TweetOn Tuesday, I’ll be at Bright Club, the music/comedy/science chimera held at the Wilmington Arms in Farringdon. Not playing music, but talking about lasers, and possibly Dracula and the late Nigel Hawthorne. But that remains to be seen. See, Bright Club also features people talking about their research, and I’ll have my physicist hat on [...]

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TweetI went to see post-rock (or instrumental/orchestral/chamber noise, whatever you fancy) septet The Monroe Transfer play at the Union Chapel yesterday. I hadn’t seen them play since I left the group about a year ago, so it was a real pleasure to see them in what seemed like their native habitat -  the Union Chapel, [...]

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TweetThe new podcast is out now, featuring a new version of Up!Went My Dreams (first released in demo form on the podcast a year ago, fact fans), the tale of midnight hauntings and romantic tomfoolery. Perfect (now as then) for a Halloween night. Sweet dreams… [Audio clip: view full post to listen] (on a related [...]

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TweetLots of exciting things going on at The Sound of The Ladies towers; new recordings of old songs, the glimmerings of a new science-based EP and a sea-based album. I went to see the Pixies play the entirity of the superlative Doolittle, which was as exciting as it sounds. On Tuesday I played at Freedom [...]

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Tweet I spent my Saturday composing new music (well, more musack) for The Institute, a site-specific event at The Pleasance off Caledonian road. I don’t want to give too much away, but the fact that the performances take place over Halloween weekend should be a bit of a clue. Let’s just say that the guided [...]

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TweetThe latest Sound of the Ladies podcast is out now, featuring Every Single One, the gleaming centrepiece in the Squid Roast Trilogy. The shiny bookends (Straight, Boy and Department of Homeland Security) have appeared in various forms and weave a wondrous fantasy of aquatic malfeasance. Coming to a digital music service near you soon. Ish. [...]

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TweetI had a lovely time at the World’ Smallest Festival on Sunday (albeit briefly – no fun for the wicked). The festival took place in a secret island location somewhere in southeast London. Or the labyrinthine back garden of someone’s house, for those of you with less poetry in your souls. Thanks to Donal for [...]

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TweetYou know that The Sound of The Ladies are a fan of tiny gigs (having had tremendous fun with The Sound of The Ladies Lounge), and now we’ve been asked to play The World’s Smallest Festival (in Forest Hill, London). It has a great line-up, including The Pipettes, Popsocks and a host of comedians too. [...]

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TweetI’m increasingly full of the joys of harmonizing, and it seems that any time I run into a brick wall in arranging (I.e. I’m burying a good song under my shortcomings), harmonies, usually falsetto, are my default rescue option. Luckily, songwriter extraordinaire Ben Walker has conclusively proven that multipart falsetto harmonies are the way forward: [...]

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TweetI thought it’d be fun to run through the nuts and bolts of “The ’40s never died” – it’s pretty much loop-based, and building up and getting rid of these loops is a good way to create dynamics. Steve Lawson has an excellent video tutorial on live looping, irreplaceable in the arsenal of the solo [...]

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TweetThe Sound of The Ladies podcast this month features brand new song “The ’40s never died” -  you can get the podcast on iTunes here, non-iTunes here, or just listen to it below: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] To accompany the song, I’ve recorded an instrumental version and done a little video for [...]

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TweetHello – just a quick hello to say -  The Sound of The Ladies Lounge is now a Video Podcast. Click here for the iTunes page, or here to get the feed if you’re not on iTunes. It’s an m4v file, which I think is mainly for iPods I think. I’ve just uploaded Episode One [...]

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TweetOk, so I said I’d write a blog post about songwriting pet hates. I’m curious as to whether these same things bother everyone, and whether there are some main offenders that prospective songwriters might want to avoid. But rather than this be a unadulterated rant, I thought it would be nice to put one songwriting [...]

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TweetI’ve been incremementally adding to and subtracting from this website as time goes along, tweaking it to add more interesting stuff and then removing it when no-one’s interested. But I’d be keen to hear from you all what bits you like and what you’d like to see. My next miniature adventure will be trying to [...]

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TweetAfter weeks of procrastination (oh, ok, writing the music for Answer Me This 100, performing at the Latitude festival and dicking around at The Peasenhall Pea Festival) I edited this beatch in a couple of days and here are the results! The Sound of The Ladies Lounge 4 from martin austwick on Vimeo. You can [...]

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TweetIt’s slightly the calm after the storm, now. Recovering from a minor bout of a mystery minvirus (not swine ‘flu). The piece for the latest podcast is something I’ve had for about a year -  it’s part one in a trilogy/triptych about a murder mystery I’m working on. I don’t want to explain too much [...]

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TweetHello chaps and chapesses I know you’re probably thinking about the weekend, but cast your mind, if you can, to next week. Ok? Now focus on the evening of the 29th, next Wednesday, say about 8pm. Now, imagine, you’re nursing a pint in the lovely atmospheric basement bar of The Hideaway, midway between Tufnell Park [...]

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TweetThe Latitude is a festival that’s been around for about four years, and has rapidly got a rep for being a very nice (if middle-class) fest. Its USP is the mix of music, comedy, theatre, caberet and kiddie-friendliness – over the course of the weekend I saw a solo set from Thom Yorke, 1927 (an [...]

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Tweet It was an amazing show on Saturday for the hundredth episode of the Answer Me This! Podcast. We arrived bright and early at the Roundhouse to set up and rehearse the show, and I got my first look at the *awesome* venue. It was a perfect cylinder, so standing in the middle and singing [...]

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TweetYou probably already know that The Sound of the Ladies Podcast is available for free via iTunes every month, so this probably seems like anti-news. But the most recent SOTL EP, Scrape The Paint, is now available to buy on iTunes. If you want to buy it from me, you still can, but, well… I [...]

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