April Shmapril

It's with some sadness that I have to announce my book Independent Animation: Developing, Producing and Distributing Your Animated Films will, as of this month, no longer be in print. Ah well, we had a good run and it was nice to be a *sniff* sort of real author for a while.

APRIL FOOL'S. Ah, we have fun. I'm delightful.

It won't be in print because a brand-new, updated second edition will be coming out on April 11th. 

In essence this is the same book at its heart but it was a welcome opportunity to condense elements of it and keep it more up-to-date, as well as adding in a bunch of brand-new case studies and expanding on certain areas that have become more invaluable to indie artists in recent years, such as navigating the festival landscape and getting films out in the world and seen by the right people. As with the first edition, it is loaded with exclusive insight into the working processes of some of the industry’s most noteworthy indie animation talents, including Signe Baumane, Adam Elliot, Don Hertzfeldt, Kirsten Lepore, Robert Morgan, David OReilly, PES, Bill Plympton, Rosto, Chris Shepherd and dozens more; not to mention curational perspectives from the folks behind Ottawa International Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb, Manchester Animation Festival, Cardiff Animation Festival, London International Animation Festival, . It also boasts a new cover model courtesy of the incredible stop-motion talent Joseph Wallace, whose pictured film Salvation Has No Name is smashing it at the moment (be sure to catch it at Annecy if you've not seen it yet). It's a little sad to bid farewell to the original Ernie Biscuit cover, but rest assured the areas of the book that cover Adam Elliot's work have remained untouched.

You can preorder now - and if you buy it directly from the publisher you get free shipping to boot. PLUS if you buy it at any point throughout April you get a freakin' massive 20% discount. We spoil ya, so we do.

It'd be nice to get a new film of my own off the ground at some point in the near (or at least not horribly distant) future. In the meantime I'm still riding the magnificent Laura-Beth's coattails all across the magical land of Wales with Crafty Witch's CAF on Tour inclusion. Next stop will be the Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea, Monday 24th April at 7:30pm.

Circling back to the subject of shilling my wares, the extraordinarily short run of the My Head is Too Small for My Body physical CD editions is nearly depleted; there are just four copies left so if you don't want to miss out (just imagine the unbearable, wide-reaching shame) be sure to hit me up on Instagram or Facebook and we'll sort you out.

That's enough now. That's enough.

February Shmebruary

In spite of myself, I've put out an EXTREMELY limited (because I'm delusional but not that delusional) CD run of my latest album My Head is Too Small for my Body. Pop me a message on Insta or Facebook if you want to grab one up, if for no other reason than to have something shiny to put your mug of tea on. Or even better, waggle it about when your mates come over and bond over what the fuck that Ben Mitchell thinks he's doing.

A mere £5.50 incl. postage (UK only soz) and boasting a chunky SEVEN bonus tracks #phwoar

Of course if you don't fancy the clutter and like your music all digital-like, you can check it out on a variety of streaming platforms. I'm not up to much else outside of work these days, so here’s some more podcasts for ya:

After a bit of a hiatus I've resumed my Independent Animation companion podcast series, starting with  a chat with indie filmmaker Sean Buckelew about his incredible film Drone, which some of you may have caught at my Manchester Animation Festival screening back in November. If you didn't come then, firstly, you're dead to me, but the good news is you can now watch it in full online. Hopefully that'll bring you some comfort in death.

There's also a new Animation One-To-Ones where I meet Hair Love co-director Everett Downing Jr. and Patrick Harpin to discuss their new family animated Netflix series My Dad the Bounty Hunter. They're nice guys, so go check it out and cheer yourself up, for chrissakes. 

Heads-up for next month, Cardiff Animation Festival On Tour featuring Laura-Beth's Crafty Witch has another stop coming up at Brynmawr's Market Hall Cinema, 11am Saturday 18th March. Pop it in your diaries, you lovely Brynmawr-ians.

A'ight, I'm done. Go in peace.

I've never looked better

I'd originally planned to release my new album My Head Is Too Small for My Body on the 19th, but as that's proved to be an unexpectedly contentious date I've rescheduled it...to right now. Surprise!

