Sunday, September 25, 2016

Fall Update 2016

NAME CHANGE: 

I've changed the name of my project from my birth name, Mike Simonelli, to Mike Sim in order to separate my art from my personal life.  
I have new websites now:
I'll be leaving this blog's URL as is for now so older posts will still be googleable and because I also write about things other than my own music on here (like my end of the year lists and music therapy stuff and whatnot).

I'll also be leaving my old websites - so you'll still be able to hear that music if you'd like.  I also might be posting old music on those that I haven't released yet.  

INITIATION : 

As I previously mentioned, I'll be releasing a visual album in pieces.  Last week I released the first of twelve videos - this one is called "Initiation"

Backstory:
I’d rather not talk about the lyrics and get into programatic details - but since there might be some familiar sounds to some folks in this, wanted to say something about those sounds.  In a way this is a song that's evolved for over a decade, and like a lot of the material on the visual album will be - at some moments, it's sort of a collage of sorts from things that I've done before as well as other things and new things.  The first time I publicly played the main melody from this thing somewhere was in 2005 (there's a video of this somewhere on the interwebs which Andy Young filmed from my high school's talent show) and at the time it was called "Portrait of the Invisible".  It then evolved into a piece with more improvisation with a few jazz groups I was in (which sounded like this back in 2006) - and then made it's way onto the first Koala EP in 2009 (with added sections that were co-written with other band members).    


(((The section that was the original thing that I wrote starts around 2:09)))

One of the other things in here that you might recognize is a song I wrote called "All is Swell", which comes up twice in here and was originally on the Kaleidoscope EP which came out in 2012.


There's also a few quotes and some samples used from the recording session I did with the Gypsy Rock Monkeys last fall.

EP: 

I'll be releasing an EP later this year.  It's tentatively titled "Just a Phase" and is made up of reimagingings.  It'll be more stripped down and raw than the recordings on the visual album.  You can check out the tentative tracklist below: 

1-She Said
2-Wishful Thinking
3-Slide 
4-Dirty Mind 
5-I Wanna Be Your Dog 

TWIN PEAKS SET:

I'll be performing a Twin Peaks set at the Industry Lab in Cambridge on November 19th.  I've been writing some new material for this set as well as reworking/reimaginging some of my own material and some music from the show.  It'll be an all alternative soundtracks/multi-media bill. 

I'll be posting some more info about this as it gets closer. 

There's also more upcoming shows here.

As always - thanks for listening and much love, 

Mike Sim