end of the line.

antares have split up.

After four and a half years of fun we’ve decided to call it a day. There’s no cool story or major drama behind it, in fact the reasons are pretty dull. Doing this band has never been easy, from our conflicting working hours (myself and Jamie work regular office hours, Calvin lives a student life, Danny does grafting shift-work and Theo works retail!) to the different things we’ve all got going on in our lives. And after years of labouring the required efforts, it’s become something we’ve no longer got the energy to do.

We’ve not always been note-perfect, in fact we’ve had some shocking moments, but we’ve never not given it our all and hopefully the better gigs will stick in people’s minds.

Thanks to everyone who’s made the things we’ve done possible. Jason Sanderson was the common denominator that helped bring this band together, gave us our home to practice in & make unbearable noise and then spent insane hours producing our recorded output. Alex and Ellen at Holy Roar Records helped make the crazy things happen, like playing Offset Festival, having actual releases out and many other helpful nudges.

There’s a huge amount of names who’ve helped us in a massive variety of ways, from Luke for the web design/hosting, Paulie P for all those essential early gigs, Scott for driving as well as coming along to loads of gigs..too many names, so we won’t go into it! Lisa for the EP design, Dan with the van for being the man, Mr Tilt for the nice words..the list could go on all night. At least we’re bowing out alongside our brothers The Plight, Lavotchkin, Cyvoid and End to Empire, who've also passed on recently.

I’ll put out an update across the antares channels if any ex-member bands do anything worth shouting about, but other than that all that remains to be said is thanks for taking an interest in us! Not many people seemed to notice us, and that was probably mainly our fault, but we’ve all had a blast rockin this silliness for as long as we did.

Oh, and just in case you never got them before, our songs can all be downloaded FREE from HERE!

Anyone need a vocalist?

Steve

designdesigndesign

ideas don't have a very long shelf-life in my mind, so unfortunately if things don't get nailed super-quickly they have a habit of disappearing into piles of paper in the corner of my room...the two latest creations took differing stances on this argument but i'm pleased to say that weeks down the line i'm still pretty damn chuffed with my handy-work. here's how they both came about...

as detailed below in the initial plan for the inlay, I had an A3 sheet of space to play with and a vague idea of what I had in mind. i was still feeling love for the "triangles" logo, so pushed the boat out with regards to drawing this out in that arduous style also detailed below. the idea for this inlay is that i draw it all out on A3 and can then just easily copy it myself on any old photocopier - keep it simple, keep computers Out of it!! of course, this means that the previously drawn-out "triangles" logo in the previous blog entry wasn't useable, needed to be done out again. this took fucking hours. well, maybe 3 or 4.



as previously detailed, I used a lamp and a sheet of glass to drawn over a projected outline, but this time didn't outline the actual finished work as decided that felt stifling in the design





i'd worked out the folds and roughly where everything was going to sit, so was fucking rad to see the big ole logo in pride of place atop the A3 sheet waiting for its content to be filled in...



toyed with the idea of switching pens, compared a few, but stuck with the Mitsubishi Jetstream i'd used thus far



i've always loved using my typewriter for inlays, especially for lyric sheets, but for this I was wanting to challenge myself and try something a bit new to me so decided to trace out the lyrics from a typewriter'd source. if i'd have done this with my head firmly screwed on i'd have no doubt used some lined paper to make sure these words were all put in straight, but...yeah...so that was an interesting part of the project, and the wavey left-hand margin was an adaptation after i saw i was screwing the damn thing up!



as i said above, after the initial explotion of momentum the energies start to wane, but for whatever reason i managed to bring myself back to it across a month..probably because it was sat in my livingroom taunting me as the unfinished challenge the whole time!



and after the masses of effort getting the sheet to this stage, it was weird then just simply being able to duplicate the whole thing at the push of a button and having multiples of this headfuck...



So, inlay drawn out, the next stage was to sort a back-print. as below, i'd initially thought about a big live photo, nice and easy solution, but the kid who's pictures i wanted to use didn't get back to me, and by that time i was already more siked on using multiple pics across the back, 18 or so...this proved a headache for my technological limitations (crappy office computer and MS Paint!!), so decided to go with a modified version of the "dots" shirt design, which was by this time now sorted...some printing jiggery-pokery later and BAM i've got myself an inlay! there was lots more tiny incidental stuff along the way, but without waffling too much (!) that's how it was cobbled together. and on some lovely slightly off-white 120gsm card no less. here's the finished thing, got the front-side unfolded on the left, the back-side unfolded on the right and the inlay at various angles!



