the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Today is release day for my brand new solo album, Manifesto.
Listen here:
Celebrating 40 Years of Bass Playing, the new album is one of four that I’ve recorded this summer, in one of the most creative periods of my entire music life. Continue reading “New Solo Album, Manifesto Out Today”
Ta-daaaaa! I’ve got a new album out on Aug 3rd. It’s called Manifesto, and it’s lovely. I’m really, really happy with it and I hope you enjoy it too when you get to hear it. 
Below are the sleeve notes to the album, which tell something of the story of its coming into being, but also how the manifesto for music making that I’ve stuck to since my very first solo gig acts as an AI-resistant model of creative practice that values process, meaning, community and exploration over things that can be cloned by a predictive algorithm.
Read on…
40 years of playing bass. I got my first bass for my 14th birthday, but got it a few months early. So October or November 1986. I don’t remember because I didn’t realise that this particular birthday gift was the thing that would dominate my professional, social, creative and academic life over the next 40 years. I didn’t know that only 13 years after that I’d be playing solo at the Troubadour in London, and having built a bit of a name for myself as a session player and journalist, I’d become known primarily as a solo bassist. Not just a solo bassist, but a looping solo bassist; a self-recording, self-releasing, Internet-dwelling, creativity-documenting, university-speaking, CD-selling, Royal Albert Hall-playing solo bassist of some international notoriety. Continue reading “Manifesto – New Solo Album and a Model for AI-resistant Music-making”
For an artist as prolific as Steve Lawson, ‘new album’ can mean a lot of things. Time Stops, in Steve’s own words, marks the first time in a long way that the music hasn’t been catharsis-first. “It feels like a very long time since I played music for its own sake.” says Steve, going on to explain “Throughout the pandemic and then through my lymphoma diagnosis and treatment, music was very explicitly the soundtrack to a set of narratives, emotions, experiences – it produced some really lovely music, some music that is so special to me, but that association with a story means that for those who know the story, it has a whole other layer of meaning.”
The lymphoma Steve mentions was diagnosed last July and resulted in 6 months of intense chemotherapy and recovery that helps highlight just how important his Bandcamp subscriber community is. “I realised that I had a group of people who cared about me through the lens of caring about my music. That the two were intrinsically linked. I’d been aware of this for a long time, and that notion was essential in forming the community in the first place, but experiencing what it was like to make music during cancer recovery and do it for an audience who were reading the story and listening to the music within the context of that narrative, was quite extraordinary.”
The new double album, Time Stops, marks a return to a more traditional model of music making. Of course, stories and emotions and meaning are woven deep into the music as always, but its primary purpose wasn’t to soundtrack a life-changing experience for the subscriber audience. “I was just relishing getting back to exploring the music in my head outside of catastrophe and life-changing events” explains Steve, “Those experiences are here too, particularly the lightness of much of the music reflecting the feeling of currently being in remission, possibly for good, but this wasn’t ‘let’s document with music how I feel about having cancer’.”
Across the two albums, Steve draws on the latest iteration of his intricate and bafflingly complex sound-world. The album was recorded while in California, where Steve was visiting the NAMM Show for the first time since January 2020, immediately pre-pandemic. It features his Elrick SLC signature 6 string fretted bass throughout and all the sounds are from the MOD Audio DuoX – a multi-FX pedal that offers an unparalleled level of audio manipulation and experimentation. Central to all of the work is what Steve describes as “some of the best melodic inventiveness I’ve recorded in many, many years. Melody is always central to my music world, but during the soundtrack-experiments of the last few years, large scale ambient works became the dominant form. Here, tunes are back in the foreground, big time!”
The album is out now for Steve’s Bandcamp subscribers, and will be available to the public on May 26th, as two separate albums, volumes 1 & 2 exclusively via Bandcamp. A third volume of subscriber only material is also released.
“It feels really good to be back making music this way, for music to be something other than self-care. It’s still very much self-care, but with a greater outward focus.”
Last Friday, Bandcamp – the music sales and streaming platform that I use for all my music distribution – donated all of their revenue share back to artists for 24 hours. This was an amazing gesture, resulting in several million pounds/euros/dollars ending up directly in the bank accounts of musicians struggling to pay bills and find ways to replace lost live income right now.
