Victorious Combinations

 We put out our summer single " Smooth Sailing " on July 1st, and have been blessed with many radio plays around Canada, but especially here at home in Vancouver. Thanks to CFRO and CBC for the love!    Smooth Sailing is definitive Combine the Victorious sound. Blending Fleetwood Mac with Sade over a Sting inspired chord progression but somehow ends up sounding even more like us. Daniel Clement  (guitarist) and I became friends in Junior High in White Rock, BC.  Back in 1981 we started rehearsing our band Idle Minx in his family's garage. We know each other quite well and musically even better. The old records we shared as teenagers are the shorthand between us that has become the modern sound of Combine the Victorious.  And with this song, as with so many of our songs, this one was born from another Isabelle Dunlop chorus hook. As soon as she sang that we all knew we had a good song on the line.  Dan's guitar work on this one is lovely. The chorus gu...

 Well we had a decently busy year, with our biggest show to date back in June opening for Images In Vogue and a mini tour to Manitoba in August, three shows in November and hopefully a lot more in 2025.  We've decided to complete writing and recording a batch of new material to combine with a few of our previously released singles to make a full length album. Vinyl is being considered this time, which would be a first for us, as we've really only pressed CDs of our first album The World Over and done very limited runs of CD-Rs for other releases just to promote.  The first of the new songs is now complete with a couple more started in the demo stages. Hopefully we'll have four songs done by New Year's Eve!  Stay tuned and I'll drop previews of the songs on this blog and our soundcloud page. Really want to make as great an album as we can and I'm feeling as though we'll have the material to make it memorable!

 We have two new songs we are finishing off simultaneously. I've mentioned Goodbye Bad Times already but the second song has a working title of Space and Time. Unlike the optimistic hooks of Goodbye Bad Times, Space and Time is an apologetically romantic song. We are opting for a very restrained sound as well, acoustic guitar and piano with Isabelle's voice  Space is Time is a song born of a story. The three of us were inspired by world events and started creating a tale of a forgotten woman, ignored by her husband, potentially a powerful oligarch, or political man. The woman is to be removed from the situation by a hitman. The hitch of course is the hitman falls in love with his target and must resolve his own internal crisis. It's not something we've done before but I am hopeful we can get an animated video to accompany this song. It'd make a nice short movie! We are rehearsing solidly for our upcoming show at the Rickshaw, opening for Images in Vogue. I'm exc...

 Isabelle, Daniel and I have been working on several new songs. The first to be finished is our latest collaboration "Goodbye Bad Times."  We performed it live for the very first time this past Thursday night at The Cascade Room and all were pleasantly surprised at how well it was received!  Once again we've asked our brilliant friend, the artist Robert Edmonds, to create a cover for the song and I'm intrigued to see what it inspires.  This idea was born of a late night jam Isabelle and I had after a band rehearsal night. We'd gone for a late dinner and returned to the studio a bit intoxicated and just started playing around with the instruments We sent Dan a voice memo sometime in the wee hours and forgot about it. In his own remarkable fashion Dan then showed up to our next rehearsal with a fully thought out guitar part with changes and chorus ideas. We were working on Danser tout le temps pretty hard at this point so we noted it but set it aside for a month or...

  For the past two years we have been playing music with my long time friend Daniel Clement on guitar. Dan and I have been friends since highschool, and shared our first band together back in the 80's in White Rock, B.C.  After many decades of creating independently we have rejoined forces to enhance the sound of Combine the Victorious. Isabelle and I have been writing together since 2005. We've had several successful song licenses to television and film over the years but we have always remained primarily a studio project. With Dan's addition on guitar our sound is more complete and we feel better represented when we play live. His influence has helped up find faster songs for the repertoire and accelerated the writing and recording process; we already have our next single (Danser Tout le Temps) recorded and ready for mastering and three more tunes are waiting in the wings for us to finish off. It's very fun and exciting. This year we've played more live shows th...

