Early Autumn Soundings
1.
How we have such a lot of news, and rather than burst forth with it all in one giant downpour, allow me to dehydrate it slightly into a chewy, sweetened and condensed 3-part story; do enjoy the slightly more intense flavour, but, maybe a nice cuppa will help you get it all down more easily.
Jeepers, we played at Glastonbury! That was great, and gads, a real insight into efficient stage management; never have we been shunted (I use this term affectionately) on and off stage so fast and line-checked so minimally to a resulting pretty great sound. We had fun festy times with our extended Modern Studies family and were treated like rock-stars, if slightly grubby ones.
And oh how our dear hearts ache: we did our humongous Fringe Show with Made in Scotland, and it was a riot. We cried a lot, mostly because of the beautiful strings, brass, and singers who galliantly assisted in every possible way to make our music as 3-dimensional as we could ever hope it to be. Our Glad bar was a cosy enclave of lovin’ and nurturin’, and rosy-cheeked audience members waved us goodbye clutching their bespoke posters and armfuls of records.
2.
So Rob wrote a finger-pickin’ pretty and we added some swooping cello, double bass and shuffling drums for ‘Curlew’ as part of Earth’s beautiful release Avocet Revisited. We were delighted to travel to Totnes for this year’s Drift Sea Change festival to perform it as part of a daytime talk on the release, as well as a set of new material in an extremely sweaty club, the two events liquidly conjoined by a sampling of local cider. Travelling the length of the country with a double bass for one tune is not something we’d undertake lightly, thus demonstrating our complete LOVE for this project!!
And although Rob looks his usual man-about-the-mountain self here, he’s had a run-in with a tick bite, which has been horrendous, and caused him to retreat to bed for a month or two; no joke, check yourself after wading through the swishy swashy grass, people. This meant we cancelled Electric Fields, sorry about that, and played Milton Arts festival without him, where we were joined once again by the valiant and excellent-at-tour-van-chat Alex Livingstone.
Also, in a significant move, I’ve now traversed the gamut of keyboards from the days of our ancient harmonium recently to arrive at this cute li’l Roland synth, which is actually light enough for one person to carry… thus reducing our van load massively and making us skip along with the unsuspecting gait of basket-toting children to Grandma’s.
3.
So our bigly news of the moment is we’ve been signed to Fire Records. Which is exciting. They’re re-releasing our first music-baby Swell to Great on the 27th October, on sweet transparent vinyl, so you’ll be able to use it as a looking-through thing as well as a listening-to thing. Here’s the pre-order link… Swell to Great on Fire.
Through October we’ll be working on finishing up album 2: We’ve done lots of recording guitars, drums, organs, synths, tape loops, trombones, voices, more voices, and coming up soonly a suitable collective noun of strings. We are entranced by working with these people we so love and admire, it is doing us the world of good, and we scurry all this good stuff away for Spring like the industrious squirrels and let you know release dates as soon as we have them.
In the meantime, we’ve got 2 shows upcoming in November:
November 3rd: Aberfeldy Festival
November 4th: Jane Weaver support at Glasgow Stereo
So this has been nice, thanks for listening, stay special, we love you.
Emily & the band xx