Victorious Combinations

This is just a quick note to talk about the progress we've been making on our next full length album. We've been releasing singles for the past few years in attempt to get the algorithm going on the streaming sites and for a bit it has seemed to work. However we, Daniel, Isabelle and I, all feel like its time to collect a few of our favorite songs and add them to the growing pile of completed new tracks to bind them together into a new album.  We have four completely new songs never released and are working hard on finished a pair of freshly started tracks. It is our intention to grab just a few of the songs we've released over the past three years to complete the music journey. I confess it is rather excited to have so much new material and all of it is sounded quite great - plus I've made a handful of updated mixes from our other repertoire that will someday become B-sides or part of an EP in the future. As always we shall be giving our previews of tracks on our bandc...

  We are excited to be playing The Painted Ship in the heart of Kitsalano, Vancouver. This will be our first time performing in the Painted Ship but we hope it will be a place we can return to over the next year or so.  2884 West Broadway Show starts at 9PM until 11PM.  Just Combine the Victorious on the bill with several brand new songs to play as well as our favorites from the past.

 Excited to share the MetronomiX remix of Glasgow this week. On Friday we'll drop it on all the streaming sites. You can listen today on Bandcamp if you'd like. Glasgow - MetronomiX Remix by Combine the Victorious

      At the beginning of 2021 I took over Ryan Dahle's studio in the Song City building here in Vancouver. As one of the tasks I set for myself Isabelle and I recorded the following song, "The Love Ballad". We had collaborated and written this song for another person to sing back in 2018 but that fell through so the song just kinda sat on a hard drive for the past years. Then, while we were in Hipposonic Studio this past summer (thanks again for the great session Rob Darch!) Isabelle suggested we try tracking drums and other instruments on the demo. In the fast paced session we blasted through 6 songs (including the ballad) and then took everything home to discover what we'd captured.  After much reflection I decided the version we'd recorded was not the version I wanted to present to the world. Nothing wrong with any of the parts we'd tracks individually but the song didn't sound like our own yet. So over the xmas season Isabelle and I rehea...

 We are really pleased to release our song "What's Going on in Your Head," this week. It has been a long journey to arrive at this release, starting from the Los Angeles living room of friend and producer Stefan Sigerson, to making the song fully twice over. The initial version took on a more full band sound, with live drums and electric guitar and rhodes piano in addition to our usual electronics. However, even after making a final mix and having it mastered we never felt the song connected properly.  So even though we'd spent almost two years attempting to perfect that version I finally decided to scrap it and start over. Taking the drum stem from the original version we imported that into Abelton Live and build an entirely new song. This time instead of quoting so directly from the trip hop influences of Portishead and Massive Attack we took it more minimal and created a new synth driven riff to centre the song to. You can hear it in the intro, the icy slightly dis...

 We are beginning to release the new songs we've been working on this year. The first is a song that had its initial seed planted in Los Angeles back in 2016! What's Going on In Your Head has been around for a few years now but we've never felt we had the definitive version until now. This new track is a complete reworking of our earlier version with ever element rethought, re-sung, re-played and rearranged. I think I can speak for both of us when i say we are finally happy with it! A dark and brooding trip -hop style song in the manner of Portishead, What's Going On In Your Head is a delicate balance of melancholy, melody and menace.  Release date is December 10th 2020.  Video and single release, worldwide though Boutique Empire. 

We are excited to finally release a new song.  We wrote this one over the summer, it was born from the cowbell pattern we'd originally written for another song.  That one kinda ran out of steam and was abandoned. The Bolsheviks was created after Isabelle suggested muting the guitar parts on the other track.  Suddenly everything opened up and we had a fresh idea.  I was just fooling around with a keyboard line and the melody instantly came out. At that point we both knew the old idea was done and a completely new song idea was in its place. Lyrically it's an interesting combination between us, with Isabelle handling the refrain and me taking on the bridge.  We've played at this kind of thing before but it was a lot of fun to come up with the "Dont" section.  Maybe it's my subconscious trying to encapsulate the world of facebook and social media in a song; or maybe not. Anyway, very pleased to share this today.  It feels like a fresh start for Co...

We are stoked to announce this remix of our song "Real Life Turns Me On."  Produced and mixed by none other than Ben " Kreap " Crea from Melbourne, Australia, this is possible the best track we've ever had the pleasure of being part of.  A disco masterpiece that is now be offered by the fine people of Dance and Rave.com .   Have a listen, have a dance and put it on repeat!  This one is a killer!

We are really excited about a couple new videos that are being made concurrently.  One is still being developed and we're hoping we can secure some grant money to finish it, and the other is almost ready for airing.  So, rather than tease you with details about the former (we will admit it's for our song Best Tonight ), we shall let out some information about that latter video: Glasgow (live @FoxCabaret). A few weeks back Isabelle and I were going through some of our new ideas and I came across a folder containing footage from a live show we had performed at the Fox Cabaret .  When we had a look at it we were both really impressed with how great the raw footage was!  Big thanks once again to Benn McGuire and Mike Love for their great camera work, it was a real treat to rediscover it.  We'd performed a short opening set that night, only five songs, and Glasgow was right in the middle of the set.   I was inspired enough to take on the...

