New Music (Tonal Couture, Solo-stuff, Snazzmobb)

A few music updates. I've been pretty busy as a musician lately. Here's some stuff I've been working on.

Snazzmobb is still plugging away at refining our set, now that we've finally settled into a refined bass/ drums/ keys trio arrangement... we're currently polishing edges and editing our press-kit, hoping to start shopping it to venues and promoters soon. I'm not going to lie, it's been a tumultuous year for the outfit, with quite a few strange setbacks befalling the initial lineup I set up a year ago this month, with the intent to fast-track the act to playing out quickly and often by mid-winter of last year. Through that time-period, we ended up writing a set three times longer than it needed to be, featuring songs from all the various phases of the band's still young, yet already rocky, lifespan. That long-form set meandered and wandered, was probably interesting in some ways, but not at all moments what we had initially set out to do. We've recently sliced that set by a third, leaving the content that reflects what we sound like NOW, and we're really happy with what we're almost ready to unleash. Accordingly, the demo that we recently released already feels outdated, as it was recorded as a duo with a bit of a different focus... I hope to drop some sort of an accompanying single soon to demonstrate the current feel of our content.

I recently also started playing with a downbeat instrumental dub act on the seacoast, called Tonal Couture. This project is POLAR opposite from Snazzmobb, and I LOVE that. While the snazz is a rambunctious, high-energy, venue-focused dance act, Tonal Couture is super relaxed and ambient, better suited for swanky martini-lounges and chill-out-rooms. It's fun to play, and fun to listen to. We record our sessions, and we've made select cuts available on our Bandcamp page, as part of the possibly-fictitious un-album (quickly becoming a bizarre future box-set of some sort), called "Future Rarities and B-Sides Without A-Sides." There are 12 tracks up at the moment... check them out, and enjoy.



Also, I've started working on a post-LeVautourEnsemble phase of solo-content. This time around, I'm using my own name (well, sorta... I'm dropping this stuff as "Bernard LeVautour," which is how I've usually billed myself in recent musical-projects) and promising myself to drop the "experimental" schtick and finally make music that I would actually want to LISTEN to. Expect sparse, down-tempo electro-jazz type stuff, mostly... because that's what I tend to actually be most into. Here's the first track I dropped to debut that sort of content...

Tipsy Cougar on Headhat Records!

After much delay, Tipsy Cougar, my noisy indie-electro/ "metro-grime" project, has finally finished and released our album, "Immaculate Conceptions," through our good friends over at Headhat Records.

... and, guess what? It's available right now, to download for FREE/ donation! Click here to get it directly, or here to browse the rest of the excellent stuff in the Headhat/ Webhat catalog!

I was going to explain a bit about this project and the gradual creation of this record, but... Just download it and see for yourself... I think this mess may speak for itself. 

Yes, it's supposed to sound like that.

A bit of a personal update...

I have received my acceptances, weighed the options, narrowed the field, and eliminated some question-marks… I have decided to pursue the first phase of my graduate school education at the University of New Hampshire this fall.

I have registered for classes, and begin in Durham at the end of August, which means a relocation from Manchester (the home of Metro-grime) to the beautiful New Hampshire seacoast. Sara and I have been apartment-hunting, are coming daily closer to figuring out where to reside in the coming months, and will hopefully be moving from the Tipsy Cougar Pad into a new comfortable and creative Swords We Swallow Studios (presumably somewhere in the Dover area… we’re currently leaning toward a complex with an appropriately [if a bit cheesy] Literature-inspired name) by mid-June.

Needless to say, I’ve been pretty busy the last few weeks, what with visits to campus offices, apartment-scoping, searching for a Portsmouth-area restaurant-job… but I’ve still had a couple of entries for this site in the works… one involves an update on Swords We Swallow, with a web-address, audio, release-information, and videos, which I’ve somehow still found some time to put together… and another that pertains to Lady Gaga (pop-music as post-modern performance- and identity- art).

So stay tuned.

Pandora, Revisited.

Some of you who have been reading my blog for a while now may remember an essay that I posted a little over a year ago, titled "Pandora; The Slow Death of Amoskeag". (For those of you who are newer readers, or didn't happen to catch that one, click here to read it now.)

When I posted the entry, I regretted that I wasn't able to post the photographs that the piece makes frequent reference to as accompaniment to the prose. They were all captured before I had switched my photography primarily to digital, the hard-copies were buried somewhere at the back of an over-crowded storage-unit, and I was posting from Arizona at the time, making it impossible to recapture the image in a more accessible medium (not to mention I was under the assumption that the sign had long since been removed from its haphazard home against the building.)

Since I've returned to Manchester, however, I've been pleasantly surprised to find that the sign still sits discarded in the same spot. Sara Jane and I took a stroll through the millyard recently with our cameras, so I'm now able to add some supplementary images to the earlier essay that had lacked them prior.

Enjoy.






















Stay tuned, I plan to post some more of the set tomorrow. The rest of the building is interesting and relevant as well. In keeping with one of the predominant themes of the essay, this is definitely a sort of a study in the interdependence of certain concepts of "beauty" and "decay."

Dirty, Shiny Shellac; Metro-Grime in Fragmented Pastiche.

I'm working on collecting my thoughts.

The image in my mind is a splattering of acrylic paint, a combination of of drab, dirty colors and the bright, slick, and jarring, across a tattered piece of newsprint, torn and scattered on the shiny floor of a creatively-lit club. I'm scooping up the pieces, spreading some shellac on the wall, and reassembling the fragments into something completely different.

I have so much that I want to say in giant brush-strokes of sticky, shiny goop. This entry will be a bit messy. I know that you like it that way.


The term Metro-Grime has become the new catch-all. It began as a tongue-in-cheek mock-gimmick label for a music-genre. Then we realized that it could be applied to so much more. It's a way of seeing things. Something slightly less than a "lifestyle," but pretty close. It has to do with the combination of the dirty and the fashionable, where the juxtaposition itself is essential to any conception of either. The beauty itself is derived from the decay and disorder, and the individuals who embody the movement are acutely aware of this and thrive off of it. This is how many of us have lived for years. Metro-Grime embodies an unabashed love and embrace of the pretty dirty things. Manchester, New Hampshire, for instance, IS a Metro-Grime city, and serves as home to healthy numbers of such individuals... but is merely a single example, the most pertinent to my present analysis, of a nearly endless list of just those grimy/ gorgeous neighborhoods, cities, and districts that I know well enough to pull merely off the top of my head.

Manchester is my city, and always will be, no matter how much I may enjoy a span of time elsewhere. I love the city, its quirks, its dirt, its problem... and these things are among what makes it a beautiful and creatively pertinent place. Thus, as a cultural critic-at-large based in this dirty/ pretty city whose life-blood could use to be documented, I'm prepared to call the flaws as I see them, as part of the creation of an ongoing aesthetically important documentation of a place that deserves one.

So bear with me as I drag you through the dirt and glitter. I'll start in with some specifics tomorrow.