Tag: birmingham

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Two New Albums and My Anniversary Gig!

So, last week, I released my first ever best-of album. It’s culled from all my solo work between 2000 and 2013, and is a pretty lovely summary of what I got up to as a solo performer before I added the Quneo into my performance set-up and started to experiment with percussion and keyboard sounds.

The album was put together by two of my long time friends/listeners/subscribers, Tom and Mike, and their sleevenotes are on the Bandcamp page, so you can read a little about their thoughts on each track. Tom also provided the photos for each individual track, so if you go to the track pages on Bandcamp you’ll see those, or if you buy it and download the files…

Anyway, have a listen here:

Then Sunday was my 20th Anniversary gig – it was a deeply special show at my favourite venue in Birmingham, Tower Of Song. As part of the evening, I hosted pre and post show discussions about improv, which were recorded as part of the research for my ongoing PhD. What became apparent fairly quickly is that these weren’t ‘pre and post show discussions’, detached from the rest of the ‘event’ – they were the first and last acts of a four act play, ones that centred on conspicuous listening, and gave space for the audience to register their presence, preferences, gratitude, and anything else they wanted to talk about…

As an improvisor it was quite a profound moment, to have an entire audience talk about their anticipation of what was to come, about their reasons for being there… The permission to ‘do what we do’ comes from the audience – lots of people have theorised this, but I’ve never actually encountered it in quite such a clearly expressed form!

And what’s more, the first album from the gig is out today! The subscriber-only, 42 minute album is the whole of my first set, the solo one which preceded the Illuminated Loops set with artist Poppy Porter. That’ll be up next.

It’s been a really interesting year for music-making – The Arctic Is Burning is one of my favourite albums I’ve ever made, and ended up being a really fitting part two to Beauty And Desolation, despite that not really being the plan initially.  There have been two LEYlines albums (vols IV and V), four other live solo albums, Seeing Sound with Daniel Berkman (recorded in 2014!) and my most recent duo album with Pete Fraser, Restless got a public release this year.

But it’s been a year of solo experimentation, mostly. The explorations with field recordings have been a really inspiring addition to my sound, and have given me so much to thing about and experiment with. Perhaps I’ll do more with that in the new year.

I hope 2019 has been a good year for you – I know that politically it’s been a struggle for a huge number of people, and I’ve seen various friends struggling under the stress of the way things are going, but I hope that in the middle of that you’ve been able to find a sense of purpose, have some fun and explore ways to be part of the solution rather than buckling under the weight of the problem. Peace to you and I hope you get some time off through the festive period.

(top photo by Richard Hallman) 

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New album news – LEYlines V out now

Right, I’ve got a ton of half-written blog posts about all kinds of stuff, but here’s some news that’s exciting!

We’ve just released LEYlines V – the fifth album by me, Andy Edwards and Phi Yaan-Zek. It’s the 2nd set from the that gave us LEYlines IV, which came out a month ago, so if you want to recreate the gig feeling, just listen to the two albums about 15 minutes apart, buy yourself some very reasonably priced drinks in the break and have a chat with some likeminded oddballs about what you just heard 🙂

The gig was at Tower Of Song here in Birmingham, almost exactly two years ago, and as I said when LEYlines IV came out, represented a pretty significant leap forward (or maybe sideways!) for the band (see this blog post for more info on the LEYlines history). Everything we do is fully improvised, and so there’s no sense that any of us need to maintain any continuity gear-wise from one gig to the next, so we always turn up with a different set of sounds. Andy has his ‘LEYlines kit’ which is a hybrid set-up of percussion and small drums (best seen in this video from our duo album Over Time) and Phi uses LEYlines as an R&D space for new sounds and approaches to processing and manipulating his guitar sound… to quite extraordinary effect…

For my part, these two albums have some of the most OTT ‘fusion-esque’ playing I’ve ever done on them – there are a lot of moments where Phi and I have swapped our traditional roles, and while he’s providing texture and harmony, I’m playing crazy lead lines 🙂 You can listen for yourself here:

You’ll notice that there are two different editions of the album, with different artworks, subtitles, and even the way the tracks have been cut up… It’s one of the joys of LEYlines as a project, that we get to really mess with conventions around what an album even is (and we can’t even be consistent about how we render ‘LEYlines’ in text form! ha!)… Is the music inextricably attached to that title and artwork? Are those just emblems or avatars – metadata that helps us tell stories with it?

