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THE KENEALLIST: Bandcamp Friday For April – Live At Mama Kin

The Keneallist

Hey, thou —

This is just a quick message to let you know that our Bandcamp Friday release for tomorrow, April 7 is Live at Mama Kin – Boston, MA – August 15, 1998.

Never previously available for download or streaming, this title has only been purchasable, until now, as part of the Sluggo! SuperDeluxe package. For those of you who remain adorers of physical, tangible music delivery objects, and who haven’t yet experienced the joys of Live at Mama Kin, this option still exists here.

(Bandcamp Friday, I hasten to tell you even though I’m certain you know this already, is that special first Friday of the month when the Bandcamp service waives all of its own fees and every bit of income generated goes to the artist/independent label. A very good day to browse the work of the many multitudes of artists who make their work available via Bandcamp.)

'Live at Mama Kin' on Bandcamp Friday!

Live at Mama Kin finds the quartet BFD of the era (me, Bryan Beller, Marc Ziegenhagen and Jason Harrison Smith) in serious fighting trim – almost literally fighting as we found ourselves in near-fisticuffs with unhappy locals when we parked our truck to unload our gear that afternoon – ah, Boston!

It features our covers of “Immigrant Song” and “Inca Roads,” as well as the rarely played originals “Tug,” “Vent” and “Pencil Music,” an opening improv here entitled “BSSOC,” and a heaping helping of additional live faves. The vintage 1998 recordings were given a shiny new mix in 2013 by Mike Harris and myself. It is a wonderful-sounding document of a ferocious show.

'Live at Mama Kin' on Bandcamp Friday!

One hopes you’ll choose to give it a listen, and by “one” I mean me! Revel in the now quarter-century old (good lord) sounds of MK/BFD!

Good luck!

Mike!

P.S. We’d still love to know what MK vinyl you’d like to own!

Well-worn vinyl LPs from your imaginary collection.
Above is currently non-existent Keneally vinyl that may turn actual, with your input!

So we’re toying with the idea of issuing an “it’s about time!” LP version of an MK album or two. And we’re asking you what Top 3 albums you’d most like to hear on vinyl. If you’re so inclined, please respond by replying to this email or emailing us at hello@keneally.com.

If you’ve already shared your wishes, thank you! Many of you are very passionate about your choices, and we find your responses super encouraging. By the way, the most requested title so far is… oops, sorry, out of space!

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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.
Exowax Recordings
Visit the Mike Keneally Store!

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