March 2016

4 new songs, video project, booking shows out of town + April 3rd at St. James infirmary.

1.  We have a show this coming Sunday at St. James. Also playing are Holiday Friends and TUFT. They both fall somewhere on the super pro sounding indie pop spectrum. It'll be the first 21+ show we've played. Free.

photo 1.JPG

2. Our tape was reviewed in the cool daily tape blog, Cassette Gods. http://cassettegods.blogspot.com/2016/03/people-with-bodies-st-c18-self-released.html   and Also a write up in the Elko Daily paper: http://elkodaily.com/elko/out-and-about-this-weekend/article_7d247062-aa2d-594f-ae3e-41e60abbe428.html

3. Kent and I just got back from a road trip of Northern Nevada. Found sound petroglyphs near Austin, hung out with some rappers in Ely and played a show in Elko. It was good. We're working on booking more weekend dates out of town.

4. We have 4 new songs and have played 3 or them live so far. It's cool to have some new material. (Working titles: Optimism/Pessimism, Theme Song, Car Crash, Lluvia) Plus, we're working on 2 new video projects. One of them is top secret, but the other is a DVD version of the EP. I still have a ton of editing to do, but we want to have it out by June. It'll include music videos, plus a bunch of extra video to play. Most of my friends from Argentina and Brazil seemed to ingest music that way - through a dvd player in the house - so Kent and I thought it would be cool to release the cassette in that format. Especially since we're video nerds and stuff.

That about wraps it up for this month. Mostly working on material. Keep an eye out for the DVD and new songs, and we'll maybe catch you on Sunday 4/3.

-Fil

In Current Rotation:

February 2016

Cassette Tape, Another Video and an Infomercial.

February has been very productive.  First, we finished our self titled EP and put it out on Cassette. You can buy it on Bandcamp, at Spectre Records. and you can stream it this second right here:

The online version is 4 songs, but the cassette version runs a few minutes longer. We drove out to visit Mike Branch, an environmental writer who writes about his pastoral/anti-pastoral experiences living in the high desert wilderness. Plus, we added a few clips from a trip we took to Peru in 2013. At the end of Side A, there is a weird choir song that was blasting from a bell tower on the top of a hill in Cuzco. I drank a beer next to some teenagers and recorded it. Here is the view from that bench:

 

Next -- When Dave Dondero came to Reno in January he showed up late due to car troubles. He eventually made it and played a very intimate "story-teller" set that gave a lot of his songs a new depth. After the show I didn't sleep.

In the morning we drove up to the dry lake bed, Winnemucca Lake, then the wet lake bed, Pyramid Lake, and we walked around all day. I brought my hi-8 camera and later made the footage into a video. The loop is from a thrift store keyboard we found, and then Kent scored the rest with violin.

Lastly, I made an infomercial for the tape. I hired a dude on the internet to do the voice.

Most of these blog posts probably won't be so eventful, but February has been hectically good. I think we're onto something./

-Fil

 

In current rotation via Kent:


January 2016

We made a video.

TAPE NEWS:

We're done. They're in the mail.   

We originally planned to duplicate the cassettes ourselves, and we got 100 clear yellow tapes - after I finished them (with a ton of help from hugely supportive friends), they didn't sound right. Quiet/warbly. I think I bought low quality tapes and couldn't quite figure out how to properly fix them in time to release them.

SO, we pulled the trigger and paid somebody to duplicate them in Missouri. They will be light blue, which matches the artwork. I got the test tape and it sounds really nice. -- I guess the lesson is sometimes you don't know what you're doing and that's good, but sometimes your tapes sound bad and that's not good. DIY and also die eventually.

That said, we are goddamned stoked. The official release show is February 13th at Spectre Records in Reno. We'll have them at a pre-release house show in Carson City too.

Cool. See you soon.

Fil. 01/27/2016

 

In current rotation:

 

 

 

December 2015

Ok, what's up.

We're shooting to update this every month with something new - if you want to be updated in a monthly bite-size, sign up for our email list at the bottom.

We are done tracking our first EP that is most likely going to be self-titled. We have a mix that we're tightening up and we'll be putting out 2 versions: a normal internet version with 4 songs on Bandcamp, and a cassette tape version that includes soundbites from a conversation we had with author and general bad ass, Mike Branch. The cassette version will dive into the lyrical themes, which mainly revolve around the idea of home, place and the romanticism we assign to leaving. Mike Branch's work is largely about living in the sticks and ripping up stereo-types of pastoral identity. He lives in the high desert hills outside of Reno with his wife and two daughters.

The release date looks like February, but we're definitely antsy to put it out asap.

We're working on a live-style music video of the song "A Mirror, A Storm". Both the tape and video have been recorded completely DIY in our basement, and I've been learning a ton about how to engineer sound. It's been a really cool experience getting tones right and mixing them. I've had experience doing vocal tones for radio, but this is my first time filling out an entire range of frequencies. There's a violin on one of the tracks and we found out that putting a mic close to the body sounded terrible. After frustratingly stumbling through a few takes, we put Kent in the stone-walled meat cellar behind my bedroom and put the mic about 8 feet from him. Suddenly it sounded right. In that vein, Google has been a huge help. ("How to mic guitar amp very high end.")

So that's that.  Check back for an update next month. The motor's just getting started and I'm excited to see which way the steering wheel jerks.

-Fil. 12/2015

 

Current rotation: