lpliveusername Posted July 15 Posted July 15 Back in the summer of 1999, Chester Bennington witnessed an Irish band named Cyclefly playing live at the legendary Whisky A Go Go during their first trip to the United States in support of their debut album 'Generation Sap.' The Linkin Park singer was impressed with their performance and kept in touch with the band. Cyclefly wrote and demoed "Karma Killer" in May 2000 following an European tour opening for American band Bush. The band spent 3 weeks at the Beethoven Street Studios in London, England, where they recorded 4 demos with arrangements provided by Sasha Puttnam, who was a touring member of Bush at the time. The album version however was recorded on a later date at Parkage Studios in East Sussex, England, with producer Colin Richardson. The song is about "giving bad karma, blaming every one else for it. not realizing it always comes from ourselves." While Cyclefly was working on their sophomore album 'Crave,' Linkin Park was also in the studio working on their major label debut 'Hybrid Theory' and the two bands were sending demos back and forth to show their progress. Chester was already a fan of Cyclefly and wanted to sing on the album's title track "Crave," but ended up recording vocals for "Karma Killer" by suggestion of the O'Shea brothers, which is arguably the band's heaviest song along with the lead single "No Stress." The radio single for "No Stress" contains a quote from Chester which reads: "Cyclefly is one of my favourite bands and their new record is the best I've heard in a long time. If you don't like it, YOU SUCK!" Chester's vocals for "Karma Killer" were recorded in Los Angeles on January 15th, 2001, the day before Linkin Park did their first US TV performance at Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Chester joined the band on stage in September 2001 when Cyclefly opened two shows for Linkin Park in Europe. You can hear the band's guitarist Ciarán O'Shea talking about their relationship with Chester and at 39:15 in the following interview: "Karma Killer" was set to be the second single off 'Crave' and while the album version was mixed by David Bianco, Bill Appleberry provided a new mix of the song for the single release which unfortunately never happened due to Cyclefly being dropped from their record label after internal disagreements. The Bill Appleberry mix eventually found its way to the public through the band's official MySpace page. However, the audio only circulated in 96kbps (as heard below) which was the bitrate supported by MySpace back in the day. Now thanks to Ciarán O'Shea, we have a 320kbps upgrade of the song which is available on his official website. Download: MP3 (320kbps) Thanks to LESTAT for the heads up! For those interested in hearing more from the band, check out our Cyclefly thread and their members' current project Mako DC. Quote
JZLP-Benningstrong Posted July 16 Posted July 16 One of my very early Linkin Park memories was this song. I downloaded it from pushmeaway.com Pretty good song, thanks for the upgrade. Quote
Trumtram Posted July 16 Posted July 16 Awesome, thank you. I actually was lucky enough to see them perform this song with Chester. Unfortunately, though, Cyclefly sucked badly live and were booed heavily. Quote
Fleur de Lys Posted July 17 Posted July 17 Blast from the past, haven’t heard this in like 15 years. Really cool! Quote
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