Dear music lovers, the music industry is changing dramatically. The internet provides opportunities a for global publishing of music to everyone, the former majors fight hard to keep their power but they are losing ground. Are they really losing ground? The amount of different and independent music makes it hard for music lovers to keep track with new recordings and new bands in the different genres of musical interest. Music magazins more and more prove to be unable to fulfill the new demands and focus on releases by record labels with shlep and money -- the major record labels. We've got a new freedom in the music business but it's a freedom of Speaker's Corner: you've got to be known to get an audience.

Promotion is expensive, small labels for the most part don't have the money. As for Cannery Row Records, we rather invest money in new music than in promotion. Music lovers are confronted with the problem to find information they need. So the freedom we gained is a freedom we have to learn. We have to find a way to gain information about our favourite music and we have the duty to inform. It is difficult but again the solution is the internet. Search engines are a big help to find websites about all musical styles. Download platforms are already substituting record stores. Networking is a way to profit from each other's knowledge.

The situation is far from being perfect but we are all working. It's the market that rules and the market is ruled by money. But with all the benefits we can have by using internet possibilities, alternative musical styles and artists will have a serious chance to increase their chances and customers will spread their range of accessible music. The future is bright. Freedom has always been subject to study -- and it works.

We are open to discussion! Any creative input about the topic is welcome!

OUT Now on Cannery Row Records:

"Back to the Start"by The Durgas

A TOWN CALLED NOWHERE

Wed 5 December....Obsessions come and go, and I've slid back into reading about the Bronte's again, mainly because I found a great biography of the famous sisters alcoholic junky brother Branwell. Written by Daphne Du Maurier, it brings to life a much-misunderstood writer / painter who never had anything published during his short life and only managed to sell one or two paintings. His over active imagination got him into trouble from time to time, but it's difficult not to like this wonderful 'failure.' Stayed up til dawn reading the book, and only managed to get one and a half hours sleep before I hit off across to the north side of the city to meet up with Les Keye . On arrival, I discovered Les had no sleep at all, he's been up all night, but was ready all the same to get down to work. In his home studio we drank countless cups of tea and listened back to a 'live' recording we made last week. When I say live, I don't mean a recording of a gig, but a recording of me Les and Chris all playing together in a room, no over dubs, just lashing it out, and it doesn't sound bad either. Another 7 or 8 songs I had been working on were loaded up from one hard drive to another and we now have to figure out what's good and what's not so good. After five hours we were brain dead, so I packed up and off I went, heading south.

In the past few weeks I had been listening to a lot of Holly Golightly. Her LP "Surely There Is No Other" was rarely off the turntable, so I was very pleased when the postman arrived with a package from Damaged Goods Records with two more LP's and a four track EP on clear vinyl. The package also contained an LP by Billy Childish. Anybody who can write a song and name a band after his mother's 1950's cycling club gets a vote of confidence from me. The album from Mr Childish sounds like it was recorded in the forty minutes it took them to play it and it's wonderful. Holly, of course has been on the stereo day and night. In a vain attempt to break from vinyl addiction, I spent a few days in the Wild West of Ireland, where 'The Lilting Banshee' 'Out On The Ocean' and other fiddle tunes were recorded. On a drive back from Ballyhaunis, near Bekan, we stopped off to check out the ancient roadside passage grave, before continuing on down the long winding road.

A few days later I found myself staring in amazement at the fattest birds I'd ever seen, and I'm not talking about ladies. I'm talking pigeons. Big fat pigeons were everywhere. They struggled to get airborne, these lay-abouts. Over near the Rialto Bridge in Venice, but especially up around the tourist trap that is St Marks Square you will find these obese birds, fat from the never ending stream of tourists who, for some reason or other, feel the need to keep feeding these feathered vermin.
Found a few great antique stores. One had a carved Tibetan thighbone in the window. It reminded me of the time many years ago when in L.A. I asked to see the thighbone in the display case of a particular antique store I had visited. The assistant obliged and then went off to deal with another customer. I looked at the hand-carved bone, which had been fashioned into a flute, with a row of holes drilled along the shaft, so what else would you do, but put it to your lips and try and get a note! And I got one, not a very melodic or clear sounding note, but a note all the same. The shop assistant came running over in a panic "Oh you must not release the spirits!! " she exclaimed. The fact that I wasn't a trained monk seemed to have something to do with It.  I might have learned a few things about Kundalini, I may have known how to meditate a bit and put a stop to that endless chatter; the internal dialogue, but my ancestors had drunk from the wrong gene pool. As far as she was concerned, I was far from being the ideal candidate for blowing through this odd magickal/religious tool. 

Mad, timeless Venice. I rambled up the street, stopping off for a drink before dinner, in the little bar around the corner from where an unseen hand has scratched a pentagram onto the door of the local drapery store. Later, I found a bookbinders down one of the labyrinthine streets, asking for €450 for customized leather bound books. An ancient looking copy of the legendary grimoire, The Necromonican sat in the window with a little sign saying 'enquire inside about price.' But of course this book wasn't / couldn't be ancient at all, as The Necromonican was imagined by HP Lovecraft in the 1930's. Still, the copy here looked splendid. However, that didn't mean I was going to stride in there waving a chequebook ...or a credit card. Come to think of it, I don't own a credit card, and I've never had the luxury of a chequebook taking up valuable space in my pocket either. Cash is King in my brain baby !!!

