Showing posts with label sonnamble. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sonnamble. Show all posts
Sonnamble on the radio
RTE lyric fm have been showing us some love, bless 'em. Bernard Clarke showcases two tracks from Blindlight on the excellent Nova.http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/nova/1489151.html
and there's also an airing for the old Elvers radio fave, Cutthroat...good times guaranteed!
Sonnamble review
first review in for the Sonnamble album. i'm not sure i entirely understand all of it, but it seems broadly positive....
Sonnamble on the Wire Tapper
A track from the new Sonnamble waxing is to be found stuck on the front of the August edition of The Wire. Global domination beckons. To be honest I feel quite ambivalent about the mag even though I've been reading it more or less every month since issue 2 (yes, I am fucking old). But it's a cheap way of getting the music into the cd players of a lot of people who might just like it, and that can't be sniffed at...The new album (more on that here) is a bit leaner than the first; slightly more upfront and more focussed, perhaps. And it sort of marks the end of that phase of the 'band' - we've recently been working with just double bass and treatments, and at the weekend experimented with adding viola and percussion (a line-up that will make its live debut in Vienna in October).
More soon...
activity
time to write a bit about what i've been up to and what i may get up to in the next few montha assuming i don't get run over by a bus or something.
Forwind seems to have become the hub for much of my musical activity. i'm slightly embarrassed by the fact that i seem to be on every release in the catalogue. the Clang Sayne album is getting a digital issue, and the Fourth Page album will emerge there soon. also it's likely it'll be the home for the fruits of a recording session last weekend for a new trio of myself, James O' Sullivan and Paul May. this group was a long time coming, but seems to have been worth the wait. we worked at onecat with the excellent Jon Clayton engineering; an 8 hour session enabled us to record 70 minutes of material and mix it too at a leisurely pace. the results are pretty strong and sometimes dark as pitch. James and Paul were on top form; both of them get so much variation out of bits of metal and wood by purely physical (and sometimes magnetic) means. there was little we came up with didn't work at some level, and we're shaping it into some kind of form at the moment. james described the final piece we recorded as a 'fucking beast'. more on that later.
Sonnamble are gearing up for more action too. Conor has a few mixes on the go of stuff recorded last year, just before our Dublin gig. but a more recent session yielded some delicious results - just double bass and live processing. lots of space and some lovely interaction. not using loops makes things a lot harder work and riskier. it's easy to generate structure with loops for one thing. but without them you get much more of a sense of the relationship between what we're both doing, which is essentially playing the same instrument. ooh er.
a few home sessions with mr Chris Jones have come up with some nice stuff too., some entirely unplugged, and others entirely, er, plugged. there's an unplugged one here. also Chris has taken on the sisyphean task of going through all the material the quartet with Andy and Conor. there's a lot of it.
yikes.
also there's been a few (sometimes choice) gigs with Neptune Is Mars, Lucy and more, but i'm starting to bore myself now so i'll leave it there...
recent activity
so, in self indulgent mode, a round up of where i've been dragging myself and my bass around recently...
lucy jane - after a series of unfortunate events involving broken tape machines, unwanted distortion and endless uncomfortable phone calls, we ended up mixing our recordings in sunny rochdale at lisa stansfield's gracielands studio.
thanks to a hugely lovely and talented bunch of chaps, we've ended up with a superb set of mixes done in record time. our engineer steve was incredibly quick and amazingly creative, coming up with some really lovely slightly eno-esque treatments for a couple of tunes. luckily he appeared to genuinely like the music, which always helps. plus, it should be said that we'd got some generally very nicely recorded source material from our sessions at dropout. lucy writes about it here.
we've also been doing a few gigs. we're not a pub indie band or a glorified karaoke act which means that in the wrong environment it can be hard work. but when the sound's ok and the audience are listening (or at least are quieter than us) then it can get sort of magical quite quickly. on the rare occasions we manage to hush a previously rowdy audience, i get the feeling that this is quite special stuff.
clang sayne - laura's moved to ireland these days, but is back in london as i write. we've done two gigs this week - one at cafe oto (london's hippest venue, according to matt) and last night at the gladstone. plus a radio session for resonance fm's dexter bentley show and recording this weekend. it's still a tidy little unit, and coincidentally winterlands is still picking up nice reviews, including one in the current wire mlagazine. for the gigs, we've gone back to doing more 'song-y' material rather than the more improvisatory stuff we've been exploring lately. even so, we never ever play the same song the same way twice anyway, so anyone turning up expecting to hear the album played live was likely to be disappointed. which is fine with me.
