After many years of writing, recording, mixing, remixing, trashing, rewriting, re-remixing and finally mastering, the first full length record from my electronica project, Boboroshi and Kynz, is available via iTunes (US, Aus/NZ, UK/EU, Japan and Canada), as well as Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, GroupieTunes, Amazon MP3 and Lala.

The track listing is:

• The Mo(u)rning Song
• As Good As You
• Dire Necessity
• 5am
• The Vigilance
• Arpelago
• Abbreviation
• Highline
• Hope
• Sunset

The record is currently only available for digital download. And now, Kynz and I can return to figuring out what we’re going to do for our next record, which hopefully will take less than the seven years this one did.

We’ve released the music video for the Honor By August single Into the Light, Directed by our good friend Timothy Devine

Check it out!!

Way overdue, but I finally have posted my SXSW photos to flickr.

Amy and I gave our panel on the first day of SXSW interactive and it was a blast. It was nice to have it out of the way so we could chill and enjoy the rest of the week. Despite a one day sickness that I warded off (and developed into South By Scurvy upon my return to DC) I was out and about at the conference center and Sixth Street Environs.

Here’s the breakdown of Photos:

SXSW Interactive

SXSW Music

Hotel Café Tour @ Parish

Sara Bareilles @ Parish

Honor by August (my band) at the 7th & Trinity Guitar Hero Stage (photos by our manager Trish on my camera)

and finally, but not least of all, Paramore at La Zona Rosa

I sent Jim Bacon an email last night asking about why the Virginia Railway Express had not utilized the westbound rail corridor heading out towards Charlottesville (and through a lot of the boom area in Fairfax and Loudoun counties) as a new line. For those of you who follow the Virginia transportation mess, and care about sustainable development, you really should check out Jim’s blog Bacon’s Rebellion Blog and his bi-weekly e-zine of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Jim saying that he had checked out Rotoscope (myspace) (via the link in my email signature) and liked it enough to put up a post on the Bacon’s Rebellion Blog. Looking at the comments, Waldo might have felt that he had stepped into the twilight zone when he opened up his RSS feed this morning.

I think I might need to gather my thoughts and write an article about the VRE…

Just in time for the holidays, Lowwatt Recording releases the new Lowwatt Glow compilation. Twenty tracks from different artists that have worked at the studio with Ted Comerford (also my producer). I did the design work for it. You should love it. Try to grab one from one of the bands or from the studio or various shops around Raleigh, NC.

We just got back from a five day run in Mystic, CT working on new material and doing pre-production for our upcoming recording sessions in mid-December. There’s something about the space that just lets us create in a very good way. We rolled in the first night to just setup the recording gear and hang out. Halfway through setup Evan starts playing a simple piano riff and Michael jumps on it. Come 4am, we had a song from scratch: “Johnny (Pass Me Another One)”. We got the five songs from earlier this year demoed and wrote another four new ones. And had some great jams and a lot of fun (including a jaunt into NYC for Alison Becker’s Christmas party at Pete Wentz’s bar in Alphabet City).

You can see pictures of the adventure on flickr.

After years of making music together, Kynz and I finally decided to put out a Boboroshi & Kynz ( myspace ) record before the end of the year. It will have ten tracks and actually clock in at almost exactly 80 minutes. The track listing as of today is as follows:

The Mo(u)rning Song
As Good As You
Dire Necessity
5AM
The Vigilance
Arpelago
Abbreviation
Highline
Hope
Sunset

Some of these songs have been released on this blog before and some of them are up on our myspace page. It’s going to be digital distribution only at first until we can figure out the whole vinyl/whatever thing.

When Honor by August goes out on the road, it’s generally on the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and Atlanta along the various stretches of I-85, I-95, I-40, I-64 and so on that exist east of the Appalachian Mountains. We, like most bands, have a conversion van. We don’t even have a trailer. All the gear [fig. 1], clothes, and four guys pile into “Murdoch”, our lovable Ford E-150 Conversion Van, and head out on the road.

In the last 16 months of being on the road with the band, one thing has become abundantly clear: we are internet addicts.

It’s not just surfing DListed or Perez Hilton or checking on the Weather. We like being connected. I will put in four plus billable hours from the van per day I’m out on the road. Sometimes, on the long hauls, I can get a full day of work done just from the van. One of the best features of the MacBook Pro plus Verizon EV-DO card setup that we utilize is a nifty feature called “Internet Sharing”. This allows us to take the connection on one laptop from the EV-DO card and create a closed wi-fi network using one of the laptops as a base station.

It’s quite simple to setup. Plug the card in, open the system preferences and go to “Sharing” and set it up like this:

And with that simple setup, three of four band members are online. If it were four out of four band members, there would be serious concern about the proper operation of a moving vehicle, so we shall stay firmly fixed at the 75% mark. This connectivity allows not only the guys to stay in touch with friends, but to also work last minute show promotion, route around traffic accidents (yay Google Maps drag-to-alter-this-route feature), and get some work done as well. I’ve many a time made a poster and emailed it off to our booking agent, or updated tour dates on the website, etc.

Now, this isn’t perfect, as there are some drop out areas. All the major cities are usually Broadband speeds. I-26 in South Carolina is a wireless deadzone. West Virginia into Ohio drops down to dial-up speeds for most of the trip. However, most of I-76 through Pennsylvania is actually quite speedy on the download rate.

At the end of the day, it’s about maximizing the effectiveness of everyone in the band. If you can get three people to put in a few hours of promotion a day, that equates to a lot of exposure for the band, and hopefully a better show draw because of it.

I’ve been quite behind in getting photographs up into Flickr and I’m starting to get back on track after being on the road for most of the last month. Here’s the photos from Honor by August’s trip to Los Angeles when we played the Viper Room.

