the two core creators from the band formerly known as Talk Engine release a few new tracks in anticipation of their forthcoming cd, Quite A Pair, which is coming out in the fall. all Talk Engine tracks are now available for FREE DOWNLOAD from the TE myspace page. please sign up for the new SheelerBirth mailing list. no spam!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1o9CvX2YlU

i love this fucking piece of music!

but being quiet is not the same as being idle.

after some changes in the Talk Engine lineup, a couple years of experimentation with different approaches to our music, and building a small but kickass recording studio in manhattan, we are back. new lineup, new songs, new name.

now we're SheelerBirth. check us out at reverbnation. we think you'll like what you hear (and see; we've been adding video as well).

meanwhile, all tracks on this page are now available for free download. this is our small way of saying "thanks!" to you fans who have stuck around during the Long Hibernation.

or maybe it was more like an incubation, because something beautiful sure has come out of it.

http://www.reverbnation/sheelerbirth

peace. love. ROCK!

Check out this video: I5: IraqiVersary

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you just never know. you get booked. you don't have time to check out the venue. the booker leaves you about 1,000 postcards to distribute 3 weeks before the event. but you barely have time to practice your set, much less roam around the city after the dayjob, sticking flyers on BBs and telephone poles (flyers that we ALL know nobody reads). but the booker had some press, and god knows he sent a couple hundred emails so i figured what the heck, how bad can it be? i was just coming off another solo gig a few days before, where it took me 45 minutes to find the place, my pedal case strap broke, and when i finally got there, they had like 10 people in the room -- all of whom had heard me before. ok, it's like that sometimes. but it was the same story at this second gig. (where i forgot to take my merch off the merch table and it hasn't been seen since. luckily didn't leave too much!)

tomorrow night we're playing for the well-known series synonymUS, at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and i am very confident that it will NOT be a BS gig. i wish i was just as confident that our set is as tight as can be -- did the last two gigs solo but tomorrow is with my (incredible) guitarist.

i hope it goes well. i'm sure it will at least go OK. but i can tell you this much -- no more gigs for a while! maybe some poetry stuff here and there, but there's no pressure in that (and no equipment to lug around!). we're gonna spend the rest of the fall with our new pro tools rig and make some brand new music!

peace out!

so i, which means we, got a full half-page with HUGE photo (thank god not a bad one) in the New York Times today. it may be our 15 minutes of antifame, since so much of it surrounds jackie's sordid past, but she's doing good things now so maybe there's a balance? if you've got some time, check it out, maybe write a letter to the editor if you think the kind of thing we do fucking ROCKS!

check out the article here -- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/education/09POET.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin 
and if you love it, please write a letter to the editor, or leave a great comment on MySpace, or an even greater coment on nycpoetz.blogpot.com, which is where we do most of our blogging. after all, we love MySpace, but we also love reliability.

AND WE TOTALLY LOVE ALL OF OUR AMAZING, SOPHISTICATED FANS!

what music are you listening to? let us know -- send a note to listings@poetz.com and we'll compile a list and publish it as soon as we have enough answers.

right now, we're listening to pj harvey, the dresden dolls, the yeah yeah yeahs (seeing them saturday night!), patti smith (check her site for a free download of an awesome new antiwar song, pattismith.net) and also, of course, bach. that's one of mark/landru's heroes.

there's one person in our lives that is definitely NOT a hero, but that's a real long story for another blog.

many x's and o's
TE

so you spend a lot of time writing, editing, posting a blog. a worthy blog, something that seems to warrant a wider audience.

but nobody without a MySpace login can see it.

we did not realize this until our last post, when we were very embarassed to have sent the media a link that they could not access.

i doubt that we will do much blogging here in the future. only band-related notes, tour notes and such will go here. but the broader social and political issues that we care so deeply about, well, i guess this just isn't the place for them. mostly, we'll blog at http://nycpoetz.blogspot.com/

hope to see you there.

peace out.

been lazy out. been quiet on the blog site as the band restructures itself while promoting the CD. making good progress on both sides, and we just got some really nice reviews -- one at music street journal (we like this one the best, as they go track by track and obviously they really listened to the record) http://www.musicstreetjournal.com/talkenginecd.htm

and another one at poetix net http://poetix.net/reviews.htm - poetix is a great site for california spoken word artists, definitely check them out if you're a poet.

we just started working with a cool new bass/keyboard player, and our producer's coming over to the studio today to teach us the best way to use our digital recording setup. we didn't go the whole protools route, none of us are interested in doing all the learning we'd need to do to get that right. we're using a GNX4 and Pro Tracks on a kickass computer with an M-card that has every kind of possible input, from midi to instrument cable. if only we knew how to operate it all. hopefully, after today, we will, and can start getting some of our new stuff down. we're also working on recording some other artists in a totally different project, so it's gonna be a busy summer. our guitarist is spending half of the summer in spain (insert jealous face here) so hopefully we'll get enough tracks laid down now so that the rest of us can make some progress on the mixing side while he's away.

we've got one little gig coming up, just two of us, check our events if you wanna know about that. but a gig in chinatown? forgive the skepticism, but what the hell, it's summertime and cbgb's is closing down, and the tribeca rock club is already shut down (which we thought might be the "next" cb's but we sure got that one wrong) and tonic is always on the edge....

we saw joan jett at the bowery ballroom last week, and she rocked the house. didn't care much for the opening act, it was like the ramones on speed, if you can even imagine something like that. if we didn't have such a good spot right up front we woulda fled. just put some kleenex in our ears and gritted our teeth and suffered through their overlong set. some people seemed to dig it, so i guess they weren't terrible but just not our cup of tea. strange opener for joan, though, i thought. somebody like karen curious might have been a better choice.

we're gonna get better about blogging. we really really are. this is the summer of catchup! (even if some slackers will be maxing and relaxing in europe while we work!)

peace out.

it's like a cliche, record is finished, band breaks up.

that's not exactly what happened, but almost.

jaxx and landru are still here. everybody else (i.e., the rhythm section) gone.

so? so. new band, still called talk engine, is gigging all around. we're doing our first "live rehearsal" at CBGB's on 10/20 and we'll see.

what's important? creating new work. being unpredictable. having kickass live shows. we do all that. do we sound the same as on the album? hell no. does it matter? hell, no.

we're going to record a few of our new tracks this month. maybe we'll put out a little EP, or maybe just make it a download thing.

stay tuned!