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 Accordingly, the demo that we recently released already feels outdated, as it was recorded as a duo with a bit of a different focus...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...

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…