We have continued our aural experimentations and explorations, over the weekend. Our goal: the shimmering mirage-like prospect of our EP. Songs have been lined up, paraded and inspected (like so many toy soldiers), and arrangements sketched.

'Octavia' is beginning to take shape: stuttering cello figures, a pulsing guitar and – now – some pseudo-military snare drumming.

Sadly, though – midnight having passed some minutes ago – these and other myriad sonic possibilities must be abandoned for the night.

Cogwheel Dogs have spent the past few days in a caffeine- and raspberry-fuelled fest of musicmaking.

We are setting down the bones of our next opus - provisionally anticipated to take the form of an EP. So microphones were arrayed, guitar strings changed, and duvets strung up like (peculiarly inefficient) sails.

We concentrated on three songs: Power in Paper (a rough, 'unplugged' recording of which is available on our website), Octavia (snakes and ladders to a soundtrack of creaksqueaky chamber cello) and Kitchen (sliced eggs, scritchy electric guitars and dying insect drums).

It's all been most exciting.

Thanks to everyone, incidentally, that came to our Death Disco show on Wednesday. Our throats have just about recovered, now, to the extent that normal speech is possible.

Or whatever passes for normal speech in our world.

Two more articles on Cress have sprung up in delightful crannies of the blogosphere.

My New Favourite Band says that our music

... tip toes through the daisies one minute, and is slashing at the pretty little flowers with a big spade the next. It's all everso slightly left of centre. And we do like ever so slightly left of centre.

Cogwheel Dogs have a faint shimmer of Dry period PJ Harvey about them, never a bad thing, and there's a very similar, very strong songwriting sensibility at work here. If we were betting folk (what? Oh), we'd say these two are going places. Ask Alan Mcgee who's booked them to for his Death Disco night at Notting Hill Arts Club on July 16. If you live in London, check them out for us will you and report back? Thanks.

Meanwhile, Scribblings with Green Chalk is enchanted by our attic-based recording habits, and urges us to write an attic-themed song:

I most definitely lack talent to give you a verbal taste of what to expect when you click over here. I’m impressed by Rebecca’s blog, the band’s website – I’m a sucker for visual wit, I’m afraid. As for the sounds: I like where these songs are going. They are going places and can take you there, which is what songs, essentially, should do. That’s a great beginning and I’d love to see where the songs go from here. I hope there’s a song about the attic somewhere along the way ...

The fine folk at Junkmedia have reviewed Cress. And they seem to like it, scattering their prose with delightful nuggets such as "primitivism of the most beautiful sort" and "everything a good post-punk single should be".

… [Anticoagulant] really shows off this band's strengths. Feverishly strummed acoustic guitars, brushed tom banging, and beautifully distorted cello sweep across abrupt key changes and dynamic shifts, and the effect is pretty dazzling - try listening to it just once. If the rest of their material is anywhere near as good as what's presented on this single (which, as their MySpace page surely attests, certainly is), Cogwheel Dogs are set to become one of the most exciting bands to come out of the underground in years.

Please do go and read the full review on Junkmedia.

We're proud to present a photo or two taken from last week's brace of gigs. On Wednesday, we played at Death Disco (at Notting Hill Arts Club - a venue one can scarcely help but adore) - again, augmented by the inspired percussive antics of Chris Browne on drums.

And on Friday - this time drum-free - we were back in Oxford: an OxJam gig organised by Stuart of Sunnyvale Noise Subelement fame (who also played). Headlining were the Half Rabbits. Oxfordbands.com reviewed the gig thus:

Angular guitar-and-cello duo Cogwheel Dogs got the evening off to a more-than-decent start, with an immaculately played set of occasionally awkward, but often highly potent ballads. Latest single ‘Cress’ is a grower (pardon the pun) and tonight is performed with tremendous bluesy brio. The excellent, misty-eyed ‘Ghostwriter’ doesn’t suffer much from the absence of the hypnotic typewriter which graces the record, and even the underwhelming-on-CD ‘Anticoagulant’ seems better balanced tonight, with Rebecca Mosley’s ever-more-authoritative singing keeping Tom Parnell’s screeching cello from freaking out the squares just that little bit too much.

(Read the full review on Oxfordbands.com)

If you so desire, you can see an assortment of photos of the OxJam gig on Flickr ...

Cogwheel Dogs are pleased to unveil our new website.

Please - be our guest: explore. Let the adventure begin.

Our song Cress features on Premiere Evasion - a compilation released by independent Parisian record label Rabeat's Cage - alongside songs by Jonquil (MySpace), Eberg (MySpace), Sunnyvale Noise Subelement (website; MySpace)  and Hreda (MySpace).

You can order a copy of the compilation via the Rabeat's Cage MySpace page (paypal accepted) - and we'll soon be selling copies at gigs.