Goodbye, faithful kingdom!
These are the bright stars (& this is how to find them)
6 alarms
Sea organ
Frozen field, burning field
Waltz

We’ve taken an old-fashioned approach to it, recording and mixing to tape; most of the album only became digitalised as it was being mastered to CD. As we’re sure you know by now, we love making our packaging as interesting as the music, and we’ve made a very limited number of specially packaged CDs which we’re sure you’ll love.

Part of Trials on 24 track tape

We think we can confidently say that this is the best recording we’ve made.  In the time between now and the album release, we’ll be uploading videos and pictures of how we made it, and we hope you’ll be as excited about it as we are.

Rhiannon, Neil, Pete, Nick, Nicole, Ed & Susie
xoxox

Our new album is nearing completion, which we find extremely exciting.  Tracklisting, artwork and more information to follow very soon, but in the meantime here’s a video of Susie recording her piano part for a song we’ll be playing on 20th August at Bush Hall for the very first time…

See you there…

tmt
xoxox

To celebrate the end of a (hopefully) productive week in the studio, we’ll be playing the first Goodbye, Faithful Kingdom! All-Day Festival at The Macbeth on 24th January.  It’s a Bank Holiday the following Monday, so we can all stay late and have a great time without worrying about getting in to work the next day.  There will be…

Barbeque!
Art exhibition!
Affordable artworks!
DJs!

Bands including…
Agaskodo Teliverek, Napoleon IIIrd, The Monroe Transfer, Spinmaster Plantpot, Fireworks Night, Lime-Headed Dog, We Yes You No, Ed Seed (The Mules), and Temba

Tickets are available here

And, finally, today marks the beginning of a campaign that you, dear reader, can help us with.  If you’re a Facebook person, find out more by joining our group.

n, p, n, e, n, s, r
xoxox

In the meantime, we’ll be playing our regular slot at Goodbye, Faithful Kingdom! this Tuesday for Thomas Truax’s David-Lynch-inspired album launch.

“Goodbye, Faithful Kingdom! is refreshingly different” – Subba-Cultcha

Tickets available here…

THOMAS TRUAX 

Thomas Truax is a New Yorker currently residing in London. He’s a singer-songwriter and inventor of strange self-made instruments like his now legendary ‘Hornicator’ and motorized mechanical drum machines including new ‘Mother Superior’. He employs these as well as traditional instruments in exceptionally crafted, witty and often touching songs. His activities have been documented in two feature-length films: ‘Instrumental’, from director Gabe Shalom (US, 2005) and Adam Clitheroe’s ‘One Man In The Band’ (UK, 2008). With three acclaimed full length albums under his belt: ‘Full Moon Over Wowtown’(2004), ‘Audio Addiction’(2005), and ‘Why Dogs Howl at the Moon’ (2007) Thomas took a break from near-constant touring and work on a nearly completed fourth original album to concentrate instead on an album of cover songs from the films of David Lynch. 

Goodbye, Faithful Kingdom! are informed that Thomas Truax will be doing a Lynch-themed show at The Macbeth, which might feature a backwards-speaking dancing dwarf!

“A cranium pouring with genuine innovation. Imaginative, out-there, rich in content.” – Plan B
“Inventive and Romantic” -TimeOut
“Beguilingly Bizarre” –Uncut

THE MONROE TRANSFER

“The Monroe Transfer demand to be absorbed by candlelight, with a phial of absinthe on the side.” – Metro (One To Watch) 

GNOMES OF ZURICH 

Two piece dirty blues and punked up rock put through a mincer and turned into a riotous mess of danceable beats, incomprehensable noise and beautiful, soaring melodies. Featuring Ben Walker (of Sidearm and Good Luck Fox fame) and Andy Clydesdale of the Audio Massage empire. 

We’ve had a couple of very flattering reviews in the online world, of which we’ll give you a litte taster here:

‘Like the sleeve, the music inside is carefully and skillfully crafted by people who clearly love what they’re doing.  The CD is accompanied by a DVD which contains an animated video which tries to offer a visual interpretation of the sounds using photo collage and drawings. From that you won’t be expecting anything flashy or fast moving. Like the music, the visuals are simple, yet powerful and they take time to slowly unfold, telling the story of… well, I’m not sure what exactly the story is. But I don’t think that matters. Like the music, it’s a piece of art to be experienced, not understood. And if it’s a little strange, that’s OK too’ 
Full review (The Daily Growl) here.

‘I Dreamt…’ is a slow boiler of a song. It paces itself, never meticulously, but like a finely crafted Hitchcock shot. It teases and builds, exercising the imagination to a point where the song begins to write itself in your head. A slowly drawn violin melody toys with the listener throughout the track. It patiently goes from sweet and innocent to a much more sinister, shocking sound that creates a journey of emotions that can leave you feeling sorrow or joy at every one of its slight twists.
Full review (Line of Best Fit) here.

You can order the CD & DVD double pack right here from us, or from the Organ Grinder Records site.

Something we’ve been working on since the beginning of the year is a particularly exciting new project- The Bird’s Eye Film Festival have commissioned us to write a new score for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 classic silent film Pandora’s Box.  

