[sorry for the break in posts - was away at Greenbelt over the weekend]
You can download Growing Up And Moving On here, or the whole Slow Food album here.
This was the first thing we recorded. It is, I think the most edited too… Perhaps.
Nerves? Expectations?
Trip and I met 11 years ago. We wouldn’t have played like this then. We were young. Unformed. A different world.
We’ve moved on, up, out, through… Sometimes in parallel, sometimes divergent, always with a bass in hand.
It’s a slow build, the underlying loop changes not. The emotions evolve. We’re exploring, tentatively (it’s the first thing we played, remember?) Satisfied as it unfolds.
You can download Grown-Ups At Play from here, and the whole Slow Food album from here.
The simplest tune on the record in terms of the techological wizardry. There’s one little loop towards the end, but most of it is just Trip and I playing, with him hitting some deep, deep bass pedals (srsly, you’re not going to hear those if you’re listening on laptop speakers or through crappy headphones. They dig deep.)
Trip and I have experimented with this kind of thing before. I think this is the best tune to ever come out of our non-loop improvs. It’s almost like we growed up ‘n’ stuff.
This is almost an old fashioned duet.
Almost.
The loop section adds a lil’ StevieSpice to the proceedings. After all, we are grown-ups.
Click here to download The Upward Spiral. And here to download the whole ‘Slow Food’ album.
It was really tricky to choose the opener for the album, and this wasn’t the obvious first choice, as it has a kind of false start… it feels likes it’s going to be all big and ambient, then Trip hints at a sparse bass groove, I switch to the rolling rhythmic line, he follows, then jumps in with the jaunty melody, switches to fretless…
Two minutes in, it’s hopefully clear why it’s the opener.
Joyous, optimistic, improvised music. That’s the idea.
Of course it turns into a freaky glitch-fest at the end, but not before a crescendo of euphoric blade-runner-esque cinematic guitar-ish-ness.
10 years ago today, I received a shipment of CDs from ICC duplication, to the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham – it was my first solo album, And Nothing But The Bass, and the start of my solo recording career.
Here it is – please download it for free:
10 years on, and I’m less than 24 hours into the life of a brand new album, Slow Food, with Trip Wamsley. It’s been such an amazing journey, not least of all because what seemed like such a weird thing to do back then – to me and to everyone else – is now so normal. The internet is awash with people experimenting with solo bass, and looping crops up everywhere from coffee-shops to the top of the charts.
The gimmick potential diminished many years ago, for which I’m most grateful. It let me get on with making the music that mattered to me, via the method that made most sense.
Solo bass was never a circus trick for me.
I was never interested in looping as a way of showing how clever I could be.
It was a way of me getting the music inside my head out to the world.
I hear things in layers, I hear evolving texture not rock drums and last-chorus-key-changes.
The template is still much the same. I’m just much better at it. The vision is more refined, the tech is better (thank the baby Jesus for Bob Amstadt and the Looperlative) and yes, I’m orders of magnitude more developed as a musician – technically, theoretically, conceptually, melodically… I just make better music happen. At least, I make music happen that is ever-closer to the soundtrack to the inside of my head. And I’m still loving it.
I’m loving the collaborations this has all led me to – the albums with Jez Carr, Theo Travis, Lawson Dodds Wood, Mike Outram and now Trip Wamsley. The gigs with Lobelia, Michael Manring, BJ Cole, Cleveland Watkiss, Julie McKee… The myriad incredible musical moments of the Recycle Collective at Darbucka, The Vortex and Greenbelt.
And I’m grateful to every journalist that’s ever taken the time to listen to and write about the music, every radio DJ that’s ever played it, and every person who has played a CD to their friends and said ‘check this out’, or emailed them a link, burned a CDR for them, emailed them some tracks. It’s all great, and I thank you for it.
So, 10 years on, here’s the new album: Have a listen, enjoy, pay whatever you think its worth. For me, the last 10 years have been priceless.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll be all-too-familiar with ‘it’ – the first of two duo albums with Trip Wamsley. I blogged about them here, and at the time thought they’d both be EPs. Well, I’m not sure about Trip’s release, but this one has grown into a full album – all 42 glorious minutes of it. [Read more →]
Trip and I have been friends for over a decade. We met at the NAMM Show in LA in ‘99, and I was immediately a fan of his music. I doubt he heard anything I was on at the time – I was still 11 months away from my first ever solo gig, and he’d already been doing the solo bass thing for best part of a decade – he was SO far ahead of the curve, inspired by Michael Manring, playing opening shows for big name acts in The South all on his own. A real inspiration. [Read more →]
I’ve got a lot of posts to write about this tour, so I’ll start with one of the easiest – the music gear round-up. For the kind of small-scale touring we do, getting this bit right is SO important.
If the gear is too big, we can’t travel.
If the sound is bad, you can’t hear what we’re doing,
if anything breaks, we can’t afford to carry spares so it needs to be fixable.
We need the trinity of tech spec – small, reliable and super-high-quality. [Read more →]
One of the joys of releasing music through Bandcamp(officially the world’s greatest digital music release platform, as voted for by me)is that album releases can be progressive.
We’ve already added ‘Happy‘ to the live album, when it became our de facto single, thanks to the awesome video. [Read more →]
Tomorrow we drive to Nashville – I love Nashville. Some of my favourite people in the world are there. Clever, lovely, talented creative people. What’s not to love about it?
Which is why we’re there for a week in the middle of this tour. We’re doing a lot there. Here’s the list: [Read more →]
