journal

Steve Albini told us: "whatever you do don't sit in attendance at your mastering session - you'll end up intervening too much and coming away with something that sounds really weird". We promised we wouldn't go. I'm sure we even meant it. But when it came to getting 3 of the tracks mastered for a pre-album single, we just had to go and check out the process: we couldn't let our little Chicago-born baby out of our sight, let alone allow some strange bloke to fiddle with it unsupervised.

And fuck it, we needed a day out. Post-Chicago Giriworld had been a bit of a weird place to be; all the months of focus and anticipation -followed by the euphoric blasts of recording and being let loose in Chicago- had unwound and left us back home with a lot of work still to do and a lot of cash still to find -and the great triumphant skyline that we'd been slogging towards was behind us now. Nothing could alter the fact that we'd pulled off something amazing, but it was only half the battle; all the drudgery sidelined by the shining task of getting our asses recorded in an audaciously big-ass way now unfurled like a long shitty carpet in front of us, with only uncertainty visible beyond…

So with the precious reels of Giri noise, freshly Fed-Exed from Chicago, we roll down to London in Consi's estate -which is rank with petrol fumes from a worryingly leaky tank. The ringing nausea this causes, together with the fear of being fried alive, combines neatly with the shrieking insanity of our recent rehearsal tapes. Blaring mercilessly through the duration of the journey these seem to have increased in psychotic pitch of late and, inexplicably, we've gone Disco-Funk. Consi's implausible rhythmic choices have led us into this sleazy, pounding under-groove: a world where all is huge throbs and anxious steel. The improvised track "Steve -long distance- Cram" became the Giri's unofficial travel mascot, it's interminable thump, guitars like electric vomit, and big-angry-bastard-on-a-pogo-stick bassline has us all nodding along -pleased with, but scared of ourselves: is this new 'direction' going to seep its way into our set?

Musing on this we seep our way into the car park of Abbey Road -which is about as big as an ironed rat. Small clusters of tourists are there snapping the much graffiti'd wall where scrawled, inept attempts at profundity mingle with badly punctuated quotes from Beatles songs. Early, we decide to go get a drink, and in homage to the history of the place, cross the road either side of the most famous zebra crossing in the world. We plot idly in the sun with our Guinnesses, watching the residents of St Johns wood slope affluently about, all prickly reminders of our impending impecuniousness: even they'd be hard pressed to spend as much as we're about to in the next three hours.

The studio reception looks uncannily like that of a posh hairdresser's. We slope scruffily downstairs to the canteen to rendezvous with our engineer. In the corridors, the great and the really fucking awful are commemorated along the walls in gold discs, and beautiful vintage tape machines sit seemingly spare and unloved. Our engineer, another Steve, finds us and he looks vintage too, but has a reality about him that has seemed lacking here so far. We hoof it upstairs to his little mastering studio and he loads up the reels. Mr Albini had spoken very highly of this chap, and it becomes quickly apparent to us why this is the case. The man plays his mixing desk and his boxes of tricks like an organist coasting through Bach, and with a few flicks and nudges has somehow given the raw sound of the mix an extra meaty inch or two. We want to dabble and intervene and blurt out our ideas because we know this is our last chance to exercise any control over the sound before it gets set in stone for good, but we restrain ourselves enough to let the pro attend to his craft, and once we've given him the general idea of what we're after he becomes a willing ally in our goals, tapping his feet under the desk to our noise and squeezing more aggression out of the speakers.

Three hours of tweaking and it's done: soundwise the single is made. Steve thanks us for being 'rock'. We roll out of there utterly destitute but with some much needed progress under our belts.

***

Two days later we're crouched in the stairwell of Sofa Central in Manchester. Our gear fills the middle landing, another bands gear is below (by the locked door to where we're playing tonight) and above us another pile of amps and instruments keeps expanding and expanding as the other 6 or so bands on the bill arrive and unload their stuff into the congestion.

It was a new venue for us and we'd been asked to headline a four band 'hardcore' bill; we'd never played with any of the other bands before and we thought it might be an opportunity to introduce ourselves to a brand new bunch of noise lovers who didn't turn up to the stuff we normally did. And so what if a four band bill is a little much for a Wednesday night -meaning we won't be going on till pretty late- the promoter obviously has a healthy, naive ambition about him, which is cool.