While I've been popping out a fair few EPs in the interim, this is the first full-length record of mine since The Birdcage in 2015. Part lockdown project, part therapy exercise, this one's a bit more thoughtful lyrically than my albums have been in the past and I got a lot of demons out of my system with it. I also got some help from brilliant musicians Ed Richardson, Phil Brookes and Leanne Brookes to make it sound extra swish.  

It's available on Bandcamp now for a mere bag of shells (and you can try before you buy), but if you just can't bear to part with your cash then it'll be rolled out on various streaming platforms over the next few weeks.

I actually snuck out one final EP for this one last week, featuring the unnecessarily rude On The Air plus two non-album tracks Burnout and Revolución that didn't quite make the final cut. Again that's on Bandcamp as well as various streamers plus I cobbled together a disconcerting little lyric video for it:

Not-so-pale September

A clump of pleasant news to kick the month off with. Firstly I'll be speaking with one of my heroes Joanna Quinn at the Linoleum Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival in a couple weeks. Be sure to pencil this one in as we'll be speaking candidly about all manner of subjects, from navigating the emotional pitfalls that come with industry success to dealing with imposter syndrome, burnout, staying motivated when life gets in the way and the pressures the younger generation face in the current social media climate. Plus you'll be able to ask her questions of your own which is worth the price of admission alone (especially as it's free).

The lecture will be held within the I'M FINE! project and is supported by the British Council Ukraine under the UK/Ukraine Season of Culture and Projector Library. It will take place September 8th 6pm CEST (4pm UK time) and is available internationally, just be sure to register in advance.

On a related note, the second of our I'M FINE! podcast minisodes produced in association with Linoleum has gone up over on Skwigly. This episode features insights from Catherine Lepage (The Great Malaise), Julia Skala (Sommeregen) and Johnny Kelly (Procrastination). Give it a stream or a download, whatever works for you.

Lastly, in anticipation of the impending new album my most recent Struwwelpeter EP Piggy (originally a Bandcamp exclusive put out on Inauguration Day 2021) has had an expanded release on most major streaming platforms including Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music.

Be a pal and give 'er a listen 'cause my stats are a shambles at the moment and I need the boost.

Piggy, where'd it all go wrong?

Happy inauguration day folks!

Man alive, we actually made it to this point. To mark the occasion here's a completely unrelated new song I wrote about a certain Piggy that outstayed its welcome. The last Struwwelpeter EP in anticipation of the nearly-done new album My Head Is Too Small For My Body is available from today via Bandcamp (stream below) featuring the exclusive extra track Mysterious Bruises with guest vocals by Laura-Beth as well as an alternate acoustic mix of the title track.

Gracias to Hannah Stevens of Weird Eye Collective for the painterly assistance with the EP cover art.

Don't it all spin by quick

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I realised, thanks to the cruel joys of social media and their respective 'On This Day' thingies, that today marks the ten-year anniversary of my fourth Struwwelpeter LP The Book Of Women. After the soaring (scraped quadruple digits, phwoar) sales of the not-as-good previous LP Agnosticaust in a post-MySpace world this one quietly came out digitally (with a physical release the following week) to a more tepid response. My G5 had crashed two weeks beforehand so I'd lost a bunch of the masters as well as virtually all the assets for a couple of animated music videos that would have gone with it and ended up cobbling the released album together from a mix of partially-recovered files, earlier demo versions and a couple tracks hurriedly remixed from scratch. Even still it was a fun one to piece together and had some great guest musicians. 

History has repeated itself with my iMac shitting its stupid iMaccy britches earlier this year so my plan to have released a new LP by now hasn't happened, but the EPs have been going down OK (once the stats are aggregated, at least). At any rate if you've yet to give The Book of Women a whirl it's available Bandcamp, Spotify (below), iTunes, Apple Music, Google Play, Amazon, Tidal and Deezer. 

Fun fact: while this album didn't set the world alight, the main single Set You Free did get played on BBC Introducing back in the day - although the hosts kind of took a dump on it, which seemed slightly at odds with picking it in the first place. Comme ci, comme ça.

Another little'un

New music for your Monday!

Hell For Leather, my latest EP in anticipation of the still-cooking Struwwelpeter album My Head Is Too Small For My Body, is up now on a bunch of platforms to stream/purchase. As well as an instrumental version of the title track it also features alternate non-LP versions of Act Right (which originally appeared on my 2015 LP The Birdcage) and the previously-unreleased Worst of You, which will be a bit longer and ruder on the album proper when it comes out.

Depending on where your loyalties lie you can check it out on Spotify (below), Bandcamp, Google Play, Apple Music, Amazon and Deezer, with more to come.

What? 'Spalpeen' is definitely a word.

Happy Monday, youngfolk!

This year's edition of the magnificent Encounters Film Festival has announced its Official Selection, which I'm excited to say includes my latest film Speed as well as Laura-Beth's The Gift among what looks like an absolutely stellar line-up. For those of you paying attention - yes, I was on the preselection team for the festival again and no, I didn't get to preselect the films I worked on. But I would have in a goddamn heartbeat because I'm a lovably unscrupulous spalpeen and, frankly, they're delightful.

Other personal highlights include some films/filmmakers recently covered on Skwigly, such as Michaela Mihályi and David Štumpf's SH_T HAPPENS, Theodore Ushev's The Physics of Sorrow, Andreas Hykade's Altötting and Robin Shaw's The Tiger Who Came To Tea. 

Of course this will be a digital edition and you can find out more info as it comes via the festival website in the coming weeks.

That reminds me, following up on my earlier post regarding Speed's inclusion as part of Fest Anča's Extremely Short Selection of Extremely Short Films - it looks like that one is indeed going ahead as a physical edition. Obviously they have precautions set up but it'll be an indoor screening, so if you swing by then be sure to be safe and, y'know, make sure you don't hug your nan for a while. At any rate it'll be this Friday 11pm at the Stanica Žilina-Záriečie in the EKSEKF 2 programme.

Back to Skwiglyville, we've wrapped up our second batch of Skwigly Film Club episodes, so if you're not yet caught up then head over to the site to catch our recent watch-throughs of George Dunning's Yellow Submarine and Jonathan Myerson's The Canterbury Tales. Also if you want to weigh in on what we look at next then be sure to keep an eye on our Twitter and cast your votes during the playoffs.

If you fancy something else to listen to then you can siphon a previously-unreleased upload I dusted off over the weekend into your trembling little earholes. This is an alternate, non-explicit edit of the opening track to my 2015 LP The Birdcage plucked from a pile of prospective b-sides for the next EP that will hopefully be going up soon. It was quite a long time ago that I put this one together so I don't remember much about making it other than having some fun with the funky-worm synth during the bridge. Anyways, here it is:

Struwwelpeter · Act Right (Clean Edit)

Weren't that purtey? Right, now scram, ya ingrates.

Listenables

Guess who liked "Weird Al" album covers growing up...

It's been a minute or two since the last one but today sees the release of the second single from the upcoming sixth Struwwelpeter album My Head Is Too Small For My Body. The album's still a ways from being cooked but it's taking shape and unlike any records I've produced it's actually turning out to be quite thematically consistent. In the meantime this song is called Progressive and it draws on an affection for alternative synth-pop I developed during my time on Trampires. It also lyrically felt like a prescient choice given the recent convergence of cancel culture and societal uprising that kicked off a couple weeks back. To that end, if bought/streamed from Google Play, Apple Music, Spotify or Amazon then 100% of any sales revenue will be going directly to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Color of Change (so 50% each), two organisations doing particularly important work amidst all of this uproar. For those of you on Bandcamp they will similarly be donating revenue to NAACPLDF if you buy on the 19th of the month moving forward.
The EP also features an exclusive remix of the song as well as a re-recorded acoustic version of an old track Staying In, a song about...well, staying in. Although the original version was less about social responsibility and more about being anxious and lazy it felt like a fitting topic either way.

If you're after some more lockdown listenin' then there a bunch more episodes of our Skwigly Film Club series in which we watch and discuss animated features. We'll be resuming the podcast from next week for another batch if you want to get involved but in the meantime you can listen back to our watch-throughs of The Iron Giant (Brad Bird), Corpse Bride (Mike Johnson/Tim Burton), South Park (Trey Parker) and The BFG (Brian Cosgrove).

Montage!

In these final months of its festival eligibility there are two events left on my wishlist that I'm waiting on before I start thinking about an online release for Sunscapades. One of them - the fantastic Anima Brussels Animation Film Festival - has just announced their official selection and I'm very happy to see they picked it for their Animated Nights category. Especially humbling to see it in such good company, alongside some brilliant new work by Erin Kim, Laura Jayne Hodkin, Fokion Xenos and Mirai Mizue among others. Don't have the specifics just yet but the festival runs from February 21st to March 1st; fingers crossed I'll be able to head over to this one in person.

Some non-film news is that I've just put out the first single from my upcoming sixth Struwwelpeter album My Head Is Too Small For My Body that I'll hopefully have done by mid-2020. This one features special guest guitars by my old chum Ed Richardson and is a Spotify exclusive so it can't be bought or streamed elsewhere, at least for the time being. Give 'er a whirl:

I'd always suspected there was a delightfully corny action movie montage song in me somewhere and I imagine that working on Chuck Steel a couple years' back knocked it loose. For the b-side I even did a special "80s Movie Montage" remix for it to amp up the cheese.

After taking a brief break from being on sale after Black Friday, my book Independent Animation: Developing, Producing and Distributing Your Animated Films is once again, yep, on sale! From now through to the new year you can get it at 20% off if you order direct from CRC Press, and if you act fast you may even get it in time for the holidays. This is another publisher-wide sale so it applies to their other books - and if you get two or more of then it's a meaty 25% off! Plus free shipping, of course. What are you actually waiting for?

"Rabbits? Where? Ooh, wow!"

Following last week's streaming preview the remastered reissue of my 2006 Struwwelpeter album Agnosticaust is now available to buy. You can get your hands on it (not literally, digital only releases from here on out) pretty much everywhere that sells music but I'm inclined to point you in the direction of Bandcamp as that version features an extra five bonus songs. You can check out the whole album before you buy below:

The extra cuts are Tom Waits For No One (hidden track on the original CD release), the video remix of Let Slip, a remastered version of the original album mix of TGI Nancy Friday and two previously unreleased live performances of The Rachel Capers and Laughing At A Wall. I spoils ya!

Catapulting ourselves into the present day, in the 93rd episode of the Skwigly Animation Podcast I catch up with Lauren Orme, Festival Director of the Cardiff Animation Festival, founder of Cardiff Animation Nights and co-founder/Creative Director at Picl Animation. Lauren has also recently finished her short film Creepy Pasta Salad with Winding Snake Productions that screens next week at Bristol’s Encounters festival in the competition programme Herstory on Thursday September 26th at noon.
I also speak with David Hutchinson of Wildbrain to discuss navigating the often-overwhelming world of online animation having recently created the YouTube series Boy and Dragon.
Finally Steve chats with Connor Heaney and John Walsh of The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation to discuss the various upcoming Harryhausen 100 events in honour of Ray Harryhausen’s centenary and John’s book Harryhausen: The Lost Movies. Ray also makes a special cameo appearance from beyond the grave, which is sort of fitting when you consider his body of work. As always you can give it a stream (below) or download for keepsies.

I like pink

Original phonograph cylinder release

Some good news in that this month sees me finally ticking off a big ol' ticklist item. What with physical media being pretty much utterly redundant when it comes to independent music distribution, I'd wanted to migrate my back catalogue of albums to the platforms I've been using more recently. The slight issue being that everything prior to 2010 was mixed and mastered pretty abysmally and it's been hard to justify putting too much time toward sprucing up old music that was never that big of a deal to begin with.  So getting them all remastered and freely available on today's newfangled streaming platforms will be an ongoing, protracted endeavour - but one that's finally underway.

