Update! We're not dead!

Sorry for the delay in posts (although I’m pretty sure no one is actually read this).  It’s been almost half a year since the last time I posted any new content here, and even now I’m struggling to think of material that I absolutely feel compelled to share.

First off, there are many reasons why I haven’t been posting.  The lack of energy and concentration I’ve been feeling was caused initially by being rather sick for a few months, however, recently it’s simply a symptom of my time being filled by other pursuits.

Another factor is that I lost interest, after barely starting, in writing reviews of new albums.  I may find the inspiration again, as I’m still listening to a lot of new music, but for now I’m going to hold off.

However, over the last six months Al, Brian, and I have been working hard on the new Common Swift album, which is shaping into a very exciting project.  We’re still going to have guitar, keys, and drums at the core of the sound, along with our dual tenor voices, and will still play around with time signatures and other structural song elements, but we’re also looking forward to having a more diverse sonic landscape with this album.

The last album, These Safe Homes and the Passing Spirit EP were written with performance in mind primarily, so we limited ourselves to the instruments we could use in a live setting.  For this album we aren’t holding ourselves to these restrictions, and have been working with brass, auxiliary percussion, synth, prepared piano, electronic beats, accordion, and recordings of found sounds including a grandfather clock.  The focus is on creating an exciting and deeply personal musical expression for an album, and we’ll figure out the live performance later.

Who knows where all of this playing will take us, but its been an exciting journey so far, and although we are a long way from it, we are really looking forward to sharing this album with the world.

Other projects that Brian and I were working on were two films by Arizona film-maker Austin Tyler Lee which have been released this spring.

The first film is “Peaks”, described as “brothers Nathan (Mat Vansen) and Alex (Ron Ferguson) struggle to keep their lives and responsibilities in focus after their mother’s suicide. Forced to live together, Nathan, an empathic painter, and Alex, a busy sales representative, find each other existing on separate worlds. Bound by blood and sorrow, their lives are intertwined, and they depend on each other in ways that neither can communicate to the other.”

Peaks was written by Austin Tyler Lee and the music was scored by Brian and myself. In the film we craft a new version of the song “Phoenix” from These Safe Homes, which is softer, slower, and more sorrowful.  We’re very pleased by the way the film’s score turned out, and once it has been loaded online by Infinity Awakened Productions we’ll let everyone know about it.

The second film that we worked on is a music video for our song “Desk to Dust” off our 2011 Passing Spirit EP.  We think it turned out really well, and we’ll put a link up to it on our YouTube page later today.

Also, kittens.