If we’re friends on Facebook or Twitter, you may already know that I have a new album coming out next week.

It was recorded live in Minneapolis, after a fortuitous sequence of events (outlined in the sleeve notes) lead us to play in an art exhibition by a fabulous artist called Geoff Bush.

The music was all improvised in response to Geoff’s beautiful art. His theme for his work is ‘Believe In Peace’ – which is also the title of the album, and his work is based on the I Ching from which the four track titles come.

So we have four tracks, all played on my fretless 6 string bass (I only take one bass with me on tour in the US), and there’s some clever weirdness going on from my Kaoss Pad.

Here’s the opening track from it. Like all my recent stuff, it’s mixed and mastered for good speakers/headphones, so if you’re listening to this on a laptop, you’re going to miss a lot…

Enjoy, please tell your friends, and look out for the finished thing on the 1st or 2nd of January! 🙂

I’ve got loads I need to blog about, sorry for the silence here. First up, here are two new recordings.

Firstly, here’s a rough mix of one of the pieces from my improv gig with Corey Mwamba last week in Derby. Corey’s a remarkable musician, and we had a wonderful gig. The whole show should be up on Bandcamp at some point (projects are backing up and I need to start releasing some of them!)

This is the 2nd thing we played on the night – I missed all but the last 15 seconds of the first thing with the recording. Corey starts out on recorder, then switches to vibes. His restraint through the first half is a great lesson in the parameters of improv. Too often, improvisors play all over everything, particularly melody players, rather than ‘arranging on the fly’ and creating space, colour and texture. Throughout the gig, Corey’s choice of when to play and when not to, as well as what to play when he did, was brilliant. A truly remarkable musician.

Please check out the other gigs Corey’s putting on at Deda in Derby. It’s a lovely place to play, and he’s doing good things there. Here’s the tune:

Also recently added to Soundcloud, this is a thing I was playing around with a couple of weeks ago, that I LOVE the feel of. Sadly, I don’t have the recording of how I came up with it, just these two loops that were there at the end. It’s going to be really tough to match the gentle flow of this, and it may be that I end up leaving this as is for the next record. we’ll see…

Please feel free to share both of those with your friends, to click the ‘like’ button, tweet the link to it… all that kind of help sharing the recordings around is SO important to us as musicians who can’t afford promo budgets and magazine adverts to let people know what we’re up to!

If you think back to the US tour that Lobelia and I did in Dec/January, you’ll remember that as well as gigs, we also did some masterclasses, teaching and consulting as we went round.

It was a whole lot of fun, and a great way to share some of what we’ve learned about social media for musicians and new ways of exploring artist-to-audience communication, without restricting it to people who were rich enough to hire us for a one-on-one session for a day. Here’s what we did: Continue reading “House Consulting – Like A House Concert, But With Less Tunes And More Talking”

[I have a lot of very bright, creative, wonderful friends, doing fascinating things with music and social media and news and all kinds of other areas of human life that make the world a better place. One such friend is Jemimah Knight, a hugely talented journo – and bassist – who authored this lovely essay as a guest post. Thanks J!]

“Hi, I read Steve’s blog and listen to Lobelia‘s beautiful voice when I can. It’s a privilege I take for granted really, but maybe we do so when we know good people who can make music.

I grew up with a musical family around me, my father is like some musical polymath – he can play most things – although the violin is a bit tiny for him maybe. My mother has a beautiful voice, she sang a lot more when I was small and she was professional. My brother, plays bass, I play bass badly and my dad – as mentioned, annoyingly also plays bass well. Continue reading “Guest Post – Jemimah Knight: "Bass Soul".”

Good news – the Lawson/Dodds/Wood album, Numbers, is now available from CDBaby.com.

CDBaby is one of indie music online’s big success stories – it started out as just a CD shop, but has become a site for hosting band websites and most successfully for distributing digital music to the big online stores like iTunes and Amazon for you.

Anyway, our album is now on there, so use the widget below to head there and get it, if you’re of the CDBaby-shopping persuasion. You can, of course still get it from this site – CD or Download.