Redpoint

'Great Decline' update

2010-01-31T03:34:00.001-08:00

Happy Nearly-February!

The final track from our new album, 'The Great Decline', is now available for free download.

It's called 'The Sky At Night' and you can get it here.

There's also a short film promo up on our YouTube channel here.

The promo for the second track, 'Time In Indiana' is also up on the YouTube channel.

We've almost completed work on the next two tracks. Both should be up sometime in the next two or three weeks.

As ever, thanks for all the kind feedback...

Next 'Great Decline' album track now available!

2010-01-24T01:53:00.001-08:00

Hello all. The second track from our album 'The Great Decline' is now available for free download here.

It's called 'Time In Indiana' and it's the second song in the album tracklisting.

Hope you like. Film promo up in a bit.

So that's:

1. Hospital Love
2. Time In Indiana

Coming very soon... we'll be jumping to the final track. :)

Promo for 'Hospital Love' now on YouTube

2010-01-10T02:57:00.001-08:00

Have a look. Go on...

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here.

We're back!

2010-01-08T05:30:00.001-08:00

Apologies for the silence on this Blog. We've been building up our presence on Twitter and YouTube...

Follow us on Twitter here.

And subscribe to our YouTube channel here.

Big news...

The third Redpoint album, 'The Great Decline', will be released, track by track, over the coming months.

There'll be ten songs in all and we'll be releasing them - with updated artwork/track listing - as they're finished.

The album opener, 'Hospital Love', is available now! Go here to download it for free.

The second track should be available in the next couple of weeks...

We hope you enjoy it.

We're doing it this way to keep things fresh for us and, hopefully, fun/interesting for you...

Much love.

Andy & Ian

Remix

2008-10-23T01:03:00.001-07:00

Quick plug for a remix one half of Redpoint did of a track from Covert's deeply ace 'Symbolic' album.

Have a listen here. Then download the album - for free - here.

The Unexplained

2008-10-03T01:13:00.001-07:00

Something spooky/funny for the weekend...

'Nostalgia For Now' - available to buy!

2008-09-23T04:44:00.001-07:00

Redpoint's second album, 'Nostalgia For Now', is now available to buy and download from the microsite here.

Go on. Go get one. It's only a fiver and the cash will go to a worthy cause: that is, us. We need a few bits and pieces of hardware and overpriced software to help us carry on making music.

So please buy, play, tag the tracks you love on last.fm and tell other people you think will like it.

Cheers.
Andy & Ian
Redpoint

PS. By 'Nostalgia For Now' we don't mean a celebration of nostalgia in 2008. Give the album a listen and we're sure you'll get the idea(s). :)

We'll add some thoughts about individual tracks (when we've finished the commentary on Protect & Survive!) in the coming weeks...

Space Giraffe tracks and commentary

2008-09-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

Quick update...

Have a look at the Llamasoft website for our commentary on the music we contributed to Jeff Minter's glorious Xbox 360 game Space Giraffe.

We'll have Nostalgia For Now up for sale/download in the next couple of weeks. For those who haven't seen it, here's the microsite.

Next up: an EP/mini-album (hopefully by the end of the year) and trying to find a venue for a one-off gig in 2009...

And since we don't have a special PR agency to build our profile or place our music in episodes of 'House', if you're a fan of our stuff, please spread the love. Tell people, gush, extol, eulogise! Put a link to our website in yer forum signatures. Give copies of our music to influential people. Do all that and more. Thank you.

NFN Preview & Mailing List

2008-08-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

Hello!

The 'Nostalgia For Now' preview microsite has just gone live, featuring song snippets, choice quotations and the transcendent imagery of Mr Hollis Brown Thornton.

Have a look at the Credits page/'Buy' link for details of how you can sign up to the Redpoint Mailing List and snag a free mp3 of one of the album tracks - right now!

Good. Productive day, that.

We're off outside now to sponge up the embers of summer...

Andy/Ian

New album - finished!

2008-07-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

The new Redpoint album, 'Nostalgia For Now', is done, done, done. Written, mastered, agonised over, remastered... DONE.

Ian and I are both very happy with it and excited to get something that's so far only been experienced by four pairs of ears (including our partners) out there into the wider world.

The plan is to release it on September 16th - the second anniversary of our Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker gig. Depending on how our label/distribution options pan out, that might change, but one way or the other, it *will* be available very, very soon...

5. Lonely Water

2008-07-03T00:35:00.001-07:00

It's a vague lament; a chilly-fuzzy melody that seems to waft by
on the breeze.

The PostSecret website was an inspiration, for the way it reflects the gulf between our outer actions and inner lives. We wanted Lonely Water to hover right there in the divide, like emotional insulation.

The title comes from a terrifying '70s Public Information Film about the dangers of drowning in stagnant water, leg snagged in the spring of an old bedstead, with only Benny from Grange Hill available to help.

4. Nevada

2008-06-29T02:28:00.000-07:00

One of those mini-tunes/half-riffs which develops slowly, taking on extra layers and mood-shifts, before suddenly, the sun breaks through, the structure clicks and it's a song.

For me, the catalyst was the queasy unease of travelling around London in summer 2005: the initial twitch that life might end at any second gradually giving way to a background rumble of low-level paranoia.

I cope with pressure by pulling back from the picture. This time, I took the image of my vulnerable, cramped body jammed between a clutch of potentially lethal commuters and lifted myself out of there: up over the top of the train, through the earth and high into the sky, hovering over a complete view of the Tube network.

