Things that are taking up my waking hours right now:

Old Masters redux

Ken and Alan have copies of all the Fine Art tapes (except the KFAI tape, which was mostly a lost cause and a lesson to all -- always bring your own sound engineer!). In the next few weeks they will have gone through them and will have recommendations for he best tracks. Before anything can proceed though, I want to find Kay, Jay, Jenni and as many of the other people involved with the band as I can. So far, internet searches and the phone books have come up empty, so they'll have to contact me...

Sound Commandos, My Next Album, Radio Radio...

The Sound Commandos album did really well in its first six months. It's now available from most of the online music sellers and has had a goodly amount of airplay, especially on Internet radio services like Echoes, Galactic Travels and the like. Twin Freaks has been the favourite track from the album, with Black (a polar opposite in sound and feel) coming a close second. Unfortunately it has not done as well on Minnesota radio. MPR's The Current played only one track from Millions; so far the station has ignored Sound Commandos altogether. I thought that was perhaps because most of the tracks are (much) longer than the usual single in length (most "alternative" songs are between 3 and 4 minutes in length). If that's the case, perhaps things will open up a bit this year as I have been hearing longer tunes lately. Without local airplay, it's difficult to convince brick and mortar music stores that they should carry the album; without local stores, it doesn't get played on the radio. Oh well, none of this is new, it's just too bad the attitudes continue. At least the Internet is there, and it has been my friend (and Chris'), helping to get Sound Commandos and our solo albums heard by people who otherwise wouldn't know it existed.

While the album had previously been available as a download only from Blue Water Records, iTunes, e-music, Rhapsody and so on, the full-length, retail-ready CD was released in November of 2006. Blue Water Records has it available on their site and the CD also available from the Sound Commandos Shop. EU orders ship from the UK, orders for the rest of the world ship from the US, which means timely and cost-effective shipping. Also at the shop is a Sound Commandos EP, featuring remixes of three tunes from the album. The Whole Sound Commandos site has gone through a facelift. The Shop is fairly recent, and now you can stream tunes from the album directly from the site.

In retrospect, 2006 didn't look as busy for me as some years have been. The Sound Commandos project was finished, of course, and both the creative and less enjoyable business activities took a fair amount of time. Apart from that, I did help produce a remix of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey" for my good friend Charles Sadler under the name In-Flect. I did other stuff, like doing a major cleanup and restoration of a lecture tape, as well as preparing and burning a vidoe project for the local transit comission but not that much that actually involved creating music. However, I have finished the first tune for my next album (the tune was started last year, so it counts, I suppose).

The Eighties Are Back again: Old Masters

The best of the Fine Art recordings are cleaned up now, and all I need to do is edit clips and upload them for you to listen to. I am also working on a way to get reasonably sized movie files here, but hitting a few dead ends. But it really shouldn't be too long before I can get everything up and running, although I still need a place to host the mp3s and other files.

Frank Hudson and Renee Robbins were a pair of true Fine Art fans. Sadly, Renee passed away but as Frank was going through some of her stuff, he found a large number of slides Renee had taken of the band. I did get Renee's pictures onto my site at Mac.com - check out the Fine Art page for the link to a slideshow covering at least three generations of the band with three Fine Art songs. Be patient, Mac.com can be fairly slow!

Any ex-Fine Art-ists reading this? Drop me a line and let me know where you are...