New album in the works

For two years, now, I have been working on a new album. It will be called ‘In Perfect Blooms Of Color’ and I will release it sometime during the second half of 2010.

Until recently progress has been slow, but ever since I moved to New York in August, I’ve been making a lot more progress.

Much of the songwriting and early demoing took shape in 2008, but planning and rehearsing the US tour took up a lot of time and energy. Then in early 2009, right before leaving New Zealand to go on a 9-week tour of America with Evan, I decided to team up with my long-term mate, Rob, to record guitars, trombones, french horns, and accordions, as well as some stray percussion.

Unfortunately, due to the long tour and wind-down phase thereafter, I found myself without the requisite energy to tackle the recordings Rob and I had made earlier in the year. Several hundred brass and guitar takes were filling up my hard drives, and, after lying dormant for so long, it wasn’t always clear to me, how some of these recordings even fit together any longer. In short, the state of the album was a royal mess.

My saving grace was New York. In August of last year, I moved to Brooklyn with my best friend, Mary, and inspiration hit soon after. There’s a lot of energy in this town, a lot of young adults are working on amazing music and art. My internship, too, helped kick my musical ambitions back into high gear.

Ever since August of 2009, I have made a concerted effort to spend at least a few hours each day on the album. I don’t always manage, but I’m never too far off the mark, either. I have 10 songs that, aside from vocals and minor tweaking are now totally ready to mixed, with 4-5 more songs that need a bit more attention, perhaps.

You might be interested to know that the album will be roughly 12 songs long, yet ought to clock in under an hour.

‘In Perfect Blooms Of Color’ will contain no instrumental songs and only very few guitars. Instead you can expect a lot of electronic beats, synths, and vocals, as well as lush orchestral arrangements with violins, violas, cellos, double basses, french horn, trombone, tuba, oboe, bassoon, bass clarinet, piano, and lots and lots of orchestral percussion, including field drums, woodblocks, triangles, large bass drums, and even the odd rainstick.

So yeah, it’s going to be a big departure. I’ll be tell you more about it shortly.

A quick stroll around my neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Happy thanksgiving! Name your own price for A Maze and Amazement

Happy thanksgiving everyone. Just wanted to let all of you know that from today through to Monday morning, you can get yourself a copy of A Maze and Amazement for whatever you like. No minimum. Get it for free, or choose to pay something for it. Zero pressure. But do hurry up, this deal is only good for the weekend!

I’m making a new record and this inspired me today

I was reading a recently published interview with Steve Albini this morning before work. Steve’s pretty much a legend in the indie community. He’s recorded over 2000 records, including albums by Nirvana and the Pixies, and has been running his own studio, Electrical Audio, in Chicago, for ages now. A good friend of mine and former bandmate, Andrew, actually interned for him for years during college, and so I briefly met Steve a few times when Andrew and I would go into Electrical to record stuff when the studio stood empty.

Anyhow, this excerpt just made me feel an epic sensation of joy:

“As an engineer, the only people I’m concerned about are the other people in the room, the band members. I mean literally everyone else in the world can go fuck themselves.

I honestly don’t care at all what some abstract listening audience would say about listening to a record. They’re not in the band. They’re not there helping us make the record right now.

Occasionally someone in a band, when they are in quandary about what to do, they’ll say “what will people think when they hear this?” My response is generally, “fuck ‘em.” They’re not here right now. If they mattered if they really cared they would be here helping us make the record. If you guess what those people would say, you are going to be wrong because there is no unified opinion in the outside world.

You can only satisfy yourself in the studio and I am also of the opinion that decent records are made with almost total disregard to the listening audience. My favorite records are records that were utterly unique statements and that were the product of some kind of mania. That doesn’t happen by committee or test marketing or focus groups.

You distill the idea behind what you are trying to do down to an action and then you do that action. That’s the only way to go about it.”

- Steve Albini

New Misfit Mod video

Check out the new music video two good friends of mine created. Sarah (aka Misfit Mod) wrote the music, and Dan directed the video:

Misfit Mod – Sugar C from eep! productions on Vimeo.

Enright House / Pushmi-Pullyu Split EP: now available as a free download

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve recouped the costs for pressing the EP (yay!), and that we’ve sold out of almost all of our copies – thank you all. Consequently, we’ve all decided it’s now time to set these songs free!

