…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. [Read more →]
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).
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.
Gigs:
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
March 29th (near Birmingham),
31st (near Exeter) and
April 1st (near Swindon) -
the 30th already has a gig booked in Southampton (more details ASAP).
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.
Recording:
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: [Read more →]
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… [Read more →]
My first ever solo gig was at the Troubadour in Earls Court, London, on Dec 15th, 1999 – 10 years ago last week.
The eve of the new millennium, and a gig that started with a lie (the lovely chap who booked the gig asked me if I had a whole set of material after seeing me do one solo tune in a band-gig. I lied and said ‘yes’ ). It wasn’t the first time I’d played solo bass in public – that was a product demo at the National Music Show for Bassist Magazine in Nov 97. I also played weird improv noise stuff for a contemporary dance company in Nov 98. [Read more →]
Finally! Thanks to a little help from a friend who had the CD (we sold out of them ages ago, and didn’t have any left to get the high-res files from!), We’ve now got the Steve Lawson and Lobelia EP up on Bandcamp.
As you know, I’m a huge fan of Bandcamp, and it now handles physical CD sales as well! How exciting is that (you can buy Behind Every Word on CD from there).
I’ll be ditching my online shop altogether soon and moving all my sales over to Bandcamp, or just simple Paypal buttons for the CD-only sales – if you want a one-stop shop for listening and browsing now, you can just go to the MP3s/Downloads page here on this site.
Anyway, here’s the Nebraska EP – Listen, Enjoy, Share it, Embed it anywhere you like, and if you want to keep it, pay whatever you think it’s worth:
For many years, musicians have been looking for decent ways of hosting, embedding, distributing and selling music online. The shops that sell MP3s, on the back of iTunes success, are myriad. As are the sites that let you upload a few tunes and put them on your profile, ala Myspace, Reverbnation etc.
But two services are now becoming essential in the web-savvy musicians tool-kit – BandCamp and Soundcloud.
…That’s what my brain is asking when I’m improvising.
) 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 #
