heaven

So we played heaven in london, but i think i really found heaven on earth in montreux, switzlerland. we played the jazz festival there and i have never seen a more gorgeous place. the tallest mountains i have ever seen surrounding a crystal clear lake. im quitting the band and moving there. serious.

merry england

so four days into the uk and we are finally feeling a bit together. somehow we opened for the killers on friday at hyde park. if that wasnt surreal enough we then shipped off to glastonbury in our first tour bus. we only had it for the weekend but we got to feel what it was like to be so pampered. highlight of the festival was seeing skream and benga tag-team a 90’s uk garage set and then close it with some new dubstep tunes. o and seeing bruce springsteen step in with gaslight anthem for a song. that almost set off a riot, gave me serious goosebumps. then we had to go on stage right after that…

finally we are back in clubs as we played the cooler in bristol last nite. the crowd was fantastic and stuck through the sweaty mess with us. today we somehow have the entire day off, and i keep hearing michael jackson blasting out of every car that drives by ayad’s flat. bummed i missed the mass thriller dance at one of the tube stations around here. his passing away was the first news we heard when we landed thursday and it still doesn’t seem real. he will be missed. the saddest part is the exploitation of it all by the media, the same press that lead him to such an abnormal life is now making millions off his fair-weather fans tuning into the news coverage of him. no disrespect to mr. jackson, but thousand of more tragic deaths happen every day. has everyone forgotten Neda already? cue the conspiracy theorists.

maybe im just bummed with press in general, apparently we dedicated an entire set to jarvis cocker at glasto. one journalist thought we were doing this to offend MJ fans… they also don’t know the names of our songs and i’m pretty sure didnt even watch the set as another journalist complained about us playing a song that we never actually play live. ever. but all press is good press, rite? hmm…ask MJ. i wish i could make a living reporting on things i have never witnessed… however, we did dedicate the reeling to jarvis

cant wait for more festivals! thank you everyone who has been coming to our shows or making time in your festival plans to catch our set!!!

9 DOWN

nine shows deep in this tour and it feels like we left yesterday.
harlem shakes and cale parks have been killing it every nite. last nite pomona was by far the wildest crowd tho, not that any have been bad but jesus those pomona kids are nuts in a great way.
sittin in el paso on the way to dallas tomorrow. great to be back in texas.
kinda wanna sneak into juarez.

prop h8

so what was a beautiful morning in san francisco has been tainted by the california supreme court’s decision to uphold prop 8. their choice to leave the 18,000 marriages that took place before november as legal is bittersweet in comparison to the prop 8 ruling. at about 10:03am rumblings made their way through the press and into the crowd (pictured above) about the decision which erupted into booing and chanting “shame on you!” followed by a sit-in blocking traffic by city hall.
now i’m not a california citizen but i am a human so it’s my problem too. it is really overwhelming to hear a supreme court decision that supports the bigotry of the masses. since when did democracy become more important than human rights? potheads have more rights in this state than the LGBT community. this is all very angering but the sorrow that pacifies me is to see not only how disorganized the movement is but how few people cared or came out.
here is where i get hypocritical. as musician it is difficult for me to justify why playing a show tonite is worth more than me getting arrested in an act of civil disobedience with the rest of the rally. how much can i convince myself that music actually changes anything?
the only thing keeping me from quitting and doing something responsible with my brain and body is that this isn’t the end all be all. everyday i am made aware that life is short. so goes the philosphy of “don’t waste life not being happy”, but i am reminded of my friend julian’s question to his buddhist father, “is it zen? or is it apathy?”
please do your part : check out decision day events here

back on the road

sometimes we feel like this guy walking onto a treadmill.
sometime since the last time i woke up our album came out, we shot a new music video, did about 35 interviews, played on a couple radio shows, celebrated mike’s bday, played on a boat, played good old great scott, and now we are in Washington state about to play the Sasquatch festival.
however tour officially began before we ever left boston and jeff blew a tire on the trailer. thats how it works. we have been too lucky in every other aspect of this project that we see all the bad luck on the road as paying our dues. another tire has already blown in the cross-country trip and im sure plenty of challenges are to come. but dont really care about that now, too excited to see Gorges.

