Blimey, it really is all go in the Lawson House Of Music. After a fairly long period of relative inactivity, we’re back in full-on music making mode!
What that means is that there are three new albums on the horizon – First up, there’s the duo album with Mike Outram, which I’m FINALLY getting round to mastering. It’s sat there for so long (we recorded it over a year ago) and I’ve been continually listening to the rough mixes that we did (some of which are on Soundcloud) and love it, but for some reason wasn’t in a position to finish it. Maybe I wasn’t sure quite how it was meant to sound… Anyway, it’s now nearly done, and should be out in a week or so…
Next up, there’s Lobelia’s new solo album – she’s been planning a covers album for years, having played a whole range of remarkable songs at shows, which has resulted in her amassing a collection of songs that sit together beautifully as an album. We borrowed a rather lovely vocal mic from our marvellous friend Tim, and fell in love with it, so bought one of our own. Which means we’re now recording with two amazing mics, and she’s sounding better than ever. That’ll be out before we go to the US. I’m not playing on it (as yet) but I am busy mixing and helping to produce it.
And then there’s my new solo album. Something that’s been on the back-burner for 5 years! The catalyst for revisiting it was a conversation with our lovely friend Mike Atherton, who had just made a lovely little Sci-Fi short in 48 hours. He came over for coffee (having borrowed our studio monitors for the audio part of the filming) and we talked about all things cinematic. I LOVE talking to Mike about film and TV. He cares a great deal about it, but has pretty much zero snobbery about any particular genre or medium. He just loves passionate film making. When he left I went straight upstairs, deeply inspired by the chat and particularly by Precision, the short film he’d just made, and recorded a 12 minute, Blade-runner-esque epic soundtrack type piece. It was just an improv, but I thought it’d be fun to play it over the top of the film and see if it worked. Bizarrely, it did, and the much more romantic, ambient nature of it brought out a whole different kind of personality in the lead character, Merica Adams.
I sent the track to Mike, who really liked it and forwarded it to the film’s director and composer/sound-designer, who both dug it too. Which is nice.
So I had a rummage round the hard drive, and found that I actually had four tracks that need to be on an album – Travelling North and Nothing Can Prepare are both on Soundcloud as VERY rough mixes, and I found another track that I recorded here just after Christmas. So I’ve been working on those, in between mixing and editing Lobelia’s album, and mastering the album with Mike.
So prepare for lots of great new music coming to a Bandcamp page near you. At the moment, I’m not planning to press CDs of any of them – it just doesn’t make any sense to do that, but they will all be up on Bandcamp as better-than-CD quality 24bit files, so you can burn your own CD if you want to be able to play any of them via a CD player.
If you would want a CD though, do let me know. I’m not averse to making some, if there’s a demand!
Watch this space…
im feeling on the edge with cds -i want to own them but know i dont actually play them once ripped, given lack of storage space im pulling back on cd purchases but seems sad hearing releases wont be on cd. kind of feel like music deserves a wider audience than the tech savvy downloaders. maybe im just getting old and sound like an old git moaning about the passing of wax cylinders. music on my computer somehow feels private and temparery. cd feels collectable, lendable and displayable. on other hand ive bought number of cds with so basic a packaging i felt i might as well down load. sorry for waffling congrats on the albums – have to admit its lo’s im most looking forward to hearing.