lizzie plays a sorrowful amnesiac
• James wishes to be visited by circus performers
• Tom G and Daz carry fossil fuel
• Rachel will always have someone with her – even if she wants to go for a windy or rainy stroll in the country

Hope to see you on 2 April in London, and/or on 12 April in Birmingham.

* Within the confines of our normal weekly 2-hour rehearsals, plus a bit of solo notelearning.  We wouldn’t want you to think we were trying too hard ….
** Not actually that highly guarded. You can come along to our 2 April preview gig if you want to see how it will go (see blog posts below).