Chaospiral Studios

So I’ve been having this idea about a new Winter Trees Stand Naked project called “Music for nightmares”… It would be something like an ongoing album for which I’d release each individual track as soon as it was finished. It could take me six months to come up with a 30 second snippet or 2 months to produce 3 fully fleshed out tracks, for example, but there would always be something in the works. A brilliant idea, or an excuse for procrastination? Hm!

Also, the album is now available at Last.fm too, for those of you who use this service. It’s not so convenient since you have to download the tracks one by one instead of having the option to grab the album as a single file like in Bandcamp, but I wanted the songs to be streamable through their radio service and Last.fm’s profile page is nicer too, so there it is!

http://www.last.fm/music/Winter+Trees+Stand+Naked/…+and+hear+one+bird+sing+terribly+afar

http://www.last.fm/music/Winter+Trees+Stand+Naked

Aw, great, forgot to post about the new album here.

Oh well, happy belated Winter Solstice and merry Christmas or whatever it is you feel like celebrating.

Click to stream and/or download “… and hear one bird sing terribly afar”, by Winter Trees Stand Naked: http://wintertreesstandnaked.bandcamp.com/album/and-hear-one-bird-sing-terribly-afar

The release date for “… and hear one bird sing terribly afar” is nigh! Mastering will take place this weekend and the album will be available for download on the 22nd of December, as announced. In the meantime, here’s a surprise treat for y’all: the official video for “Room Two”. Enjoy!

Winter Trees Stand Naked – Room Two on Vimeo.

There’s less than three months to go, but we’re slowly getting there. Most tracks are finished by now, some are still missing a couple of arrangements and I haven’t got any lyrics yet for two of them, but overall it’s looking good. AND I have a full tracklist at last. Behold!

Winter Trees Stand Naked – “…and hear one bird sing terribly afar” (2011)

A: Music for short attention spans

01- Room one
02- King of the river
03- Smoke rings
04- in time not far away
05- Postcards from the sea
06- Petite valse parisienne
07- Room two
08- Curtains
09- Boris takes a walk
10- Clockwork ensemble
11- Nocturne
12- Room three
13- A second lesson in darkness
14- My own special place
15- Blind curve
16- Thaw
17- Close your eyes

B: Music to stare out of windows to

18- Music to stare out of windows to

I also mentioned on Facebook that there would be a preview of the album sometime in Autumn. I was going to choose a couple of tracks for an early teaser, but actually, it would be kind of cool to have you choose the two tracks you’d most like to listen to based only on the titles. So if you’re particularly curious about any of them, let me know and, as long as it’s finished and ready for public exposure, I’ll give it a vote.

William Burroughs by Brian Duffy, 1960

“… one extraordinary day in 1979, an over-stressed Duffy decided to bring his career to a sudden end. In an act of self-destruction which passed into photographic legend, he asked his studio staff to leave and then began burning piles of his negatives in the garden. He only stopped when a local council official intervened, following neighbours’ complaints about the clouds of acrid, black smoke his bonfire was generating.”

(Of course, these kinds of acts only “pass into photographic legend” if you’re already a legend to begin with, so don’t try this with your collection of Holga snapshots and Polaroids, kids. Wait, come to think of it, please do. And be sure you don’t leave anything behind.)

Welcome to the new Chaospiral Studios! Running entirely on WordPress using the fantastic and very customizable “Weaver” theme, it’s more streamlined, easier on the eye and, more importantly for me, much easier to update and maintain than ever. Hope you like it and please let me know if you find any broken links or missing images or if anything doesn’t work properly.

Sineo Cavek, fin de siècle thinker and the last true living dandy. Styling by Viveka Goyanes.

Berlin, 30.10.10

Click for larger view

You might remember that some years ago I recorded a drunken-kinda-blues-folk demo under the Frater Chaovsky and the God-Fearing Mongrels moniker for the RPM Challenge, which wasn’t supposed to go anywhere but actually ended up having quite a good (and unexpected) response. I did it just for fun and because I wanted to go back to playing real instruments after so many years of making dark creepy stuff, but I never planned for it to turn into a proper project.

Well, never say never.

Some months ago I started recording more material in that vein and mixing it with looped beats and samples, trying to blend the hip-hop influences I developed in Winter Trees Stand Naked with a more organic, folky-blues-gravely approach. I sent the first track that came out of that to my good friend Marco Fernández, for whose band I played guitar and banjo for some time, as I thought his voice would suit the song perfectly, and suit it it did! So well, in fact, that we’ve decided to go on with this project together and see what we can make out of it.

That first track, “Visitation”, can be streamed and downloaded at Last.fm for the moment, while we set up something more decent and start working on more stuff. I can’t tell how long it will take us to come up with new material, as this has been a very sudden decision on our part, but things are looking good for the moment. So keep your fingers crossed, show your support if you like it and spread the word…