Fast Train! New video by Zitter, now available at youTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Zitterswan/videos

Zitter is now on Facebook! C'mon and join us on that retrofuturistic ride!

It looks like we’re going to spend the autumn writing new material. At the same time, we’re taking care of the songs we worked on while we finished off the Quintus disc. The fingers might even find themselves moving in some very familiar ways as well since we even spend some time looking what’s left in the old Zitter archive. The pile of songs being prepared for a new recording session is growing, to say the least. At t his point, the priority is on writing and programming. The intention is to get the actual recording running during the winter months.

Stefan from the Rotten Soulz gang has made a video entitled Dudesons Tribute # !. The music used in the video is the Zitter song is Silent Paintings Speak. Fasten your seatbelts, cause this is breathtaking n‘ crazy stuff!

Check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ZQ-RHTmXs

Now we have found a temporary branch to re-build the Studio Vulture on. With all equipment up n’ running, with the cables in the right sockets, the instruments could be plugged in for a serious recording session, not interrupted by any distracting things like rehearsing, jamming or having fun. With that said, nothing will probably change when it comes to the ordinary Zitter snail pace of putting down tracks on the hard disc. So, it’s still plenty of time to sit back and enjoy the complete Quintus disc by streaming it on Spotify.com.

Quintus is now available on Spotify! Listen to the complete 13 tracks or just your favourite ones! Don't forget to save them in your favourite playlist!

http://www.spotify.com

The complete Quintus disc is now available on Itunes! More on-line alternatives will be added later, if they are not already up n’ running.

Here's the link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/quintus/id381061862

We've had some annoying problems with our previous web hotel. Now we've changed to this web hotel, which will guarantee that everything's working properly in the future. The new address is www.zitter.se. Have a great summer!

Sadly, the wings of the vulture are broken. BG and Fred have decided to close the door to the Vulture Nest. It’s a mutual decision, grounded on some Zitter-related issues as well as issues of a personal nature. The timing could have been better, considering the upcoming release of Quintus. But, that’s how things always have been working in the Vulture Nest! Since there is no schism between the two members, they might be back if the wings are healed right. Meanwhile, if a “fore” is heard, the golf-addicted Fred might materialize. Where to find BG, no one seems to know.

Zitter wish to say a great vulturistic thank you to all who have supported the band through this twelve yearlong light!

The beard album expression gives food for thought. It tickles the nerves, keeping them under constant pressure. The main question is if there is one beard album per band? Having done the bearded beast justice, nothing lies in the way of climbing higher and higher. Is it really so?

Or, is it more likely that one band sticking together long enough will end up with, say, two or three beard albums before they call it a day? One reason to expect this is that you never know when you are recording a beard album. Each album is a potential beard album since it only can turn out to be or not be a beard album in retrospect of what followed on that de-facto unshaved beast. No time to relax. It gets impossible to keep up the work pretending everything works fine. There is always a risk the razor is lost, then you find yourself entangled in some itchy mirror image of what you’re not about anymore. Even though you thought so.

The only way to avoid a beard album seems to be to release a beard album! Then you should be on the right way away from that horrible mistake. Or, is it possible to release two beard albums in a row?! Three?!?!?! That would be something to write home about, letters written from inside the house of the padded walls.

To sum it up, you never know when the beard is growing on your chin. Maybe it’s best never to shave?

The reason the beard album phrase pops up in the Vulture Nest again and again, is simple: we believe we went down in the beard-marsh with the Happy Fools’ Parade disc. The songs on that disc turned out to be long, slow and just a mishmash of different kind of tracks. The co-operation was switch to commands: “Play the song like this!â€쳌

Happy Fools’ Parade turned out to be the alarm clock we needed, the necessary step to define what music and sound Zitter should be about, i.e. what could be heard on Alligator Highway. That was a major step towards what we now have tuned into a vulturistic beak n’ roll machine music. What a relief!

Why the “beard” in the beard album expression? When does the beard grow wild? The play off-beard is what comes to mind. After a long season it’s time to show who is the best. No time for insignificant worldly matters like shaving. Let the beard grow long, wild and out of control! That’s the face of the warrior who shows his/hers determination to crush the last resistance from small annoying ants. Then comes the day when the spaghetti-arms tremble under the weight from the most wanted trophy. Point proven: We are the one! We are the best! We are the bearded gods! If the same logic applies to the beard album, this beard thing must be something very positive indeed.

Maybe the women sport athletes only grow a beard in a symbolic way. But turn the clock a century back and there they are; the bearded women travelling the world! These poor women treated like beasts, the “mistake of nature”, the nightmare come true, the missing link between the humans and the wild beasts. Freak shows, circus companies and other “scientific” amusement parks earned a nickel or two exploiting these priceless women, or creatures as they would have been called in their heyday. Them being something for the world to stare at, point fingers at and laugh at. Then comes the final proof of the abnormality of the bearded women, the spectators mimic what is spelled out as the a-b-n-o-r-m-a-l to prove themselves normal. So that’s what should be done when listening to a beard album?

Or, is it a transitional state of mind? First, you go back to a caveman lifestyle without a razor or a shaving machine in sight, then you return like a new shaved god from outer space, proclaiming the arrival of the future? Somehow the beard album is a turning stone, be it symbolic or the real thing.

Perhaps it’s just about the goat, the goat, the goat.

