Absentee

Highbury Garage

One of the finest London venues for alternative music. Great size and great sound.»

Absentee

'Absentee the band' began with 26 year old Daniel Michaelson. His debut for Radiotone was the double A side single 'One Big Wave'/'Sweet Sweet Sleep'. This magically lo-fi record was made at home on a 4 track cassette portastudio.
Having upgraded to the luxury of an 8 track reel to reel machine, Dan, and future bandmate Melinda Bronstein recorded a debut mini album Hawaiian Disco. It is a wonderful thing to behold and was first released in December 2003.
Five tracks from Hawaiian Disco and other as yet unreleased songs were used on the soundtrack for the feature length black comedy 'Twisted' which premiered at last year's Raindance Film Festival.
Slowly but surely, and without genetic modification, 'Absentee the band' grew. Their live show went from strength to strength and they released a double A side 7" single through Radiotone in May 2004. Despite being largely recorded in a small rehearsal room in Hackney, the tracks received a great response including Single of the Month in Unpeeled Magazine and plays on various national and regional radio stations including Radio 1, BBC 6 Music, Bristol Uncovered, Radio 2XS in Manchester, Radio Ceredigion in Wales and Cable 103.9 in Brighton
Absentee then went into the studio with producer Arnulf Lindner and engineer Steve Cooper to record their first studio album. Bass player Romeo had to leave Absentee in order to concentrate on his own band The Magic Numbers who had just signed a deal with Heavenly Recordings.
The finishing touches were put to the record in September 2004 with the help of mix engineer extraordinaire John Gallen.
A strictly limited taster featuring 4 tracks from the Album, started quietly doing the rounds and the band started receiving some amazing offers of gigs. First, Ed Harcourt asked Absentee to join him on tour. They naturally said yes. And not a minute too soon found a new bass player - Laurie. The tour took them all over the UK, making friends and fans along the way. They have since supported Kevin Tihista, Joanna Newsome, St. Thomas and old friends The Magic Numbers.»

Shout Out Louds

Hello. We are four boys and one girl from Stockholm in Sweden and we play music together in a band. We used to call our band Luca Brasi but because of another band who also called themselves Luca Brasi, that name now sleeps with the fish. These days we call our band Shout Out Louds. That has nothing to do with Kiss although we do not mind Kiss under any circumstances. Now we are going to tell you about our band.

We started our band in 2001. Actually, Adam (the singer) and Ted (the bass man) started it and after only a few seconds Carl (the guitar player) joined them. They had all been friends since they were rather small and they loved the same records so there was really no point in not starting a band. Then Eric (the drummer) and finally Bebban (the keyboards etc. player) came along. They were two more friends from a rather early stage in life. Eric played the drums like some kind of a creature while Bebban was getting awfully tired of walking around the city on her own waiting for people to come out of their garages, so there was really no point in not asking them to join the band.

Three songs were written, and we wanted to play them in front of an audience, so we did. We also wanted to record a demo of our three songs, so we did that too. After hearing our demo a man named Filip Wilén, who is our friend, wanted to sign us to Bud Fox Recordings which is the name of his record company, so he did. That made us very happy so we wrote more songs and played them over and over again.

Then it was time to record our very first ep and we did that with a producer called Ronald Bood. He is a very intimidating person who looks like a street fighting man. But he has a very good pair of ears and when our ep was released we were able to play and travel all over Sweden and some in the other countries of Scandinavia. Those were happy times. We also released a full length album that year, hurrah, and after that we were able to play some more. We even got to travel to London to play and we had a glorious time indeed.

Not long after that we got to go all the way to America. We found out that New York is a very good city to play in so we went there again. And then one more time. The next thing that happened was that someone said: "Welcome to Los Angeles.", so we went there of course. And that was where a big record company found us. Then they fed us pizza, flavoured vitamin water, violet candy and chicken with parmesan which we all liked alot except for our singer who is not very fond of cheese so he only liked it a little. Then they let us play for a bit on Mr Nat King Cole's piano and then they signed us. That made us very happy so we drove to the beach and went for a swim. Then we went back to Sweden.

Since then many things have happened. Ted has cooked food for us which we ate directly from the table but on newspapers, Eric burned his hand on a strange thing which made it grow probably two sizes but it got smaller again soon enough, Carl moved from the knife-south, Bebban decided to never speak again but failed, and Adam went to a wedding dressed like a king. We have also played in our rehearsal space and found out that we have alot more songs on the way than we could have imagined. We hope we will record them one day. We are also going to play in many different cities this year and we are all oh so happy about it. We hope to see you there. We hope so very much.

Love,
Shout Out Louds
Stockholm 2005

Biog From Their Website

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