Birth day!

It's with a great pleasure mixed with some moderate anxiety that I dare to share a few recordings I made with my new partner in crime. As a longtime contributor of Stickist.com (thanks Manny for the hard work), I felt that it should be the first place to share that.

But before, a bit of storytelling...

I've played the Stick for many years, too many to count TBH. I always wrote tunes/ideas but always struggled to find a musician who could understand what I was aiming for.

At the end of the last year, I met a very young drummer in my hometown, coming straight from Germany, Nils Oswald. We played a few ideas and I immediately felt we could do something. Very quickly, we decided to record some small tunes I wrote years ago, and we arranged them together.

The recording process went very quickly and it was very DIY. We rented a small and empty rehearsal place for two days, we put 3 mikes around the drums, we set up a computer with the Stick directly into the audio interface, put headphones on, and that's it. We recorded each tune twice, and we selected the "better" one. We did near-zero mixing or mastering (but we spent quite some time doing balances and tries before).

So the pieces are very "raw", and we left quirks and mistakes here and there intentionally, and we did absolutely no overdub so the audience can hear the "sound" the band is capable of in a live situation. Hopefully, you will listen the tunes without hearing them too much, or without focalizing on them too much.

The band we now are is named [KREPYSKYL] (it's a phonetic word for french word "crepuscule", meaning "dusk" or "dawn"). A webpage is under construction and I already have a FB page and an Instagram. Feel free to get in touch with us through those medias if you feel inclined.

Hope you'll enjoy those tunes as much as we enjoyed crafting them. I think those four tunes are online on the major streaming platforms.









Feel free to comment, love, hate or just listen and forget! And sorry in advance for the next days, you will probably have to suffer some promotional posts on various social medias, as it's now the official way to let the audience know about our existence.

Bruno

Beautiful and spacious music !!!

I have a weakness for anything in odd rhythms, so Bourcarel is my natural favorite.

I comme Icare, however, scrubs the bass beautifully, as if it were Jim Lampi himself playing it. It's impressive. The FX are also beautifully integrated into this song.

The other 2 tracks also keep the level up.

For me, the best debut of 2024

As if I wasn't uncritically hooked on Stick with Stickup and had something to cling to, I think it's a bit too ascetic for the average listener. Adding a saxophone or flugerhorn would open up new spaces and make this music easier to perceive. Personaly, while listening to it in places "with my imagination ears", I heard hidden sounds played by Jan Garbarek on his soprano saxophone.

Have you considered using bandcamp?

Thank you very much for the kind words.

Speaking of odd rhythms, Boucarel is in fact a 3/4 (so not a so strange rhythm). The oddest tune may be I comme Icare, in which one long part (after the two chords intro) is in 7/4 (in Bminor then in Abminor) , but the idea was to play it in a certain or natural way so it has not the typical unstable feel (well, we tried to play it as smooth as possible).

I hear you about the ascetic aspect. Maybe we will add some player sometimes (I would love a Fender Rhodes, a trumpet or a singer), but experience tells me that the more you are in a band, the more difficult is to maintain a good atmosphere and a consensus about the artistic direction, so I'm not in a hurry And to be honest :
- I love minimalistic music : one of my musical references is the bands produced by Manfred Eicher from the ECM German label (speaking of Jan Garbarek...)
- the challenge of that project is to stay a two pieces band for a very particular reason : when I was a young Stick student, I went to my first seminar in Milan (2001 maybe?), being a real newbie. And I had been hooked by the Stick and the two pieces band concept since the moment I attended a show by Jim Lampi and a drummer. After that, Jim had been my teacher on various seminars (and I decided last month to take some lessons again with him : circle completed). That idea of being able to produce some music as a two only musicians band came from that, and this is still very dear to my heart.

Again, thanks for listening!

TBH, my bandmate did all the work on putting music online. But I'm quite sure Bandcamp isn't on the list. I'll check that point with him tomorrow, because I definitely would consider that idea, as it seems BC is the most honest platform for musicians.

I'm with you on that.

Your sparse arrangements are very much appreciated here.

I don't dislike band music per se, but I do have a strong attraction to more minimal instrumental music.

PS. I'll be adding extra links to your player entry on my list in due course (& a band entry for KREPYSKYL).

Steve Lawson & Markus Reuter had some interesting stuff to say about bandcamp in this (rather long) podcast.

Yeah, that episode is on my to-listen list, thank you for the reminder.
And thank you for adding the project on your list!

Having had another listen through I'm slightly put in mind of Bill Frisell. You may take that as a great compliment.

N.B. I'm not saying it's at all derivative (for all I know you've never even heard of him?), just that your pieces conjour up a similar feel & reaction for me.

Yes, indeed, I listened to Bill Frisell a lot years ago He's a master at what he's doing, and his use of effects had a great impact on me.
On a side note, I discovered a few years ago another guitar player very close in style, Jakob Bro. I love his works.