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THE KENEALLIST: Tales from a tasty tour, with just a hint of vinyl

The Keneallist

Mike Types to You from the road

March 28, 2023

Salutations from over here!

We are nearing the end of the Devin Townsend European Lightworks tour – as I type (in the dressing room in Stuttgart on March 25, the walls unexpectedly decorated with Beatles Anthology artwork, two stones’ throws away from Mercedes Benz HQ) there are 9 shows remaining of a 32-gig run.

The Keneallist: Beatles artwork I did not expect to see on the dressing room wall in Stuttgart.
Beatles artwork I did not expect to see on the dressing room wall in Stuttgart.
The Keneallist: Some flags fluttering outside Mercedes Benz headquarters
Some flags fluttering outside Mercedes Benz headquarters

It’s been remarkable. I really love this quartet and over the last few nights we appear to have kicked ourselves upwards to a higher level of communication and precision. Really satisfying. Unfortunately, in tandem with this playerly ascension, Dev has been dealing with respiratory ailments that have really taken a toll on his singin’ throat – if only the realities of scheduling could allow us to just say to everyone with tickets to the show, hey let’s all meet here a week from now and do all this then.

But he’s been powering through like the show-must-go-on sorta guy he is. And even last night in Brussels, which was probably the height of his throat issues, he still hit some performance peaks that were absolutely astonishing to me. He operates at a level that’s pretty well beyond belief.

The Keneallist:
An intriguingly-named eating establishment near the Stuttgart venue.
The Keneallist: The weather in Stuttgart was wonderful. I walked for a long time.
The weather in Stuttgart was wonderful. I walked for a long time.

But what about Keneally albums on vinyl, you say?

Well-worn vinyl LPs from your imaginary collection.
Well-worn vinyl LPs from your imaginary collection.

Funny you should mention it, ‘cuz Scott Chatfield and Chris Opperman and I were talking about this two nights ago. NONE of my albums are on vinyl, and there’s an obvious feeling amongst us that it’s high time we remedied that.

But we’re all like, what do we start with? Do we go with The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat since it’s new? Or do we go with one of the old “classics”? Do we go with something that requires two discs to get all the music on (a la Sluggo! or Dancing), or something that would fit neatly on one slab (like the new one, or Wing Beat, or Wooden Smoke)?

And then Scott was all like, we should ask the Keneallist readers what they think, and Oppy and I were all like, yeah!

So that’s what I’m-a doin’ now, asking YOU what album you’d most like to see us print up on vinyl. Or maybe a top 3, and then we can do some MATH over here and see which albums are the most coveted on wax. Please respond to us by replying to this email or emailing us at hello@keneally.com and let us know what you think about this – thank you!

Paris in the springtime

The Keneallist: The front of L’Olympia. Really awesome.
The front of L’Olympia. Really awesome.

NOW it’s March 26, and we just played a show to a really wonderful audience in Paris, at the legendary L’Olympia. I listened to some of that live Jeff Buckley album recorded there to get in the mood.

It really is a beautiful venue and the audience knocked us all out, including a very young girl (I’m thinking she was around nine) who Dev invited up onto the stage to select her choice from the multiple stuffed octopi festooning Darby Todd’s drum kit, and who then sat peacefully in front of the barrier with hearing protection on, happily clutching her new octopus while a series of crowdsurfing dudes spilled over her into the pit between barrier and stage (fear not, the security force were sure that no dudes landed on top of her – at the point that it seemed like the frequency/velocity of dudes was becoming unmanageable, she was relocated to a safer vantage point, further down the barrier.

She was totally chill about the whole thing and her guardians kept an eye on her the whole time. All of this was very interesting to witness from the stage perspective, believe you me).

The Keneallist: Part of the lobby at L’Olympia. I was going for Kubrickian symmetry; missed it by that much.
Part of the lobby at L’Olympia. I was going for Kubrickian symmetry; missed it by that much.
The Keneallist: Our front-of-house engineer Chris Edrich, and lighting man Mike St. Jean, during our gig. Photo by our merch woman Laia Miguel Lloret.
Our front-of-house engineer Chris Edrich, and lighting man Mike St. Jean, during our gig. Photo by our merch woman Laia Miguel Lloret.
The Keneallist: Paris is kinda freaking amazing-looking.
Paris is kinda freaking amazing-looking.
The Keneallist: A freaking amazing-looking opera house in Paris.
A freaking amazing-looking opera house in Paris.
The Keneallist: These are chairs displayed in a window in a very posh shop in Paris. I think they cost €80,000,000 apiece.
These are chairs displayed in a window in a very posh shop in Paris. I think they cost €80,000,000 apiece.
The Keneallist: This is a fragment of a bus inside the lobby of another posh shop in Paris. It costs elevendy zillion Euros.
This is a fragment of a bus inside the lobby of another posh shop in Paris. It costs elevendy zillion Euros.

