Initial thoughts:
Here is the 2nd collection of songs made by people who post on the NFC Discussion
Board and/or their bands. This release features songs from artists located all over
the world, in countries such as; India, Turkey, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, US, Canada, 
Holland and Australia - just to name a few. As the first compilation (released earlier 
this year) proved, there are quite a lot of talented musicians using the forums. The 
first compilation was a moderate success -- didn't receive a lot of attention, but got 
quite positive reviews from the few who gave feedback. This CD was mostly experimental, 
and a way to test if the concept, originally conceived by James Barricklow, could even be 
realized. As it turns out, it could, and a fairly nice compilation came out of it. It should 
be noted that Volume 1 was put together relatively fast, and the contributions I got after 
taking over the project from James were all submitted within a month or so. Not an awful 
lot of time went into the "production" of the CD either. In contrast, a lot more work has 
been put into the production of Volume II - and the period where songs could be submitted 
was significantly longer (around 3 months). A lot more time was also spent producing the CDs, 
trying to make the tracks sound as good as possible, selecting which songs to use, deciding 
on the order and so on. 

As just mentioned, the period where people could send in their songs was a lot longer
this time (but still relatively short, all considering). Consequently, the number of songs
that was ultimately to choose from was a little over 200. One could easily argue that 
this is a pretty small number, considering the fact that the board has about 4.000 registered
users, and the fact that - for a while - the project was mentioned on the main page of NFC.
On the other hand, the fact that "only" 200 songs were submitted made the selection process
a bit easier. Obviously, there would not be room for all songs on the compilation, but there
was too much good material to fit on just one CD, so Volume II is instead a double-CD holding
over 45 songs all together. 

A note on the production:
Most of the songs were submitted electronically in the form of computer files, usually in
either the MP3, WMA, WAV or RealAudio formats. Still, some of the songs suffered from being
in very poor quality, and some were even dropped entirely just because of this. I wanted to
present the songs in as good a quality as possible, even though only a couple of them had been
produced professionally (in a studio for example). This is painfully evident in the fact that
most of them are in mono (the same signal is repeated in both channels), which doesn't sound
all that good. In addition, I needed to remove "hiss" and other annoying background noise(s) 
from a lot of the songs, and a few had annoying clicks and pops.

CobainIsAlive's song for example suffered from having loud constant hiss and crackles in the
background, and several "pops". These were very difficult to get rid of, but I did manage to
make it sound a bit better. I ended up cutting out a short guitar intro, actually, because the
quality of it was just too poor. With it being a very nice song, it would be a pity to drop it 
entirely. Another song suffering from severe hiss was kemo's song. It wasn't until the last
minute I decided to give it another chance, and try making it sound better. The result is a song
without hiss or background noise, but also a sound that is a bit "flat" and clearly has traces
of the noise reduction process. Still, I think it sounds significantly better than the alternative.

A song that had somewhat of a dramatic "makeover" was the soothing 'Mellow Jam' by difused. I added
some ambience, making it sound more "broad" and "live" and amplified it a bit, among other things.
The two brilliant songs by monimino should also have a broader spectrum and actually sound like
stereo recordings even though the original tape I received was not recorded like that.

One song even had to be "slowed" because the vocalist was singing a bit too fast (due to being
nervous). The slowed down song turned out to be about 40 seconds longer than the original. The 
result was surprisingly good too, actually. A couple of songs also got re-recorded for the comp, 
primarily because the original had been in too poor quality. As it turns out, quite a lot of the
songs being submitted mostly consisted of one person playing guitar while singing. So, to accomodate
this, I decided to reserve one CD for songs like those, and the other for "band" songs. Alas, CD 1
is mostly comprised of songs with a solo artist, usually playing guitar and singing, or an instrumental
of some sorts. Then, the 2nd CD is mostly comprised of songs made by a full band, and thus songs
where several people are involved. So, most of the songs on the first CD are relatively quiet and 
soft melodies, whereas the 2nd is more Rock N' Roll based, with a slow tune here and there. The 2nd
CD also has some electronic songs, and essentially covers several different genres and musical styles.

A note on the songs and selection:
The 1st CD starts out with a humorous track made by Mike Ziegler who used to run a Nirvana website
called "The Happening". It proceeds with a couple of nice covers and Monimino's terrific "Here lies".
It is followed with some additional covers and a few originals. The CD also offers a couple of short
guitar solos, and a nice long bass solo by LotusKDC. The CD is concluded with girl's Beatles cover,
which would probably "belong" to the 2nd CD but was put here since there was no more room on CD #2!
About half the songs on the first CD are covers which is a bit unfortunate, but they are pretty good.

The 2nd CD opens with a great rockin' track by the British band Martyr, and is followed by Exhausted -
an artist that also contributed to the first compilation. The third song, by a Swedish band called
Reek, was recorded professionally in a studio which you can clearly tell when listening to it. The
fifth track is the only one on the CD not by a user of the discussion board. Instead, it is a song
taken from a recording I did of a show by my brother's band earlier this year. Track #7 stands a bit
out from the rest, but is a very nice one all the same. The rest of the CD is a dirty mix of rock
songs and softies, and the CD is concluded with a nice audio track from a video game, provided by
oreogasm. Unfortunately, the songs by Martyr are not in as good a quality as they could be, since
they were taken from some low quality MP3 files. The band had promised to supply a CD with these
songs, but never did, sadly.