Fear No Evil - free single out now!

Press release:

Following the poignant "Red Sky", Eat More Cake deliver their second single "Fear No Evil" with remixes by Choking Dolphin and Steviebeatbox. Eat More Cake are a five piece band lead by songwriters and musicians Andrew Briggs and Matt Pearn supported on stage by drummer Alex Lane, DJ Owen Charles and vocalist Kay Juviler-Bacon. Their live show has wowed audiences at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, Camden Barfly, 93 Feet East, Hamswell and Glade festivals, as well as many other venues in and around London.

In "Fear No Evil" the band's easy-flowing mixture of electronica, hip-hop and indie underpin a thesis on the illusions of childhood, urging the listener to embrace the truth and seek happiness in the real world, whatever it's short-comings. The original mix is driven by an infectious blues-guitar loop and hand percussion whilst Choking Dolphin takes a more dreamy, electronica, synth-lead approach. The Steviebeatbox remix sees the vocals delivered over a bouncy Hip-hop beat and what feels like a slightly more optimistic chord progression.

Eat More Cake will be releasing their debut album "Climb The Ladder, Live The Dream" in 2010.

Eat More Cake - Fear No Evil - Urban Torque® by Urban Torque®

What's in a name?

Isn't the internet big?

One of the great things about having a name that's a bit different (with apologies to the two bakers shops also called Eat More Cake) is that if you're googling for information about us, the chances are you'll find information that is actually about us (or those two bakers. Oh, or a World of Warcraft guild, whatever that means...).

I often feel it must be a disadvantage for a band that has a less distinct name. Especially if that name happens to have geeky connotations - of the 20% of the Internet that isn't porn, I reckon around 15% must be geeky stuff. Take for example a band with a name containing 'Header', 'Banner' or 'Tag'. Have a search for 'header myspace' and see if you can find anything that isn't a reference to how to add custom myspace code...

Of course, Jim Header and DJ Header may be multi-platinum selling artists for all I know, but I think in some ways a name is especially important for bands that are 'up and coming' in these days of information overload.

It's a pastime of mine (and Andy's) to Google ourselves every so often. I mean, everyone's Googled their own name just to see what's out there, right? Googling 'Eat More Cake' at the moment gives a good assortment of information - our websites (MySpace, Facebook, etc.), YouTube videos, reviews of Red Sky, gig dates, etc. Here's a selection of some of the highlights at the moment:

Eat More Cake Interview on The List Mag (San Diego entertainment magazine)

Red Sky at #100 in the Swiss Dance Charts!

Eat More Cake's remix of Kandi in top 100 tracks of 2009 on Stop Me's blog

Urbantorque Transmissions page for our 1 hour mix - if only for the comments!

Enjoy!

EPK!

Electronic Press Kit. It's a perfectly simple concept: make available the information you would wish to present to press/venues/agents/management in an online format.

Strange, then, that there is such a wide range of EPK variations around, with completely different concepts and that very little useful information exists about what to include, and how to go about it. Google gives you millions of results for people who want to help you build your EPK (for a price), or will do it for you (for a price), or will host it on their EPK-generating website (for a price), etc.

So we decided to make it up as we went along (nothing new there).

We've been working on a video biog/epk for a while. It's been really difficult to get round everybody we wanted to in a suitable location (everywhere's so noisy these days!), to interview them about their involvement. However, we have finally crowbarred the whole lot together with a whole load of live and studio footage to come up with this, our video biography:

The rest of the web EPK is made up of stuff we think is useful: a written biog (also downloadable), a load of photos (also downloadable), some previews of songs, links to our YouTube content and contact information. Personally, I'm very pleased with the result having taught myself a lot more web-type stuff to get it working properly. Let's hope it proves useful for those that use it.

For your pleasure, here is our Electronic Press Kit:

www.eatmorecake.com/epk

Eat More Cake LIVE! Wednesday 3rd February

So we're back at The Underbelly, Hoxton Square tomorrow night (early doors - on stage around 8pm). Last time we played there I blogged about the excellent quality of the sound and the engineer, so I'm hoping it's the same guy tomorrow!