THANKS MUM

CLICK HERE
THANKS FOR EVERYTHING MOM.

spring a leak

it’s spring in boston finally.
and manners has leaked.
o well.
we would really like to thank Pop Sense and all the other blogs for not posting links to where it is being shared. after all, if you really want it and you know how to use the innernets, you can find it. but it’s really really cool that bloggers are respecting us and encouraging people to buy the album in a couple weeks. whether or not they received cease-and-desist letters or not, we appreciate their enthusiasm and help.

speakin of blogs, we really owe a lot to them. from the ones that love us to the ones that hate us and all the anonymous commentators in between, i sometimes doubt whether we would have played for as many people as we have and we definitely would not have reached as many ears. it sucks we can really only pay them back through “exclusives” whether it’s interviews or mp3’s and that’s assuming they deem it worthy of their blog in the first place let alone that nothing is really exclusive on the internet (streaming? hmmm… Download Helper via Firefox anyone? everything is embedded and easily yours aka not exclusive to the website). i guess the hope is that the collective community of musicians pays back the community of bloggers that advertise them by bringing hits that in turn into paychecks from adverts.

maybe labels should develop a blogging outlet that enables users to have access to more material for legal posting and sharing in turn for a percentage of website advertising revenue. that’ll never happen.

one idea that will happen, and in my opinion is pretty genius, is this new site oak.fm. full disclosure: the founders are my friends (boston is a small town) and i dj’ed their launch party, but either way i really think this is gonna take off. the idea is basically a complete social-music networking aggregator. kind of like elbows or hype machine for sites like myspace and purevolume and even facebook mixed with google analytics. for a fan it consolidates all these outlets and for a band it’s absolutely AMAZING because it lets you see such comprehensive statistics as where and how many streams from each site you are getting as well as where people are talking about you or which websites are you more successful in. basically it will replace the archaic, out-of-touch, and expensive nielsen Soundscan.

if you dont know what soundscan is, it’s a regional-market based album sales report that is really handy for booking agents so they can see what cities your band is selling best in and therefore figure out appropriate routing and venues for you to play. what oak.fm is gonna do is give a more relevant picture of where you fanbase REALLY is, on their computer and any indie band with out a booking agent will be able to route really smart effective tours.
this is just one of the brilliant sides to the site, and although it hasnt launched yet. i can’t see this not being a huge asset to the new music industry model that is forming as we speak/type.

so anyways, please pre-order the album?
cheers bloggers, we owe you one.

triple holiday

so today is three holidays in boston. patriot’s day, marathon monday, and the date… thanks for the three day weekend boston.
today was also the premier of our first video off manners, watch it here.
we are really happy with how it came out (thanks sam and ariel and the entire crew and actors/actresses!) and we hope you like it too.

what a good long weekend. friday nite i got to cover for a friend and dj at a wine tasting aimed at the younger wine connoisseurs, called wine riot. the first three hours were weird, i couldn’t hear myself and people kept complaining i was too loud. old people have discovered twitter and were all tweeting on a massive projected twitter board next to me. i have never seen “the 2006 four vines peasant grenache is just to die for, do i taste hints of lime peel?” on a twitter feed. the best was the experimental internet acronym usage by the elderly like “I am definitely LOL @ Rutherglen calling their 2004 Pinot a Noir when it’s Obvi a Grigio. N3wbs. ROFLMAO”. And my favorite “the dj is playing some serious house music…at a wine tasting… that’s a first…” THANKS FOR HEADS UP, SORRY IM 21 AND CANT AFFORD TO GO TO WINE TASTINGS AND SAMPLE THE BEST VINTAGES IN THE REGION WHILE MY BOTOXED WIFE GETS PLASTERED ON ‘PEANUT NOR’. IF ONLY I WOULD HAVE PLAYED ALL OF CHOPIN’S NOCTURNES, THEN MAYBE YOU WOULD SEE ME AS A CULTURAL EQUAL WHILE WE SOBBED DRUNK ON THE FLOOR THANKING FREDERIC FOR HIS EXQUISITE EXPLORATION OF ARPEGGIOS AND CHROMATICISM (not like thomas bangalter doesn’t employ both in his french house masterpieces…ugh) luckily there were plenty of super nice people that wanted to dance once they were drunk for the last hour. i wish i had to palette to understand the difference between wines. Charles Shaw is all i need. wine riot, im sure you’re the coolest wine tasting there is.

