Phil Rossi has posted a bunch of the Eden podcast at both the CrescentStation site as well as at PodioBooks. I did the soundtrack work for this and while I didn’t get to make as many pieces as I had originally intended due to schedule, it’s still a lot of exciting noisemaking with a good friend of mine. Check it out and while you’re at it, listen to his first podcast novel, “Crescent” as well.

The second Victoria’s Secret video using Juniper Lane’s songs is up on YouTube. This one features an instrumental of our song, “Take Me Home”, which has also been seen on ESPN’s Baseball Tonight and MTV’s The Hills.

Two of our songs from the album Wake From Yourself are being used in one of the online promos for Victoria’s Secret fashion show. It’s pretty disturbing and awesome to hear “Memento” and “Follow Me” with supermodels talking over them. A guy could get used to this.

Phil Rossi is a long time friend of mine who I’ve jammed with over the years in his outfit, The Bad Habit. He did a podcast novel last year entitled “Crescent” that did really well and you can still get for free from iTunes. Dark Sci-fi theme.

He’s started a new one, and I’m helping him score it. Eventually, when it’s all done, I’ll collect the pieces and put it out as a record. Here’s a snippet from the first episode that we’re working on right now:

Eden Appears (mp3, 3.6MB)

More to come!

Freddy and I produced a track for Honor By August for the Alternative Addiction sponsored compilation entitled An Alternative Christmas. We did all the recording in the studio in my apartment and it was mastered by Dave Harris at Studio B Mastering in Charlotte.

You can hear the song on the Borealis Studios myspace page.

Here’s what just went up on the HBA blog on MySpace:

Dear friends and fans of HBA:

It is with a heavy heart that I announce my departure from Honor By August. Over the last (almost) two years, I’ve had the time of my life on the road with the guys but it’s come to the point where I cannot give my full attention and energies to furthering the band. I feel that in this critical stage in the band’s development, they need an individual who will be there in full mind and body at every moment. And I sadly am not that person right now in my life.

Some of you know that I’ve been working on my solo project, Rotoscope (www.myspace.com/rotoscope) for many years and also my electronic project, Boboroshi and Kynz (www.myspace.com/boboroshikynz). Both projects have full-length records coming out before the end of the year. I’m also starting a production career with Brian Frederick of Juniper Lane called Borealis Studios.

So I, as my predecessor Joe, will pass the torch to the next person. I will miss every moment on stage and will hold this time close to my heart. I’ll be going away for a while to the studio and performing locally both solo and with Juniper Lane (www.myspace.com/juniperlane). In the words of Bono, it’s “time to go away and dream it all up again…”

I hope to see you in the audience at an HBA show in the future. This time standing next to you as a fan.

Love and Peace -
John Athayde/Kid A

Catch you all on the flip side…

After many years of writing, recording, mixing, remixing, trashing, rewriting, re-remixing and finally mastering, the first full length record from my electronica project, Boboroshi and Kynz, is available via iTunes (US, Aus/NZ, UK/EU, Japan and Canada), as well as Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, GroupieTunes, Amazon MP3 and Lala.

The track listing is:

• The Mo(u)rning Song
• As Good As You
• Dire Necessity
• 5am
• The Vigilance
• Arpelago
• Abbreviation
• Highline
• Hope
• Sunset

The record is currently only available for digital download. And now, Kynz and I can return to figuring out what we’re going to do for our next record, which hopefully will take less than the seven years this one did.

We’ve released the music video for the Honor By August single Into the Light, Directed by our good friend Timothy Devine

Check it out!!

Way overdue, but I finally have posted my SXSW photos to flickr.

Amy and I gave our panel on the first day of SXSW interactive and it was a blast. It was nice to have it out of the way so we could chill and enjoy the rest of the week. Despite a one day sickness that I warded off (and developed into South By Scurvy upon my return to DC) I was out and about at the conference center and Sixth Street Environs.