An hour after we arrived though we're still waiting for someone to come and open the door to the downstairs room of the venue, and as the gear mountain moves in on us we discover that the bill had expanded to 7 bands -seven bands on a schoolnight. That's more than ambitious, that's mental. Finally someone comes to let the bands in and the gear mountain gets lugged into the room and four huge leather sofa's are humped off the 'stage'. The PA hasn't arrived yet so we get our gear set up and wait for things to get going. Obviously with that many bands playing they'll be wanting to get things moving sharpish, or the night might never start. Okay, so nothings actually happening…dum de fuckin' dum...ahh, the PA has arrived, right then -cue the urgent flurry of activity…nope, the promoter's just standing there chatting, is anyone actually going to set the thing up? Apparently yes but he's not here yet. Ok… We strum out some noise to break the tedium whilst the other bands, seeming to know each other, chat away, and the promoter chats away and nobody seems concerned that there's this gig occurring tonight, that the doors open in an hour, that the PA is lying disassembled on the floor and there's a band onstage ready to soundcheck and get the fuck out of there so they can eat and rest and make ready for rocking. It goes on interminably, but finally someone gets round to plugging in the PA. Cheers. We burst out some noise and fuck right off.

At half-past nine we're all back and have a nice portion of drinking time before our 11:00pm slot. The unfamiliarity of our circumstances is tempered by the arrival of a pleasing clot of Giri supporters among the encouragingly large crowd, and we're ready to reward them with a firestorm of a gig. Bands come and go, and time crawls its way past our allotted hour. The promoter admits things are running late and that our gig might be happening at midnight now, but there's no sense of urgency about the changeovers or any tight rein on stage times. Bands are sauntering about after their gigs while their gear sits idly onstage, no-ones saying 'get the fuck on with it we're running stupidly late' -obviously that would have been too much like work. The Giri faithful look visibly saggy as they wait out yet another rather poor 'punk' band that's clocking up some overtime. Some of them have last trains or buses to catch and have to split, others resign themselves to the long haul, and by the time we finally get onstage it's well past midnight and there's barely thirty people left in the venue and they're all half dead with boredom and fatigue.

The gig is scrappy, raw, alcohol-blurred and nasty. It needs to be nasty in order to pierce the sense of drained-out futility that the evening has left in us. But it's a short-term cure and there's not much to think about it afterwards but what the people who came to see us, hung around for three hours and had to go home before we came on must've been thinking: 'what was the point in that?'

***

A three day mope and we're off in the Girimobile again, this time to make our second trip to Bristol to play 'Choke' - a proper band night run by proper people who know how to organise things fucking properly. This is just a carnival of pleasures after the shit parade we were subjected to earlier in the week.

The journey to Bristol probably doesn't take much more time than we were hanging around waiting at Sofa, and we're unloaded, fed and soundchecked with blissful efficiency - it's not fucking hard. There's an adequate period for relaxation psyching-up, drinking and pool. We'd sharpened up on our pool skills in Chicago on the weird pocketless table they had in the studio, but we seem to have reverted to sloppy and awful back on these shores, and are being eyed by this gaunt, dark eyed Bristolian who has designs on claiming the table from us. He has pool shark written all over him, and when his turn comes, with Consi defending Giri honour, a sense of imminent trouncing descends over the table. Magically though, Consi manages to pocket seven balls off the break - he struts around the table firing 'em in, looking more puzzled with each successful shot, as the Bristolian pool-king senses he's been hustled. He hasn't - Consi is usually terrible at this game. His opponent gets to take a shot or two but the lead is too big to recover and Consi rams the black home for a victory that is equally impressive and implausible. He's likely to be a feared legend in the Bristol pool fraternity now - the stranger in the big black coat.

The night kicks off with Big Joan. The room is already fullish and sweaty and there is a kind of a love affair going on with Big Joan and their hometown crowd. It's great to see them in their element, taking sick pleasure in establishing a groove and then suddenly veering off into a screeching, nasty-as-hell noise-binge. The band make a racket like a huge, angry, farting reptile made from aluminium and illegal circuitry, and the vocals are like the fractured audio feed of a riot in a sadist's private insane asylum. They're filthy and they love it.

As do we. We climb into our positions and roar into Point of Entry, seamlessly slipping into Armies and Spies before drawing breath and receiving our first bout of satisfyingly enthusiastic applause. We grind and sweat through the rest of the set like we fucking mean it and as the climactic thrashing of Your Crime fills the room it feels like we've pulled off a triumphant one. The trauma of Sofa is purged and we're glorious noisy bastards once again.

A breif swagger and schmooze and we're ready to let Bilge Pump unload their unpleasant sonic goo onto us. They're pretty fucking good really aren't they? They rant schizophrenically at implausible demons and take up arms against the crowd with mashed-up balls of barbed-wire noise. They bounce off at all angles and unravel and sprawl randomly before sucking themselves back into a kind of 'structure' only in time to fuck it all up again, gloriously. It's proper good shit.

High spirits inform the aftermath and the Giri glug away at the fountain of pissed, Martin perhaps taking things too far when, indulging in the fine art of screaming like an idiot at the top of your voice, he incurs the wrath of the venue's bouncers, who seem not so much angered as disturbed by what they've just heard. We've done good though, and bring to a close a week that has skinted us out, traumatised us with a nightmare gig and brought us back to glory on a Bristol stage. We've got to negotiate a long murky path before we get our album out there, but the single's on the way and more gigs like this can only do us good.

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