4-Way Split

I thought I’d take a break from writing about games stuff I’ve done to talk about one of Wallowing’s most ambitious projects.

Wallowing was doing a UK 3 or 4 date weekender right before COVID came along and turned all our other plans upside down. Just like in a typical disaster movie, I was sat in a pub having some food, and a TV with the sound off (and subtitles on) was showing the news covering the outbreak.

Even with all the news coverage bubbling up in the background around us, we had no idea how quickly things would change. That night’s show would be the last show we played for over a year, and the last time I saw any of the rest of the band for around as long. If I’d have known, I would’ve taken a couple more photos.

Wallowing didn’t want to slow down. Tom, especially, isn’t one to sit around and wait. I think lockdown actually drove him to push even harder, and he hatched this plan for a split LP with 3 other bands (Slabdragger from Croydon, plus THIN and Vixen Maw from NYC). He’d pretty much written the riffs for the Wallowing tracks, and we started figuring out how we were going to record it. I was in the process of moving to Manchester, which made things more complicated.

We started sending phone recordings back and forth to each other while I learnt the tracks. These tracks were far, far more complex than anything on Planet Loss. Faster, too. I’ve never been a blast guy, so this was a whole new thing for me. To this day I still wonder how I played them. There’s a set of dates we played in Oct/Nov 2025 where we played them live, and I barely remember any of it – they required so much focus, as well as being physically exhausting in different way to the rest of our material, that I think I almost couldn’t reconcile them with real life.

We had to figure out a way to record them. It wasn’t a full album, so we were happy to go a bit DIY. Tom would record scratch guitars in to a Zoom recorder I’d sent him, and I’d quantise & build a click around it (which was a long process, because there are a lot of timing changes / tempo automations). After this, I’d take the click down to a practice room and attempt some takes.

Around this time I’d added a china cymbal to my set up (which was a 24″ ride, 20″/18″ crashes, 15″ hats at the time – but more recently I sized down to a 20″ ride). Having something short, sharp & hard amongst my mostly dark/long cymbals really helped with the fast paced, jagged material on the split. I’d tried a bunch of china cymbals, but settled on a Sabian AAX 19″ – I really liked its harshness compared to the others I tired.

I’d mic up the drums in to two separate Zoom recorders (giving me two snare mics, two bass drum mics, two overheads, two room mics, and rack + floor tom). I went for more mics than technically needed because a) my mics weren’t very good, and b) I couldn’t properly check how good the recording was while at the room, so I was just trying to make sure at least some of it was OK.

I’d copy the recordings off the SD card & edit once I got home. I’d eyeball sync up the sets of recordings from the two recorders when it came to edit. Eventually I ended up setting up a kit at home still using this system, but it wasn’t a year or so after the “4-Way Split” before I got a proper audio interface & ditched the “two zooms” process.

The rest of the plan was that Tom would record clean guitar along to my rough drum mixes (again in to his Zoom). I’d sync the two up, and then we’d send raw drum stems and clean guitar/bass to be re-amped & mixed together by Jason at Century Audio. He was, impressively, able to make our weird taped together raw/clean takes sound great & like the full band. We got there! At no point during this process did we meet up or play as a full band. The rest of the bands contributions to the split came together around the same time.

The ‘queue’ for vinyl pressings was quite long at this point, so it ended up being released just as the world was getting back to normal – September 2021. Physical copies are long sold out, but it is available to stream here: https://sludgelordrecords.bandcamp.com/album/4-way-split

Orbital Detritus

Originally this next part was going to be the entire focus of this post, but actually, I got kinda caught up in the background.

This is about the section in Orbital Detritus which gave me (and probably everyone else in the band) the biggest headache, which required the most focus live.

At around 1 minute in to the track, we descend out of a fast blast-y riff in to a (mostly) 3/4 groove. The guitar and bass are locked in playing single 8th notes, sorta like short arpeggios grouped in 3s. Originally I was thinking of playing double-timed of what I eventually landed on, but it ended up sounding too monotonous.

This would be fine, except, in true Wallowing fashion – there were some spanners thrown in the works. There were some weird little filler transitions on the guitars between segments, and they were different lengths. So, I’d get 6 bars being able to play 3/4, and then I’d be thrown a measure of 9 eighths before an obvious ‘reset’ – which would be fine if I was playing double-timed, and sitting on those 8ths… but as I’m on 3/4, this ends up 1.5 bars for me. Next time I get thrown 10 eighths, which isn’t even as nice as 1.5 bars. The time after that, just 4. Then a 10 again…

I’ll add that I was learning this from a really poor quality, clipped, phone recording (not the one you see in the photo below), which wasn’t originally played to any kind of click.

There was a suggestion that I should just keep on my rhythm and let the notes flow around it, but this sorta ends up with the guitars on the back foot (half a bar out) and sounded more like an accident that deliberate writing – so I wasn’t keen. I think to me, it’s important that everything has a reason, has a purpose – has some kind of logic to it being part of what I’m playing.

So this was a bit of puzzle to solve. How could I find the pattern within this? And how could I lock it in without sacrificing the 3/4? At first, it just looked like a big block of notes – and that was what I needed to change. I needed to break it down in to sections that I could at least see some logic for.

So I did was made the annotated diagram, shown above. This made the pattern a lot clearer. 9, 10, then 4-10-4, 4-10-4. It’s still a lot to focus on live, because the bits in between are so hypnotic & tight – there’s no room for error. The normal 3/4 sections in between fills were always either 6 bars, or 2 bars – with the two bar versions only found in the 4-10-4 sections. Still, a lot of counting to do!

Now that I had the pattern more clearly in front of me, I could figure out how to approach it from a more musical perspective. The 9 and 10, I figured, maybe I could actually treat them pretty similarly – and that’s what I did. I broke the 9 down in to 3x 3/8 rhythms (kick+china-rest-snare), and then the 10 was essentially the same, but with an extra snare 8th on the end (k+c-rest-snare-snare). It felt like this grouping gave it a thematic consistency, and allowed the hypnotic riff underneath to breathe & wind its way, without losing the rhythmic lock.

The 4, well, I figured I’d just kick all 4 of those 8ths, with a china accent. That’s how it ended up how it ended up. The section leading out was basically a 10 again but followed by 9 stabs (the guitar noticeably switched up here, so this dynamic made sense).

Remarkably, the first time we got in a room together and tried to do an instrumental run, we played the whole track through first time.

You can hear the track here: https://sludgelordrecords.bandcamp.com/track/orbital-detritus

Earth Reaper

After playing these tracks only 5 times, we were ready for new material. I think we actually teased a tiny bit of Earth Reaper on that tour… but it wasn’t long before Earth Reaper became the main focus of our sets. I was relieved that I’d probably never have to play these tracks live again. I left Wallowing in 2024 to allow myself more time for other things, and now some other poor bastard has to figure out these riffs!