We are pleased to announce the official release date for our new full length album AUTONOMOUS is set at September 14th 2015.   Below is a playlist of about half of the songs we've uploaded onto Soundcloud, have a listen and please feel free to share!

We present our late addition to the album " Encryption ".   Just finished this one over the weekend and created the cubist video from some cool live footage our friend, the great and creative Stefan Sigerson, shot last March at a live show. This one fills in the gaps between the more pop songs on Autonomous , such as Stop Givin Up On Love and the deeper dance tracks like Stand In Front of Tanks .  Kind of a spy music track.

 “Caught Up to You”                             How’s She know what’s going on in my head                             What did she mean by those words?                                 Was it the fight that made it alright or is it in all of us?                                                          You play with my emotions like it’s a joke that I care                              But me without my senses, there’s nobody there.                             ...

We are excited to share the first track from the new album " Autonomous " - Real Life Turns Me On .   Started back in 2013, it's a song that has evolved thru several different versions until it arrived at this master. Our good friend Stefan Sigerson was instrumental in bringing this track to life, he was there right at the beginning and played both the bassline, and the disco guitar as well as adding the piano breakdown all on the first night.  It then kind of sat on the hard drives for a while before we revisited it.  At the time we were exploring a different direction but over the course of the year we kept coming back to Real Life and adding things, subtracking others, and finally hit on the robotic vocal effect that runs through out when we figured we had something cool. Sometime in 2013/14 we ran the track past Juice while he was still in Vancouver and playing with us, and he laid down the lead guitar you can hear on the song.   I think it adds a nice counte...

We are getting closer and closer to finally finishing our new album.  Back on my birthday we had a listen through to nine out of the ten songs that'll be on the collection.  This little instagram clip is a tiny section from one of the last songs we'll be finishing, Recharge .  You can hear the guitar playing of our friend Don Harrison over the repurposed drumming of Jesse Smith (I grabbed song of his drumming from a song off our debut album The World Over and built a new groove over top).   It's quite an ambient and funky thing we've created and should fit in nicely between the more traditional dance rock tracks and the electro-disco vibe of the others.  Check out it. A video posted by Mark Henning (@boutiqueempire) on Mar 19, 2015 at 9:45pm PDT

Working on another new song today, one we started in January titled either Humanity or Illuminaut.  Not sure yet.  Anyway, we've had the pleasure of Don Harrison do a very effective guitar part on this song so it's starting to sound really good.  I was attempting to build a more dynamic lift for the chorus and just spent a few hours messing around with a few different synths before finding a good part. This afternoon I dialled in a really nice wide lead synth sound on my novation and suddenly this very Simple Minds - Sons and Fascination era part came thru my hands.  It occurred to me that over the decades I've probably referenced the album and more specifically Mick MacNeil' s keyboard playing hundred of times.  What a great player; some of his parts were so simple to play but they would expand a chorus or bridge way more than the guitar could.  I have always enjoyed the way he could layer sounds or add effects, usually a quick sixteenth note delay or ...

We will be performing live at The Reef, 4172 Main St, Vancouver, this coming Sunday, November 9th and the second Sunday of each month following.  We're going to be trying out new songs, as well as reworking tracks from our last releases.  Come in out of the rain and warm up at with us as we prepare songs for our next album.  It's a great vibe.

Our new track - It's Still On - has a long history.  We initially wrote and recorded a version for our second release, the Disagreements EP.   It was an ok recording but really in retrospect I always heard it as a demo rather than a finished record.  We'd shared the writing with our pals Barry Flynn and Ingrid Schroeder and it was an exciting moment.  However, the years rolled by and the song started to feel forgotten. We were considering tunes to play for Isabelle's parents Golden Anniversary, and, because there was going to be a piano at the party, I recalled our old song Please .  It was written around a completely free form piano part, with wildly varying tempos and time signatures, very romantic.  Isabelle and I began rehearsing for Scotland and after the first time we tried it just with piano for accompaniment we both felt the excitement again. While over in Scotland, we had the pleasure of driving up through the Highlands and had a brilliant vis...

We are really excited to be playing the Fox Cabaret this Thursday night.  We'll be opening the night for headliners Sex With Strangers album release party.  Also on the bill is a favourite band of ours ACTORS and War Baby.  2321 Main Street, doors at 8.  Combine the Victorious is on a 8:30, plus it is a FREE SHOW!  So there are no reasons not to attend.  It will be a great night of music, without a doubt. Isabelle and I are keen to try out a brand new song for this show.  We both feel as though it might be the first single from our next album and there's nothing like playing a song live to get a feeling for how it works.  Of course we'll also be performing some of our strongest songs off the Crumbling Hearts ep as well, though we've given each of them a little special update to make everything feel fresh and exciting. If you are reading this and possess a camera capable of taking decent video footage we'd love for you to come down and film the...

Juice has been editing some nice footage from a recent rehearsal and put this together.  The new five piece band has so much energy, and the sound is nicely rounded out, it's hard to remember when Isabelle and I were doing this as just a duo! Check out the clip, we are playing Glasgow with Leigh Grant (former drummer of Pure) on the drum kit, Juice on guitar, Misty and Isabelle handling the singing and me on keys.  The new band is amazing.  Our show last night at VALT2013 was a tonne of fun, and we reportedly have sounded incredible!  Got to find some footage from the night to share. In the mean time please check out this clip: