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Home From Greenbelt. First Blog Post – Some Pictures

Home from a wonderful weekend at Greenbelt Festival. My show there on Sunday afternoon was quite possibly my favourite ever time playing at Greenbelt, and resulted in quite a few USB Stick sales. Which is nice 🙂

I’ll post more about it soon, but here, for starters, are a selection of the photos that people took and posted on twitter while I was playing, along with Lobelia who joined me for two songs, one of them also featuring the lovely Andrew Howie. Good times 🙂

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FingerPainting: Complete is, uhm, Complete, and The USB Sticks Are Here!

So, after four months of

  • mixing and mastering
  • naming tracks
  • keeping Daniel and Artemis up to date with all the developments
  • getting their input on titles and artwork
  • generally surrendering all family and social life to the task of getting this magnum opus finished..

It’s finished.

10 Shows, 59 tracks, 10 hours, 16 minutes and 7 seconds of music.

[Buy the USB Stick here]

10 of the tracks (or or two from each of the 8 shows from 2013) feature Artemis on vocals. A few of those are on Soundcloud or on Bandcamp.

So what now? Well, they’ll be on sale at Greenbelt Festival this weekend. All the preorders will be sent out at the start of next week. I’ve discovered that the FLAC versions, being 24 bit, won’t all fit on a USB stick, so if you ordered that, you’ll be getting the stick with 7 albums on and 3 download codes to get the others 🙂

Now begins the task of loading them all up with music!

In the meantime I’m sequencing the 2 CD set, which should be available by early September.

I also ordered custom sticks/boxes for the Steve Lawson Complete Works set. Which is slightly misleading, in that it only has 2 of the FingerPainting albums on it, but it’s 24 albums spanning my entire solo and collaborative career. But you can order those on Bandcamp too – music.stevelawson.net/merch

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New Album! Serendipity by Steve Lawson and Daniel Berkman

Time to release another of the complete shows from the Steve Lawson/Daniel Berkman FingerPainting: Complete set. This one, titled Serendipity, was recorded in Petaluma, California, and was the 2nd-to-last show of our January tour. It is, of course, included in all of the full sets of all 10 shows, or on its own from Bandcamp for £5.

Click here to buy the USB Stick of All 10 Shows.

It has a markedly different flavour that the rest of the shows, due to Daniel electing to leave a fair few of his laptop-type gadgets and controllers out of his set up, and instead using a sitar-guitar on a couple of tunes.

The decision was in response to our observation that the average age of the audience was considerably older than previous shows, so we might want to go somewhere a little mellower with the music. However, just before we started, we overheard an enthusiastic conversation involving about half of those in attendance, about the relative merits of various 20th century composers: John Cage, Stockhausen, Harry Partch… REALLY difficult music. So we were once again freed up to play some pretty weird music as the muse led…

The end result is a record that’s both distinct from the rest of the set but deeply consistent with the aesthetic. It’s fun, exploratory, overflowing with melodies, and features two stellar vocal contributions from Artemis, the 2nd of them entirely wordless. So often the vocal improv was the high point of the show, the pinnacle of the show’s emotional crescendo. Huge thanks to Artemis for sharing her amazing skills on all these gigs!

Big thanks must also go to our amazing hosts for the night, Darin and Jessica Wilson. Darin is himself a fabulous musician. Go here to listen.

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What Do Singles Sales Tell Us About The Health Of The Music Industries?

Here’s an interesting data set – a list of the best selling singles ever, divided into physical and digital. It lists anything with ‘verified’ sales of above 5 million (though those numbers are often rightly questioned because of the way that ‘sales’ are reported – there are 185 references at the bottom of the wiki page 🙂 )…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles

One of the interesting bits for me is the time span of each era – the physical sales cover 1935 (Bing Crosby, Silent Night: 30 million sales – at a time when it must’ve been owned by pretty much everyone on the planet that had a record player, was before albums existed, probably sold even more copies as sheet music and was a song in the public domain!) through to 2004 (Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams: 7 million physical copies, of a track that was also on an album that sold 15 million too.) So that’s a 69 year span, with 128 singles selling more than 5 million copies. It’s worth keeping in mind what percentage of the records released those were (how many records had even been made, let alone were stocked in shops, by the end of the 40s/50s/60s etc…)

The digital list covers 2004-2012 (8 years), and has 104 singles selling more than 5 million copies. All of which also appeared on (numerous) albums, were licensed for films/games, earned some money for streaming/youtube/other usage, and were no doubt torrented extensively. But, crucially, none of them required any plastic discs to be made and shipped around the world. No shops to stock them, no trucks to carry them across the country… So in terms of where the money went, far less of the gross revenue needed to go on the fixed cost of physical manufacture and distribution of a scarce good.  Continue reading “What Do Singles Sales Tell Us About The Health Of The Music Industries?”