 We have been recording a new single this past month. It is a funny one that emerged quite naturally right before a rehearsal. I had been sorting through my overly large and needlessly over complicated Ableton Live set and hit a wrong scene and a basic four on the floor kick and hi hat pattern played. The scene had been set at 130 bpm though, which is much faster than most of the songs we play, so it set me to playing a simple octave sequence on A. It had a Kraftwerk-like charm.  When Isabelle and Dan (Daniel Clement is our new guitarist) arrived I played them the core elements and Dan quickly came up with the arpeggio guitar part, which later came to define the chorus. Isabelle left the room momentarily but when she returned she was singing in French! Why? dunno, but it all felt right. Danser tout le Temps was born! We jammed on it for a few rehearsals and even tried a super loose version of it at our last Cascade Room gig.  It wasn't fully realized at that point though...

 2022 has been a prolific year for us, I think the reality of Isabelle's recent health issue has really put us in the mindset to focus in on what counts. And it seems that music is essential to both of us!  At the start of 2021 I took over the former studio of Ryan Dahle in the East Van Song City building. I spent all my free time last year in the studio working on ideas. We have now been choosing from those songs and finalizing them. We Are Not Alone was the first one we finished because that one was almost the last song we wrote.  Crazy Story was the last song we wrote and it came together almost instantly, however it did take me months to figure out a part and learn how to tune a piano! The next song we're putting out is titled Rushes Over Me and is another from the group of songs we started last year. I pursued a series of trip hop type experiments and really invested into that darker groovy sound. Rushes Over Me started from a field recording of the air conditioni...

      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...

When we were writing Autonomous there were several different directions and ideas that were tried over the past year and a half.   Even though some of the songs were re-workings of older songs ( It's Still On is a remixed, re-recorded version of our song Please from the Disagreements ep - 2008) a few of the songs happened all at the last minute.   Happy Girl was one of them. Happy Girl was born of a drum track.  My old friend Leigh Grant did us a big favour and came into the city to track drums on a couple songs, and a few ideas we had.  Back in the Spring of 2014 we had him come in to record at Valt Studio, Jordy's downtown production space.  It was hardly a massive room, and the equipment was simple and effective, but we ended up with a lot of great stuff!  It was during this session we recorded the drum tracks to Hardly Spoken, Happy Girl, and two others that didn't make the album but may still be used one day! Originally I had Leigh track drums...

Autonomous by Combine the Victorious We had a lot of fun recording this song.  It began very close to the end of the recording sessions.  Most of the album had been figured out, recorded, arragned, even pretty close to mixed.  In listening we both thought there could be another moment, something a bit more ambient, so I started messing around with ideas. Recharge was born of a cheeky inspired thought: what if I recycled a drum track from our debut album " The World Over ."   We cut the drums for that album at Mushroom studio, with both Jonas Fairly and Jesse Smith covering the drumming duties.  For Recharge it was Jesse's drum track from our song " For the Glory " that I used as the basis for the track.  However, unlike The World Over, where we'd been making a huge bombastic, large room, lots of tracks kind of record, on Autonomous we wanted to make a dance record so that fantastic live room had to be tamed.  (Kudo's to Shawn Penner for his excell...

Here's another new song from our forth-coming Autonomous album.  This one is sequenced as the album's closing track, a sweet way to say goodbye (before starting the whole thing over again!). We started writing Stop Givin Up On Love over four years ago.  It was titled If Not Love and was much slower, with a completely different chorus.  However the story behind the lyrics has remained pretty much  the same.  It's a song I wrote initially about my brother, who was going through a very rough patch, and in it's initial iteration was very slow and a little depressing sounding.  We put it away and hardly gave it a thought for years.  It was written in the same weekend as our song California, which also started out much slower than it's ended up. At around xmas last year I was going though all the various songs that we'd sketched, recorded, or finished, trying to get a feel for what was going to make up our album.   Because I've started writing an...

