Writing and Recording
The band met in London on July 2006 to work on new material for Fear of a Blank Planet album. At the time, two songs ("My Ashes" and "Normal") were already written. Those sessions produced the album songs (except for "Way Out of Here") plus four more songs of which three would not quite fit the concept, the only one the band thought that could make the way into the record at this moment was "Cheating the Polygraph", that's the reason why they performed it during the tour on support of the Arriving Somewhere... DVD.
But the band later decided none of the four songs were up to the standards of the record, as they weren't properly developed yet, and there was a policy not to make the album over fifty minutes long. So the four tracks were mixed between June and August 2007 to make the Nil Recurring EP. "Normal" was composed entirely by Steven Wilson. He later reworked the song, simplifying its structure to transform it into the song "Sentimental". Barbieri summarized the album as "an EP that’s going to be of some value to the fans instead of just a couple of new tracks and some things they’ve already got."
Read more about this topic: Nil Recurring
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