Victorious Combinations

We are pleased to present the official video for our song Best Tonight , directed by Wayne Hoecherl, and featuring dancer Taya Morrow. Filmed on a cold February evening in an underpass beneath the No. 1 Highway in N. Van, we had a very fun shoot with Wayne and his crew of Dan Kozma and Chris Hooper.   Wayne had a concept to utilize the the underpass which he discovered working on a television series earlier that season.  I think the final result is quite striking.  Big thanks to everyone involved in this project! Best Tonight Director: Wayne Hoecherl Camera and editng: Dan Kozma Key Grip: Chris Hooper Dancer: Taya Morrow Hair and Make: Charlene Santaga for Bambu Salon Fashion stying by Isabelle Dunlop of Isabelle Dunlop Clothing You can download the song from iTunes or bandcamp or stream it on Spotify

We've been rather slow at promoting songs from our past album Autonomous  but I did finally get around to putting a clip together for our song Best Tonight  this weekend.  We had footage of us playing it very early on at the Fox Cabaret, as well as a simple camera on a tripod filming us playing it during the past Rock'n'Roll Marathon in East Van this past October.   Also, back last winter we started making a video with Wayne Hoecherl and dance Taya over in N Vancouver but never really put the final touches to it, so I've kinda appropriated the little promo clip Chris Hooper edited for us into this video as well.  The life of a song on video! Best Tonight has been used as the opening and closing theme music to the series Records In My Life for the past year.  We though it was time to recognize that and put this clip together to share the full song in video format as well! We present for your Youtube viewing pleasure " BEST TONIGHT ." Edited by Mark H...

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...

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...

We are excited to announce the release of our second full length album, Autonomous.  Twelve songs that combine the style and sound of modern electronic dance music with more experimental and traditional song writing.   Have a listen, download it, share it, comment on it.  We'd love to hear what you think!! Autonomous by Combine the Victorious DANCE - ENJOY! with love from Mark and Isabelle thanks to: Robert Edmonds for the artwork  Don Harrison for the guitar Leigh Grant for the drums Stefan Sigerson for the bass and brilliance Ingrid Schroeder and Barry Flynn for the song writing Jordy Birch for the additional production Paul Schroeder and Adam Percy for their brilliant mixes & Matt Kennedy, Hugh Ellenwood, Elaine Henderson, Jesse Smith, Kevin Jones, Misty Reid, Jane Dunlop, Vince Tuckwood, Patrick Gilmore, Helen Mitteregger, Hajnalka Mandula, Richard Bafaro, our families, The Population Drops, Jim Newto...

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.

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 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 had a fantastic session at the Armoury Studios at the end of May, and after living with the mixes for a week we've submitted them off to Craig Waddell for mastering.  This is our best work yet, with our most complete vision for an album and definitely the most dance floor worthy collection of song yet.  Isabelle and I haven't figured out the final running order yet, and we've been playing with several different orders to see which flows best, but we're looking for a nice long playing album.  Something that you can put on at the start of a party to get things going, and then hopefully put at again at the end of the party to set your night activities in the right direction! Everything sounded quite stunning through the overhead monitors.  It is my favourite room to mix in Vancouver, so good!   We even had the opportunity to record a quick piano part to start our first day.  The middle eight of the song Caught Up To You has a quirky samba kind of brea...

We are really excited to have just booked time at the amazing sounding Armoury Studio to do our final mixdown.  After the months (years in some cases) we've been working on these songs, it feels thrilling to set a date for completion.   The monitoring in that room is astounding.  John Vrtacic designed the over head sound system and it has possibly the best bottom end I've ever experienced.  Really looking forward to the session. Have to say thanks again to Don Harrison and Stefan Sigerson for their contributions to the songs.  Everything is sounding fantastic! Getting closer to completion.  yes. M

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

Had a great day recording last weekend when Leigh Grant (original drummer from Pure) came in to play on three more songs.  It's been really fun to see how adding live drums to the tracks makes everything come to life.  He's now playing on over half the album. Leigh killed it once again. We tracked drums on Best Tonight, California '15, and Stop Givin Up On Love.    I started with Best Tonight so we could enter it into CBC Searchlight, and I've just finished the edits on the last of the three,  They as sounding super solid.  Very proud of Boutique Empire studio, it's turning out some big sounding songs! Last year Jordy Birch and I had Leigh come into The Valt studio, (Jordy's studio downtown), and he played on four other songs, one of which we later dumped the original song entirely and built a new one on top of his drumming: Happy Girl.   I know we were all hard on each other in our old band back in the day, but man, Leigh can really drum. ...

We've just finished this track, Best Tonight, and are going to enter it into the CBC Searchlight contest, so please help us out with some voting this April!   Combine the Victorious - Best Tonight Produced and performed by Combine  the Victorious Recorded and mixed at Boutique Empire Recording by M Henning Music: Henning, Dunlop, Harrison, Grant Lyrics: Henning, Dunlop, Birch Vocals: Mark, Isabelle Guitars: Don Harrison Drums: Leigh Grant Synthesizers etc: Mark Best Tonight The odds are long but we'll still make it Set a records and then we'll break it We booked a flight and then we'll take it Australian nights and getting naked Short on money, long on soul what we found funny was all that we could not control So we'll travel the world and visit our friends We're putting our dreams together again "Cause nothing makes me happier than music We'll make the best tonight So we'll trave...

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...