It was soothing to think of the process as purely mechanised: trains creaking and hauling themselves out of the stations, gently gliding in to predetermined stop-points; doors obediently sighing open and bleeping shut; circular routes carefully carved out to either double-back or return on themselves.

Nevada feels like that to me: a benign, cycling, mantra-like riff acting as a kind of turbine to propel the hulking drums; a fragile synth underlay enhancing the sense of being carefully transported by some gentle giant.

I also went a bit mental in Nevada in early 1995, but that's
another story.

3. Smell Of Music

2008-06-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

Synaesthesia, that is. Interconnected senses swirling around in a kind of mass symbiosis. Something you hear evokes a colour, a texture... Something you taste conjures sound, mood...

Mostly, though, smell... There's a purity to the idealised flash of memory that smell can stimulate. It's as though an experience
inhaled - as part of the instinctive rhythm of survival - rewires and transports more profoundly than any other sense-memory.

And, of course, for a synaesthete who makes music, smell and sound meshing and colliding... That can be downright mystical. Magical...

Soon come...

2008-06-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

New single - The Unexplained

2007-11-19T16:23:00.000-08:00

Breaking off from the extremely occasional updates of our thoughts on the Protect & Survive album tracks, here's a new song. We hope you like it. Download from the usual Hidden Music website via the 'Music' link over on the right.

The Unexplained was a partworks mag produced in the UK in the early '80s. Ghosts, UFOs, Kirlian photography, out-of-body experiences, the Cottingley fairies, spontaneous human combustion... A monthly fix of paranormal paraphernalia tagged "Mysteries of mind, space and time".

Being far too young for it, but also being far too phoney-brave to tell my parents to stop having it delivered because it was scarring me deeply, I went through a long phase of trying to sleep with the light on and my eyes wide open, listening for things under the bed. Wonderful food for the imagination, terrible for attention span at school the next day.

Worst were the reader letters on the back page. The anecdotes, with their sign-offs from provincial towns, seemed more plausible for their intimacy. I remember a story about the ghost of a haggard old man sitting in the bath which made me terrified of going into the bathroom without reaching around and making sure the light
was on first...

Now I'm all grown up and sensible and sceptical, I miss the part of me that could be so profoundly affected by this kind of stuff. The song is a sort of tribute to those mysterious formative forces - and more...

2. Firem

2007-09-18T05:52:00.000-07:00

Firem is the name of a planet in Nintendo DS puzzle game Meteos - which inspired me to swipe an online computer simulation of Earth being hit by a meteor and use it for accompanying visuals. So there's definitely some kind of album-themed, interstellar, apocalyptic angst type-thing going on...

That low-slung seven-note riff has more than a whiff of Black Sabbath about it. That's because Black Sabbath were one of my formative musical influences. Growing up in a dog-rough, drafty old terraced house, alive with creaks and clunks and fleeting shadows (I later found out it was overdue for slum clearance) led to a spooked-out obsession with 'the paranormal'. So, Mr Tony Iommi's growling, reverb-drenched doom-rock was the ideal soundtrack to those twilight trips to the outside toilet.

By glamorous contrast, the remixed version, on the 'Stay At Home' EP, was partly written in downtime in a posh hotel room at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.

1. Square Leg

2007-09-07T00:53:00.000-07:00

John Carpenter, really. His movie soundtracks always had that ominous, pulsing, relentless feel - something wicked this way comes and there's nothing you can do about it. Pretty much how I felt about nuclear weapons in the '80s. I used to speculate on where would be the best place in the world to hide from a nuclear war. I thought Patagonia (after reading Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia') but my pocket-money could never have covered flight and accommodation.

The samples are from Barry Hines' extraordinary Threads. My favourite horror films - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Halloween... - they're all 'horrible' in their own twisted fantasy-worlds, but Threads is the horror of the possible; the thought of all those cosy provincial mundanities - milk bottles on a doorstep, the local pub, factory chimnies - being incinerated in an instant.

'Square Leg' was a "home defence" exercise in 1980 that calculated the result of an all-out Soviet nuclear attack. The (conservative) estimate was 53% of the population killed, with a further 35% short-term survivors and 12% suffering serious injuries. Obscene enough, but we'll get to Mr Oppenheimer later...

Protect and Survive - Side Two

2007-08-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

Up now.

Individual track blah in a bit...

Protect and Survive - Side One

2007-08-16T02:37:00.000-07:00

All that stuff below is my increasingly non-cryptic way of saying Redpoint's debut album, Protect and Survive is at last out in the wild.

Well, one half of it. Side 2 to follow, next week.

Go here to download.

From my perspective, P&S is an attempt to recall/resolve all those hopes, fears and churning paranoias that squatted on my shoulders from childhood up to early adolescence (that's the shabby simplicity of the mid-to-late '70s and the Cold War cold-sweats of most of the '80s).

Mashed in with that is the psychological uproar of fatherhood and how my kids rewired me to certain messy but enriching emotional realities.

Once the whole thing is out there, I'll post some thoughts on individual tracks.

I'm sure Ian will pop in soon to offer his take on the album.

Hope you like.

"But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable."

2007-08-04T04:01:00.000-07:00

"Our lives are woven together in a fabric."

2007-08-01T02:34:00.000-07:00

"Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others."

2007-07-31T01:47:00.001-07:00

"In an urban society, everything connects."

2007-07-14T08:38:00.001-07:00