It was freezing cold in Rome, but before long we found an odd little place that sold slices of pizza, full chickens, big hunks of beef, cokes, sandwiches and beer, drug of the nation.....beer. A bottle of Becks cost €2.20, so we had a few of those before finding a restaurant for dinner. The Hotel Cristina was a bit depressing after the palatial Palazzo Guardi in Venice, so we kept away from it as much as possible, spending lots of time at the Forum. The Arc of Septimus Severus prepared us for what was to come. Stopped by at the Temple of Saturn on the way to the garden where the Vestal Priestesses would spend the afternoon, just across from House of the Vesta. I imagined these foxy ladies taking it easy here for an hour or two after spending hours tending the flame in honour of their goddess Vesta of the hearth, and of course in honour of Rome. Further up the hill we found the house, which Augustus shared with his feisty second wife Livia. It's claimed she poisoned eight or nine people to keep her family in power. But who knows the truth.   Further up the road, the Colosseum looked spooky when you consider what went on there. It was time for more spaghetti.........

Back in Dublin, the Fender Champion 600 Amp, matched with a €9.90 Beringer Tube Overdrive pedal was put through the mill. It sounded best with my old Epiphone Casino.  Some of the songs were brand new. One, I wrote as the guys were strolling in. Days of merry solitude were spent getting the over dubs down, a little drop of red wine to keep me company, the black and white wild fat cat slowly roaming the gravel driveway, stopping every now and then to stare in the window at me. Days drifted on. A week felt like a month, just the way I like it.

Nathaniel Handy, Songlines Magazine

Oct 2007

Two Dollar Bash - On The Road

This is good ol' time American music. There is blues, folk, country and chugging R&B in here. The auras of Canned Heat, Woody Guthrie, Neil Young and Springsteen waft on the breeze. And, perhaps more pertinently, there is an echo of the Rolling Stones' down home bluesy vibe in here - because, like the boys from the home countries, Two Dollar Bash are not as American as the seem. For Two Dollar Bash consists of three Glaswegians and a Parisian (who does, tantalisingly, sing a great uptempo blues number - 'Roulez-Roulez' - in French midway through the album), based in Berlin. The cover artwork is a collage of epic stateside highways and skyscrapers glimpsed through car windscreens and the lonesome lyrics are sung in a heavy US drawl. This is classic, big skies and barrooms American music, and that is no bad thing. There are evocative songs here with harmonies, madolin, banjo, guitar and particularly good harmonica playing from Matt de Harp. But I'm left with the feeling that though the songs tell stories of their lives, they do so in a dislocated, American way. The three members of the band have spent their careers living a vagabond life across Europe. I want to hear the sounds of this life. As good as the music on this album is, I can't help feeling intrigued to hear more of the music and experiences of Scotland, France and elsewhere in Europe, rather than a blueprint of a mythic America.

Dorfdisco.de

Nov. 2007

Es gibt sie noch, diejenigen, deren Welt schon morgens schlecht und unverändert gegen einen ist, gleich was man dagegen unternimmt. Diese, im amerikanischen als "Country" bekannte Sichtweise der Dinge ist auch die von Two Dollar Bash. Kein Lied in dem nicht von irgendeinem Trübsal oder Unglück die Rede ist, kein Zustand, der nicht von heilloser Leere und deren unvermeintlichen Abrutschen in Alkoholismus zeugt. Und wenn man schon unter einem Wolken verhangenen Himmel auf die Sonne wartet, dann tut man dies als gestandener Mann, dem nicht viel anhaben kann, keine unglückliche Liebe und auch kein tragisches Schicksal. Denn anhänglich sein, oder gar jemanden auf die Nerven fallen, das ist das Letzte was der dieser Haltung innewohnenden Ehrenkodex vorschreibt. Und so leben und spielen Two Dollar Bash abseits jeder Beachtung durch die Medien ihren Country und Folk vor ein paar Berliner Gleichgesinnten in den gleichen dunkelgrauen Stoffmänteln und klobigen Schuhen, deren Welt längst vom Fortschritt aufgefressen wurde. Was bleibt ist diese traurig schöne Mundharmonika, das durchgehende schwirren der Westerngitarre, das ab-und-zu anziehende Banjo und das nur selten, und wenn dann zart zu vernehmende Schlagzeug neben den ehrlichen, vom vielen Zigaretten, Bier und Whisky geschmirgelten Stimmen von Tony Rose, Mark Mulholland, Matt de Harp und Joe Armstrong. Gott hab sie selig will man sagen, wäre diese schon zweite CD in einem Jahr nicht so herausragend gut, dass sie damit bis nach Nord Amerika touren, auf das South by Southwest Festival eingeladen werden, während ihnen in Berlin gerade mal ein Gig vor 10 Freunden im English Bookstore Friedrichshain bleibt.

Hansdieter Grünfeld, Neues Deutschland (Zeitung)
Oct. 2007

Seit Jahren arbeiten sie unter dem namen „Two Dollar Bash" zusammen, doch haben die drei Schotten und ein Franzose nichts an leidenschaftlicher Spielfreude eingebüßt. Auf Saiteninstrumenten, der Mundharmonika und bisweilen vierstimmigem Gesang, präsentieren die Musiker eine ausgewogene Mischung aus US-Folk- und Country-Blues sowie europäische Volksweisen.

Als fahrendes Volk im Geist der alten Barden, sind die Künstler ständig unterwegs. Gerade kehrte die Gruppe von einer dreiwöchigen Tour aus Großbritannien in ihren derzeitigen Unterschlupf in Friedrichshain zurück, um ihre neueste CD „Two Dollar Bash" morgen Abend persönlich vorzustellen. Besonders hörenswert unter den 12 Einspielungen, deren Texte Sehnsucht, Liebe, Verlust und fortwährenden Aufbruch spiegeln, sind die Titel  „Old Mail Train", „Rosalyn" oder „White Fright Liner Blues". Das Album sollte in den nächsten Tagen nicht nur in Musikläden erhältlich sein, sondern auch im digitalen Vertrieb von Zebralution die großen Download-Plattformen bevölkern.