sonnamble - the new line-up's settling in but there's a sense that there's a lot of territory still to explore. conor's treatments and the playing seem to be finding a nice synergy. playing live wasn't easy for the duo, mainly because it takes a decent sound system and a fair amount of time soundchecking to get anything like an environment where we can get a good performance. the quartet might be a thornier proposition still, but i think we'll manage it....
lucy jane - after a series of unfortunate events involving broken tape machines, unwanted distortion and endless uncomfortable phone calls, we ended up mixing our recordings in sunny rochdale at lisa stansfield's gracielands studio.
thanks to a hugely lovely and talented bunch of chaps, we've ended up with a superb set of mixes done in record time. our engineer steve was incredibly quick and amazingly creative, coming up with some really lovely slightly eno-esque treatments for a couple of tunes. luckily he appeared to genuinely like the music, which always helps. plus, it should be said that we'd got some generally very nicely recorded source material from our sessions at dropout. lucy writes about it here.we've also been doing a few gigs. we're not a pub indie band or a glorified karaoke act which means that in the wrong environment it can be hard work. but when the sound's ok and the audience are listening (or at least are quieter than us) then it can get sort of magical quite quickly. on the rare occasions we manage to hush a previously rowdy audience, i get the feeling that this is quite special stuff.
clang sayne - laura's moved to ireland these days, but is back in london as i write. we've done two gigs this week - one at cafe oto (london's hippest venue, according to matt) and last night at the gladstone. plus a radio session for resonance fm's dexter bentley show and recording this weekend. it's still a tidy little unit, and coincidentally winterlands is still picking up nice reviews, including one in the current wire mlagazine. for the gigs, we've gone back to doing more 'song-y' material rather than the more improvisatory stuff we've been exploring lately. even so, we never ever play the same song the same way twice anyway, so anyone turning up expecting to hear the album played live was likely to be disappointed. which is fine with me.
sonnamble - the new line-up's settling in but there's a sense that there's a lot of territory still to explore. conor's treatments and the playing seem to be finding a nice synergy. playing live wasn't easy for the duo, mainly because it takes a decent sound system and a fair amount of time soundchecking to get anything like an environment where we can get a good performance. the quartet might be a thornier proposition still, but i think we'll manage it....
sonnamble in the mix (and expanded)
conor's just alerted me to a rather nice mix on fluid radio from M Ostermeier, featuring a track from the sonnamble album. we also featured on ed pinsent's sound projector show a week or two back on resonance fm - listen here. and a track or two will be played on late junction on april 29th.so rather than sitting on our arses and basking in all this er, media attention, sonnamble are hitting some next level shit, as i believe the young people say. we've doubled in size with the addition of sonic warriors chris jones (guitar) and andy willis (percussion), meaning i can concentrate on double bass.
two sessions so far have been pretty sweet. chris's guitar seems to be a great fit with conor's patches. andy's stripped down the kit to snare and cymbal and the two of us generate sparse, slow grooves under chris and conor's shifting clouds of chords, drones and glitches. learning what not to play, as ever, is the key and the most difficult thing to do. it's good to be playing with andy and chris again. currently it's kind of sounding a bit like the necks meets ashra meets fennesz, but others may beg to differ. we'll have some stuff to listen to up on the interweb soon.
Playa Durmiente
Playa Durmiente from -GO- on Vimeo.
this is a piece from a friend of conor's and it's rather lovely. the music is sonnamble (from the hotly anticpated debut longplayer).
information rain
conor and i have been starting to set about compiling material for a sonnamble release (in time for the all important christmas market with any luck). the amount of material we've generated amounts to over 200 gigabytes. this would probably have accounted for all of NASA's digital storage not too long ago. accumulated over about a year, these are live recordings of me playing double bass, electric bass, lap steel guitar, and even ye olde novation bafftation, live processed by conor, who occasionally slips in a bit of lap steel or electric guitar. one with a leopard skin scratchplate. oh yes.
we could of course do a 50 cd box set and release the lot, but the only reason for that would be to guarantee a 70 word review in the wire. so hence the sifting and sorting process. conor has already spent a silly amount of hours assembling some pieces which work, so we're some way there already. i'm starting to sift through some sessions myself, and it'll be interesting to see what conor makes of my selections. this is the point where i suppose we start to agree what works and what doesn't. that is all ludicrously subjective of course but i reckon we'll get there...
we could of course do a 50 cd box set and release the lot, but the only reason for that would be to guarantee a 70 word review in the wire. so hence the sifting and sorting process. conor has already spent a silly amount of hours assembling some pieces which work, so we're some way there already. i'm starting to sift through some sessions myself, and it'll be interesting to see what conor makes of my selections. this is the point where i suppose we start to agree what works and what doesn't. that is all ludicrously subjective of course but i reckon we'll get there...
