A Long Time Coming

The limited free-run of G. Zarapanecko’s Glitterdammerung was reasonably successful. It was free for 12 days, and got maybe 30 downloads total, plus random links on French and Finnish music blogs (though I haven’t a clue if there was anything resembling feedback about the album.) I’m hoping to do a physical tape release soon, with details forthcoming. I’ve also begun early recordings of a new, noisier G. Zarapanecko release, getting back into exploration of synth programming as well as electroacoustic processing. We’ll see where this ends up, many, many months from now, I’m sure. Now the trouble will be finding some poor, interested suckers who’ll actually pay for the digital release now…just another example of me shooting myself in the foot with promotional ideas...

I nervously sent out copies of the first An Historic demo, “My Czerny,” to zines like Razorcake and Give Me Back a while ago, hoping not to get one of those bullshit reviews where the reviewer doesn’t even spin the disc, or stops it after the first song, etc. To my surprise, not only did I not get one of those reviews, but I also received something resembling praise at points – I won’t bother trying to summarize, so here:

AN HISTORIC:
My Czerny: CD-R
This thing had “Beware! Most likely contains ambient and indiscernible home recordings!” written all over it, mostly due to the ambiguousness of the packaging and the lack of much information besides song titles. Instead what we get are some “actually pretty pleasant and tuneful home recordings,” mostly of the, uh, squeezebox/accordion variety, I believe. About half of the handful of tunes here are single-instrument pieces, while the rest feature additional instruments and overall excellent vocal work. Got no idea what it is they’re actually singing about it, but they’ve convinced me, whatever it is. Most likely not gonna make any Razorcake reader’s top ten lists, but was an atmospheric enough run on a night when the rain’s coming down and the wind’s howling around the house. –Keith Rosson (An Historic)

I’ve been busy for awhile recording new An Historic material. My plans to get something finished by an upcoming show fell through, or so it seems, but the project is around the 75% mark, which is relatively exciting. The material here is from Ephemeral Stampede, all home-recorded demos of an album I had written almost two years ago and planned to record in a real studio before everything fell apart financially. This might be the last we hear of this material, or I might some day, much later, re-record these tunes in such a way that more closely resembles my original arrangements. But for now I’m relatively satisfied with everything so far, and just two tunes and a handful of random tracks to finish up. Meanwhile I’ve just about finished writing the material for another An Historic release that will be recorded hopefully in May if all goes well – I’ve been practicing and performing most of these songs solo and I’m going to keep them closer to the solo-arrangements on the recordings, which is a different approach then I’ve taken with An Historic material in the past, mostly because the fidelity of my equipment makes solo recordings sound pretty awful.

An Historic performs April 3rd at the Unitarian Universalist society sometime between 6:30 and 8:00 for a benefit dinner for the Connecticut F.A.D.G.E Fest . (Feminism, Autonomy and Diversity of Gender Expression). April 9th is a performance at the Fucking Discovery Zone with Story, Cud East, Squinch Owl, Tyler Bussey and New Year’s Revolution – 7:00 PM and donations for touring bands. Finally, April 10th is the first Juggler’s Meadow Festival of 2010, with tons of bands and lots of other various stuff going on too – zine stores, free market, workshops, food, etc. Details on that last one TBA.

After some finagling and jumping through hoops, Passing a Penny, the song cycle based on Rob Talbot’s poetry, is definitely still on. More details to come as we approach the May 8th performance.

Finally, after a brief hibernation after our concert at the Stone, Broadcloth will be bouncing back soon. Again, details still forthcoming.