Newsletter September 2006

Every time we add something new, you'll see a linked guide to it here, with our archive of past Newsletters.

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It has been a slow summer, especially compared with our frenzy of activity a couple of months back, but that hasn’t stopped you all visiting: sessions in August are running about 20% higher. Keep on coming - we’ll have some fresh music action shortly. It’s also good to know that nearly 4000 of you have signed up to receive this Newsletter. Thanks again for your attention and patience.

One person not lazing around has been Lene Lovich, who will headline twice at New York’s Drop Dead Festival 4, at the Knitting Factory. The festival runs three days over Labor Day weekend, with performances from early evening until 4am. On Friday September 1st, she will revive the duo performance format which she has used in New York before, but with the special help of the distinguished Dorit Chrysler on theremin (an early electronic instrument whose spooky sounds are controlled by moving the hands between sets of electrodes). (As we know, Lene was never one for a conventional solution.) Then, on September 3rd, Lene appears with a full band for the first time in many years. Performance times are not fixed yet.

To help support all this, we’ve arranged a new Lene Lovich image gallery, including photos taken back around 1980 in the Lucky Number era and a whole new set from last year. Most are also available for print-quality, high resolution download. Also, we’ve added the bulk music download collection of two-minute excerpts from each track of her recent CD Shadows And Dust. One click, and down comes 19Mb of mp3 or m4a (your choice, see our comments on audio quality), which takes under 20 seconds with a typical broadband internet connection. It’s a lot more convenient than gathering tracks individually. And the two-minute (or more) length is far more than samples on other sites, so you really get to hear a solid piece of music. And more: all tracks are labeled clearly. No more having to figure out who the artist is on len443-23B.mp3 or something similar.

Observant visitors will have noticed that we have been offering a similar bulk download of the brand new Shirts CD Only The Dead Know Brooklyn. This one has 13 two-minute excerpts and is 23Mb. This month, we add bulk samples of Thorne’s The Contessa’s Party to the others. With the Contessa, you get three-minute excerpts from each of the tracks (only reasonable, since this attempt to reinvent the extended club track has eight tracks lasting a full 74 minutes of dense music). And one more: we’ve posted an extensive graphics gallery for Thorne. In his case, the photos go back to 1973, and a few are a little embarrassing in his mature years (he’s stopped playing the flute upside-down in Japan, for example). Again, photo-quality download is available for most.