the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
All the latest news about musical goings-on…
So, Mike Outram and I have been releasing a new preview track each time the play-count on the previous one reaches 500 – the last two are on Souncloud, and are both past that benchmark, so we’ve made another available.
BUT.
It’s not on Soundcloud. It’s available for free in exchange for a Tweet.
Head to http://stevelawson.net/tft/ to get it. Continue reading “Third Preview Track From forthcoming Steve Lawson/Mike Outram album”
I finally got round to doing something I’ve been meaning to for ages, but never managed to line up being motivated and having the money for it – I replaced my live mixer and preamp with a MOTU Ultralite Mk III Soundcard.
There are a number of reasons for this – Continue reading “New Toys, New Music”
As promised, when the 1st of the Steve Lawson/Mike Outram tracks reached 500 plays, we uploaded another one. It’s a really long one that goes through 3 or 4 very different sections, though that evolve on into the next in a lovely fluid way. In order to explain a little of what’s actually going on (it’s a pretty big noise for just a bassist and a guitarist to make live!) I’ve annotated the track, as you can see below. Continue reading “Annotating Tracks With Soundcloud”
…That’s what my brain is asking when I’m improvising.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the great pleasure and good fortune to spend a day recording with Mike Outram – guitarist extraordinaire. I’ve been a fan of Mike’s for a long time, having heard him in a couple of different settings with Singer/Songwriter Rebecca Hollweg, and more recently with Theo Travis’ Doubletalk quartet.
We were able to snag a day recording in the rather lovely studios at Leicester College, giving the students there something to record, and a very different type of project to work on. Continue reading “Is It Good? Yes, It’s Good. Can I Make It Better? (New tune with Mike Outram)”
Recorded at Friday night’s gig at the Islwyn Guitar Club in Crosskeys, Gwent, South Wales, here are two new tunes that ’emerged’ – they’re both improvs, but I like ’em, so will probably have a bash at something like them for the new album…
The recordings are remarkably good considering they’re just on a little Tascam digital recorder thingie (recorded by Andrew Buckton – fab singer/songwriter who came with me, and sang beautifully on the gig too).
here they are – enjoy!
As y’all know, I’m a big big fan of Bandcamp – it is, at the moment, the best self-service MP3 sales platform on the entire internetz.
They’ve just implemented the option to have artists, albums and tracks tagged with genre, location and associated words… Making it searchable.
So, this is where you come in – I’m interested in what you associate with my music when you listen to it. It can be a genre description, or a feeling, or something far more random. The floor is wide open.
So, if you would be so kind as to have a listen via the MP3s page, or Spotify, or last.fm (or indeed your own MP3 collection, if you’ve already demonstrated your cool, your exquisite taste and your generosity by downloading them all 😉 ) and let me know what comes to mind. Please either post it here in the comments on this post, or on Twitter with the hashtag #SBStags
(of course, if you’re a last.fm user, you’re most welcome to cross-post the tags over there…)
So, let your imagination run – let’s see if we come up with a mental map of the music that means something.. or just a load of random stuff that helps no-one… It’s over to you 🙂
2009 was a fairly easy-going year, music-wise for Lobelia and I. We played a load of US shows in January, and a handful of other shows across the year, but it was mainly pretty low-key stuff.
2010 is already shaping up to be a much more musically-focussed year. I’m in the process of booking some solo house-concerts for the end of March/Beginning of April – the open dates are
If you want to host a house-gig on any of those dates, and are near (or between) those places, please drop me a line.
Then Lo and I are doing some duo shows at the beginning of May – on the 6th we’re in Leeds and the 8th in Surrey (more deets soon) – if you’re anywhere between those two, we’d be happy to come and play on the 7th, or either side of those dates. Do drop us a line.
And at the end of May we go out to the US, mainly to take Flapjack to meet the family, but we’ll be doing some house concerts and ‘house consulting’ as well – if you’re interested in hosting something (or putting us in touch with a music school/university) please drop us a line.
It’s now nearly 4 years since I released Behind Every Word, and while it’s currently selling REALLY well thanks to Bandcamp’s wonderful download sales platform, it really is time for a new album. So I’ll be working on that very soon – just need to get the tech side worked out. Hopefully will have that available for the US shows.
In a couple of weeks time, I’m going into a studio for a day with Mike Outram – guitar-monkey extraordinaire. No idea what we’ll come up with, but if its releasable, that’ll be out sometime soonish as well.
And then there’s the archive – I’ve got a whole load of fascinating music languishing on hard-drives. There’s a duo album with Italian guitarist Luca Formentini, a strange-yet-beautiful experimental duo album with free improv trumpeter Jeff Kaiser, a quartet live recording with Jeff, saxophonist Andrew Pask and bassist Steuart Liebig. (that last one is really interesting cos I thought the gig had gone pretty badly, then listened to the recording and really liked it 🙂 )
And there’s also a double album’s worth of live stuff with Theo Travis, recorded on the tour we did after For The Love Of Open Spaces came out. That really needs to be heard. So maybe I should work on that first.
Suffice to say, there’ll be lots of cool music from me this year, if something else doesn’t get in the way.
For now, here’s the album with Theo Travis – have a listen, and then pay whatever you like for it if you want to download it.
I’ve got loads of End of year/start of a new decade type blogging to do over the next week, but for now, here’s the Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, freshly uploaded to Bandcamp.com, for download sale, pay-what-you-like. 🙂
If you weren’t around here when it came out, feel free to watch the documentary on the making of the album that’s on Youtube – I’ll embed part 1 below, then click through the links. (the sound on the first one’s a bit rough, but it gets much better as they go on!)
Time for some end-of-year bloggage – I’m going to do a round-up of my favourite blog-posts on here from the year in a bit, so if you have any that were particularly useful to you, please do let me know via twitter or email or a comment here…
But first, my own chart of music listening for the year. This is taken from my last.fm account, so is a pretty accurate list of what I’ve been listening to (there’s no much of my listening that doesn’t get scrobbled to Last.fm…)
I’ll add some notes into the list… (the numbers after each name are the number of plays in the year) My Top 50 most-listened artists of 2009: Continue reading “The Only 2009 Chart That Really Counts: Your Own”
I was on the internet before my first album came out (this is what it looked like back then). In fact, much of the momentum that my first album had was to do with my good standing in the various bass-related web communities that I was a part of. As a player, teacher and journalist, I had a bit of a profile, and the web was a MUCH smaller place in the late 90s.
And that all made it so much easier to decide to do my album completely on my own. I never even entertained the idea of trying to get a ‘deal’. The economics didn’t make sense even then, and I had a hunch that the future was indie… Continue reading “A Decade In Music: The Internet And Me”