I don’t even know if it is an expression. Maybe it was just something being said once and then it fell into oblivion. If it is a well-known expression, I don’t have a clue who coined it. All I know is where I read the phrase and who was being quoted as using it. I haven’t read nor heard it since then. The exception being when it pops up in conversations in the Vulture Nest. At times, it has been used quite frequently there.

The expression in question appeared years ago in an interview with the ‘copters chief captain Andersson. He referred to one of their albums as a “skäggplatta”. In a word-by-word translation, that would be “a beard album”. A beard album is not a great album; it’s not even a good one. On the contrary, it’s an album you need to get out of your system even though you know it’s going to be a total disaster-kind-of-an-album from an artistic point of view. Not that I believe the ‘copters ever did such an album, but anyway, it was in this context I stumbled across the expression.

The beard album is a necessary step to reach higher grounds. It is the stone turned away and used to build a tower, which is going to help you climb some inches, metres or miles closer to the stars. The beard album is never such a thing during the rehearsals and recording of it. It needs time and more time to show its real hairiness. The curtain falls on the same day as the follow-up album is unpacked in the record stores. This album is the one that defines what the band really is supposed to be all about, i.e. something very, very opposite to what could be heard on the beard album. But without the beard album, no chance of getting all things together for the real stuff. With that said, it’s quite obvious everyone must love to make a beard album as soon as possible! Unless it has already been achieved.

We didn’t know it when we did it, but it turned out to be just that; our last rehearsal.
When we turned off our amps last Thursday, we thought we’d finished just another rehearsal. And so it was until an SMS conversation Friday night turned it into a last rehearsal. Saturday was a hard days work moving our stuff out from the ol’ Vulture Nest into the new one. No, it wasn’t a move to the other side of town, just a matter of switching rooms with our neighbours. Still, it took us all Saturday and Monday to get all the gear up n’ running again. And what a change it turned out to be! Shoulder to shoulder in a much smaller room, we almost got blown away when we turned up the volume on the amps n’ the PA. We might never have sounded that loud n’ clear ever! Moving on might just be the inspiration needed to hatch some more golden eggs in the Vulture Nest.

Two major decisions have been made concerning the release of Quintus. It will be released by Vulture Nest in cooperation with Serpentine Music. The mastering will be done by Mastering Studio. No date is set for the release, but it will out before the sunny days turns into the holidays.

The silence form the Vulture nest is not due to inactivity. On the contrary, we have been busy like a swarm of angry bees. That much said, nothing more will be revealed at this time, except that we dug into the memory box and found four new stories ‘bout some ol’ songs from the Happy Fool’s Parade disc. Pop over to the home page n’ read some thoughts ‘bout those ol’ tunes Childhood Days, Hey, How n’ Right Or Wrong.

Not that Fred and I jump into crazy jam sessions often; actually that kind of business is very rare. The number of songs we have written together, being under the same roof, is very few. To be honest, I don’t think we ever have written an entire song together. The riffs and loose ideas we have come up with n’ worked on in the Vulture nest have always been taken care of by anyone of us, thus never ending up as a joint effort. Will this also be the case with this new one we came up with this Tuesday and continued working on today?

Yes, we have tuned into a songwriting mode this week. When we played Judas Was A Saint n’ a few other songs in drop D tuning, we came up with at killer riff we just hade to continue working on. It felt like being the best riff ever, just like all new songs n’ riffs feels when they are new.

So, we played the riff over n’ over n’ again for hours until it developed into a song only missing the most important part: the refrain. Ideas have been tossed around, but not any have fitted the rest of the song quite the way it could n’ should. Maybe that will happen on Saturday?

The fact that we have written something together makes this one a special one to us. If it survives and ends up somewhere in the future is impossible to tell. Maybe it turns out being one of those songs that felt like being the best ones written in the 21st century, but ending up as nothing but a constructive waste of time?

I didn?t know we had a manager, but we obviously must have had since we just sacked her. During her ten-year regime she managed to get us one gig, one rotation of Red House n? Naked on a local student radio station and landed us exactly zero record deals. When she captured one of our few shows on videotape, she found it more interesting to film some people in the audience than the guys on stage. When we gave her a badge with the Zitter logo, she wore it on her backpack for one week before it ?fell off?. Then she finally told us, straight to the face: ?Your music suck.? That one hurt. But we are appreciating her as much as we possible can anyway. We must, since Fred is happily married to her. Merry X-mas!

The last two weeks have been a lil’ strange. First we had to change our rehearsal day from Tuesdays to Mondays. This turned the week a lil’ upside down even though we rehearsed on Mondays some years ago. The first Monday we left the building, we had to say hallo to a band we hadn’t seen in years. They seemed a bit surprised, probably thinking we had quit long ago. They can keep on dreaming.
But the strangest feeling came today when we strapped on our guitars and turned on the amps. The inspiration from this week’s concerts with Ace and the Wildhearts respectively might have been pumping in our veins, but most importantly; the first mix of the Quintus disc is done. That had to be celebrated in some way, actually with playing all songs written during the work with the Quintus disc. Indeed it is a strange way of working, but it’s the Zitter way of doing things.

The second episode of the Hard Steel comedy by Rotten Soulz is out! It is as crazy as the first one. Episode 2 n' the bloopers contains excerpts from Red House, God Of Wine n' Side By Side.