Project updates...

Having just returned from a somewhat tumultuous trip back east, I'm sitting at a Phoenix coffeehouse, loving being back in such a vibrant city, and excited for making fun and positive things happen for our future here... so I figured it was a good time for an update.

The Green Sea has changed formats yet again... because... why not? What we've been doing lately is some sort of live-improv noise that usually falls in a somewhat electro-punk-meets-comedy-rock vein. Basically, we've found that we thoroughly enjoy playing extended-sets without content, making absolutely everything up on the spot... which naturally incurs some hilariously unpredictable lyrics and sudden genre-shifts. We now have a site on Bandcamp, where you can stream or download loads of various fun content... We currently have four records up there- our debut EP from 2006, two live-improv mixtape records, and an ongoing collection called "...bits and pieces..." that houses lots of stuff that hasn't shown up or been appropriate for any of the other albums.

You can find all of that here-

https://thegreensea-az.bandcamp.com

We've posted some goofy videos from this phase, too, on my Youtube channel...

Such as these-

I've also begun working on a solo-record... (at the moment it's separate from the electro-jazz album I mentioned in the last post, but time will tell... I've got a few tracks from it up on my personal Bandcamp account since relocating to the desert... This is an indie-rock record at its core. I'm making the dusty, wild-west rock songs that occur to me, without trying to sculpt them into any particular context. This record is a snap-shot into my mind at the moment, as it evolves... It's called "Future Tense." 

Take a listen here- 

https://levautour.bandcamp.com

More tracks, and some videos, from that will be shortly forthcoming. 

And as always, new original art, prints, customized instruments, stickers, t-shirts, etc. are being added almost daily to the Etsy site where I sell my visual-art work... I've been pretty productive in that regard lately...

www.etsy.com/shop/levautour

...and more is to come soon. 

New solo-music and art.

I've added a second track to my slowly-evolving first solo-record (tentatively titled {ironically untitled}, without the pretenses of project-title, concept, experimentalism, etc... this one is simply intended to eventually be a stripped-down collection of songs that I would actually want to listen to. As strange as it sounds, with as many records as I've been involved with the release of (8 or so in the past 5 years, I think?) I've never actually done that.




In other news, I have new listings at my Etsy shop... and my "make an offer" liquidation-sale for friends and acquaintances is still underway, so email me if you want to barter or work out alternate delivery before you order.

Old Vine audio...

Old Vine is now on Bandcamp. That means... Lots of listenable Voodoo-folk audio for your ear-bulbs!

If you visit our site, you'll notice there are two records currently up on it. Both are works-in-progress at the moment... "Cavernous Spaces" is our forthcoming EP... original music, and a couple of original arrangements of creative covers. "Voodoo-Folk Live; B-Sides and Covers" is... pretty much how it sounds. An evolving collection of live covers and alternate takes. Alternately, "Cavernous Spaces" is our "actual" record, and our demo aimed at concert-venues, "Voodoo-Folk Live" is our demo as a bar-entertainment duo. Together, they should showcase pretty thoroughly what me and Mickey do as Old Vine.

Cavernous Spaces-




Voodoo-Folk Live-




We are currently also looking for suggestions as to where YOU'D like to see us play. (not just the city... we get lots of "play in Nashua/ Manchester/ Boston!" requests; we're looking for more specific suggestions... like, what bars or venues would you come out to see us play at?) We have two alternate sets- a longer bar-entertainment set (mostly covers), and a shorter, venue-focused set (mostly originals). Versatility is my favorite aspect of this particular act.

"Old Vine"... details, explanations, etcetera.

OK, here goes something I told myself in the past that I'd never do.

I recently played a benefit-show, as a duo with my friend Mickey Fearon... it was for a good cause; we put together a 3-hour set of eclectic and entertaining covers, peppered with a few originals, to entertain a crowd aimed at helping out a friend in need. This was done somewhat spur-the-moment, with very little preparation.

Surprising to both of us, this worked out pretty well. Somehow, this collaboration turned into an actual "thing." That "thing" is now called Old Vine.

Here's the thing. Me and Mickey have been friends for a while, but we have pretty opposite tastes and musical-backgrounds. Turns out, that works out pretty well. Mickey is a classic-rock kid, I'm an indie-rock kid. I'm a jazz guy, Mickey digs the blues alot. Mickey learns covers note for note as a guitarist and NAILS them, I'm a performer first-and-foremost with a background in original music in concert-venues; I hadn't played or learned any cover at all in YEARS. Turns out, we balance each other out well. My weaknesses in regards to what we're doing are Mickey's strengths, and vice-versa.