And those TTTKCE reviews keep a-rollin’ in…

There’s been a cluster of nice new The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat press coverage since the last Keneallist…

  • Actually, we did quote this review from Dmitry M. Epstein in the last Keneallist, but it’s such a special review to me I kinda want to highlight it again. It starts: “Prog polymath fathoms the frontiers of his fantasies and pushes their envelope to enforce a breach into the great unknown.” And it ends just as majestically, and in between hits some insights about my stuff that I really appreciate. Dude can write.
     
  • This is a sweet track-by-track overview from Gary Hill at Music Street Journal.
     
  • A really lovely piece by Greg Cummins at DPRP, including the first time, to my knowledge, that my music has been compared to a song by Mountain (and I totally get where he’s coming from with that, actually!).

    (Note: we ferried to the UK yesterday, and now it’s March 28 and I’m backstage at Bexhill-on-Sea, on a drizzly, windy day by the seaside. Seagulls hover outside the window. Its the sort of place where if you listen carefully you can hear “Bungalow” by XTC emanating from the crevasses on the beach. Back to the press parade…)
     
  • A well-timed review, considering I was just in Paris, is this one in the beautiful French language from Alain Bourguignon.

    At the bottom of this review is a very considerately-placed Google Translate Link that will make life easier for English-language specialists, and I’d specifically like to highlight this translation of the section about “The Carousel of Progress”:

    “After a simple, accessible beginning, the thing turns unexpectedly and completely moves away from the introductory plot. The instrumentalists let go completely, the lines move away, intersect, everything becomes sinuous, tortuous, surreal…One would think that our master builder did not come out intact! Then things calm down, find a clearer direction, return to the introductory melodic line. Awesome!”

    How delightful!
     
  • We finish up with a very good interview conducted by my long-time friend, and a very faithful supporter of my music for years now, Jedd Beaudoin, who found the best quote from our interview to title his piece, “Not so much boiled as cut in half.”
     

BFD passes the audition

Two days ago I received a set of mixes from Kip Stork (expert audio engineer and utterly sweet guy) comprising a MK/BFD show at a club called The Siren in Morro Bay, CA, from January 16 of this year. This was one show of a run of five nights featuring a heretofore untested BFD quartet lineup consisting of myself, Rick Musallam, Pete Griffin and Joe Travers.

The audio evidence suggests that the band is a very good one! I’ve just uploaded five of the tracks to Patreon.com/MikeKeneally over the last couple of days, and will very likely upload more during the coming week, so if this intrigues you you might like to check it on out. Thanks to Kip for a fantastic mix, and for the surprising and sudden delivery of same!

Mere minutes to showtime

Y’all are awesome. Thanks for reading all of this if you did. I listened to a bunch of Peter Gabriel today, which I haven’t done for a very long time, including loads of tracks I’ve never heard before and which were great fun to discover – when’s the last time YOU listened to songs from OVO? Anyway, listening to Peter Gabriel songs is a pretty nice way to while away some hours in a dressing room in Bexhill-on-Sea when the weather is dissuading you from actually being near the sea yourself.

Devin’s voice sounded amazing at soundcheck today, I think he’s going to be in full voice for tonight’s show which begins 59 minutes from the moment of this typing. And with that, I leave you for now.

Thank you Dan, if your name is Dan! If it’s not, thank you too!

Love,

Mike

P.S. Three more sights I drank in on my journey

The Keneallist: Our hotel for the day off yesterday was in Eastbourne. This dude was nearby.
Our hotel for the day off yesterday was in Eastbourne. This dude was nearby.
The Keneallist: A pier in Eastbourne. Perhaps the pier in Eastbourne. The only one I saw, anyway.
A pier in Eastbourne. Perhaps the pier in Eastbourne. The only one I saw, anyway.
The Keneallist: A beer in Eastbourne. Most definitely not the only beer in Eastbourne.
Most definitely not the only beer in Eastbourne.
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THE KENEALLIST: No more teasing – TTTKCE is officially out!

The Keneallist

Hallo there!

Hey, this weekend marks the official worldwide release of The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat! Happy TTTKCE Weekend!

Obviously a good bunch of you have already ordered it directly from store.keneally.com, which is brilliant and we are immensely grateful.

Now it’s going to be making appearances a bit more out in the wild, for the convenience of online shoppers and listeners who perhaps aren’t on this mailing list and/or are in the habit of visiting The Keneally Store directly. Astonishing to think that such people exist, I know, but modern life is full of surprise. In any case, the little album that could will be more widely available moving forward.

