Well its friday night - no I ain’t got paid - and am sat in the house listening to some of my favourite “unsigned” music. Sort of decided to adopt a cloak of hubris and share tonights highlights! These are not reviews nor recommendations intended for anyone. Have a listen to them, you never know you may like ‘em…

First up is AlienPig - a great intro to tonights squizzerhead ;-)

Next some folk who make music late at night in a converted barn at the base of a small mountain.

Thirdly we have adam-son.

I often lose myself in this song from stella maris

and finally a real indulgence - superb live band Mrs Cakehead

Enjoy!

A few years ago I had a few quid in me pocket which I’d received through the death of me granddad and decided I wanted to use some of it to release a compilation album of material from all the unsigned bands I knew and so I stuck an ad up on a forum I, and “they”, used a lot at the time. They might do still, dunno, I got a bit bored of some of the more repetitive themes…

It cuts a few ways - you get a release and merchandise which both contain other bands thus offering people who see band x a chance to sample and maybe go see and otherwise support band y or z.

The deal was simple: You give me a good recording of yours, I’ll pay for mastering, artwork, registrations and a limited number of hard copies. Any money I get comes to you. You can print as many other CD’s as you like and they’re yours to sell, whatever! I even went so far as to offer to pay for the metal work if people also fancied a vinyl version - so long as they agreed between them to fund the pressing (making the metal available foc if they wanted to print more)..

I got an offer from someone to help with the registrations and mastering foc whilst offering half-price studio time and another offer from a photographer also offering a free package. Why? They said it was a great way to “help the community” and it doesn’t hurt to be associated with something like this.

I got loadsa nice feedback on the offer and the plan.

I got 3 responses from bands - these are the same ones on there all the time moaning about lack of opportunity or exposure, bitching about the costs of this that and the other - and 2 of these didn’t happen to have any quality recordings and asking if I could wait until they’d saved up a few quid to afford even a half price day in a not particularly expensive (not a reflection on quality I hasten to add) studio.

Well, it never got made and the money disappeared into the same dark hole every other penny eventually ends up in.

Still a good idea. Maybe one day soon!

well we now have a limited range of merchandise - well two different t-shirts - for those of you who want to carry our johnnie around on your person. These can be purchased from http://squizzercrow.bandcamp.com/merch

we are also launching a special offer where you can get 50% of what you pay back. for more details of this offer please see http://squizzercrow.org/merch/offer.html.

sad fucker that I am ;-)

dem dur burrs was released on the 19th February. This release is a turning point in that it is the last release featuring our original line-up - all future releases will be with the new experiment: dave on guitar, debz on voice, melodica and buttons, lez on sax and mouth organ and lynn on drums - oh and me on voice and bass. Our first release, due in July, will be a sort of “best of” - perhaps more appropriately “a new beginning” featuring live versions of all currently released material followed quickly by new material. We’re all looking forward to it - hope you are too!

We’ve had a lot of feedback on dem dur burrs and quite a lot of this has been along along the lines of “what the hell does the it mean?” or “how do you pronounce it?”.

The answer is probably immediately apparent to any of you who have ever known anyone from the Wigan area of the UK - it is a phonetic representation of “them there bears” uttered in a Wigannish accent (you should hear them murdering the word snake, but that’s another story).

Enjoy!

Its nearly February. This time last year I was getting ready to start trying to complete 14 songs in 28 days for the annual February Album Writing challenge (see http://fawm.org) by downloading a few plug-ins (I was after some decent brass sounds and I still don’t have them). It did seem a bit of a task - after all with other commitments it meant between 4 and 6 hours per “song” - but hey, it should be fun.

The first night of February I laid down the basics of a track and then finished it on the 2nd. I called it “and he killed a cyclist in norwich” and banged it up on soundcloud. Missing out a few days by the end of the month there were 14 rough songs and a few bits and pieces. But most amazingly there were the best part of 1000 plays on soundcloud.

Amazed? I nearly fell off me chair when I looked! To me that was incredible - although I have been writing, playing and gigging for more years than I care to remember my contribution had nearly always been watered down or tempered by “band mates” - “you can’t do that, its silly/weird/wrong” - and those plays made me re-think whether it was ever worth me doing my own stuff vaguely seriously!

