The Cattlestops ride again!

I have had a busy but very enjoyable weekend playing with The Cattlestops - a 5 piece band (acoustic gat, electric gat, bass, drums, fiddle) playing a range of styles from Western Swing to Bluegrass to Country Rock. We played in Wanganui on Friday to a booked-out Lake View bar and restaurant, on Saturday to a booked-out Wellington Bluegrass Society crowd and on Sunday to an almost booked out Winemaker's Daughter in Te Horo. All three gigs went really well and we had a huge amount of fun!

Here's a poster I put together a few weeks ago for the Saturday night Bluegrass Society gig.

 

Tribal Blood

Here's another cd cover I created recently. David Antony Clark is a local composer and audio engineer who has released a number of albums in the neo-primal genre, several of which I have created artwork for.

In this release he has combined his neo-primative grooves with Maori singing and chanting written and performed by Rawiri Toia, a lecturer in Maori issues at Victoria University. The lyrical content explores the feelings and experiences of the first Polynesians who arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand around one thousand years ago.

I like this cover. It's distinctly Maori, but doesn't feel cliched. I chose to use the oft-used Trajan font for the subtitles as it adds an air of historical authority and makes it feel like a bit of a museum piece.

I just heard yesterday that this album has been accepted for release by a world music distributor in Germany, so this week I need to make a new version with new barcodes and logos etc for that market.

Previous albums I have designed for David include 'Shaman Dancing' and 'Songs of Magic, Sex and War', both of which are featured in my gallery. Also check out his website, where you can hear audio excepts from all of these and more.

Wasup wit Noo Zeeln rap?

Here is NZ rapper Tommy Ill's new single - it's called 'Come Home Mr Ill' and it's pretty good. Give it a watch if you haven't seen it yet...

I really like the mixture of old and new technology, the hand-made/home-made look and the sampled & recycled materials - audio and visual. It is, in many ways, very original and very Kiwi. There's one thing though that spoils it for me, and it seems to be common to most (if not all) NZ rap and hip-hop:

"Th' lyric is reel clevah and the images are pretty, but 
why he gotta taawk like he come from noo york city?"