Merry holidays! We recorded these 100% live with no overdubs, mostly on first takes on a weird laptop setup two days ago. I mixed & 'mastered' them late last night. Two new songs that weren't on the album, one album track with a vastly different arrangement, and two more that are similar to the album versions but still different enough. I'm pretty proud with the way these turned out. This is definitely a little bit of a detour stylistically, don't expect us to do a whole album of completely glitched out Casio stuff anytime soon, but this was fun to do.

The Muttering Retreats - December (EP) [224 CBR MP3] (Self-Released, 2008)



Click here to download

Hi guys,

Our friend Brian in Chicago did an interview with us before our show there back in July. It was a mere day or two before the show, so the article didn't make it to press in time, but he finally published the interview. It may be interesting to anyone wanting a window into our processes, both live and on record. Check it out here:

http://armsdistance.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/muttering-retreats-say-something-then-depart/

Cheers!

-Tim / The Muttering Retreats

So, we've been toying with covers a bit in the past couple of months. We learned a couple one-offs, and are obviously learning a whole slew of Beck songs for our Halloween show. Here's the first one we've finished recording, it's a cover of "Sleep The Clock Around" by Belle & Sebastian, from their 1998 album "The Boy With The Arab Strap," which received a 0.8 rating from Pitchfork, so you know it's great. It's on our profile, but I have no idea how one can download songs from that new convoluted player, plus MySpace chopped down the maximum file size to 6 MB, which is kind of ridiculous, so here's a link where you can download a respectable rip of the song:

http://www.mediafire.com/?1u0jdzmmcyt

Enjoy!

So there is an article in today's New York Times announcing the death of the cassette, which makes me want to announce our next release. Now I know we just did the whole CD thing, and we're definitely still pushing that, but tapes are fun and cheap to release. Because of this, we're already boiling up some schemes about the content of the next one.

We've recorded a lot of our shows. Some of them were just recorded on a hand-held cassette recorder (natch) placed/hidden somewhere in the club, others were recorded on another obsolete format: minidisc. A lot of these live recordings have captured covers, alternate versions, improvisations, guest musicians, and all kinds of other stuff that didn't/won't end up on a proper album. So we're going to sift through all of these recordings and come up with 20 or 30 minutes of audio that we especially like. Then we're going to collage it together and augment it with maybe a couple additional performances on top of the live recordings, creating a mix of live and studio material, which is usually the case in live albums anyway.

Anyway, don't expect this cassette until the weather starts cooling down. We've only started to delve into all of the live recordings to find the unique performances, it will take a while to tactfully put it all together.

So, we got a great little writeup courtesy of Music Saves. It's online (temorparily) Here, but I took a screenshot for posterity's sake:



We're so amped about this! Thanks Music Saves!

I just wanted to drop in and give a big thanks to Marty, Scott, Pat, and Pat for helping turn our lowly (lack of) power trio into a ramshackle 7 piece for the prom.

Also, thanks to all the wonderful folks who got all gussied up and came out on Saturday. You all looked fabulous, and all have much better dance moves than I.

If anyone has any pictures from the show, send them our way. Picutres featuring the hoverboard may warrant some sort of prize from us.

-Tim

Good afternoon, friends!

So we've been very busy the past few weeks. Other than the couple of shows we've managed to play, here's what's going on:

1. We finished recording and mixing our album last Wednesday! I'm still a bit surprised that this actually is done, it still has yet to set in. We sent it off to Chicago Mastering Service on Thursday, we're expecting the mastered versions back this week. After that, all we have to do is get all the packaging templates in order and hand over a large sum of money to someone to make 1000 of them! Exciting, no?

2. We've got a couple of shows in the works, including a CD release show on July 5th. The show isn't 100% set in stone yet, so just keep it on the DL, but consider this a "save the date" if you will.

3. Our friend Max (who drew our flyer for the one and only show of ours that was snowed out) made an MP3 blog, and posted our cover of The Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'" as the first post! There will eventually be a slightly better mix of it up for free download via this page, but go to his blog if you just can't wait!

4. We're playing the prom! On May 17th (Saturday), we'll be gracing the Beachland Ballroom stage to play our take on The Enchantment Under The Sea scene from Back to the Future. We're currently preparing a playlist of songs from the movie and/or 1955.

As always, stay tuned for more updates... I can guarantee that in the next few weeks we'll be posting the album art/tracklisting, adding some of the album songs to our player, giving out the deets on our CD release, and MUCH MUCH MORE!

Ok, so this is even news to us! We sat down last night to take some inventory of what we still have to do, and except for a triangle here and a backup vocal there, we've got about 98% of our album tracked! Mixing will begin mid-month, and we're looking to deliver mixes to the mastering house before month's end. All of a sudden, a May release date doesn't look out of the question at all!

So details on the album:

1. The current batch of tunesconsists of 15 songs, the album will probably include somewhere around 12, depending on how great and/or not so great certain things turn out.

2. We've enlisted the help of several of our friends on a bunch of instruments, including: (but not limited to) accordian, french horn, trumpet, & backing vocals.

3. We personally broke out a lot of instruments you typically wouldn't see us with on stage... some of which include Hammond organ, acoustic guitar, tuba, a filing cabinet, and lots more I'm sure I'm forgetting.

4. The cover will be pink. But not just pink.

Details as they arise. Stay tuned for updates very soon.

-Tim

Good Morning Readers,

I hope everyone is having a great November. Indian summer could only last so long, and now we're into the few months of the year where sunlight only exists out of windows while you're stuck at work. Hopefully we can help to remedy and/or soundtrack your autumn/winter malaise with some new songs on our profile and the promise of an album right around the time the weather starts to turn back.

We've been working hard on the album lately. A lot of September and October were spent recording. We're having a blast, we've got to include a lot of our friends on the recordings and songs just keep happening. I think we're working on about 15 of them now, but not all of them will make the album. Everyone knows you need some extra tracks lying around for a rainy day. We took a slight break from recording to learn those Magnetic Fields songs for the Halloween show, and then to inevitably re-learn all of our songs for this week's two shows, since we sort of didn't play them for about a month. But after this week, we're probably going to lie dormant for a while so we can get tracking this album taken care of before the attic is too cold for woodwinds.

In the meantime, we recorded a bunch of practices in the past week or so and found a handful of decent sounding otherwise unreleased songs. You can listen to three of them on our profile.

Also, with all of this talk of an album, I guess maybe we should spill the beans about when it can be expected. We want to finish tracking by the end of the year so we can get everything mixed and sent off for mastering. We plan on releasing it ourselves all professional-like (you know, real cds with shrinkwrap and whathaveyou) by March or so (fingers crossed). Expect some sort of CD release party extravaganza and lots of rejoicing when it's all done.

That's about all we've got right now, please come out and see us this week!

-Tim / The Muttering Retreats