saturday nite i got to take a vacation from boston and drive out alone to hampshire college to dj with KRS-1. what an honor. that guy is a legend and he completely lived up to it. he did all his hits as well as freestyled over everyone else’s hits. the entire tent was jumping. see here:

then Dj Sarah Barr played and i got really nervous, she played really good hard electro and house jams and mixed really well. she killed it. so i canned my planned set and kept that vibe going. really cool crowd and i met plenty of great people. hope to play out in Amherst again.

now vacation is over and it’s back to work. im finishing up a dance floor ready remix of the reeling tonite and look out for Calvin Harris’ and Rob Da Banks’ remixes coming out soon as well. it’s weird to remix you’re band’s own song, but it’s great because you don’t have to listen to anybody! sleep well innernets.
-n

SPEAKING IN CODE!

so i have been waiting for this a couple years now, but finally on april 23rd we all get to see it premier in boston. i’m talking about Speaking In Code, a documentary by Amy Grill that follows several figures in the electronic music scene, from Modeselektor to Ellen Allien to the Kompakt records crew and few people in between including basstownian David Day.

Click on the flyer below to get tickets!

You don’t want to miss this!

Official trailer:

speaking of david day, what an extraordinary dude. i first met him when he wrote for the boston phoenix and he found my mixtape on the counter of Proletariat and gave me my first press ever as a dj. he booked jeff’s and mine old band, the peasantry, at the great scott at a party called basstown a little bit later on. sadly. jeff was hit pretty bad by a car (he is ok now obviously) and the band had to pull out but i ended up playing one of my first club dj gigs. david asked me to join the resident crew at basstown and basically started my career. many great things came from that, including opening up for my hero’s and meeting some of my favorite people who were part of the basstown crew as well as getting to present new local groups to be featured at the saturday night allston party. one of those groups was passion pit, which lead to being asked to join the group 8 months later, which lead to my eventual absence from basstown haha. anyways, i owe a ton to david. and i’m really happy to see the film he worked on so hard (and is featured in) and i hope it helps to get him some of the recognition he deserves for his relent-less and self-less commitment to the boston music scene.

so check it out if you can, i know i will if it isnt sold out already…

east or

happy easter everyone that celebrates easter!

some of us went home for easter, i’m in maryland. holidays are great.

been working on a mix for annie mac a lot lately that takes all the seperate tracks from the new album and remixing them into a 5 minute mini-mix. then i’m gonna sync 5 minutes of visuals to that and it’s gonna be out probably sometime in may right before the album comes. i’m really excited about it,  i will try my best to not make it boring and amateur.

back to boston in the a.m. and back to reheasals. i think things are going a lot better now, we have 7 of the new songs down and the rest will come together.

we debate a lot about whether using a laptop is responsible in our live show. ayad is convinced i have ruined every show ever because of laptop and audio interface problems. it paramounted in austin when the shaky stage kept making my firewaire cables come loose and killing the drum machine and i was so delirious form the heat i threw my computer and knocked over my snare in the process. it’s never been the same since then… i’m pretty sure it’s only been a few shows and that the hiccups were my fault, not the computer’s, i mean, thousands of bands realy on a laptop every night. granted, ayad is right, a really rich band get’s pro tools HD and taxes less of the computer’s CPU. stewart copeland even uses a complete mac tower and digital performer rig, which maybe makes sense since i use a motu interface. ugh, i wish soundsystems could just listen to our minds, things would be so much more reliable and so much more boring/annoying.

on a somewhat related note, ableton live 8 is completely brilliant. nothing huge has changed but the whole zoom thing and grouping and new warping algorithm sounds sooo good. i just need to get plogue bidule up and running again and i think i could disappear for 5 years with a computer and speakers and be the happiest person on  the planet.

have a good nite innernets.