After over two years of writing and recording, we are proud to announce that Monolith is now available for digital purchase, with Limited Edition CDs soon to follow!

Click here to purchase “Monolith” in mp3, FLAC, and a variety of other formats

Listen to the record in it’s entirety here;

Rock Band Network has released the software tools to enable independent musicians (scrubs like us) to code their own songs and make them available on the Rock Band Network. This is great news, and I am starting on putting the first From Exile song up as quickly as possible. I don’t even have an Xbox, but I’m sure someone does… right?

First up will be the title track of our upcoming release, Monolith.

Listen to it here (to warm up your chops):

Recording sessions can be tough. I learned this over the long and arduous session that I just finished. It’s not always as simple as you would think. Throw a couple mics in the room and hit the red record button, right?

Then the fun stuff comes into play… After spending hours upon hours in a hot, steamy, dark room, huddled around a computer and countless other humming electro – toys with other stinky dudes who may or may not have bathed within the week (yourself included), agonizing and arguing over whether to use a dotted eighth note or sixlet feel to a 2nd bassline doesn’t really hold your attention the way it should. You lose focus. You forget that this recorded material is going to haunt you for a long time, for better or for worse… The hope is that it is a successful recording and will stick with you forever, but the fear is that, in the end, you won’t want it to.

Anyway, that’s why it is fun and important to change the pace and do something a little different once in a while. It lets the brain reset, and hopefully, if you are resourceful, you can still make something productive and unique out of it. In a couple weeks, when From Exile’s ‘Monolith’ is released, I’ll be getting into the gritty details of specific sounds on the record and where we were having fun.

Here’s an example; TOOL in the studio, annihilating a piano:

I loved this video because I had a similar run-in with a piano a couple years ago… It involved a pair of machetes and a bottle of whiskey, and although I do not have any video footage of this particular night (one, of many, that I probably should have been arrested), I did rip the ‘head off the dragon’, so to speak, and it resides at home with me to this day:

So, to my earlier point on recording experimentation, I had the opportunity to stop by my father’s shop and record some samples of buzz-saws and such for an as-of-yet-unnanounced project (TO BE RELEASED BY END OF YEAR!):

Here is some footage of us working with Eyal Levi on some experimental junk during the Monolith recording session (starts @ 1:38):

We were using key rings, a battlestation of delay pedals, and a glass pipe… bah, I guess I should stop there. I have a show tonight to prepare for!

Most of you know that we have been working on this record a very long time, and it is still coming along very fucking well. It is only a matter of time until we can release it, but for now, I plan on editing through some of the candid footage I was able to collect. There are some rrrrrrrrrrough mixes in there of the middle section of the record –

The record has been sent away for mastering and we are expecting to be able to upload some new songs very soon…

Also, we are planning a special pre-release listening opportunity for mailing list members … Details to follow; for more information, register for the From Exile mailing list:
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