 “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've been busy with so many projects as well as putting our live show together for the 29th, but I found some time to get back to a new song we are recording.  This one features Jesse Smith on drums, Stefan Sigerson on bass and Don Harrison on guitar and I must say it's turning out DANCEY!  Wow what a great combination of players.  This is just me starting to create the mix, but it's already pretty astounding.  Check it out. Working on new @combo nethevictorious #recharge love #stefansigerson on #bass and #donharrison on #guitar super #dancey! A video posted by Mark Henning (@boutiqueempire) on Apr 23, 2015 at 6:46pm PDT

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

Well, we've been working for months now and the album is finally taking shape!  So far we've decided on at least seven songs that will be for the vinyl version.  They are in no particular order: Stand in Front of Tanks It's Still On Hardly Spoken Caught Up to You California'15 Best Tonight Real Life Turns Me On Some of these songs we've written on our own but several have been collaborations with old friends and new.  We can list Ingrid Schroeder, Barry Flynn, Stefan Sigerson, Jordy Birch, Justin "Juice" Kadis, Misty Reid, Leigh Grant, Don Harrison amongst our writing partnerson this album.  It's been really interesting comparing the results of each collaboration, as the songs are all playing together quite nicely. I think we still have a couple really long and hard vocal sessions for the rest of the material we're considering, and there are still so many ideas that we've started in the past that have only reached an ver...

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 ...

Just a quick note today to mark more progress on the album.  We recently rediscovered a song that we'd started in 2011 and have now brought it up to date:  the sample above is a work in progress and just the chorus hook to our new song Stop Givin Up on Love. This song was originally titled If Not Love and was almost a dirge on its first iteration.  However after several years, a lot of development, many DJ gigs and the rest of the album taking a more progressive shape it has morphed into the cheery hook that you can hear above.  Isabelle's voice sounds great on the harmony part and now I need to get  the verse vocals down so I can pass it over to Don Harrison to add some inspiring guitars!  Certainly it runs a counterpoint to the electronic muscle of Stand in Front of Tanks. It's taking us a long long time to complete our new album but everything is sounding better than we've done before so I suspect the process has required the time and we've nee...

I know it's been a while since we'e posted anything on this blog, and I apologize for the delay.  After we got back from Scotland things have just been constantly busy! However, we have a the first of the new material finishing up and we've just completed a reworking of an old favourite of ours.  A song we wrote with our friends Barry Flynn and Ingrid Schroeder back in 2008 called Please, now re-titled It's Still On , will soon be up online.  Just putting some finishing touches on the mix.  We 've even approached the mysterious Paul Schroeder (Stones Roses, Verve, Campag Velocet) to do a mix - still waiting on that one! Tomorrow I we'll start letting a few glimpses of the music out again.  It's been a long time and it'll be great to have our new music out there. Thanks for reading. M

I've just spent the past week working on a new song called The Best Tonight .  It was built on the back of another song we wrote last year called Overtime .  Recently we'd cut a version of Overtime with Jordy Birch producing, and even though he pushed us to get a great vocal performance, after the glow of studio excitement faded the song just seemed to lacking something.  The recording was great but the song itself seemed to lack that little spark it needed to make it important. So, while I was attempting to "fix" the original song a new song started to appear from the work, a better song actually.   The Best Tonight is kind of a story song, our story.  It happened quite naturally, and was initially effortless to get down on tape.  However, like so many other tracks in our history, under the sober light of day I felt a bit uncomfortable with the very literal vibe to the lyrics and we set about trying to rewrite them.  It's taken all week but I thin...

Isabelle and I are feverishly working to complete the recording of our next full length album.  So far we've compiled over thirty five different song ideas, but more keep arriving with each session.  This past week we played out first show as a duo since we got back from Europe in 2012.  It went extremely well, though of course the energy was different from when the band performed as a four or five piece.  The extra room sonically allowed us to really explore the electronic side of our sound, and of course inspired another way to present our material. As it looks right now we'll be including a few re-imagined songs from previous releases amid the new material, all to be put onto vinyl for the final release.  We've been speaking with Boutique Empire artists Robert Edmonds about the art work and we're quite excited to see what he creates for the album. So much to do!  Gotta get back into the studio. Thx for reading Mark