Entries Tagged 'Sunil Sawani' ↓

I saw giant swarms of birds changing direction quickly in the stormy sky on my drive home. Some landed on electric wires momentarily, but most flew around frantically, as though none of them knew where they were going, but were all thinking the exact same thing.

     Sit Up, Sit Down (MP3, 4.9 MB)

Ok guys, new category: [SONG]… Just single songs not as part of a “Release”. These won’t be shown on the Releases page, but perhaps someday in the future I’ll package a bunch of [SONG]s together to make a [PTSXXX]. edit: who cares? they’re all up there now. these are the kinds of decisions you have to make when you have a fake record label. -ss

Anyway, this one is called Hold It Till It’s Gold and came to me while on a bike ride. It gave me an opportunity to mess around with the Alesis ControlPad I got a little while ago.

     Hold It Till It’s Gold (MP3, 1.7 MB)

This is the result of reworking a couple songs I had for my old band, The Low Hello. They sound totally different this time around, due to all instruments being played by me. I always liked these two songs a lot, and it was fun to record them, despite having a cold and having to sing.

     ZIP file of all songs (ZIP, 5.6 MB)
     01 Check Your Pockets (MP3, 3.1 MB)
     02 File Under Sole (MP3, 2.5 MB)

I had started working on a set of songs as I was finishing college; I didn’t have a band, though, and after the fun I had recording with other people on the Square Miles EP, I decided I wanted to do another full band recording. Luckily, a couple of my friends were in a band called Tenley, and they were amenable to helping me out with my songs. I piggybacked on their practices — as soon as they were finished, Keith (their singer) would step aside, and I’d jump in and we’d work on my songs for a bit. This worked pretty well, and we eventually booked some time at an acquaintance’s basement studio to record.

When they were done, I sat on the songs for a long time (over a year), and then I decided to take the step of actually releasing Tenille as a for-sale product. That was OK in the beginning, as friends and family purchased copies. After that though, the sales dried up, despite the fact that I had it up for sale on iTunes and CDBaby. I am just not the promotion machine one needs to be to make a record really sell and gain buzz… And I’m not really interested in that aspect of things.

This year, I shifted gears and decided to put all the songs up here for free… The “hits” on this one are probably Big Arm and Hard to Be, but I like the EP as a whole, and at that point, I was convinced it was the best thing I’d done. Thanks to Keith, Jason, Dan, Billy and Steve for all your help in making this happen and being my band for a short while.

     ZIP file of all songs (ZIP, 14.7 MB)
     01 Hard To Be (MP3, 3.7 MB)
     02 Fragments (MP3, 2.4 MB)
     03 Big Arm (MP3, 3.0 MB)
     04 Waiting For Machines (MP3, 2.2 MB)
     05 The Lions Tame (MP3, 3.6 MB)

Bonus song
This song isn’t actually part of the EP, but my friend and local hip hop artist Big Now decided he liked the music for Waiting for Machines enough to lay down a few rhymes on top of it at the end of the song. The result is great, and obviously very different than anything I can do. Have a listen:

     Waiting For Machines, featuring Big Now (MP3, 2.9 MB)

The first six “releases” are music that spans from 1995-2006, including the first things I ever recorded on four-track. I’m doing this as a way to consolidate it all, and maybe drum up more interest in some of the later better stuff (like the Low Hello EP, the Square Miles EP and Tenille).

Each release will have a separate blog post for it, containing the links to the individual songs, a ZIP file of the songs and any additional images or video (for easy download of everything), and other info. The Releases page will have just the titles and cover images, and clicking on the cover images will take you to the particular blog post for that release. Got it?

Oh, by the way, I’m putting Tenille up for free. It’s my one and only CD I made for actual sale (it’s for sale on iTunes and on CDBaby right now for some amount of money… I haven’t seen a single cent any of the slim sales I’ve made through those avenues). But I’ve decided that it’s better to have people hear all the songs rather than just the two I used as advertising for the for-sale CD.

I’m also going to be retroactively filling in more information about each one later, including cover shots (some of which don’t exist yet, like for King Filament and The Square Miles).

Anyway, enjoy!