Somehow, this odd outfit landed a residency.

We're playing Wednesdays, starting this week, at Great American Tavern in North Reading, Massachusetts. 8:30 to 11:30.

Sure, we're playing acoustic bar-rock. But I promise- our set is WEIRD. Me and Mickey's ideas of "standards" are VERY different... which should make for an interesting experience for just about any sonic-palette. We seriously cover everything from Cab Calloway to Outkast to Johnny Cash to Death Cab to Clapton to M.J. to Kanye... and pretty much everything in between. Expect to hear some hippie shit, expect to hear some hipster shit. All in the same set, mixed with stuff your grandmother might whistle along to. I'm not kidding. And then we mix an original tune in just to mix it up a bit. 

So, come out on some Wednesday and hang out. It'll be fun. And "like" us on Facebook... and check out some videos from that first event that got this all started...

Snazzmobb album-release!

My indie-dance-rock trio Snazzmobb dropped our demo-EP, "The Violent Taste of Hot Sauce," last week!

It is available for free streaming and download on  our brand-new Bandcamp page... Five tracks are streamable live, plus four downloads rounding it out to nine if you choose to download!



Also, more of our material is now available on Youtube!

Updates... Etsy, Snazzmobb, etc.

I updated my Etsy site... in addition to the prints and original-pieces associated with the initial "5 Icons" series that I made the site to make available, I've now expanded it to include... well, pretty much all of the pieces of my work cluttering the walls of my studio that I would be more than happy to find a new home for. Accordingly, I think the listing-prices on this stuff are mostly pretty good deals... but nothing's set in stone, so message me directly if you want to haggle. Or if you live in the greater-Boston area, message me before ordering to see if it's possible to avoid shipping and fees.




Also, Snazzmobb is on Tumblr now! Check it out! Follow us, share us, like us... whatever it is you Tumblr people do over in Tumblr-land.

New Snazzmobb content!

My new band Snazzmobb posted a new video-teaser yesterday. This is the second released track from our forthcoming demo-EP "The Violent Taste of Hot Sauce." (watch the first one, "Real People, Real Sex," here.)

This one's the only content that we didn't write in our current set (ready to debut live soon... peel your eyes.) This is an original medley arrangement, with all due respect and reverence to His Purple Highness.

Enjoy, and feel free to share with your friends.

An Unorthodox Album Release...

I have a new album out and available now... in a totally different form and format from how I usually release material.

This one's called "Bernard LeVautour- Vulture From the Vaults {a live dj-set of unreleased rarities and back-catalog cuts}"

A physical, limited-run pressing is available via my Etsy site-

Click here!

A blurb from the liner-notes, to explain a bit about what it is-

"I haven’t quite figured out yet if this is intended to be a CD that’s packaged in an art-print, or an art-print that comes with a CD. So let’s call it, somehow, both. 

The print is a limited-edition digital/ photo-reproduction rendering of a painting called “5-icons,” the only place where all five images from my “Iconography” series appear in the same space.

The album is a single-take live-mix. It’s dirty. It’s messy. It was recorded direct to Type II cassette-tapes on an ancient Tascam 4-track, because that seemed appropriate, as there’s material in this mix that dates back far enough that we were using those things without irony.  Much of the mix is improvised, and I broke a turn-table and plowed my way through a whole slew of other technical issues throughout the mix. 

I wanted to release some sort of compilation of my own unreleased back-catalog cuts and rarities from my musical past, but I wanted to do it in such a way that wouldn’t enshrine or fetishize moments  from the past. Therefore, this mix is often in some ways somewhat irreverent. In terms of mixology, my impulse veered often toward stubbornness- the highest quality, best-known, most successful recordings dropped into this mix tend to be the ones that I made the largest effort to dirty up and in some cases possibly even “ruin” into unlistenable noise, while allowing certain cuts from far more obscure past-projects that most won’t even know I worked on to spin clean, almost undisturbed. 

Basically, this is just a filthy mess that I felt like I needed to get out. For some reason, I feel better now that I did." 

For $15 you get both the limited-edition print, and the disc that's mounted into the back of the frame.
 

