Last night I put on a chip gig in Glasgow, and had some rather wonderful fellow musicians play: Joe Bleeps, Galaxy Wolf, King Keytan, and Myths and Monsters.
Here’s some pictures from the event:
The bowtie is hosting a wee gig tomorrow (today technically) in Glasgow. Might be the last time the Game Boys come out live for a while. If you’re about, come down and check it out. We have a bunch of cool chip folk coming up from south of the border to play. Things’ll kick off about 7.30pm onwards.
On Saturday night a few of us headed out (full of rum) to belt out classic power ballads for a few hours. It was good times.
We didn’t feel all that great on Sunday though. Normally I’d just lie about and eat rubbish all day, which eh… I did anyway. But Lee aka radiomoths came round and we recorded the base of a new track with a bunch of different pedals, synths, and the C64. It’s all de-tuned and sounds a bit like the soundtrack of some robot death march from a film. Lee also took photos that I’ve stolen from his blog.
After we were done, I ate some more rubbish food. Not too bad a way to get through a hangover.
On Friday I spent some time in the studio working on different tracks. One of them was an experimental cover of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ with my sister and her boyfriend singing and playing guitar. They studied music at University, and it was nice to record with people who knew what they were doing.
We used a bunch of different effects to layer the sound up, and I added in chip drums later on.
You can hear and download the track below. It’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ like you’ve never heard it before. In someone else’s words:
I could imagine it being played at a f**** up fun fare with porcelain dolls singing as they go round in a Ferris wheel.
unexpected bowtie (and friends) is an album that started in 2011 as a means of collecting different sounds from some of the hardest working, most creative, and most pleasant people that I’d come to know in music.
Taking everything from ambient guitar noises to crazed loops of a Welshman throwing rocks into a wheelbarrow – I pieced them together to produce this jaunty beast.
Despite having been finished almost 2 years ago, and with most of the tracks previewed already, the whole thing has never been quite ready – partially because I still have some samples left over from one band that I’ve just not been able to work out what on earth to do with. (down to my musical incompetence, not theirs!). Hopefully these will make their way into something astounding sometime soon, but the time for this release to make its way into the world is well overdue.
Click on the accompanying artwork above to take you to the new shiny shiny unexpected bowtie bandcamp where you can download the whole thing for free for the first time.
FOE – The Black Lodge (cover)
So here we have it, a totally unnecessary chiprock cover of the Black Lodge by FOE.
I promise to keep my hands off of other band’s songs for a while.
Man of Lists Profile – PulcoMusic.com
A while back my good friend Pulco aka Ash Cooke asked me to take a couple of poems that he’d recorded and destroy them.
This I did, and they’re appearing on an album along with the far more musical efforts by other people soon. Have a click through to read a wee feature on me, and more about the album itself.
It’s good; I’ve heard it.
Hello.
Here’s a wee quickie b-side of a track for a new Monday, and a new week.
You can download this one right away too.
Bubye.
HELLO.
The track that I posted up the other day has been picked up by Central Station – a ‘creative social network’ who are featuring an artist for the first 50 days of their re-launch. Their site is a fairly involved, gritty little community that highlights stuff that would slide under the radar otherwise… both opportunities for collaboration as well as unusual exhibitions and projects.
It’s a bit of a shock, as I had absentmindedly subscribed to their channel over on Soundcloud, and didn’t really expect anything of it. The funny thing is that unexpected bowtie isn’t something that I’ve ever actively pushed in any way, or really something that I speak much about outside of these four virtual walls; it’s more of a personal experimentation with random sounds (which are often chaotic and messy). If people pick up on it and like it then that’s cool, but I’m not going to chase it in anyway… It’s for that reason alone that I’m quite chuffed/flattered/stunned that CenSta have deemed it worthy of including…
You can check out the page here, as well as all the other awesome artists that will be appearing. There’s still time to submit your own things too, so fire them in…
Collaboration Preview – Track 3 – ‘marks for effort’
with Burning Buildings
This track is a much softer, less grizzly track than the last one that involved Pulco. It comes with a piano melody courtesy of Manchester’s Burning Buildings. They’re awfully nice chaps, and probably slightly unhinged… but the end product is one that I’m really personally pleased with. Sometimes there are melodies that just fit your vocal-style to a tee, and for me this is one of them. Hopefully you might like it too.
You can find some of their tracks for free over at Bandcamp, tweets on Twitter, and a review over at Artrocker.
unexpectedbowtie 