A week today will see the rerelease of my 2006 Struwwelpeter album Agnosticaust. This has been out-of-print for over five years since the CD sales dwindled to non-existence but back in the very brief days of MySpace convincing its youthful patrons to arbitrarily buy anything with the word 'indie' in its metadata this album did pretty well, relatively-speaking. It's a bit of a shame that I subsequently made two far better albums (The Book of Women and The Birdcage) that never quite found a similar wave to ride, sales-wise, but revisiting this record having not heard it in a very long time I was relieved to find it didn't make me puke blood with embarrassment. That being said, it took a lot of time to get it remixed to a listenable standard alongside the newer records. I won't bore you with a track-by-track breakdown; basically it's a bit louder, a bit fuller and some of the multitracking on the vocals has been redone from scratch as they were a rushed mess at times.
It will be available to buy from Bandcamp and various other outlets on the 20th but in the meantime you can already stream it on a variety of platforms including Spotify:

Despite the revamp it's still a pretty warts-and-all, no-budget affair with some ludicrously corny moments (inexplicable white-boi rap moments? Check!) but there's hopefully some stuff in there to enjoy. Mainly I'm glad it's back out in the world for the fond memories of a time when I could just spend my days just slapping a record together with my mates.
Well, my mates and that one bag of shit who stole my rare Dillinger Escape Plan EP for drug money, but hey - water, bridge etc. Needless to say I'm glad my social circle these days is mostly people who make cartoons and drink tea.

Available time to design the cover was clearly limited

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!
Canadian Mother's Day, that is (before all you non-Canucks panic). Instead of a reissue this month I've decided to put together a new EP collection in loving tribute to the most Canadian Mother I have. Just think, if she hadn't birthed me you wouldn't get to enjoy any of my at-times-moderately-well-received creative endeavours. No zombie duck film, no cartoon witterings, no poorly-rendered nudity - frankly it wouldn't be worth getting up in the morning. So raise a glass to mum and, y'know, to me as well (obviously). From both of us: You're welcome.
These are the six songs out of the 100+ I've written over the years that she likes, or at the very least doesn't find objectionable; a full LP's worth would've proved far trickier to pull off. As one might imagine, this is me at my most pop-ey and accessible so is probably a little easier on the ears than the other records of mine I've been putting up lately. So give 'er a free stream below (and for you non-Bandcampers it's available for a mere bag of shells over on Amazon):

Old Chestnuts

Happy Monday all!
A few oldies that I worked on have recently resurfaced. Firstly the latest of my old discography to finally make its way to Spotify, iTunes et al is the 2010 EP Digital Stimulation.

This one originally came out in the run up to the LP The Book of Women that would be released at the end of the same year and features six exclusive alternate mixes/edits of songs from that album as well as its 2006 predecessor Agnosticaust (which will hopefully get itself a full reissue soon). Check 'er out:

On the animation side of things I saw that a collection of highlights from Jonti Picking (aka Weebl) and Sarah Darling's webseries Wobble Box went up over the weekend, with a couple of the segments I animated thrown in. So that's something to keep your company on your lunch break:

More good news is that Rumpus Animation's first step into the world of video game adventuring The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle - for which I provided the voices of That Guy Who Sounds Like Ben Mitchell and That Other Guy Who Sounds Like Ben Mitchell But A Bit Nasally among others - will be getting itself a Japanese release on the Nintendo Switch on March 29th, so fingers crossed for a wider release in the not-too-distant. You can learn more about this version here and there's a slightly more Nintendo-ey version of the trailer you can watch below:

Ben and Women

Continuing the migration of my musical back catalogue to some of these modern distribution channels - what with me being so hip and down with the youth and all - February's re-release is my 2010 album The Book of Women.
This one was originally put out when my attentions were mostly focused on The Naughty List and, in a limbo between the eras of MySpace and Bandcamp, didn't really get much momentum compared to the albums that came before and after. It was a lot of fun to do, however, and has a lot of great musician pals of mine guesting on it, not to mention fond memories associated with it. So if you're in the mood check 'er out for free on Spotify (you can stream below) or grab it for keepsies on iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon, Bandcamp or even on compact disc if you like your unfashionably retro music formats. The CD has the added bonus of featuring a photo of me on the back looking like a bell-end if that's an incentive at all.

