Hi!

We don’t have any new news this week. We are still playing at the Golden Ball on the 26th of August to continue our monthly residency.

So in lieu of no new news here are some recomendations and a recollection.

Some Recomendations

TROUTFLIES is the musical project of my York friends Reuben and Guy. They have a new single coming out this Friday called “Pugh”. I recommend listening to it when it comes out.

Small disclaimer: I play with the live version of Troutflies. Toy piano, melodica, guitar and banjolele. But I’m not on the record. So I’m recommending it here.

COUNTRY LOVE SONG #6 is a song that I am on. And in March I made a music video for it with some friends. It is a duet with Jude Brothers, an amazing singer-songwriter from Arkansas.

She was not in the country while we made the video, so she appears by projection on the wall behind me, overlaid with footage I found on Wikimedia Commons

JUDE BROTHERS is in fact releasing a new album in September. And - having heard multiple songs off it ahead of release - I reckon its gonna be pretty pretty pretty good.

There are two songs already out: “Desire and Devotion” & “Treat Me Like A Tree & Love Me For Your Crookedness” (I love a long song name) and I recommend you listen to both.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS is a great place to find open source images and videos to make digital collages with. It is also a great window into the lives of other people.

Click on someone’s username and you get a small cross-section of their interests through the medium of images. It feels chaotic and uncurated - like 2012 Instagram, but with less focus on the self and moreso on knowledge.

A Recollection

On every Monday at the Golden Ball pub in York there is an open mic. It is where I met all the musicians I now play with and is probably also the reason you are getting this newsletter at all.

On the Monday last week, it was the strangest/best open mic I’d ever been to. And bear in mind that this after going pretty much every week for the last five years.

Flash fiction, doowop guitar pedals, Troutflies, out-of-time-clapping, poetry was just a small sample of what the audience encountered. But best of all was a recollection of the Moon Landing from Jethro, including readings from a book he’d read about it.

It was a great use of the open mic format. And it got weird very quickly when an audience member tried to start a debate about the validity of the landing. I thought it was brilliant (I know you read this Jethro!) but it was also bonkers.

In fact, one of the most left-field open mic performers called it “the most left-field I’ve ever seen at this open mic“.

Well, all I can say is: more of that, more of the moon and less Wonderwall - please!

That’s it

and my 30 minutes newsletter writing time is over just like that. Until next week.

Rowan.