I released two new albums on Friday to celebrate – a public release of February’s subscriber only album, Better Living Through Technology, and the brand new (dis)order. Listen to both here, and click through if you’d like to buy them for just £2 each :
The feeding frenzy of sales was extraordinary, and ground the Bandcamp servers to a halt at various times through the day. Still, the headline stat for me is that when you add up all the new subscribers, sales of my entire catalogue and all the people who bought one or a few albums (at the new £2 price per album across my entire Bandcamp shop), I sold just under 900 albums Between Friday and Sunday. If those had been individual copies of the same album sold to separate buyers, that’d be enough to land me in the lower reaches of the UK album charts…!
So firstly, a massive THANK YOU to everyone who bought anything during the day, or even listened to it and decided it wasn’t for you – I’m grateful you took the time, and you found something else that was more to your liking elsewhere!
These are perilous times for musicians, and my decision to focus my release strategy around the community of listeners on Bandcamp 10 years ago has made me a fair bit more resilient to these changing economic times than my friends whose strategic success plan was for a viral hit on Spotify. I really hope they find it, but I’m insanely grateful for the compact community of curious and caring music lovers who sustain me via the Bandcamp subscription.
If you’d like to join us, please head to stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe – the community aspect is going to be ramped up through this time of isolation with subscriber video hangs and some creativity inspiration videos. If that sounds good to you, go check out what’s on offer…
And if you’re looking for a new soundtrack to these uncertain times, please go check out my fan account on Bandcamp – I bought more music in the last 3 days than in perhaps any comparable period in my entire life (matched maybe by a trip across the US in 2004 when I ended up throwing away clothes so I could fit more CDs in my suitcase 🙂 ) – it’s all there. <3
I’ve finished off 2019 – and the decade – with a bit of a release flourish. December started with the release of my first ever ‘Best Of’ compilation – a look at my solo work from the very beginning up until I introduced percussive samples and keyboard sounds into my live set-up in 2015. Then last weekend’s gig celebrating 20 years of my solo career (exactly 20 years from my first ever solo gig!) yielded not one but TWO new albums that were released this week to my Bandcamp subscribers. The first is the solo set from the show, and the second is the audio part of my Illuminated Loops collaboration with genius visual artist Poppy Porter. So at first glance they’re two solo sets, in that all the sounds made are made by me, but the contrast between the two is pretty huge, and certainly the memories attached for those who were there will be, I assume, rather different!
I want to finish the decade with a huge thank you to all of you who’ve bought and listened to my music over the last ten years, who’ve subscribed, who’ve told friends about the music, come to shows, messaged me on social media to offer encouragement, reviewed the records on Bandcamp or come and said hi at the various events where our paths have crossed. It’s such an amazing luxury to get to make music and share it with people, and this path towards carving out a sustainable ongoing way of releasing a lot of both solo and collaborative recordings would feel pretty exposed and out on a limb if it wasn’t for your encouragement and patronage. So thank you.
If you haven’t yet subscribed, or used to subscribe but are interested in getting the new music that’s been released since you let it lapse, I’d love for you to join us for the end of the decade. It would be amazing to finish the journey over 2020’s threshold with a subscriber boost, and it’d certainly give you a massive amount of music to investigate during any down time you might have over the festive period!
So head over to http://stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe now and see what’s on offer. There are 50+ albums that are yours the moment you subscribe, along with whatever I release in the next 12 months, a couple of eBooks, and a ton of subscriber exclusive video and conversation to investigate in the subscriber area on Bandcamp.
The streaming economy still offers nothing like sustainability to niche music makers, so I rely entirely on the generosity and patronage of those who are curious enough to come and find out what’s on offer. In return I promise to make the best music I possibly can! 🙂
I hope you have a wonderful festive time, however you choose to celebrate at this time of year, and that despite whatever set-backs and sadness we’ve experienced on a global scale over the last decade, we’ll be able to muster enough hope and resolve to greet the new year with love and gratitude, and a commitment to being a vital and positive presence in it. Aside from anything else I’m able to do, I’ll do my best to provide that journey with a soundtrack…
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)Â
Here’s the video for the longest track on my brand new album – the title track, The Arctic Is Burning.
