Beiträge von Arachnophile

  • The Spiritspiders (Grunge/Folk/Electronic)

    The Spiritspiders are my band, my project and my curse. Long story short: Tried to start rock band, couldn't find other musicians, bought an Access Virus b and a guitar. It's been that basic set-up with varying line-ups since then.


    Here are some songs from 2008 with music videos, featuring my old Virus b:


    Close (Jupiter Rising EP) - Rhodes-like sound and pads.
    Harlequin (Jupiter Rising EP) - Everything except vocals and concert guitar comes from the Virus b.


    If you're not into radio-compatible pop-crap so much, I can offer you 2009's Evolution:Elation:Extinction album-length concept demo. Back then my Virus was undergoing its first power supply-related repair and I was trying to develop a more organic sound although/because I was at that time without a band again, so I experimented with using modulated guitars, samples and piano/Mellotron soft synths instead of the Virus b during that phase. I got into playing the bass guitar, recorded real drums and bought a cajon (what was I thinking?!) If you listen to the demo in the right order, you can hear the repaired Virus b creep in through the back door and take its place in the orchestra.


    Our debut album from 2012 is more straight forward guitar music with occasional pads and strings from the Virus because the band wasn't into it. Damn hippies! You can catch it on our homepage though. Please check out the RELEASE tab to get to the audio. A song from 2013 called 2013 doesn't feature any Virus at all (unless the producer used one without my knowledge), because I actually only sang and played drums and rhythm guitar on that one. It was the beginning of our current line-up. The b-side features a cover version of House of the Rising Sun with warbling Virus pads.


    In 2014 the Spiritspiders produced an exclusive song called Lunacy for the promotional campaign for Jay Leroy's R.M.Tarot. It marks a departure from the vintage sounds of the debut album and 2013 single. You can catch a part of the instrumental in the video on the Kickstarter page's for the Tarot deck.


    The upcoming releases are going to be more eclectic stylistically and feature my new Virus TI2 heavily, because I'm dying to toy around with it.

  • Spiders on the ether...

    Hey everyone. I'm a singer and sound dabbler from Germany called Frank. My first Virus was a Virus b bought in 2000/2001. It was the beginning of a new band/project called the Spiritspiders which was supposed to blur the divisions of electronic and rock music. The Virus was something like a founding member and the backbone of the sound; the one constant element when everything from influences to band members fluctuated wildly. The Virus provided strings for the ballads, bubbling arpeggios to pop songs and creepy pads to fluff up and warp guitar textures. We spent many trippy nights, exploring astral space and the netherworlds, always returning with new patches. I used the Virus b for almost 15 years, on 7 demos, 2 EPs and our album length debut. It had to get repaired once in all that time and having used it for almost half of my life I'd never thought of it as something that would go away. But in early 2015 it had problems booting up, its display began to flicker and finally in February 2015 the spirit left its oscillators and departed to the next world. It was like losing a friend.


    The TI series had always been on my radar, since I upgraded my homestudio to professional and completely computer-based recording. I wouldn't have ditched the Virus b EVER, but somehow it felt that its time was up and left. Now its grandson sits on my desk fresh from the box, having received a MIDI dump of its grandfather's RAM banks and wondering what kind of a weird place this is. May this be the beginning of new tales.