Giving it Away, Until I Think Better of it

I have been living under various rocks for most of my life but recently emerged from my latest rock to see the weird harsh light of our new digital world.  I guess it first happened when my hard drive crashed and I lost all my information, including old demos, new things, and music for listening pleasure.   My turntable is broken and getting it fixed is annoying, so, for the first time, I gave illegal downloading a go.

Seems crazy and hypocritical, right?   Especially when I ask people to buy my music?   Yeah maybe.   But all this illegal downloading has exposed me to such great music, from unreleased Can to Les Paul and Mary Ford to Kraftwerk bootlegs to Gene Clark.   

It's a weird time in music.   If you just enter an album title and "rar" into google, you can download an album and be listening to it in 30 seconds.

In this digital age, it is just insanely easy to steal things, and I myself have recently seen the benefit of it.  

So I am putting all my old music up as "pay what you want" on bandcamp.  

It's kind of funny/bizarre.   Some of the old releases I did not have anymore so I had to google them and 'illegally' download them from filesharing sites.

I am still charging money for special objects... any item I produce that you can hold in your hands will be a special and unique object.   But, as far as I can tell, there is no enforceable way to make listeners pay for mp3s.   

You can download most of my back catalog here:

http://blankfritz.bandcamp.com

Blank Fritz is the name of my new band, whenever it comes together.  For the time being, I am playing alone.   Perhaps a bit premature, or perhaps a bit optimistically, I named the site Blank Fritz.   Now it is just a name sitting there, a reminder that I am playing solo and have not gotten another band together.

Sunset is taking a break, both as a concept and entity and whatever else. But I will keep using these various interfaces, cuz they took awhile to make.

"Yoga Drill Sergeant" at SXSW 2011

My SXSW 2011 showcase.

Performed to a confused crowd at The Marq

"Yoga Drill Sergeant"

Hot Pink Haze, #1

update:Started another blog, same content, but without all the spam comments and a cleaner interface. You can bookmark that one instead, if you like. If not, no matter.

http://sunsetband.tumblr.com

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Running like a madman finishing all the tasks I will never finish. I feel like rolling down a long grassy hill into a pool of beer and taking a nice long cold swim.

For this tour, I bought a pretty cool, very small digital video camera from Japan. I will be doing some video updates and such.

The first!

Touring

we are in the planning process for our next massive tour.

Please get in touch about house shows, DIY spots, radio, etc. We would love to come by, play and say "hi." We will be touring the east coast with our friends and bandmates Sleep Good, and the west coast with Jesse Woods.

The film "Echotone," which follows my curious path through the music industry, will be premiering at the Marfa Film Fest, which takes place May 5th through 8th. We will be playing the closing night party and have lots of special surprises planned, so do consider making the drive if that's a possibility for you.

in the meantime, take a look at this score by John Cage:

hey

Here is newsletter #3, in case you did not receive:

http://eepurl.com/i4qy

and check this out:

The World is Awaiting / Yr Eyes are Mirrors / Dreams of Sandy ( live )

Surreal to see this now. First incarnation of the group. You could see us learning as we go. It makes me laugh to watch how close things are to falling apart. The looks on my fellow bandmates' faces are pretty priceless. Everybody is wondering what the hell is happening.

I wonder that myself as I watch "The World is Awaiting" performed on frantic, completely overdriven Rhodes. Hard to imagine/remember my motivation for performing it that way.

Taken from the "Pink Clouds" cassette release show at Beerland, December 15, 2007.
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You can watch me talking about the TV Organ here:

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2010 coming up soon. wasn't "2010" the sequel to "2001" (speaking of films here)? Kubrick wasn't involved in the sequel. I heard it wasn't too great, but I always had a soft spot in my heart for Roy Scheider. How could it get any better than 2001 though? for the love of zoroaster, why don't people make sequels to terrible movies so that they can avoid the inevitable lame-ass sequel syndrome?

Anyhow, if next year is the sequel to 2001, let me recall what I was doing in 2001? Oh yeah. I was starting my old band Sound Team, living in Portland Oregon, recording on the 4track and scraping by. Didn't see the sun for about 5 months.
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A film crew followed me around for a few months and asked me about being on a major label and starting over as an independent artist. The film is called "Echotone." It's a play off the word "Ecotone," which Wikipedia describes as:

"from a combination of eco(logy) plus -tone, from the Greek tonos or tension – in other words, a place where ecologies are in tension."

The film deals with Austin's transitional phase right now (from mid-size to super-ultra city of the future) and the effect it's having on musicians.

The First Echotone Teaser Trailer 1280x720 HD from echotonefilm on Vimeo.