So yeah, please help spread the word via twitter, email, facebook, and all that other good stuff.

And to all those who have been wanting to get ahold of a CD for themselves or their friends, please note that mam!records is now down to its last 10 copies of the limited-edition EP, so make sure you visit the mam!records shop now to secure yourself a copy before it’s too late.

A public service announcement

So I’ve been hiding a bit, due to some major fluctuations in life planning and general existential conundrums. The Enright House will, of course, continue in the years to come, but it’s quite likely that I will be doing things a bit differently in the future – including the actual music. I can’t go into details yet, but the reason I haven’t been updating, is that I wanted some time to think things through on my own, whilst keeping distractions to a minimum.

What I can say, is that I won’t be touring Europe this year, after all. Instead, I will be moving to New York until early next year, and then – most likely – I will move to Berlin to set up a more permanent base for my music. For those of you in Europe, who had been looking forward to hearing me in concert this fall, please be patient with me for a little while longer. Once in Berlin, I will be in a much better position to tour on a more regular basis.

To all those that have written to me: my sincerest apologies for being so slow to write back – I promise you’ll hear from me soon.

Lastly, please be patient with this website over the next week, I’ll be re-coding some of the site, updating wordpress, installing new plug-ins, and implementing a more professional merch shop that will make it easier for you to get a hold of CDs, vinyl, shirts, and downloads.

US Tour: Dunes – Portland, OR (April 20th, Day 19)

The Dunes in Portland

I had been looking forward to Portland for quite some time now. Everyone I met, who had spent time there, seemed to adore it. It’s liberal, quite pretty, has a great music scene, it’s mellow and bohemian, and yet still metropolitan. When I started booking the tour back in November of last year, I was having a tough time, though, getting anything at all booked. I must have sent out 25 emails and all I got back was deafening silence. You can imagine, then, how stoked I was when my friend Andy from Actors&Actresses suggested I get in touch with a good friend of his, who worked at a cool little club in Portland, called the Dunes.

I got in touch with her, she liked our music, and so we booked the date. Or so we thought…

(Read the rest of this story…)

US Tour: Olympia, WA (April 15th-18th, Day 14-18)

We arrived in Olympia on Wednesday evening, just in time to play a house show at the Finger Complex. Our host, Colleen, from Polka Dot Dot Dot, had added us very last-minute to the bill, and so Evan and I had no idea what to expect.

(Read the rest of this story…)

US Tour: Nebraska to Washington (April 12th-15, Day 10-13)

After playing in Columbus, Nebraska, Evan and I had a few days to press all the way to the West Coast. It was going to be a ferocious drive, for sure, but we had kept just enough time aside to take in the famous Yellowstone National Park. A pity, then, that once we got within a few hundred miles, that we found out that almost all of the park was still closed, due to snow. Of the many entrances to the park, only one was open, and after talking to a few locals, we decided it wasn’t going to be worth going at all. Aside from the fact that only a small portion of Yellowstone was open at all, the weather was so rainy and foggy, that we wouldn’t have been able to see much of anything, even had we tried.

(Read the rest of this story…)

Flickr slideshow: Indiana

Evan and I had a few days of rehearsals in Indiana right before and after SXSW. Needless to say, Indiana isn’t much of a happening place, culturally, so we just decided to kick it Indiana-style. You know… just boys being boys, really. A bit of quad-biking, outdoor shops, shooting guns (45’s), going to batting cages. Taking in local flavor, so to speak :). You can view the whole set here on my Flickr page or just click and expand the above slideshow.

US Tour: Micek’s – Columbus, NE (April 11th, Day 9)

Micek’s Shangrila

When we arrived in Columbus, Nebraska, I was already worried. But when we walked into the bar we were meant to play that night, I was petrified. I walk in, look around, everyone stares at me, look around some more, walk out of the bar, and sit down on the curb. “They are going to f’ing lynch us”, I thought.

The crowd that had gathered in the early evening were a rough mix of locals, seemingly in their 40’s, who were listening to an acoustic covers band playing “Knocking on heaven’s door”. Holy shit, dude, seriously? What were we doing here? And were we going to make it out of here without an incident? I could just imagine me singing about sex and love and depression and my mother, and some biker dude stabbing us in the face and calling us fags.

(Read the rest of this story…)