The play count continued to go up and so I started my reverbnation account - and facebook page toward the end of March and watched amazed as the play counts continued to grow at something utterly unbelievable like 3-400 a week!

Those 14 songs were a good start but I’ve only moved three of them forward - “eating chocolate kebab”, “cyclist in norwich” and “silly bubu” - the rest are there and one day… By May I had completed our first EP “keith” which was then scheduled for a July release and included “silly bubu” together with three later compositions.

By July I had my first facebook likes, a handful of twitterers, the play counts kept going up and I continued to be amazed at the reception - nice comments, couple really kind reviews of keith. It had to stop sometime huh? Nope! Those numbers just went on and on growing whilst I sat there and watched - I did nothing re promotion (except sending Keith to one reviewer), I didn’t rely on the goodwill, or pity, of friends to bump numbers up through “befriending” them all and sending constant “love me, slurp me” requests - I’m really unsuited to all that stuff - most folk I know don’t know what I do, if they ever do and ask what do you play I usually respond with a very monosyllabic “noise” accompanied by a conversation killing look ;-) If anyone reads this they’ll probably be thinking - yeah, right, but its true, I turn self-deprecation into an artform many years ago!

Its not stopped you know. 3rd single “dem dur burrs” is coming out in a fortnight. The video for “chocolate kebab” (released in December last) has got an award from some t’interweb site for being “original with high production values” and those fucking numbers just keep going up! If you had told me this time last year that the RN play count would be 50000 plus, 200+facebook likes and 1000+ twitterers I would have had you committed! Abso-fucking-lutely incredible.

Those numbers also led to “me” becoming “we”. The experiment is now a 5 piece (OK so one of them is a novation launchpad) oozing with chemistry and making a damned fine noise which will only get better over the coming months.

So I have those numbers, the experiment is very real and, at the risk of repeating myself, if you had told me exactly one year ago today I would have been laughing so hard there’d have been flooding alerts. But that’s where I am and I would like to thank absolutely everyone who has commented/helped or simply clicked like or even just put up with my pointless tweeting without unfollowing me then I’d like to thank you, to thank you a lot, for making this past year pretty much unforgettable.

seems odd to be finalising the artwork for a single that’s due out in late feb - especially when there’s another out in 2 weeks but more on that later ;-)

Why?

Its all part of this move towards the experiment becoming a live event. We’re quite happy with our little setup - get together round a warm computer and make music that sounds like we want it to but this inevitably means that there are often more instruments playing at once than we can manage which leaves us with four options:

1. Get more folk: not really an option. Part of the reason we’re here, and this “late” in life, is the shortage of folk with whom each of us has been able to establish “that” musical convergence over the years. OK, there have been plenty of bands we’ve worked with individually and some good stuff but never that with this fuckyeah chemistry across the entire band - despite the slight geographic differences between some of our number…

2. Play fewer parts live. Again not really an option given that a major part of our sound is a sort of wall of sound thing - reduce the parts, reduce our own satisfaction!

3. Use backing tapes. Yeah, right, restrict ourselves to doing “it” exactly the same everytime. Yeah, that’s great for some folk, but, perhaps sadly, not for us!

4. Invest in a hardware solution so that one or more of us can play parts using some MIDI based trigger - be it the leccy kit, floor pedals, something like a MPC style box, MIDI pickups or some sort of tactile self-contained computer device with big touch-me baby buttons rather than messing around with mouses, monitors and, perhaps worst of all, them stupid laptop touch pad things.

You may have guessed, we’re taking option 4. The main problem is this is that, ideally, you would need two of everything and that starts to look prohibitively expensive!

After very little debate it was decided that we would use some form of app to do this - regardless of any ethical issues when selecting IOS or Android we opted for the most pragmatic solution which was to use what we already have and this we’ve decided to go down the IOS route and have been hunting down suitable apps for a week or so.

We have two which we are testing and a full review will follow in a few days. First impressions suggest a clear favourite, but lets wait and see how we get on testing them in a “band” setting on monday - should be fun ;-)