We feel very honored to be among all these talented artists. And it gives extra value to these months/year of deep and profound search around music and sound. And also it cheers us up as we are just back from almost a week of radio promo in Brittany. We did very nice interview, met very nice people too, and let’s be honest, it always feels good to talk about this very personal projet.
So, why? Why do we need to be cheered up? Well, despite of dedicated promo work, and having the chance to be welcomed by most of Breton radios, it hasn’t really translated into sales. Not sales from Brittany at least. And of course, yes, we’d love to also have some more folks enjoying and supporting our music over here. After all it’s Breton music right? Also, every single sale pushes the day we’ll have to go back to employee job a bit further away, and everyday staying focussed on our music and art is to be enjoyed and made great use of!
As we already mentioned in previous blogs, we are in this awkward time frame. Inês is released, copies have been sent to most of our audience that supported the project along the crowdfund campaign, we’ve done some limited sales on our network, and we’ve sent a couple of copies for review.
They’re a few types of possible reviews. The ones that previously supported our projects, the ones we never sent any material too but are now getting in touch with, and the ones whom we probably won’t bother sending to this time, since we are trying to slash down our promo costs too (we’ll have a Vlog running on the topic pretty soon, hit the subscribe button on our YouTube channel).
Regarding medias that had already trusted, supported and reviewed our project with respect and understanding from the very beginning, we noticed it with B album, we freak out with questions like “will they like it this time?” “does it add anything so that we’ve leveled up from previous recordings?” etc, etc…
One tip we happily use is to gather all the kind messages and even print them out. The first impressions tend, from our experience, to be the good ones you receive, the enthusiastic ones, the supportive ones. When in doubt, go threw the message and that will make us realise that indeed we truly are supported by lovely and kind people. Do you have any other tip? Share in the comment section please! We’re always up to learning new tricks!
But today we can breathe and celebrate, fRoots that had us reviewed for both our albums and also made us the great honor of featuring us on their cover, has included the last song from the album on its autumn playlist here:
Not only do we look at the Stars, but today we almost feel like Stars! During our last UK tour we had the pleasure to meet the lovely fROOTS magazine team for an interview that will be featured on their June’s edition. And yes, it is our first cover ever 🙂 And, oh yes, we feel super proud too!
Your friends might thank you for letting them know about our music !
It’s a great honour not only to get a really good review in fRoots current issue (available from today for subscribers, on sale on the 20th), but also we got chose among “album choices of the month playlist”
The review for our first album in 2013 came like a surprise, we had never played in the UK, were not distributed, had got actually absolutely no review in France, it felt really like a recognition for us. For our album B, we weren’t sure fRoots would like it, it’s much darker, and rock. Yet they still recognized that it is nothing but 100% traditional Breton music, and this is truly a very nice surprise again!
Your friends might thank you for letting them know about our music !
We’ve been hardly focusing on music recently, due to all the events that are happening right now in Turkey. We’ll try to tell you soon a few personal feelings from “the inside”. In the meantime, we are proud, really really proud to read this review about our album in fRoots current issue.
Sometimes I get hoist by my own prejudices and preconceived ideas. So it was that I glanced at the back of this album, noted the legend “A colourful and delicate oriental shine over wild Celtic music”, and the dread vision of Loreeena Newage materialised. And so it festered unplayed in the ‘oh f*** do I really have to listen to this?’ pile on my desk for several weeks, until we were just about to go press with this issue.
Don’t do that at home. Should a copy of this CD appear in your letterbox, hopefully because this review may have alerted you to it, seize it and put it in your player straight away. You will not be disappointed.
For ‘Celtic’, do not read ‘wifty-wafty-synthy-twee’, but instead gloriously full-throated, truly inspiring Breton singing and melodies from Simone Alves. For ‘a colourful and delicate oriental shine’, read ‘roaring, intricate, fiery, imaginative accompaniments’ from multi-instrumentalist Yann Gourvil on oud, electric saz (or baglama as the Turks call it), violin and programmed percussion.
Indeed, for ‘oriental’, don’t read ‘Far East’ as we Brits tend to use it, but ‘from the Eastern reaches of the Mediterranean’. It’s the sort of production that wouldn’t sound out of place on the better contemporary Turkish roots records – it turns out that they’ve lived and studied in Istanbul for the past few years – and it’s obviously a close relative to what Kristi Stassinopoulou & Stathis Kalyviotis did with Greekadelia. In fact I’d christen it Breton-Turkadelia if I hadn’t run out of credit in the ‘name a genre a day’ fund.
When I hit them up for a copy of the biog that this maltreated review copy had obviously got separated from, I found that they were involved in one of the sainted Erik Marchand’s inspiring projects that included Ross Daly, Thierry ‘Titi’ Robin and Keyvan Chemirani. That makes complete sense, and they are justifiably spoken of in the same breath as those iconic names. And if that doesn’t get you people who know about that sort of thing reaching for your credit cards, I don’t know what will.
. astrakan project . 