Spirits of giving

Lots of music-related stuff happening right now, which is nice. I've had some free time with the apartment to myself this week and have been working on some new songs that I've decided to release as a digital, freely-downloadable MP3 EP on my pal Darren's A Bunch of Beatniks Riding a Rocket label. It's called the Dead Spy EP and should be ready to download sometime in December. Tracklisting will be: 1. Dead Spy 2. Royalist 3. Television World.

Besides that, I've been collecting songs for my second-annual Christmas/Holiday mix. This time, instead of separate files I'm going to blend everything together into one big mix. It should be perfect to load up onto the audio-playing device of your choice and serve as the background to your winter activities.

Hope everyone is doing great. Links to all of this stuff coming soonish.

Weekending

Result: great weekend. The show at Landet on Friday went good simply because I made it through my all-new set without any major screw-ups. Well, I did nearly eat it after tripping on a bass guitar and then some drums on the tiny, full of equipment stage I was playing on. But that's not the point. Instead of just singing to a backtrack, which I've been doing for the past half year, I loaded up 5 songs into one of the most fabulous programs I've ever come across, Ableton Live. Anyone out there making music that uses samples, loops, keyboards and stuff of the like, do yourself a favor and check it out. My songs were no longer locked into a linear form as they had been before, but were ready to be tweaked and rearranged on the fly on stage. I truly see this as a new beginning to my performing career. I'm also hoping to bring it into my DJ sets as well.

Speaking of, DJing at Pang Musik! was amazing. Thanks to everyone who stuck around inbewteen bands and after the show to prance around the floor. And thank you to the two nice guys that caught me completely off guard by asking me if I had any songs by The Eleventh Hour. For those of you who aren't familiar, The Eleventh Hour was a short-lived side project of one of my favorite Chicago bands Number One Cup. The Eleventh Hour only released one 7" about 10 or so years ago. I'm used to people asking if I have anything by Hot Chip or New Order, but The Eleventh Hour? I love how unexpected and random stuff like this can happen and happily surpise you. I, of course, had some Eleventh Hour songs with me and was more than happy to play one. I already posted both of the songs from the afore-mentioned 7" on this blog months ago. If anyone out there didn't get them and wants them shoot me an email and I can make it happen.

The opening band at Pang was a solo act by a guy who calls himself Juvelen. He was perfect. Follow the link to his Myspace page and let the first song "Watch Your Step" load up; highly recommended.

Pushing buttons

Landet - Stockholm I Pang Musik! - Uppsala

Locked in a room, but then I escaped

So it's finally come time to reveal some of the songs I've been working during the past year. I've been keeping them under lock and key but it feels really good to have a couple of them out there for everyone to take a listen to. Fingers crossed (holding my thumbs), here are the links:

Wait is streaming on my myspace page
Wheel in a White Sky is streaming on Svenska Musikklubben's myspace page
I have a couple things going on this week so if you're here in this part of the world come check me out:

November 23, 2006 @ Landet in Stockholm
November 24, 2006 DJ Set @ Pang Musik! in Uppsala

Movers and shakers

I've been commuting from this student mecca Uppsala to a town outside of Stockholm that would have no reason to exist if it wasn't situated so close to Arlanda Airport. I ride rails and buses while reading the newspaper in my new language. "I get the gist," I think to myself after giving up halfway through an article about politics or sports or an editorial. When I'm feeling adventurous I don't swipe my train card, hop on the train and play dodge the conductor.

At the job I lift and move boxes around a warehouse. Sometimes I work outside with a fellow named Kent. We talk about how to place boxes on pallets and what time we should eat lunch or call it a day. He spent a majority of his life in the Swedish military and runs a tight ship. Everything he says has precise meaning, no wasted words, and I like that.

A girl at work brings her dog Rocco everyday. Rocco runs the place; he's my boss. During slow stretches of the day we've been known to rile up Rocco and then sit back and watch him tear apart cardboard boxes with his pearly fangs and teeth. Rocco has dough eyes and eventhough he runs the place and is my boss, he doesn't have thumbs and therefore can't quite unwrap the candy that everyone else on the job continuously eats. He uses his dough eyes as a device to obtain the candy. It doesn't work with me. I know dogs don't need candy even if they are positive that they do.

When I do my daily tasks at this job I listen to my iPod. Today my favorite song turned out to be Defeated and Lonely by Dear Nora. I'm not feeling defeated by any means. Lonely? Not at all. No matter, with the way that the melody falls over the bass and drums she could be singing just about anything and I'd love it. I came across this song the other day on an mp3 mix organized by Yacht.

I'm not lonely because I have m'sweet. She makes my life better in every possible way. M'sweet landed a fancy job in Stockholm the other week. She commutes too. I'd like to point out that commuting is the opposite of good times. We've decided to fix this problem and are moving to Stockholm in January. We'll be living extremely close to this wonderful view in an apartment on a hill in a section of town called Kungsholmen.

This was my report. Please feel free to continue surfing the world wide web.

Tear me apart

I don't know if it's right or wrong to post about this. But I wish and hope that you good people out there balance out your free music downloading and your buying for the sake of us poor musicians. Anyhow, my remix of Irene's "Little Things that Tear Us Apart" is available for download over at The Rich Girls are Weeping. Not sure how long their link will last so if you wanna grab it, go do that it now.

If you'd like to get a physical copy or a legal download, you can do that over at Labrador.

And you can hear the original version of the song via Irene's website. Contrast and compare.

97-98

Another dig into my past. Here's a couple of photo sets that were just posted over at The Like Young's flickr page. Thank you Joe and Amanda and RJ. Thought I'd repost them here to spread their goodness. These bring back really great memories. A few are from a house show we did. Wolfie played what seemed like hundreds of house shows in Champaign in the mid to late 90s. I can say that every one of them was surrounded by excitement and positive vibes. There's also a few shots from our first tour. I know the pics don't really give an insiders view to life on the road here, but the memories came flooding back and I'm glad to have these to show everyone. Those tours were important to me because they were, above all, filled with learning experiences and life lessons; the kind of stuff I couldn't have learned anywhere else.