Thought I should drop a quick post to keep you up to date with the various goings ons…
Just got back from a whistlestop trip to Poland. We were revisiting the little festival we played a few years ago (in fact, I blogged about it at the time). We were playing again at the Amfiteatre Dolina Charlotta near the town of Slupsk (which is apparently pronounced ‘swoopsk’ I discovered). It’s a lovely little place by a lake and this time we got to stay in the lovely hotel next to the gig that they were still building last time.
The rest of the band arrived in Poland the night before but I left the house at 5am to catch the early flight. we soundchecked in the afternoon, which is when it became apparent that the weather in Slupsk is much much colder than at home…
Gordon was provided with exactly the wrong kind of Nord keyboard and spent a lot of the soundcheck trying to program up a few sounds for the gig. We were playing before Bonnie Tyler, which was great. We had to reshuffle the stage completely as her drummer flatly refused to share the (hired) drumkit. But we got there in the end…
The gig was a lot of fun and the crowd were fantastic. The only problem was the temperature onstage. It was absolutely freezing and pretty windy. None of us managed to warm up all all through the 90-minute set, and I’m pretty sure the cold I’m suffering with right now is as a result of that gig…
We’ll be returning to Poland in June for another show. Not sure where it is yet but it’s quite near Krakow apparently.
In other news, Clare Teal’s new album Hey Hocomes out May 9th. Featuring me (mostly) on bass with Grant and Ben. We’re working our way through the ‘Great British Songbook’ with songs from Noel Coward to Moloko and Snow Patrol. You can preorder the album at Amazon if you simply can’t bear the wait…
We’ll be playing in Jersey this Sunday and we’ll also be only This Morning on Friday with Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford, so don’t forget to tune in…
And finally, as I mentioned in my last post here; my new EP Rejectamentais available for download on the music page, where you can also stream the whole EP in full. Hope you like it. I’ve had some great feedback so far. In fact, here’s the player embedded from Bandcamp so you can stream it right here. I’d love to hear your comments…
Hope you all enjoyed the Royal Wedding. It served as the ideal prelude to the big news of this weekend… The long-awaited release of my Rejectamenta EP. Oh yes indeed folks; the time has come.
This is a collection of five tracks that didn’t quite fit onto the forthcoming album The Knowledge of Things To Come, which I’m looking at releasing around June/July. Rejectamenta serves as a little teaser for you. It’ll give you some idea of what to expect from the new record.
Rejectamenta is exclusively available from my Bandcamp page (It’s right next to Mandala, if you haven’t bought the CD yet…). You can stream the whole album from there if you fancy having a listen…
It’s available on a ‘pay what you want’ basis. You can have it for free if you like. Or you can pay what you feel it is worth to you as a listener. If you want a guide, 50p per track is a good starting point on a lot of download sites.. Â Anything you do pay goes towards me making new music 🙂
I really hope you like the EP. I’m really excited about the album and the new direction the music is taking…
Well the time has come to start releasing new music once more. As you already know I’ve been toiling away on a bunch of new solo bass material here at Little Towers, trying to put together a new album to follow Mandala. As I mentioned in a previous post a couple of weeks ago, the intention was to put out a 10-track album plus a four track EP including the songs that didn’t quite fit on the record.
Well I’ve sorted the track listing for both the album (which is currently going under the title The Knowledge of Things To Come) and the EP and they both work a treat. Today I’ve been speaking to Steve Alexander (of Little Alex), who has agreed to master the EP sometime over the next week so you can expect a release announcement very soon.
This probably won’t mean much at this stage, but here’s the track listing for the Rejectamenta EP:
feel for a pulse
must get out [more]
the rhythmatist
lullabye
This will be the first release I’ve put out using my new Line 6/Looperlative setup, so I’m really excited to see what you all think of the new sounds I’m using. The music is quite different from Mandala, and sounds even less like a solo bass record. I’ve included some of the more ‘glitchy’ tracks from the sessions on the EP so you should get a good feel for what the forthcoming album will sound like. I’m going to release it exclusively via Bandcamp as a download only, using the ‘Pay What You Want’ model, ie; you can pay what you feel the music is worth to you as a listener (including for free). This is an experiment on my part really to see how that model works for niche music like mine and I’ll be blogging the results nearer the time of the album release, which should be in a few months time.
So, I shall leave you for now with a little album artwork preview. I put the cover together myself this time using the excellent free Gimp image-manipulation software, which I would heartily recommend to anyone currently engaged in such activities without the aid of a Photoshop-style safety net.