and by way of stark opposites, this next design was an absolute dream to do, the whole process was so damn easy! it was a doodle that had no intention of being a shirt design, but by the time i'd finished drawing it all out it was fairly obvious it had to go that way..basically, from our "lines" logo i wanted to plot it out via dots on graph paper and play with the idea.





once the rough idea was scribbled down then worked out on the graph paper (best paper in the world!!) a flash of a concept came to me - Repetition!!!



so, back to my tracing technique and across an A3 sheet i drew this out :



it was only once i'd surfaced from the dazed hypnotism of my muse that i realised the design, though rad, wouldn't really work on a shirt due to the proportions involved...some basic computer duplications of parts of the design were made to facilitate its crossing over to the cloth medium, and it was looking better, but still somehow unfinished. a signature at the bottom was something i'd toyed with for another shirt design idea, so decided to try it with this and seemed to be the thing the design needed to pull it together.



took a few attempts (and an embarassing mis-spelling that our lass revelled in!) but got some scrawl i was happy with after a few attempts so scanned and chopped this together...2 days later the damn thing was a real life teeshirt!!



and that's it.....oh, and also the dumb flyers....








buy things from us!!!


http://antares.bigcartel.com/

steve

new design.

once I get the photo's off my camera a full blog on the inlay and shirts design will surface, til then here're pics of the designs I've got on the office computer...

the inlay..this took Bloody ages - the thing was drawn out onto an A3 sheet directly as I didn't have a computer to lay it all out on, the main logo at the top took 3hrs+, no idea how long the rest of it took but was started at 7pm on 6th April and finished at 12midnight on 5th May..the text was typed up on my typewriter then I traced the text through onto the A3 sheet and sorta laid it out by eye. nothing was measured out before-hand, so was a bit hairy at times, but overall I'm happy with how it's turned out. the reverse print is the "dots" shirt design, but an expanded pattern to fill the sheet (the design as it is on the shirt was too small for this reverse-area) and the inlay is printed on a slightly off-white 120gsm card..folds down to a 6-panel fold-out




the shirt..in stark contrast, this one was a breeze of a design to get knocked together. The concept came to me in a flash at 7pm, and by 9pm the whole damn thing was drawn out (again) on an A3 sheet. within 3 days we had the shirt screened. the "enjoy antares" embellishment was added at the final hour as the whole thing just felt incomplete to me. just having "antares" didn't feel right for whatever reason, maybe because it had been said over-and-over-and-over throughout the design I felt it needed a re-phrasing?! who the fuck knows, but think it was a good idea..we've limited numbers of Small and X-Large, slightly more in Large and most in Medium. Heavy Gilden shirts. this is the design :



BUY!
antares.bigcartel.com

steve

i < 3 spreadsheets

Wow, starting to feel like we're a real goddamn band, here's what's shakin..

We're now 3 gigs into having Jamie on-board filling bass duties, and he's fucking Owning it (check the video from that recent Tomassi gig, first few songs of the set and he looks like he might take someones head off with the moves of rock!). Jamie's been a friend of all of ours for many years, I first met him back in 2001 when his band Purple Sticky Punch (later PSP, then Errander..) played Royal Park Cellars and he's been a sterling gent of a dude for as long as I've known him. Oh yeah, and he drives. And he loves Downset and Madball. Lets face it, I'm in love with Jamie Silver..there, feel better now that's out in the open..

Ahem. And another shock revelation - we now have merch! Our friend Tom Pratt of Printshop screenprinters (and We'll Die Smiling) kindly facilitated my want of 30 shirts - a design appeared out of nowhere on Sunday night, and by Wednesday the thing was an actual physical entity. Have re-designed the CDr inlay..was a monolith of a design, took Insane amount of hours (well, maybe 10-ish?) but was fully worth it (well, for me!! blog entries on this and the shirt design soon..), and hopefully people will dig it. Just took receipt of a stack of the Rolo Tomassi split 7"s , so we'll be selling these at gigs from now on, and we've still got pin badges and bottle openers, these we seem to give away...I've also done the original lyric sheet poster on A3 card, in case anyone ever wants it (I think it looks pretty good, but then I would..!) and, well, there's lots of other fun / weird / pointless things but those you have to come to the gig to see..if you're an e-buyer, we now have a Big Cartel page :

antares.bigcartel.com

I've never done one of these before, so we'll see how it goes, but the page is up so can only assume that orders work, you can give me money over the internet....this is a Massively bizarre concept to my backward mind, we'll see....oh, and gigs..

