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Pillowfish comprises songwriters Tom Drinkwater and Helen Bell, performing on 10-string bouzouki, viola, violin, guitar and voices. “a distinctive originality … intriguing songs are twinned with constantly moving melody lines … stimulating, inventive and rewarding” – Rock’n'Reel magazine 
We’ve recorded a new version of ‘The Ice Sculptor’ – one of the songs from our acoustic first album Common Knowledge. The new track has an expanded studio arrangement – rather than just being a rendition of what we can perform live in the duo – and a reworked lyric. The new version of the song was recorded as a experiment in trying out new equipment and techniques prior to recording the next album. Here’s a preview clip: We’re offering the full track as a high quality download in a variety of formats, which you can burn to CD or play from your computer or portable audio device. To download it, enter your email address in the box below:  Click to view in high definition on Vimeo
Live video of She’s So Dark from a gig at the Black Swan, York, earlier this year. Just found this video that someone made of one of our Second Life gigs and posted on YouTube: Make sure you hit the ‘HQ’ button to see it in better quality. The Second Life grid was kind of crashy that night and logging people out all over the place, so it’s a shame there aren’t that many in the audience – but on the other hand it’s often much easier to take SL video without too many avatars slowing everything down… Our first high definition videos are now up on the HD video site Vimeo – live recordings of our songs ‘Wider’ and ‘Narcissus’. View them on our Vimeo channel here: http://www.vimeo.com/pillowfish During a recent Second Life / Real Life conference in London last month we played a video gig at the Blarney Stone in Virtual Dublin, which was broadcast on a big screen in the Bedford Pub in real-life London as a demonstration of the technological developments in virtual music at the conference ‘icebreaker’ event. Live performers in London also performed as avatars in Second Life, as well as some other SL performers. There’s a write-up in the Metaverse Messenger, on page 19 of the Oct 28th issue. Having recently started streaming video as well as audio into Second Life, we’re branching out – using the live video website UStream we did our first video gig that was accessible via web browsers last week. The Ustream interface includes an interactive text chat feature. We’ve embedded the whole lot – video and chat – onto a page on our website, so you can either watch it at http://www.pillowfish.co.uk/live_video_ustream.html – our ‘live’ page, or on the UStream site at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/pillowfish-live-gig. You can see the schedule for these gigs on our online gig list, and there is also a Facebook group that you can join if you want to receive news and updates about them: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=86224170455. The next scheduled event is on Sunday 19th Oct at 9pm BST – hope you can make it! We have a new photo stream on Flickr- and we’ve got it started with some pictures taken by Jeaninne Mathilde at the Whisky in the Dark single launch party – you can view them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pillowfish/. Our new studio track Whisky in the Dark is released today as a download. You can download it by signing up to our email list on the downloads page… The release party is being held tonight at 8pm BST at Therapy, on second life. Thanks to Raven Skall for hosting us!
You can hear our track, and all the others that will be included in the compilation, on their MySpace: Having started performing in SL as a publicity/promotional exercise, we found that actually there are a number of ways in which playing gigs on second life is superior to most real life gigs available to not-totally-famous-yet acts. In fact SL has been so much better for us that we’ve stopped taking the crappier gigs in RL, and as a result our RL gig list looks quite empty at the moment, but it’s just not worth our while doing rubbish RL gigs when we can do good ones in SL. This is the first of a series of blog entries each outlining one way in which SL gigs are good and explaining why we no longer see SL as just promo, but actually an integral part of our music making. Why we play on Second Life Part 1: The sound is better Sound quality is important to us. The tone of the voices and instruments is a big part of our music, and we like it to be discernible to the audience. Clear sound to hear the lyrics is also important for our wordier songs, and of course, when we can hear ourselves properly, we play better. Read More >>> |
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Our track Seven Stolen Stars is included on the Folk Rising 2 compilation of folk and folk-influenced acts signed to Proper Distribution. Since almost the entire English folk scene (and beyond) is distributed through Proper, there’s quite a selection. The CD is to be released on 7 July.