If you have 48 minutes to kill

Happy new year, ya filthy animals.
Alongside the usual animationey chunks I'll be expectorating into the world over the coming months I'm keen to have 2018 be a year for some new - or, at the very least, unheard - music of mine. Rather than get ahead of myself and outline what I have planned - because whenever I do that on here it pretty much guarantees it won't pan out (remember when Sunscapades was supposedly going to be done by last May?) - I'm first going to tackle the long-overdue expanded digital release of some old albums.
Kicking things off I'm happy to say the fifth Struwwelpeter album The Birdcage, originally released May 2015, is now available on a wider variety of platforms as of today. These include iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon and Spotify among others. You can give the Spotify version a whirl below - it's free, fun and the health risks are slim:

Hopefully some of the other Struwwelpeter albums will see the light of the day as well, which would be nice as a lot of them have been OOP for a fair few years now. I'll play it by ear. In the meantime the original digital release is still available on Bandcamp and, for you old-fogeys, compact disc. Whatever's your pleasure.

Hell god baby damn no

So funny story.
Back when I was in uni, when I wasn't recording nightmarishly cringey songs I was recording actual nightmares.
I didn't say it was a 'funny ha-ha' story.
At any rate, I was in full-on thrall to the oeuvre of one Mr. David Lynch, as I think is somewhat obligatory to a certain percentage of all creative arts students, and that naturally bled into my own work in the midst of my fumblings at some sort of individual artistic direction.
Now the return of Twin Peaks is imminent and in celebration I've reached back 15 odd years and pulled out some aural horror for you all to enjoy. Presenting for a limited time: Lodge Coffee!

The tracks featured on this release originally appeared as bridging soundscapes between the main album tracks on the presently-out-of-print first Struwwelpeter LP You're All So Precious, recorded and released in 2003. They were created using a variety of digital and analogue techniques as a tribute to the sound design and composition work of such talents as Alan Splet, Angelo Badalamenti and Lynch himself, taking particular inspiration from the soundtracks to Eraserhead and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Sleep well!

Idle Distraction

For no particular reason here's one of a handful of covers I put together during the period I was writing and recording The Birdcage a couple years back:
Usually for each album I end up doing a bunch of covers either to teach myself some previously unexplored process in Reason or just for the gits and shiggles of it all. Then I tend to just kind of forget about them.
While I've covered Faith No More in my live shows a bunch I don't usually have the audacity to make any studio recordings of their work but this is one that sort of weirdly fit into the universe of The Birdcage, arrangements-wise. Plus with each passing year my life resembles that of its lyrical protagonist more and more.
As the wry sampling near the end suggests one the many reasons I'm fond of this particular tune is that it always put li'l me in mind of the underwater levels in Super Mario Bros. I think if I ever go on The Voice this will be my audition song.
Apparently when Faith No More were making Angel Dust the working title for this song was 'Macaroni and Cheese'.
Eeeyup.
You can tell I'm procrastinating, can't you?
Well...back to work I guess.

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

Birdsong

Earlier this year I released my latest album The Birdcage digitally, bucking a long-established tradition (2009 - 2010 - 2012 - 2013) of releasing my projects right before the holidays so as to probably be too late to arrive on time, marketing genius though I am.
Now that the seemingly unconquerable mountain that is Project Group-Hug has been conquered (for now) I've had a snatch of time to finally release it on CD for you traditionalists out there. CDs were these shiny round discy-wotsits from the long, long ago. Ask your parents.
So for those of you who fancy your indie music with an extra retro vibe, pick up the fifth Struwwelpeter album The Birdcage at Amazon today! It comes with fancy-shmancy new artwork, lyrics booklet and a bonus hidden track to boot. Well, it isn't that hidden now.

The extra song is in fact one of the first songs I ever wrote, way back in 1997. My balls were in mid-drop at the time and so it's only ever existed as a warbly, adolescent whine recorded on cassette (don't even bother asking your parents, I'm not sure I even remember what those were all about) until I re-recorded it during The Birdcage sessions as an experiment to see if it held up. And did it? Well...sorta kinda not really but sorta kinda. It certainly wasn't album-worthy but it's a fairly innocuous, mellow tune with some nice moments so what the hey, I've snuck it in there. Of course the album is still available to buy as a digital download via Bandcamp, and you can preview the whole ordeal below:

The perfect gift for the hipster in your life who insist they only listen to the most obscure and indie music; this'll learn that smug bugger good!