Thought I’d drop a quick post letting you all know what’s been going on this week. It’s been rather hectic…
Having performed over 80 shows of The Comedy Of Errors at the National Theatre, our faux Romanian busking band was asked back to play for NT Connections. This is an annual festival of youth theatre which culminates at the National with ten plays performed over five days by ten different companies. So Ian Watson, Simon Parrish and I donned our tracksuits for one last hurrah and took to the streets of the Southbank (and the Cottesloe foyer..) and bothered the general public with loud shouty Romanian renditions of pop songs. It was rather good fun…
On Friday night the Nina Ferro band took over Hideaway in Streatham. This was the first time we’d played the new set live together since Nina toured it in Australia. I managed to get a few tracks filmed and posted them up on my YouTube channel. Thought I’d post my favourite one here just for you. This is Lesson Learned by Alicia Keys and John Mayer…
I’m playing at The Spice of Life in Soho tomorrow night with Nina on a gig featuring our good friend Kellie Santin who’s back from Australia for a bit. You should all come down.
And the final kids show from Lea DeLaria and Janette Mason Boom Boom’s Bow is at Hideaway this Saturday lunchtime. But fear not if you do not have children to bring along; we will be playing a proper show in the evening with our band The Dirty Martinis. Do not miss this show!! We rarely get to play as the Martinis (the next show will be at the Swanage Jazz festival in July) so it’s a great opportunity to see the full band at this fantastic venue.
Hopefully see you at a show soon 😉
ps. For those of you following the progress of the Barnardos Oldie Composers, our very own Anthony Head will be performing Marina Florence’s Cry live on This Morning tomorrow. Remember you can download the EP from iTunes and the Charity Goods website and all proceeds go to Barnardos.
I thought it was time to let you in on some of the new music I’ve been working on this year. Most of you probably have Mandala by now, or have at least heard it on Bandcamp. And you will of course have checked out the latest Rejectamenta EP, which consists of tracks that didn’t quite fit on the new record but were recorded during the same period.
Yesterday I posted an unmastered preview track from the new record The Knowledge of Things To Come on my Soundcloud page. I had a great response over Twitter and Facebook from a number of people and thought it should be posted here on the blog.
I also thought this would be a good time to talk about what it is I do when I’m playing solo. Many people who bought Mandala have asked me whether I played all the instruments on the album. They were surprised when I told them it was just me playing solo live and I’ve found it is quite difficult to explain to non-musicians the concept and process of live looping without the music in front of me.
So I’ve annotated the track on Soundcloud with their rather useful timed comments utility. This had allowed my to provide you with a running commentary as the track plays through, explaining what is occurring musically and technically in real time.
Obviously this is one of the simpler tracks from a live looping perspective. A lot of what I do is a kind of musical plate-spinning exercise where I’m both playing and steering the arrangement live with the Looperlative. All the sounds on this track were produced wit the Pod X3 Pro going through the LP1.
The new record should be ready sometime over the next couple of months. It just needs mastering now. I also posted a preview of the album artwork via Instgram last night; got a good response for that too which I was really pleased about. The main image is by the excellent Icelandic photographer Johann Smari and the cover design is my own.
I was lucky enough to be invited by the excellent bassist and educator Lee Pellington (@Guerillabass on Twitter) to give a masterclass at Leicester College on Friday. We talked about what it means to be a freelance session musician and what you need to know to make it on your own. We also talked briefly about the solo bass project and I performed a few short live looping improvisations for the bass players in the morning. So, seeing as we’re looking at the process in today’s blog post, here’s a short video of one of my improvisations filmed that morning. The sound isn’t great and the noise of me pressing buttons is louder that the music, but you get the idea…
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Hope you like it. It’s also up on YouTube if you want to share the link. Watch this space for news of the new record. As soon as it’s ready I’ll be sending out advance download copies to a few bloggers and music writers for reviews. If you are a music blogger, reviewer, podcaster or radio host and would like to be included in this select bunch, then drop me a line here and I’ll put you on the list. Â Phil and Oliver, you are at the top of the list…
Thought I’d post this video of us playing on This Morning on the blog. It’s up on my videos page too just in case…
We had a fun morning over at ITV and were well looked after by the lovely crew there. And it’s always good to see Eamonn and Ruth.
Also think his is probably the only video i have of me playing The Beast. I shall have to rectify this soon. Thinking it might be time to film some live-looping stuff for you, especially now I’ve got my little Flipcam. I’ll get on the case and let you know when I have something good…
