Category: Music News

Two new things from Greenbelt:

Some of the official photos of my gig:

and a (downloadable) recording of the first track from the gig – an improv that morphs into A Year Afloat:

So, after four months of

• mixing and mastering
• naming tracks
• keeping Daniel and Artemis up to date with all the developments
• getting their input on titles and artwork
• generally surrendering all family and social life to the task of getting this magnum opus finished..

It’s finished.

10 Shows, 59 tracks, 10 hours, 16 minutes and 7 seconds of music.

[Buy the USB Stick here]

10 of the tracks (or or two from each of the 8 shows from 2013) feature Artemis on vocals. A few of those are on Soundcloud or on Bandcamp.

So what now? Well, they’ll be on sale at Greenbelt Festival this weekend. All the preorders will be sent out at the start of next week. I’ve discovered that the FLAC versions, being 24 bit, won’t all fit on a USB stick, so if you ordered that, you’ll be getting the stick with 7 albums on and 3 download codes to get the others 🙂

Now begins the task of loading them all up with music!

In the meantime I’m sequencing the 2 CD set, which should be available by early September.

I also ordered custom sticks/boxes for the Steve Lawson Complete Works set. Which is slightly misleading, in that it only has 2 of the FingerPainting albums on it, but it’s 24 albums spanning my entire solo and collaborative career. But you can order those on Bandcamp too – music.stevelawson.net/merch

Time to release another of the complete shows from the Steve Lawson/Daniel Berkman FingerPainting: Complete set. This one, titled Serendipity, was recorded in Petaluma, California, and was the 2nd-to-last show of our January tour. It is, of course, included in all of the full sets of all 10 shows, or on its own from Bandcamp for £5.

Click here to buy the USB Stick of All 10 Shows.

It has a markedly different flavour that the rest of the shows, due to Daniel electing to leave a fair few of his laptop-type gadgets and controllers out of his set up, and instead using a sitar-guitar on a couple of tunes.

The decision was in response to our observation that the average age of the audience was considerably older than previous shows, so we might want to go somewhere a little mellower with the music. However, just before we started, we overheard an enthusiastic conversation involving about half of those in attendance, about the relative merits of various 20th century composers: John Cage, Stockhausen, Harry Partch… REALLY difficult music. So we were once again freed up to play some pretty weird music as the muse led…

The end result is a record that’s both distinct from the rest of the set but deeply consistent with the aesthetic. It’s fun, exploratory, overflowing with melodies, and features two stellar vocal contributions from Artemis, the 2nd of them entirely wordless. So often the vocal improv was the high point of the show, the pinnacle of the show’s emotional crescendo. Huge thanks to Artemis for sharing her amazing skills on all these gigs!

Big thanks must also go to our amazing hosts for the night, Darin and Jessica Wilson. Darin is himself a fabulous musician. Go here to listen.

When I was in Dublin a few weeks back, I was interviewed for Culture Cafe on RTE 2XM. It’s a really good interview – you can see a bit of it on the YouTube clip at the bottom.

The interview covers the project with Daniel, and some good questions about being a musician/band on the internet. Well worth a listen. Big thanks to Nessy for such interesting questions!

Here’s the entire interview, which features 3 of the tracks with Daniel Berkman, on Soundcloud –

And here’s the YouTube clip:

I know, you were thinking, “it’s been days since I heard anything new from Steve. What’s up with that??” So, here are two new things.

…Well, three new things, actually, but one of them you’ll have to buy to hear 🙂

Firstly, here’s another of the complete shows from the gigs with Daniel Berkman in January. This is the 2nd gig of the tour, and as with all the others this is the entirety of the duo/trio stuff from the show. The track that plays first in the widget, Yosemite, is possibly my favourite music thing I’ve ever been involved in. Here, listen:

You can also now buy JUST the digital downloads of all 10 shows. It’s £25, which is the same price as the USB stick, but if you want to swap, I’ll do a straight swap for your USB stick order, and you’ll get 5 albums now as downloads, and the next 5 as their finished, at roughly weekly intervals. Message me, OK?

Next thing up is a wonderful bit of serendipity – last week I was on a panel for an excellent event organised by the Music Producer’s Guild. One of my fellow panelists was Mark Kelly, keyboardist with UK prog legends Marillion. Mark, as it turns out, is a supremely nice bloke, and we got along like a house on fire. So along with drum-genius Roy Dodds (of Fairground Attraction fame.. and Lawson/Dodds/Wood 🙂 ) we started hatching plans for new music. Mark’s first suggestion was to take some of my existing work and add keyboards, to see if our sound worlds collide in interesting ways. So, he improvised a number of layers over the first track he chose, which happened to be Accidentally (On Purpose) from the album of the same name. The results are both beautiful and interesting, and are the precursor to, I think, a lot more music from the two of us and whoever else we end up getting to join us 🙂

Here it is:

Lastly, the artwork at the top is for Academia, the latest finished show in the FingerPainting: Complete series. Recorded at Stanford Uni, here’s the opening track from it, with me playing a beautiful 6 string fretted Spector bass, that I borrowed from our host for the evening Rod Taylor, and which used to belong to bass legend Chuck Rainey. Mojo to spare!