The Cracked Man Video Diaries #1 - Zero Energy

It's coming up to 2 years since we formed The Cracked Man, and not far off a year since we released our EP. So now we're working on an album.

One of the core aspects of The Cracked Man is every song we create, and every arrangement we produce, has to be something we both approve of. If one brings in a riff the other dislikes, or suggests an alteration that doesn't appeal to both, then it is discarded. This means no song has a sound completely dictated by either Kim or Marcus - every output is a collaboration.

As Marcus once said, "We're not a democracy, we're a dual dictatorship..."

Although we're pretty satisfied with the arrangements of our songs for our live performances, the album is turning into quite a different beast - not least because we don't have to be restricted to to a maximum of 2 instruments and 1 voice.

Marcus is a producer and sound engineer by trade, which gives us the wonderful luxury of being able to play, record, listen back, tweak, add, adjust, rearrange, experiment, delete and start again until we're both satisfied.

And what we've discovered is every time we start recording one of our songs, something new happens that we couldn't have predicted before we began. It could be the addition of an instrument, a different way of producing a sound or even a change of rhythm.

So what we've decided to do, for anyone who is at all vaguely interested in how songs develop, is create a series of short video diaries, documenting some of these changes on the very evening they've occured.

This means the videos are not rehearsed, highly produced or polished - they are just 2 blokes talking or playing to the camera to illustrate a particular alteration. We hope this means that what might be lost in slickness is more than made up for in a sense of authenticity.

At the moment, we are unsure how often these video diaries will be put up online - anything from weekly to monthly is our best guess - but over time they should accumulate into a collection that gives an insight into our creative process.

Here is our first, which is looking at our song, "Zero Energy"