As always, this is the film of me actually recording it. I film every time I hit record, as a document of what’s going on for my Bandcamp subscribers. They get way more video than is ever made available to the wider public – new approaches that I’m working on, video for tracks that only end up on subscriber albums… I end up filming a whole load of stuff that obviously doesn’t get released at all, but rather gets deleted, but that’s OK. I’d rather do that than miss a good performance 🙂
So here it is, the video of me recording The Arctic Is Burning – one thing to keep in mind is that as you watch it for the first time, you know as much as I do about where it’s going to go. I don’t start these things with a map of what the resulting piece of music is going to sound like, or the transitions its going to take. The role of the camera is really interesting here, in that it acts as a proxy for the subscribers. They’re who I’ve got in mind when I’m thinking about the journey and how it is perceived from the outside. They play the psychological role that a producer would play in a studio, watching through the glass while I record a take, hoping not to screw it up 🙂
So sometimes the journey takes me by surprise, sometimes I have to dig deep to find out where it’s meant to go, and sometimes it feels inevitable…
Hear the whole album at music.stevelawson.net/album/the-arctic-is-burning or check out my Bandcamp subscription now to get everything I release throughout the year!
I’ve just released a new live album for my subscribers – it’s the recording of my set at the Belfast Guitar Festival a couple of weeks ago.
But more than just being a live album, it comes with a 3000 word essay – a reflection on the experience of playing there, and of listening back to the music afterwards. The album is probably best thought of as the soundtrack to the essay.
The joy of all this is having the latitude to experiment with things like this – in a conventional release schedule, this gig wouldn’t have been released, and the story wouldn’t have been told even if it was… If I’d put it in on my blog for people to read, the album and the essay would’ve been in different places and only a tiny part of the possible audience would end up experiencing them both. Bandcamp allows me to bundle the two together (the PDF is downloaded with the album, though I’ve offered a Dropbox link to it for those subscribers who do most of their Bandcamp listening in the app). I have a lil’ community of relatively focussed listeners who I can invite to think about and talk about the wider experience of playing improvised music to a festival audience that are unfamiliar with my music, and to contemplate why the music ends up being the way it is…
If you want to get the album, along with 48 other albums, and a couple of other PDF books, and a load of subscriber-exclusive video, head to stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe – come join the fun! 🙂
Hurrah! Finally, my new solo album, The Arctic Is Burning is out today – you can listen below, or click the link to listen/buy/download/share 🙂
In case you missed the pre-announcements, this is my 30th solo album in 20 years. It is, as with everything I do, live single unedited performances. I’m playing bass and Quneo – a MIDI control surface that allows me to play drums (and in other situations, piano and anything else I choose 🙂 ) You can see a couple of videos of me recording the tunes below.
My Bandcamp subscribers have had the album for a month now – if you enjoy the record, it’s worth considering the subscription. With your first year, you get 49 existing albums, plus everything I release in the next 12 months. In the last 12 months, that’s been TEN albums. Lots of the collaborations on there are exclusive to the subscription, and it also comes with a ton of video and a couple of eBooks! Head to the Steve Lawson Bandcamp Subscription Page to find out all about it.
Anyway, here’s those videos for you :
The second video from my new album, The Arctic Is Burning, is now up on YouTube. The album is out on Sept 2nd, but can be had right now by subscribing at stevelawson.bandcamp.com/subscribe.
The delightful humans at No Treble wrote about it here.
The title, Start Everywhere, is taken from an anarchist manifesto – ‘to change anything, start everywhere’ – in terms of our story about catastrophic climate change, it’s an invitation to think realistically about the scale of transformation needed in how we live on the planet in order to extend the viability of sustaining human life at the current scale. How that gets translated into improvised instrumental music is the topic of a much longer post than this, maybe we’ll get into that soon…
The track list for the album is:
…so after contemplating the scale of the problem and the permanence of the change to how the world’s climate behaves, we then need to think about the scale of the response.
For now, here’s the track – enjoy, and if you want it now, along with 48 other albums, two books, and a whole ton of exclusive video – plus EVERYTHING I release in the next 12 months, please check out the subscription.