Seekae - Sydney Opera House session

HD session video with good sound and even better song. Reasons for loving music continue to grow...



Mike

Telfords warehouse and other things

Half Avian are playing Telfords Warehouse in Chester on Thursday 13th July (next week). It's a free entry event, which is great, because at the moment money and people seem to be mutually exclusive. Early days of course, we're really having a great time playing as a duo. If you've not been to Telfords Warehouse, it's right on the canal, serves really nice beer and the sound isn't bad either. It's one of the only decent venues in Chester, which is oddly not that musically active. I'm not sure why that is, Chester is a nice City, busy and has a university. You'd think the music scene would be great, perhaps it's the proximity to Liverpool and Manchester. Who knows? Maybe it's the races keeping sane people away.
Visit the official website to read more about electropop band Half Avian.

Half Avian recently recorded this video in a room with a camera having found the slow motion button. 

Australian electronica: Hidden behind a planet... and other news

Australia electronica

Ashamed to say I hadn't appreciated the Australian music scene until very recently. PVT, Seekae, Cut Copy... what the hell else have I been missing?

In fact, if our Australian friends could bring us up to date that would be amazing, just post your informed electronic/indie suggestions up on the > Half Avian facebook wall. 

Debut of Half Avian

Maff and I played our first proper show as Half Avian on Thursday night, in the Roadhouse, an underground (literally) venue in Picadilly, Manchester. It was an Awesome night for us, the crowd was "intimate" but really up for it, and the sound was huge. Itching to get onto the next show, which is in my local town of Mold, North Wales on Sunday. After that we're organising as many shows as possible, we've missed doing this, it's been to long.

M

Buy Half Avian Future Proof (Single) on itunes.

The first single from Half Avian is now available from all your favourite online music retailers. The song "Future Proof" was recorded by Mike Payne and mixed by Daniel Shepherd.
More information and songs at www.halfavian.co.uk or...

Thanks for your continued and stylish support.

M

Half Avian Website

A new website for Half Avian, go have a look, and keep checking as it will be updated frequently. You can also join the Half Avian mailing list to make sure you're up to date.

Half Avian are an electronic/inde/pop band from North Wales: Mike Payne and Matthew Stenning.

TEN - Live in Y Delyn, Mold. Friday 12.04.2012

The Absence by Ten LIVE from Boo Said the Goose on Vimeo.

TEN

Live in Y Delyn, 

Mold. 

Friday 12.04.2012

9pm

Thoughts on Sadness

I've been listening to Infra by Max Richter recently (tonight). You only get out of music what you put in I think. Or not that, more that you only feel what you have in you already. Music isn't a shortcut to emotional depth. Music is a frame, a kindling to flickering embers of memory and memory of emotion. I think every memory can have the opposite emotional effect. Memories of happy times become melancholic reminders of good times past, and the sad, reminders of the good you have now. But if you write sadness off as something to fear, or to avoid, you miss the truth in it, and you look back only with regret.

Your highs are relative to your lows, constantly seek highs and you stop feeling them, only the difference, the jump up between them excites you, and each leap becomes smaller, less exciting, less fulfilling. By exploring sadness in life, in music, in film, in works of art and in books does the middle ground, the mundane become a truthful, achievable high. Failing to understand the true meaning of sadness I think means not understanding the power and strength that comes from not hiding from the horrors of world, but embracing them.

This music is a cathartic, beautiful, melancholic celebration of the depth and sorrow of being human. I love frivolous indie pop as much as the next man, or maybe the next man along from the next man, but it would mean nothing to me without sadness, without the shade and the darkness. I'd be smiling, but I wouldn't know why.

Now where are my ELO albums...

m