We’re very excited about the work we’ve done so far- due to the restricted space of the cinema, only 5 of us are able to work on the show and, as a result, we’re breaking out as many instruments as we can, and doing our level best to vary things over the course of 2 hours.  As well as violin, ‘cello, double bass, drums and guitar, we’ll be playing musical saw, toy organ, glockenspiel, prepared recordings and all manner of percussion- we’ve found some interesting sounds coming from an old wok, for instance…

We’ll be performing this newly-written score live, accompanying a screening of the film at…

BFI SouthBank
Wednesday 11th March 2009

For tickets, visit the BFI website.  And be quick, it looks like they’re selling well.

For videos, photos and more information about the festival, follow some of these links…

Bird’s Eye View on Facebook
Bird’s Eye View on MySpace
Bird’s Eye View on Bebo
Bird’s Eye View videos on Daily Motion
Bird’s Eye View Videos on YouTube
Bird’s Eye View photos on Flickr

The new thing is called Joy; it’s 12 minutes of strings, bowed & screwdrivered guitars and hefty drums.  For the interested, it wanders through a number of time signatures and keys; if you’re into Arvo Part, Max Richter, Rachel’s, Do Make Say Think, Steve Reich, early Sigur Ros, that sort of thing, you may well like it.

And, as a special festive thingy, you can also download our downbeat, glacial version of Silent Night; it’s nice to put on your iPod while walking around with your breath hanging in the air of a cold evening. We hope you like them.

We would love it if, assuming you like it, you could tell every music fan you know about it; since we’re giving it away, we’d like as many people as possible to hear it.  There should be a little “Share this” button just below this post, which means you can put this post on your Facebook or MySpace, and hopefully let more people know about it.  Or, of course, you could just email a link to people you know.  We’re very proud of the music, and we’d like people to hear it.  Download, listen, comment and share, if you’d be so very.

Download Joy here by clicking here

Download Silent Night by clicking here

Listen to more streaming music by clicking here

THE HELLSET ORCHESTRA
Nottingham’s The Hellset Orchestra are a six-headed beast with cellos and violins for arms, bass and drums for legs and a big Hammond organ for its belly. This jabberwocky emits sounds of a theatrically monstrous nature and utilises sounds from the metal, baroque, jazz, progressive rock and power ballad periods of history. They came together through coincidental research into rare Victorian bird-hunting periodicals and have written songs about short vikings, King Arthur, battledroids and bobsledding lizards.

“The Hellset Orchestra make an exhilarating noise, with glam rock, show tunes, jazz, prog, ska, and new wave all thrown into one highly satisfying gumbo… they sound like nothing so much as some bizarre Midlands take on a New Orleans funerary band fronted by a mad professor!” – SoundsXP

“Tiny theatrical epics, stories indeed from the perfectly named Hellset Orchestra. You’d expect to find them in full Victorian costume at the end of Brighton pier, or maybe on deck as the ship goes down Trying To Make A Monstrous Bird and other twisted constructions that dance around theatrical noir.” - Organ

THE MONROE TRANSFER
The Monroe Transfer are a UK-based, 7-piece group, making beautifully detailed and passionately executed instrumental music on a variety of instruments. Forthcoming releases include a unique CD & DVD double-pack of ‘I Dreamt I Was A Hammer And Everything Was Glass’, featuring animated film by Gemma Burditt to be released on Organ Grinder Records.

“At their most beautiful they’re able to lightly brush the places that so few other instrumental acts can…it’s exciting when a band that features not a single singer is able to take you away to someplace other than the here and now on fabulous waves of orchestral sound. The Monroe Transfer, at their most beautiful, are that band.” - Drowned in Sound

ANCHORSONG
Anchorsong is a solo project by Masaaki Yoshida from Tokyo, Japan.

He creates music with a sampler (AKAI MPC2000XL) and a keyboard (KORG Triton) right in front of the audience. In other words, he shows the process of composing on the stage. Some people say, “It’s like watching a painter drawing on a white canvas.” His reputation is known internationally through YouTube, where since the first video was uploaded, they have been viewed more than 100000 times in total.

Tickets pre-orderable (is that a word?) from WeGotTickets

plus!
DJ Bjorn Hatleskog (ADAADAT)

Get cheap advance tickets here!
Get on the Facebook group here!

It should be a night to get everyone settled back into realising that what autumn needs is a really off-kilter soundtrack of strings, electronics, and splattery guitars.  Everyone will try to sell you stuff, and there will be beer available; could you ask for more?

Goodbye, Faithful Kingdom! VI
Tuesday 23rd September 2008
at The Fly, New Oxford Street, London

Serafina Steer & Nighttime Ron
Serafina plays harp and keyboards and creates beautifully barbed
music that will both soothe and rattle your soul. She’s worked with the
likes of Ravi Shankar, toured with Young Marble Giants and Pram and has
been compared to Brian Eno, Ivor Cutler, Joanna Newsom and Laurie Anderson.

The Monroe Transfer
“At their most beautiful they’re able to lightly brush the places that so few other instrumental
acts can…it’s exciting when a band that features not a single singer is able to take you away
to someplace other than the here and now on fabulous waves of orchestral sound.
The Monroe Transfer, at their most beautiful, are that band.” – Drowned in Sound

Fireworks Night
“The multi-layers of instruments gently explode together to make a
song that is both simple and complex… they make songs that take you
on a musical adventure and tell you a story, and Echo’s Swing
is no exception.” – Times Online (track of the week)

plus!

DJ Dave Howell (Fat Cat Records)

More information, and advance tickets, by clicking here

We should, with any luck, have the first few copies of I dreamt I was a hammer & everything was glass available at the show too, so this is your chance to get hold of one before its proper release.  Hope to see you there…

tmt
xoxox