London pix coming soon!

It started off as a series of coded messages on their official site. “Yes we are still alive.” Which is good to know, considering the band has not had a release since 2003’s “Hail to the Thief” (Amazon ) and has only played a handful of shows since their last tour ended. The messages continued for two weeks.

The big coup has very little to do with Radiohead’s obscure behavior on their website, or their continual secrecy while “possibly working on a new record”. It comes down to the manner in which the band decided to release In Rainbows. First, it’s not being distributed. They don’t have any major label setup to distribute it. So they’re doing it themselves via a website where you can purchase a handcrafted box set with two vinyl record, two CDs, and a digital download for £40. Or you can purchase the digital download and decide your own cost (BBC article). So you have a band that is arguably one of the largest bands in the music industry without a record deal and saying “we really don’t need one.”

You can look at Rick Rubin’s attempt to save Columbia/Sony as the other side of this equation. An attempt to solve the mathematical proof that the music industry is inherently broken, from a very different angle.

It will be interesting to watch how it unfolds.

So I’ve spent the last 6 months or so on a gear buying spree to get my home studio up to snuff and now, I’m going back and cleaning up old tunes from the Boboroshi & Kynz catalog. The first three songs are done, and I’m putting them up here for consumption/sharing/etc. Feel free to pass them on to friends, or what not.

Highline | “Highline” is an epic trance kind of song reminiscent of the Florida scene. Kynz and I decided it would be great to write one because, well, we never had. Big builds, reverbed piano, crazy arp synths, and the classic vocal sample all combined. (11.5 MB MP3)

The Mo(u)rning Song | This originated out of a Reason Tennis match on the YayHooray design boards back in 2001/2002-ish. m0de and I put the basics down and then I finished it up with Kynz. Very loungy/chill. (9.4 MB MP3)

Dire Necessity | This was a jam that we did at Kynz’s old house. Heavy guitar influence plus some funky break action and me singing through a pedalboard. Oh yeah. (12.4 MB MP3)

There will be eight remixed/remastered tunes pretty soon. Stay tuned!

For those of you who don’t know, No Second Troy is a DC area band that we are good friends with. Evan has even covered on guitar for Tom (it happened to be Tom’s wedding on a show date). Anyway, they just released their new video and it got picked up on the front page of Spin.com. You can see the article archived here.

Rock forth gentlemen!

Thanks to everyone who came out to our back-to-back sold out nights at IOTA, the shows were a great success and we couldn’t have done it without your support! We have a bevy of photos from various friends that have posted them online. Add your link if you have some as well.

Sara’s Photoset | Tom Bridge’s Photoset

Honor by August got tapped for using our song “Into the Light” on Baseball Tonight by an editor friend of our producer’s. The guys from ESPN came out to see our show at the Knitting Factory a few weeks back and invited us to come tour the facility when we were near Connecticut again. Chance would have it that we are up in Mystic, CT at Evan’s parents house to work on new material and relax for a long long weekend. Erik, Jenna and Lenny showed us around the studio and got us into some areas that most people don’t get to see.

Here’s photos from the tour.

Evan and Michael will be on DC101 Sunday night at 9:00 as we’re the featured artist this week.

About a year ago, Lara Fahey (photographer and DC101 producer) was telling me about a bunch of the bands she was excited about. Some of them I figured I wouldn’t like just by the names (e.g. 36crazyfists. Good band, just not my thing) but one of the group was a band from New Orleans called Mute Math [ official | wikipedia | myspace | virb ]. I picked up their Reset EP [ no longer available ] and was quite impressed. It had elements of electronic and rock with a guys voice that was reminiscent of Sting in some places (especially on the track “Peculiar”).

I listened to it on and off for most of the year, but then I picked up the full length record, and that’s when I really started listening to the band heavily. While my band was at SXSW last month, it shared the top spot with Brian Eno and my own studio demos.

The songs “Typical”, “Noticed”, “Control” and “Picture” all stood out as great hooks with wonderful textures. The rest of the record is a rich soundscape full of dynamic shifts and juxtaposing textures that are reminiscent of post-OK Computer Radiohead.

The Video Blog

The band is dedicated to, if not obsessed with video blogging. They’ve been posting short snippets on their YouTube account for almost two years now. Some of my favorite video snippets are Paul’s discussion of the previous night’s opening act or the show in a nutshell.

The most interesting thing by far is their new video for Typical which features the band performing the song backwards and then having the tape reversed for the audience.

The Live Show

So Lara called me right when I got back from SXSW and reminded me that Mute Math was playing the 9:30 Club that night. I ran over after work and made their set (the doors were at 5pm!) and it was by far and away one of the best shows I’ve seen in the last few years. The show started with the drummer affixing his headphones with a roll of gaffer’s tape (a black cloth variation on duct tape used by electricians and sound engineers). Then the lead singer jumped on top of his Fender Rhodes a few times. Then he did a half-handstand on it. There was an upright bass solo. There was a percussion and pedalboard solo. A PEDAL BOARD SOLO And then in the last song there was a custom made instrument that was passed into the audience towards the end of the song, and was played by various people, and was returned unharmed to the lead singer.

All of this occured in the middle of their performance as if it was standard procedure!

According to Lara, and from the looks of the live videos on line, most of it is. That’s a great live show. A perfect performance. It’s simply inspiring to see a band with so much diversity and de facto geekiness doing well (the lead singer plays a keytar for pete’s sake).

Further Listening

Reset EP [ Amazon ] (No longer available in the iTunes store)

Mute Math [ Amazon | iTunes ]

Typical Video [ YouTube | Reversed ]