We've made quite a big change to the set list this time round. We've got half a mind on our festival dates for the summer, so we're attempting to liven up the set a little bit. It's always a shame to drop songs from the set, especially ones that go down really well, but in these days of 30 minutes slots, something will always have to make way for new stuff to come through.

Talking of new songs, you can catch a preview of our next track, "Fear No Evil" on our MySpace page now! Featuring mixes from Choking Dolphin and Steviebeatbox, the single will be available for FREE in the next week or so.

Meanwhile, if you're coming down to the Underbelly tomorrow, don't forget to RSVP to the Facebook event for discounted entry. Hope to see you there!

Shoot More Video!

I think it's amazing just how many people turn to YouTube as a first source of reference. It's become secondary only to Google as a site I turn to in order search for information about stuff.

And I'm not just talking about films/tv shows/bands - things that translate easily to the medium of video. I regularly use it to find software tips and tutorials, product reviews, I even search it to find videos shot in venues we're playing at to get an idea of stage layout, etc... And with the number of people playlisting music these days, it's a fairly practical alternative to services such as Last.fm for finding new music as well!

So it goes without saying that anyone attempting to promote anything these days should have a presence on YouTube. We've been posting tracks on YouTube for a while now - mostly with static images to accompany the music (as many people do). More recently, Andy shot our own low-budget video for Red Sky, which we were both very pleased with. We've also uploaded some videos of our live performances as well.

So now we're turning our hand to some other video work. Last weekend, we headed down to Docklands to shoot a video for our next FREE single, Fear No Evil. As with everything like this, we pulled in some favours to make this happen - an old friend of ours, Graham, is shooting and editing the video for us, and Dhiraj of Primal Pictures was kind enough to let us use his space at Limehouse Town Hall.

In true non-rock star fashion, there was much self-conscious shuffling when I was asked to bop away and lip-synch to the track - there's a reason Andy is the front man of this operation! I was much more comfortable behind my trusty QS7 playing away... However, thanks to everyone involved, I think we're going to end up with something pretty special for this video.

On the subject of video, we're also in the process of recording and editing our own electronic press kit at the moment. We've been collecting video footage for a good while now and it's great fun looking back over old clips of rehearsals and recording sessions to find stuff for the EPK. This is a much more personal video - a genuine look at the how's and why's of what we do.

And so our video presence grows, and hopefully people coming to YouTube as a first point of reference for Eat More Cake will find our channel useful!

www.youtube.com/eatmorecaketv

Eat More Cake on Urbantorque Transmissions!

So what better way to enjoy the snow than with one hour of the purest wintery chill-out in all the world, courtesy of Eat More Cake with Urbantorque Transmissions and Noice!

We put together this one hour show for Urbantorque which is syndicated across 11 radio stations across Europe. You can also listen to or download the mix on Urbantorque's website, or on MixCloud.

We had great fun putting this together, and it would be great to know what you think of it so please drop us a line and let us know!

Meanwhile, we're putting the finishing touches to our next free giveaway, so we'll post details of that very soon!

Ut Transmissions - 14/01/10 - Eat More Cake by Urban Torque® on Mixcloud

Ableton Live Suite 8! Woop!

So I managed to justify the cost. Sort of. To myself (and my credit card) at least...

Thanks to Ableton's 10-year anniversary 20% off sale, I am now the proud owner of Ableton Live Suite 8. Just finished downloading all 1.5+GB of it and am now decidedly excited about getting home and putting it on my Mac. Woo-hoo!

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking of upgrading. I'd been thinking about it for a while, since I was still running version 6 on stage, and I don't like being too far behind the times. Also, now our main Cubase-running studio PC is not in my project studio, I wanted to embrace a new way of working in a new environment, rather than just using something else to do the same job (same plugins, same workflows, etc.). Live Suite seemed to be the sensible way forward, and I can still run my old favourite VSTs if necessary through Ableton.

So I'm a happy bunny, and I'm also looking forward to seeing if a new software environment will change the way I've been writing recently. A lot of the ideas that came out of my project set-up were too big, too loud, too tired. I was writing on autopilot: make beat, add layer, add usual compression with usual settings, send to group, add usual saturation plugins, add more layers, add usual reverb, etc...

I'll keep you posted - maybe I'll even post some snippets of the ideas that come out of my first writing sessions with Ableton. Watch this space!