The Premaster for “Days From Evil” is complete.

Let me repeat that, because it is significant. (And slightly louder, for the reading impaired)

THE PREMASTER FOR THE PHENOMENALLY UNCANNY, OVERLY-AMBITIOUS DEBUT ALBUM “DAYS FROM EVIL” BY JAGGED SPIRAL IS FUCKING COMPLETE!

I felt more emotional about a month ago, when we *thought* we were almost done. Over and over. There must be a dozen CDs laying around here that say ‘Premaster?’ on them. The differences between them are not obvious. Nit-picky, you might say.

But if there is one thing I’ve discovered in the past (nearly) two years while working on Days From Evil, it’s that the project is never Done until you proclaim it to be Done. It could always be edited more. It could always be re-recorded and tweaked and adjusted a little more. And it might even be improved. And it might not. At some point in the process, you gotta realize that no one else can even hear the ‘improvements’ you are making, and you are wasting your time re-re-recording tracks that were fine on the first take. At some point, you have to decide that you have done your very best, and sometimes the best you can do is get rid of everything you simply cannot live with.

At some point, you gotta take your hands off the wheel.

So the performances for Days From Evil are hereby proclaimed to be finished. And the mixing. And the effecting. And the arranging. We now move into the uncharted backwaters of Black-Magic-Mastering. The rule in recording your own music is: You don’t do the mastering on your own recordings. We have to turn our work over to someone else, someone who has not had two years of constant contact with the music. Someone to listen to our mixes with a fresh ear and an accurate sound system. Someone to tweak, polish, buff, shine, high-gloss, fold, spindle, mutilate and polymorph our songs into something better, and turn a collection of 9 songs into an album.

I warned you. The end is near.