This has been a very busy week
On Monday we got an email from our New Zealand friend Connan Mockasin. He was playing that night in Amsterdam and wanted us to do a set. We decided that we’d try out an acoustic set, using just a Ukulele and a glockenspiel. And it went really well!
At that show we met a guy called Tonnie who is a journalist here in Amsterdam, and I’m lead to believe he infact had blogger.com’s 6th account. He recommended we attend a new media/music conference on Wednesday with talks by lastfm people, hypemachine people, and a whole bunch of smaller/way more interesting people. We went home and registered to attend online, which includes writing a small bit about yourself. Within an hour we got a call from the organiser asking if we’d like to come to a dinner he was having that night with all the speakers from the conference. Maybe play a few songs. We said yes! We played a couple of songs on the ukulele again which was cool. We were out geeked 10-1. And it was fantastic!
At the conference people talked about site design quite a bit, particularly the lastfm/hypemachine speakers, and the creator of Muxtape.com, Justin. Justin’s site is super clean and super simple. Where as lastfm and hypemachine are really packed full of everything. What impressed me the least about the lastfm/hypemachine’s talk was when they claimed that Myspace’s design was good for bands (have they ever talked to a band before?). They also claimed that metal listeners from Sweden wouldn’t want a colourful site, and that Hip Hop listeners wouldn’t like cleanly laid out sites. It was confusing to say the least.
But it was ultimatly really inspiring to meet people who are so passionate and involved in new media web stuff as it relates to music.
We’ve also been super busy mixing and mastering our upcoming EP. It’s called ‘grownups’, it has four songs on it, and it will be ready by the end of the week. We’re going to be releasing it for free online, most likely using Muxtape and Soundcloud. We’ve changed our sound a lot since our album last year, this EP is very upbeat and much more hiphop influenced. In fact, one song features New Zealand rapper Home Brew, which was an awesome collaboration to get involved in. Can’t wait to show everyone the EP!
And finally, we’re heading out on tour starting Saturday. We’re touring Germany. We like to do quite different sets for each tour, so we’ve been reimagining our performance for the last two weeks, and practicing a lot too.
Far too many things at once, it’s a good thing.