With a project as resolutely uncommercial as LEYlines (yet equally resolute in our commitment to its sustainability), we get to experiment without the sense that we’re somehow missing out on thousands of pounds of lost revenue to confused improv fans unable to find the definitive version of this particular music! It’s a joy to make music with people as curious about this stuff as I am. We’re all ploughing through the range of possible paths for creative musicians in the digital era, and together we get to try things out, see what works, see what’s got harder and what’s got easier… And LEYlines is one such space of the explorable.

So, if you’re a subscriber, you’ll already have the subscriber exclusive graffiti edition. If you’re not, you can subscribe within the next week to get it, or you can check out the version embedded above from Phi’s Bandcamp account, and get it as a single album from him… He’s running a special offer where you get LEYlines IV as well bundled in if you buy it very soon… so maybe hop on that.

We’ve got a couple more LEYlines recordings in the bag, and are planning some more shows very soon – now that I’ve stopped teaching at Kidderminster College, I won’t get to see Andy  and Phi on a weekly basis, so making sure we get regular opportunities to play together feels even more important than ever – they’ve been such a huge part of my musical development over the last 6 years or so, and are two of my closest friends, so I have no inclination to let go of this amazing musical sandpit that we’ve created here! Expect more LEYlines action, live and recorded, very soon! 🙂

As always, I’d emplore you to check out Phi and Andy’s music via their Bandcamp accounts – Phi’s studio record from last year, Reality Is My Plaything is truly the album of a lifetime – 10 years in the making, and just an extraordinary achievement. Likewise, Andy’s body of work is full of incredible music, and his latest project, Kundabuffa is an exploration of the intersection of improvisation and electronic soul and jazz that just keeps getting better and more remarkable.

shop.pyzmusic.com is Phi’s Bandcamp page
andyedwards.bandcamp.com is Andy’s.

band photo of the trio LEYlines

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New LEYlines Album Out Now – LEYlines IV – with Two Ways To Get It

Phi Yaan-Zek, Andy Edwards and myself are LEYlines. Or we do LEYlines. I’m not sure whether LEYlines is an entity or a process, but whatever it is, LEYlines is us and/or how we make music 🙂

And we have a brand new live album out, recorded at Tower Of Song in Birmingham in 2017. This is the first set, and the second set will be out next month, as LEYlines V! And there are two ways you can get it:

Firstly, it’s out as a stand-alone Bandcamp release via Phi Yaan-Zek’s page: that’s where you can listen to it and buy it, and Phi’s running a special offer to get LEYlines V with it too (when it’s out next month). Here it is, hit play and stream it while you read the rest of this:

Alternatively you can get it as a subscriber to me on Bandcamp – it comes with different artwork (pictured), and as a single track instead of being chopped up Phi-style, but it’s the same music.

BUT you’ll need to subscribe this week, cos next week, it’ll cease to be part of the back catalogue offer for new subscribers – all existing subscribers will keep it (there’s no mechanism within Bandcamp for taking stuff back – it’s yours forever once you’ve got it!) but this won’t be part of the bundle you get for signing up after the weekend. If you want it then, you’ll have to buy it from Phi even if you subscribe at a later date…

So, go check it out, then have a look at stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe for the rest of the info on the Subscription. It’ll be more than worth your time and money 😉

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A Month of Sundays (3 Gigs in Birmingham)

Following on from last week’s lovely gig with Julie Slick and Andy Edwards, I’ve got TWO more Sunday night gigs at Tower Of Song in Birmingham coming up:

August 10th : Jem Godfrey, Steve Lawson, Andy Edwards – Jem’s band is Frost* (which Andy used to be in), he’s also played keyboards with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. If that wasn’t enough, he’s an Ivor Novello award winning songwriter, writing massive hits for Shane Ward, Atomic Kitten, Holly Vallance… He’s very, very good at whatever area of music he turns his hand to, so expect amazingness. [Ticket Link] -0- [Facebook link]

August 17th : Lobelia’s Lazy Sundays presents Briana Corrigan + Steve Lawson – Briana was the original vocalist in the Beautiful South, sang on all the early hits. Since then, she’s released two wonderful solo albums, written and performed in plays and a one woman show called ‘Mum’s The Word’. She’s properly brilliant, and I’m VERY excited to see what we come up with together… the plan is to write/arrange/rehearse/plan a show in 3 days. There’ll definitely be songs, music, maybe some spoken word stuff, story-telling, poetry… who knows. It’s going to be lovely, and you need to be there. [Ticket Link] -0- [Facebook Link]

So, two in a row. Very different, but equally magical, I promise.

And if you’re wondering what you missed last Sunday, here’s some lovely video of the opening 12 minutes of the show (it’s shot in HD so choose the 1080p option and watch it full-screen!) :

See? Loveliness. 🙂

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