Plug and Pray.
Last time we asked you to keep your fingers crossed for a few opportunities. We know you did - and it didn't help. The Bulgarian National Radio and Musicautor picked seven acts to represent the country at festivals abroad. ALI wasn't one of them. The consolation is that the list reads like a roll call of people we care about. There are our Projector Plus stablemates GREESH and Jasmine Whale (who once warmed up a stage for us), our friends Tsar Plyh, and Mono & the Stereos, who opened our Sofia gig in May. Congratulations to them and to Arika Adams, Funkilicious and Kottarashky & Sando! Go BG!
A couple of weeks later the Musicautor Cultural Fund also passed on funding us this year, so it's two out of two, a clean sweep.
An honest post-mortem: seen from the outside, we don't look like a particularly active band. We know how much happens behind the curtain, but a jury only sees what gets out. The plan for the next 12 months is simple to write and hard to do: more released material, more visible work. Ideas on the table include a stage director, a stylist, a long-overdue photoshoot, and even Mitko's suggestion of lessons from a ballet teacher friend so we learn to "stand up straight" on stage. If QOTSA and Foo Fighters can move, so can we. We're younger. Moreover, we submitted some concert footage as 360 videos on YouTube, but have certain doubts that it was clear to the jury the camera angle can be manually moved by the user, so hypothetically they could have just seen a 5-6min shot of the audience... My bad. Lesson learned.
There's also a lesson in how we got our application together. We needed live recordings from PhillGood, so the multitrack from the desk went to a couple of seasoned professionals Mitko works with, who mixed it for free. Which is totally amazeballs. It came back mostly as white noise, and they rescued what little was usable. Then a producer who works on big international stages listened to the mixes and sent notes that were precise and generous. Our favourite: the snare sounded like it was played in a living room, by a hamster. In the name of transparency, part of the mess was mine. With the setlist reshuffled and adrenaline doing the rest, I forgot to switch the harmonizer to the high octave at the start of Purification, so it sat right in the bass's territory. And on the Bliss & Blasphemy video we submitted, I forgot to mute the original audio, and noticed only after hitting send, naturally. A clean version is coming. Check your multitrack before the gig. Then check it again.
That led to the obvious next question: is it time to retire our trusty Behringer X32? The live-sound people around us swear by Waves desks. The appeal is plugins on every channel, including one that hunts down feedback frequencies automatically. The whole plugin library runs about $150 a year, according to Kalo (blessed be his presence in our close orbit). The catch is the price of the desk itself, and living in a world of boundaries - we have a firm requirement so far - "one box, and not 10K euro." Watch this space.
Meanwhile, the guitar department has gone deep into sound. For Final Game (working title) we tried a new tuning and dragged every semi-hollow we could borrow into the rehearsal room, down to a shortlist of two ES-135s, an ES-175 and a Les Paul, all through Mitaka's Marshall head. The Rickenbacker sounded gorgeous, and it's still my personal favourite, but its third string ate everything else alive. We may lend a Strymon Cloudburst for the spacey bits. Fame's intro, meanwhile, is chasing a very particular early-90s U2 tone.
Here's where it gets nerdy. Our producer Gogo suggested recording the guitars through amp-simulation plugins, with a real amp only if we want something rougher. Milen jumped ship to Neural Amp Modeler, a free, open-source amp simulator, and binned the paid plugins he'd bought a few years ago. Tony went a step further and built an AI agent (soon to be made publicly available - and we'll share it) that runs his Quad Cortex. It plays a riff through the rig, compares it to the reference record, changes one setting, and repeats, keeping a log as it goes. Raising the wah alone brought the mismatch score down from 1,219 to 164. Milen built something similar for his Anagram. His verdict: language models are deaf. They know the order effects go in, but the knob values are educated guesses. Back in March we spent 30 seconds asking AI to write us a song. This is more fun.
All of this points at one weekend. This weekend. The guitar sessions for Fame and Top of Hell (and Wrong To be Right, hopefully) at Gogo's. Top of Hell, which some of you heard live for the first time this summer, arrives with a reworked second verse. Milen changed the chords and the bass line there. On his phone speaker he's not sure about it; on everything else it's excellent.
Speaking of recording: our rehearsal room has no internet. Every take from the desk leaves on a USB stick, and the stick has an impressive record of staying behind. We asked our upstairs neighbours to share their Wi-Fi. They said no. We tried. The candidates now are Orli's portable router (when he's in town), a spare modem plus a data SIM, or simply a second USB stick. Cutting-edge AI agents on one side, a lost USB stick on the other. That's where 2026 has us. Still no flying cars, though, as my 6-year-old self quietly remarks.
The name question. Yes, it's a question. Type "ALI" into any search engine and good luck finding us. We share the name with half the planet, some boxer guy, a Japanese funk band and several comedians. We're seriously discussing what to do about it. Nothing decided, but if you have strong opinions, now's the time.
In the insider/personal section: the office-band balancing act was on full display this month. One of us has spent every last day of annual leave on the band. Orli is working American hours to get a product release out while overseeing a complete overhaul of his bathroom. One of our kids has a university fair on the exact day of the recording session, and there's a wedding the weekend after. We also lived through kids leaving home to study abroad and probably too many other things to list here. Scheduling five adults with jobs and families plus one busy producer is a sport in itself. This time we got there with a few honest words and everyone bending a little.
On a personal note, I finally recorded a rough piano demo of "Letting Go", a gift for my daughter before she left to learn how to become an architect in Madrid. Amateur bass and all, it's now in the band's hands to do with as they please.
Finally, as fans: we finally got a proper rig rundown from Muse, and it turns out they run their guitar and bass sound through simulations too, which makes us feel slightly less pagan.
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