Another limp offering

The migration of my old tunes to Spotify and other various platforms continues this month with another EP, this time the 2016 Silverfish release Limp and Numb.
For those who missed the original release, this one's a mix of remastered songs from around 2007 with a couple of exclusive tracks thrown in. It's a mix of me being loud/daft and quiet/creepy, something to start off your week on a confusing note with. If nothing else it's nice and short!
Stream below or alternatively check it out on iTunes/Apple Music.

Seasonal Cheer (Part 1/4)

My plan to gradually reissue my discography through Bandcamp is very gradually coming together in the smallest of small increments. By the end of this year I'd hoped to have an old 2008 album fully remastered and ready to go up, but as this site attests things have been busy as always and so there's still a bit of work to go. The LP in question - titled The Bug Chaser/The Gift Giver and originally put out as two vinyl EPs under the moniker Silverfish - is something of an oddity and pointedly darker/weirder than the stuff I've done as Struwwelpeter.
As a taster I've instead put together a little sampler EP featuring three remastered tracks from the upcoming re-release as well as two exclusive tracks, one a live recording from 2011 with the opening track Bleed My Weakness previously unreleased (it'd been lying on my HD unfinished for a while under the bizarre title 'cookingsong.rns' - I guess I was cooking when I first started writing it in my head). Here's a little announcement video I made for the new track:

The EP, titled Limp and Numb, is available to buy super-cheap on Bandcamp if you fancy treating yourself or the indie music fan in your life this holiday season. As with other releases you can stream it completely free. In fact I'll embed it below so you don't even need to leave this page. How's that for holiday spirit?

Throwbacks

Thought I'd round up a handful of old endeavours I recently gave a bit of spit'n'polish to. Sort of a #ThrowbackThursday thing. Is that still a thing? Probably not. God damn kids and their ephemera.
I'm still quite keen on the idea of re-releasing some of my old albums on Bandcamp now that I'm all nicely situated over there. The challenge is working out how far back into the past I reach before the music gets too embarrassingly awful to share with the world.
Going back to 2008, probably my most obscure music project (in that there were literally only 50 copies ever pressed) was Silverfish, a fairly moody album with some harmonious moments but horribly rushed production. With some proper love and attention I think it'd mostly hold up quite well, so I'm gradually working through the project files and fixing them up. Here's one from this week that finally has some oomph after being long-oomphless:
Flashback a further four years to 2004, here's a somewhat cheerier song I attempted during the sessions for the second Struwwelpeter LP Rapeseed but I could never get a decent end result, mainly down to some horribly out-of-tune guitar parts. Unearthing the old RNS file during a big HD cleanup this week I took a crack at it again in Reason with what I know now and it's finally listenable:
To fully appreciate how much is going into the remixing/remastering, here's a before/after clip that should make the reasons for it going unreleased for so long obvious:

I also found the source video for one of my old BA projects over a decade ago, a music video for the Rapeseed song 'On A Limb' that mainly served as an After Effects experiment combining footage of me in dress-up dancing around like a dick, interspersed with some home movies from the 20s of our place in the Laurentians that a neighbour had come across.

I've updated the Vimeo file with a new HD render, which may seem a bit redundant as it's meant to look old and shitty, so all you get is more highly-defined blurriness. It does significantly lessen the compression artifacts, as this comparison shows:

Either way, I never looked better. I'm told by the fine folks at Rumpus that this video was partially responsible for the design of Count Fulchmuckle, one of the characters I voiced in their excellent game The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle.

Yeah, I can see it

Abandoned Language

What's new, folks? How about this latest episode of the Skwigly Podcast, eh? Out today, full of goodness, from my hard drive to your awaiting earholes. Don't say I never do nothin' for ya.
I'm happy to say that, over two years in, putting these together is still quite exciting, especially with such high-caliber guests. In this episode we have Bonnie Arnold from Dreamworks, producer of the How To Train Your Dragon movies, Toy Story and, rather awesomely, The Addams Family. The good version of The Addams Family. Also from the world of Dragons we have an extended version of our chat with Dean DeBlois which featured on the last episode of Lightbox. On top of this Laura-Beth talks to Disney talents Patrick Osborne, Kristina Reed and Jeff Turley, director, producer and designer respectively of the upcoming short Feast which we managed to get a look at in Annecy.

Meanwhile, in a less traffic-heavy corner of SoundCloud, I've bunged up an old track from an obscure LP I worked on under the moniker Silverfish. I don't think I've ever brought that particular project up on here as it was slap-bang in the middle of my MA and I did a pretty crappy job on the production. The album was made up of two soundscape EPs The Bug Chaser and The Gift Giver, shmushed together. It has a mix of songs and noise pieces generally darker and less marketable than my Struwwelpeter albums and I never felt that motivated to push it, only knocking out fifty self-pressed copies to give away at shows. Listening back I reckon it actually has potential to be quite an interesting little record if I took some proper time redoing the production. This track is my first such experiment in that regard, one of the more 'song'-type songs which always been fun to sing live. I sprinkled some Reason magic over it and it makes a world of difference. Have a listen:
Just for the record, the above is as 'radio-friendly' as the album gets.
Lastly, this week is crunch-week as far as Project Group-Hug goes, so any of you out there who might wish me well (for whatever baffling-yet-appreciated reason) do keep your fingers crossed.