This year I’ve been involved in a band which has been a lot of fun. Predominantly for meeting some cool people
at CERN and making some great friends. Also, though, for making some great music. The name of the band is
AWESOME (Awesome, Which Exudes Some Outstanding Musical Excellence), where every good ATLAS physicist
knows the golden rule: everything can be made into an acronym!
The list of band members is too big to reproduce here (seriously), mainly due to the fact that our time here at
CERN is finite and people will arrive, join the band for a while, and then leave. Also, time constraints, travel,
and other responsibilities prevent us all from being available at all times. A current core group of 4 of us will be
heading to the studio this week to record two tracks specially prepared for an all ATLAS musical extravaganza
of recording. Essentially ATLAS will be funding a cd and accompanying DVD to document musical folks from
within the collaboration where at least one band member must be part of the collaboration, in our case though,
all of us are. The personnel heading into the recording fire are representative of the international nature of our
collaboration and are, myself (English), Eddie Nebot (Spanish), Christian Ohm (Swedish) and Pier Olivier
DeVieveros (Canadian). We’ve been working on some sample songs and come up with a cover we’re pretty happy
with and one we wrote ourselves. Things evolved and one thing is quite striking to me, I only met one of the band
members less than a week prior to recording. Pier has been working on the tracks remotely in Toronto and then
arrived at CERN and we had booked a set of practices. It’s weird that, in other bands, this would probably freak
people out, but it seems a bit natural in the physics world. You work with people remotely and get used to it.
We developed our songs by sending files back and forth and when we got together for our first combined practice
we already were on the same page. So after a few practice sessions together we wrote a bunch more parts to these
songs and we’re ready to hit the studio. Should be a fun time. We don’t have a huge amount of time but we’re
hoping to get our two tracks recorded, which might be a challenge.
I’ll let you know how it goes, but we will endeavour to make things AWESOME!
