Bring ’em on!

Planet Of Zeus – Them Nights
2 months, 12 days. That is how long we were locked inside Unreal. Day in, Day out. Listening, comparing, fighting, eating. You might like their new album or you might not. But, if you are not a condescending asshole you will agree that is sounds like an ALBUM. It has flow, it has tracks, it sounds as if nothing was left to chance. It sounds like hard work and thoughtful ideas.

Vodka Juniors – Fighting Giants
Albums are supposed to be getting easier for us, not harder. With age comes experience and all that shit. Still, after all that torture and suffering we are usually left with all the good memories, and one more immortal work of art. Enter Warrior Anthems, the latest offering from Vodka Juniors. From straightforward punk rock to an elaborate mix of punk, metal, hip-hop and breakbeats. I won’t even go into detail on what pain we went through to make this happen. The end result is something we are quite proud of. Enjoy.

One Leg Mary – Nothing Important Happened Today
Their last album. Sad day. The Tool did this all by himself before leaving Unreal to pursue rock stardom.

Puta Volcano – Dune
Driving music. That’s as accurate as it gets for “Harmony Of Spheres”. You just leave the whole album on repeat and let it play for two or three consecutive times. You then realize you had an awesome time without exactly knowing why. If we wanna be totally nerdy about it, tape wow and flutter had something to do with that.

The Noise Figures – Lethargy
Hahaha get this! The drummer/singer likes Manowar! We like Manowar too! What’s there not to like?! Granted, several things. But its always nice to remember a time when you couldn’t care less and singed along “HAIL, HAIL, HAIL AND KILL”. Yet again, I digress. Drums were recorded to tape here, the rest at PiGi and Black Caravan studios. It was then mixed and (surprisingly) mastered at Unreal.

Whereswilder – Ago
Whereswilder’s sophomore album undertook quite the journey to reach peoples ears. Bed tracks were recorded -live to tape- here, at cozy Unreal. Overdubs were recorded at Artracks Studio. Then, after it was mixed, it took a little detour back to Unreal for some more processing, before finally being mastered. But this is of little importance. What is more important is that this album sparked our love relationship with their producer, Alex bolpasis. To this day we are still bombarded with various questions such as “Do you fight all the time?”, “Why haven’t you killed him yet?”, and “Is it true that he has a vagina?”

Straight Six – 21 Guns
This was hella fun. A US band sent us their multitracks to mix. What better way to achieve an old school result than to use the tools and methods of the era? Console, tape, outboard fx and processing. Number of plugins: 2(two).

We.Own.The.Sky – Transmissions Of Static
Music after my own heart. No lyrics, epicness, catchy riffs, “expected” structure so you don’t need to pay too much attention when you are headbanging at their gigs. Also, one of my early engineering dreams has been realized, if somewhat on a small scale. One of their tracks is being used by a fellow engineer to tune the PA speakers in live gigs. I am humbled, really.

Despite Everything – Jokes on us
Taken from their upcoming album “Trails”, this is their first delving into serious production grounds. We painstakingly recorded everything, getting sounds that would require little processing come mix time (as we always do). We even took part in arrangement decisions. It was then sent to The Blasting Room for mixing and mastering. Finally one of the hardest working bands in the underground music scene got what they deserved.

Space Blanket – Runner
This electronic album was mixed completely analog, to liven up the VSTis that were used. The sidechain compressor ended up being the amek 9098. Never knew it could do that so well.

Planet Of Zeus – A Girl Named Greed
Their third and probably most anticipated album was mostly recorded live. To date, the guitar cabs were the loudest ones recorded at Unreal. The mansion was shaking, cockroaches were fleeing. We then spent an inordinate amount of time recording just the right vocals using 6 different microphone setups. Samples of the drummer trying to sing are available upon request.

One Leg Mary – Miscarriage part1
You should feel relieved, no, scratch that. You should run and do whatever you can to promote your band, play gigs, sign contracts. These idiots of a band called One Leg Mary are so amazing yet so painfully stupid that they’re probably never gonna make it big. If they happen to play near you (meaning somewhere in Athens, as if they would get of their lazy fat asses and go on tour) go check them out. Then go talk to them. You will immediately understand the futility.

The Bliss – Liabatyd
We almost lost our lives over this album. Lots of hours of work, production decisions, erasing parts, rerecording parts, vocals, strange sounds, tiny little details. The result is something we are quite proud of. A fun fact is that the drum recordings stopped when the drummer sprained his fist… on Alex’s thigh. Made of steel mathafacka!

The Dive – Floating
We spent a long time trying to figure out the best approach to capture The Dive in an honest, but flattering way. The result was this. Recorded completely live, no headphones, no click tracks, minimal editing, and vocals recorded with speaker cues instead of headphones. It vibrates and grooves, but is big at the same time. Don’t you think?