So yeah, we seem to be in the middle of a right great spree of gigs - not that everything before wasn't, but y'know..the Easter Sunday alldayer with Amen Ra and a shit-stack of other awesome bands was one of the best days out we've had in a long time, Rolo Tomassi lent us their fans for one night only the other week so we got to play to a full-ish room of people who might actually dig our sound, so that was a thrilling experience (people danced, they actually danced!!), and the next thing we've got is an alldayer which has this beaut of a flyer attached to it




then this with our awesome friends Lavotchkin, Crocus and Run,Walk! :




..and gigs with Crocus are being sorted for mid-July, these are down South (more info soons....) and....well, there's more but nowt fully sorted yet.

for now, enjoy the first two songs of our most recent set - am starting to think a live stream of future gigs might be something to sort out :



Steve

new inlay, part one

With new songs come new releases, and as we've just had a couple of songs surface on a split 7" I figured it was time to give our self-release inlay a check-out, over-haul and update. With the need for a new inlay (always looking for an excuse!!) fresh in my mind, I happened across a supply of lovely off-white rough feeling A3 paper which set my mind racing to what would be possible with a Huge surface-area of inlay to fill...here's my blank canvas



Straight away, the idea to fill up one side with a live pic, maybe use several different ones at this large size so you don't know what poster you'll get...luckily, we've got a handful of good large-format pics to choose from...MS Paint and a minute of playing and this fella is now one side of my planned inlay :



Next up, the actual work begins! I was still wanting to stick with the previous inlay idea (seen in background on next pic) but crank it up a notch, so in classic texan style I just made it bigger! and in following with the shirt design (http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y9/art_is_ego/goldprint.jpg) I thought I'd try the angular thing again. Got the dimensions sketched out whilst at work, looks like it might be OK, not giving much thought to the content at this stage but have roughly laid out where it'll probably land and this'll probably end up being the overall look :



Now I need to re-do this logo Texan-style! First step is to get the thing drawn to the correct lengths n that, next up I do a rough trace of this..my whole thing with this design (and without wanting to get too pretentious on this!!) was the juxtapose of the precise angular against the more organic elemental sketched style, in the same way my vocals in the band act as the more human element against the almost overly mechanical music..to this end, a sloppy trace (within reason!) isn't to be worried about, but the hand held relatively steady so we were all good there.





And now the part I was dreading, the Real work of the piece...but, no point putting it off, and a few hours later (and a fairly cramped wrist!) I had something I was quite liking..







The next stage is getting the text sorted, then cobbling the whole damn thing together...I think there's about 4 hours of pen-to-paper work in my near future, then we should be done with it so should hopefully have this thing released by the Hull gig next week..we'll see..

spin spin, spin the blue (or clear) circle..

So we can now proudly announce that our next release will be a split 7" with Rolo Tomassi through Holy Roar Records..been sat on it a while cos don't like to count them chickens too early, and we're prone to last-minute disasters! You can get it pre-ordered here now : http://holyroarrecords.com/album.php?id=821
Not yet out for another month though..a choice of either blue or clear vinyl, only 250 copies of each colour so get 'em early.

It's about a month since we recorded and we all seem happy with the songs, now it's just the count-down while I can lay that slab o'wax on the turntable..always sounds best on wax. Still feel too close to the recordings to have an opinion on them, but still feel the vocals are the weak point of it all

Next up, we need to sort more shirts..self-screening was fun but having a decent cache of the bastards, we feel, is the way forward. And with this in mind, a friend of ours has recently started up a screen-printing service, so give his site a check if you're in the market for new band shirts or printed matter : http://thisisprintshop.co.uk/
Will possibly be the same design we've been peddling thus far, though might be something else..we'll see.

And on the gig-front, we're off upto Glasgow for Saturday 9th April, hopefully Newcastle the night before and triple-fingers-crossed, both will be with our brothers Galleons. Talk of more gigs in Leeds, Cardiff, Barnsley and one booked for Sheffield, think we might be over the dry spell! Oh, and hopefully a return to Hull soon.

That's it...be sure to add the Twitter if that's how you roll - antaresfilth - is mostly updated by me whilst at work, is hopefully relevant to band stuffs though!

catcha, Steve

split seven inch release

Jase has done his magic with the mixing, we've asked for our respective changes to the mix and the tracks have been sent over the interweb to label bossman, now we just wait...I feel like maybe I could've spent a bit more time on the vocals, they sound rushed to my ear, but everything else sounds bloodygreat. guessing that the release might be ready for mid-March..