Darkness
Last update: 12th September 2005
Previous Titles
House In The Woods
Notes
The Virgin press release says that "you are drawn into 'the house in the woods', where the fears and imagination of childhood are explored and gradually accepted."
Richard Chappell on the production, "The quiet pulsey sound right at the beginning is a triggered keyboard sound. It's a gated treatment
that's running along triggered by a groove, and then we cut it in and out and laid it at the front of the track. The
aggressive, loud noise that comes in is actually a conga going through a distortion box. It's all drums and percussion,
although there's a guitar underneath it as well. We used the Jam Man for the distortion, and there are a lot of percussion
loops on that track created with percussionist Mahut Dominique. The distortion on Peter's vocal is a combination of the
Sansamp and a Line 6 plug-in. It wasn't added in the mix, we always had the vocal like that."
Richard Chappell on why the album opens with this track, "Peter has been asked that question quite a lot. We played with the
running order a lot, and we always kept coming back to this track as the first track. It is one of the first tracks that we
finished, and it was one of the easiest we worked on, to get it right. It just has so much muscle and it seemed like a fun
idea to have the quiet intro and then the loud assault. Some people have actually broken their hi-fi because of it. A few
people became quite upset during the discussions about the running order, but Peter wanted to come back and show some
strength. I really respect that."
Peter's Comments
"The song was going to be called 'House in Woods'. In the woods where I was growing up, there was an old lady who lived there, and she had newspaper all over her windows, and we were terrified of her...She seemed like a witch to us small boys. Of course it was ridiculous, but at the time it was very real."