Project-updates, Part 1.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a collected update here of the assortment of projects I currently have in the works. It seems overdue, since I have a lot going on, and only make passing mentions of various parts of these things in assorted places online. Here, then, is a bit of a catalog of my present endeavors, collected conveniently in one spot (though broken up into three entries to pardon your eyes and attention-spans.)


It might go without saying if you keep tabs on my work at all, but as someone who is rather transfixed with various ideas of “intermediality,” the media and format of most of my projects overlap and intersect with each other by design, concept, and necessity. Regardless, I will attempt to structure these updates by artistic-medium as an attempt at SOME semblance of coherency for those who happen to be outside of my head (you).


Writing-

I currently maintain four tiers of shorter-than-book-length content in various stages of the publication-submission process. These tiers are short-fiction, poetry, academic/ scholarly, and mainstream-non-fiction. In all of these tiers I try to maintain a sort of “go-big-or-go-home” submission-strategy… My thought is, why sell content to tiny, accessible outlets with extremely limited readership before you know for sure that the biggest fish in the sea don’t want the work… right? In certain tiers, then, I’ve been joking with friends lately that my current “job” as a writer is collecting rejection-letters from The New Yorker.


In addition, I’m currently working on a somewhat-unorthodox book-project. The piece is (at least tentatively) titled “Frantic Overture in Gray Minor: The Neon Sonata.” It’s not exactly a novel, not really a short-story collection, not quite a combination of the two… yet somehow all of that at once… with some additional intermedial, format-blurring twists thrown in.


My idea with this one, in terms of the goal, is self-publication… partly to help myself try to overcome a knee-jerk distaste for that “scene”… largely by allowing myself to think of that format as an experimental way of bypassing the conventional book-market in order to find unconventional sources of eyeballs for experimental works. In other words, this book is intentionally “unpublishable” by traditional “gate-keeper” publishing-industry channels, but possibly marketable to an entirely different sort of readers. (Of course, I’m well aware that this idea is particularly dicey at the moment, in the recent wake of the “50 Shades” phenomenon demonstrating so aptly WHY the traditional “quality-control” gate-keepers are in place- to keep the masses from hand-selecting complete and utter garbage… But I digress. I would be lying if I claimed that the challenge provided by such dicey-ness doesn’t excite me. I tend to like challenges.) This work is deeply connected to and overlapping with my current musical projects... which I'll talk about next.


…to be continued…

A Pair of Reviews, Part 2: Yeasayer, "Fragrant World."

The new Yeasayer disc, “Fragrant World,” is not technically a sophomore release (it’s actually the band’s third studio-record). However, it faces many of the same fabled pressures of an act’s second album, as it is the follow-up to 2010’s universally-acclaimed “Odd Blood,” which catapulted the group to “It-band” status (recent releases by Animal Collective and The Dirty Projectors, among others, face similar pressure.)

Yeasayer navigates this potentially-tense moment in their career brilliantly with “Fragrant World.” If the record lacks “Odd Blood”’s urgency (which to my ears it definitely does- there’s little if any of “Mondegreen” or “O.N.E.”’s edgy dance-rock here), this is instead a more confident, reflective, mature Yeasayer. Comparatively, this record is almost ‘laid back’… but not in a bad way.

To my ears, the most notable aspect of this album’s interest is the instrumentation. Yeasayer has managed something many musicians might find unthinkable here- somehow, they’ve stripped even more of the ‘organic’ instruments from their mix (I can only locate a couple brief snippets of sound of this disc that I’m entirely confident are made by guitars) while making a record that I would be FAR less comfortable describing as ‘electronic’ than their last. This is not a synth record, this is not an electro record, this is DEFINITELY not a dance or EDM record. This is a well-written psychedelic indie-pop record constructed largely from a palette of ‘What the hell makes THAT noise?’ sounds. 

In my eyes, it’s about time that rock songwriting caught up with hip-hop production in this regard. This is a ‘think outside the box’ record that amazingly manages not to SOUND like one, unless you’re either stubbornly partial to the safety of the box, or you’re paying close attention to the xylophones, pizzicato, noise-swells, glitches, melodica, etcetera that sit in the spaces that guitars might otherwise go. This album should be required-listening for every musician in a guitar-bass-drum cliché-format rock band, to fuel a little thought toward how their songs are put together, and why. 

Oh, and those sub-hits throughout are IMPRESSIVELY low.