The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat - Mike Keneally

Also, know now that TTTKCE has hit those big time streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, and Sneedfisher (okay I made that last one up).

And for everyone in Europe who’s been holding off purchasing the CD ‘cause of those ridiculously high postage costs from the U.S., the album will soon be available at Burning Shed in the U.K., where several of my titles already reside!

Unrelated Sound Guy premieres with TTTKCE music!

In the meantime, the entire short film depicting five of the new songs visually, The Complete Adventures of the Unrelated Sound Guy, has now premiered in full at unrelatedsoundguy.com. If you’ve seen Mikko Keinonen’s separate videos for “Big Hit Song,” “Celery” and “Spigot,” this film pulls them all together along with additional videos for “Lana” and “The Carousel of Progress.” It all makes for fascinating viewing, I think – I sure do like it a lot and am very grateful to Mikko for his wonderful creativity and generosity.

I was just in Tampere, Finland, at the wonderfully-named venue Tampereen Tullikamari, where we played the third show on the current Devin Townsend European Tour. The first two shows, in Oslo and Helsinki, went incredibly well – if things are going this well this early in the tour, it should be getting utterly astonishing as things progress. I love this little band (Devin, Darby Todd, James Leach and myself) and feel very grateful to be out here doing these shows.

Premiere party for the Unrelated Sound Guy film

Between soundcheck and show, I wandered over to a little bar nearby called Telakka, across the street from the venue, where Mikko Keinonen arranged an intimate premiere party for the Unrelated Sound Guy film.

My dear friend Jaan Wessman (bassist in The Mike Keneally Report) was also in attendance at the premiere party, as were James and Darby from Devin’s band, and many of the actors who appear in the film (whom I’d never met before, since my appearances in the film were done remotely at home).

So it’s already happened by the time you read this, but I still wanted to capture for posterity the fact that it happened!

More things to read, watch, and listen to

Here, have a bunch of recent reviews and interviews:

  • Why, there’s one on Page 20 of the North Coast Voice.
  • Here’s another from S.Victor Aaron at Something Else!, a really nice site who’s been there for us multiple times in the past and I’m really grateful for that.
  • And how about this happy exchange with Groovy Moody Music TV, a new YouTube channel created by my dear friends Rick Musallam (of Beer for Dolphins fame) and Stan Ausmus?
  • Not to forget Cedric Hendrix’s CirdecSongs Interview from a couple of months ago – a very engaging session that unfortunately loses my Zoom feed at 57:00. But it was fun while it lasted!
  • Pete Pardo has been a longtime booster of my music on his Sea of Tranquility website, and he shares his thoughts on TTTKCE in this YouTube review. I appreciate your insight, Pete!

I am most thankful for all attention being shown to this album! Damn!

Soundcheck

Yipe, soundcheck is about to begin, I have to transition to band-guy mode. I’ll be back soon enough I’m sure! Thank you, as always, for being attentive and supportive and great.

Oh I want to mention my Patreon page again because at the beginning of this month I posted a bunch of unreleased audio and I’m going to be posting more soon, and you might want to check it out – patreon.com/MikeKeneally.

All right thank you I love you bye!

Mike!
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Devin Townsend’s Lightwork European Tour – I’ll Be There, I Will Be There

I was in the middle of a North American Devin Townsend tour in mid-March 2020 when the earth shifted on its axis and every single touring band on the planet had to go home all of a sudden, with glazed eyes and masks on and, just, liberally covered with sanitizer and thinking “what the hell just happened?.” It’s been three years since that went down and I’ve felt a very specific sense of Townsendus Interruptus ever since, so its with immense gratitude and glee that I’m able to tell you:

I’ll be playing in Devin Townsend’s band on the upcoming Lightwork European Tour, which begins on Feb. 21 on Oslo, ends in Norwich on April 5, and goes just every which way in between.

Gig information and ticket links are at Dev’s website here: hevydevy.com/tourdates/

This will be a tight little quartet consisting of Dev, me, Darby Todd on drums (who plays in Martin Barre’s band and has also played with The Darkness, Alan Price, Gary Moore, Robert Plant, Robben Ford – a truly versatile player) and James Leach on bass (a ferocious player, from the hugely influential band Sikth). I haven’t played with Darby and James yet but in a few days we start rehearsals, and I expect things to just explode. I mean this is going to be seriously great so if you can possibly come to one of these shows, you should fully do it, with all of your might.

Devin Townsend’s Lightwork European Tour – I’ll Be There, I Will Be There