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How to Talk About Music on the Internet

The ‘publishing revolution’ of the internets has been overwhelmingly positive. We know that, right?

However, there have been a few – perhaps unintended – consequences to all online words being given equal billing (at least potentially) and all public typed conversations being searchable. So let’s have a think about how we – as musicians – talk about music on the internet:

One of the hardest things for a musician to do online is work out two very distinct ways of describing music positively: Continue reading “How to Talk About Music on the Internet”

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Radio Interview from RTE in Ireland now on Soundcloud

When I was in Dublin a few weeks back, I was interviewed for Culture Cafe on RTE 2XM. It’s a really good interview – you can see a bit of it on the YouTube clip at the bottom.

The interview covers the project with Daniel, and some good questions about being a musician/band on the internet. Well worth a listen. Big thanks to Nessy for such interesting questions!

Here’s the entire interview, which features 3 of the tracks with Daniel Berkman, on Soundcloud –

And here’s the YouTube clip:

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“Mum! Quick! Steve’s Released More Music!”

I know, you were thinking, “it’s been days since I heard anything new from Steve. What’s up with that??” So, here are two new things.

…Well, three new things, actually, but one of them you’ll have to buy to hear 🙂

Firstly, here’s another of the complete shows from the gigs with Daniel Berkman in January. This is the 2nd gig of the tour, and as with all the others this is the entirety of the duo/trio stuff from the show. The track that plays first in the widget, Yosemite, is possibly my favourite music thing I’ve ever been involved in. Here, listen:

 

You can also now buy JUST the digital downloads of all 10 shows. It’s £25, which is the same price as the USB stick, but if you want to swap, I’ll do a straight swap for your USB stick order, and you’ll get 5 albums now as downloads, and the next 5 as their finished, at roughly weekly intervals. Message me, OK?

Next thing up is a wonderful bit of serendipity – last week I was on a panel for an excellent event organised by the Music Producer’s Guild. One of my fellow panelists was Mark Kelly, keyboardist with UK prog legends Marillion. Mark, as it turns out, is a supremely nice bloke, and we got along like a house on fire. So along with drum-genius Roy Dodds (of Fairground Attraction fame.. and Lawson/Dodds/Wood 🙂 ) we started hatching plans for new music. Mark’s first suggestion was to take some of my existing work and add keyboards, to see if our sound worlds collide in interesting ways. So, he improvised a number of layers over the first track he chose, which happened to be Accidentally (On Purpose) from the album of the same name. The results are both beautiful and interesting, and are the precursor to, I think, a lot more music from the two of us and whoever else we end up getting to join us 🙂

Here it is:

Lastly, the artwork at the top is for Academia, the latest finished show in the FingerPainting: Complete series. Recorded at Stanford Uni, here’s the opening track from it, with me playing a beautiful 6 string fretted Spector bass, that I borrowed from our host for the evening Rod Taylor, and which used to belong to bass legend Chuck Rainey. Mojo to spare!

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“conversational hegemony”, or how lobbyists hijack the terms of engagement

It’s kind of in the job description, for Lobbyists to try and limit the parameters of any discussion to the ones that concern their particular paid interest. Lobbying is high-dollar stuff and getting into time-wasting concepts like ‘fairness’ and ‘seeing things as they really are’ are not what good lobbyists get paid for.

They get paid for ‘conversational hegemony’ – taking over the parameters of any discussion, so that even before they put their point across, the fencing around the subject is skewed in their favour. Thus recording industry lobbyists, like the BPI in the UK and the RIAA in the US, have successfully made so much of the discussion about ‘music’ – particularly at a policy/government level – about their particular set of economic concerns. Namely:

“how do we protect the virtual monopoly that we’ve had until now on defining ‘success’ for recording artists, controlling the avenues of manufacture, distribution,  promotion and publishing/licensing, and thus leave in place our usurious terms of engagement with the artists whose recordings we exploit for financial gain?” Continue reading ““conversational hegemony”, or how lobbyists hijack the terms of engagement”

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Sneak-peak At A Track From Nie mój cyrk, Nie moje małpy

Just put another tune up on Soundcloud, this time from Nie mój cyrk, Nie moje małpy.

It’s called ‘Supernatural‘, and the lyrics are taken from two of Artemis‘ older songs – Supernatural and Beside U.

COMPETITION TIME:

This has been running on Facebook and Twitter today, and so far, no-one has got close, but if you can work out how I made the raindrop/sonar-like sound at the beginning with my bass, you’ll win a free copy of the album (which is otherwise only available as part of the full FingerPainting set, available on Bandcamp

Here’s the tune. Please feel free to share the link around, comment, like, repost etc 😀

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