Here’s the breakdown of Photos:

SXSW Interactive

SXSW Music

Hotel Café Tour @ Parish

Sara Bareilles @ Parish

Honor by August (my band) at the 7th & Trinity Guitar Hero Stage (photos by our manager Trish on my camera)

and finally, but not least of all, Paramore at La Zona Rosa

I sent Jim Bacon an email last night asking about why the Virginia Railway Express had not utilized the westbound rail corridor heading out towards Charlottesville (and through a lot of the boom area in Fairfax and Loudoun counties) as a new line. For those of you who follow the Virginia transportation mess, and care about sustainable development, you really should check out Jim’s blog Bacon’s Rebellion Blog and his bi-weekly e-zine of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Jim saying that he had checked out Rotoscope (myspace) (via the link in my email signature) and liked it enough to put up a post on the Bacon’s Rebellion Blog. Looking at the comments, Waldo might have felt that he had stepped into the twilight zone when he opened up his RSS feed this morning.

I think I might need to gather my thoughts and write an article about the VRE…

Just in time for the holidays, Lowwatt Recording releases the new Lowwatt Glow compilation. Twenty tracks from different artists that have worked at the studio with Ted Comerford (also my producer). I did the design work for it. You should love it. Try to grab one from one of the bands or from the studio or various shops around Raleigh, NC.

We just got back from a five day run in Mystic, CT working on new material and doing pre-production for our upcoming recording sessions in mid-December. There’s something about the space that just lets us create in a very good way. We rolled in the first night to just setup the recording gear and hang out. Halfway through setup Evan starts playing a simple piano riff and Michael jumps on it. Come 4am, we had a song from scratch: “Johnny (Pass Me Another One)”. We got the five songs from earlier this year demoed and wrote another four new ones. And had some great jams and a lot of fun (including a jaunt into NYC for Alison Becker’s Christmas party at Pete Wentz’s bar in Alphabet City).

You can see pictures of the adventure on flickr.

After years of making music together, Kynz and I finally decided to put out a Boboroshi & Kynz ( myspace ) record before the end of the year. It will have ten tracks and actually clock in at almost exactly 80 minutes. The track listing as of today is as follows:

The Mo(u)rning Song
As Good As You
Dire Necessity
5AM
The Vigilance
Arpelago
Abbreviation
Highline
Hope
Sunset

Some of these songs have been released on this blog before and some of them are up on our myspace page. It’s going to be digital distribution only at first until we can figure out the whole vinyl/whatever thing.

When Honor by August goes out on the road, it’s generally on the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and Atlanta along the various stretches of I-85, I-95, I-40, I-64 and so on that exist east of the Appalachian Mountains. We, like most bands, have a conversion van. We don’t even have a trailer. All the gear [fig. 1], clothes, and four guys pile into “Murdoch”, our lovable Ford E-150 Conversion Van, and head out on the road.

In the last 16 months of being on the road with the band, one thing has become abundantly clear: we are internet addicts.

It’s not just surfing DListed or Perez Hilton or checking on the Weather. We like being connected. I will put in four plus billable hours from the van per day I’m out on the road. Sometimes, on the long hauls, I can get a full day of work done just from the van. One of the best features of the MacBook Pro plus Verizon EV-DO card setup that we utilize is a nifty feature called “Internet Sharing”. This allows us to take the connection on one laptop from the EV-DO card and create a closed wi-fi network using one of the laptops as a base station.

It’s quite simple to setup. Plug the card in, open the system preferences and go to “Sharing” and set it up like this:

And with that simple setup, three of four band members are online. If it were four out of four band members, there would be serious concern about the proper operation of a moving vehicle, so we shall stay firmly fixed at the 75% mark. This connectivity allows not only the guys to stay in touch with friends, but to also work last minute show promotion, route around traffic accidents (yay Google Maps drag-to-alter-this-route feature), and get some work done as well. I’ve many a time made a poster and emailed it off to our booking agent, or updated tour dates on the website, etc.

Now, this isn’t perfect, as there are some drop out areas. All the major cities are usually Broadband speeds. I-26 in South Carolina is a wireless deadzone. West Virginia into Ohio drops down to dial-up speeds for most of the trip. However, most of I-76 through Pennsylvania is actually quite speedy on the download rate.

At the end of the day, it’s about maximizing the effectiveness of everyone in the band. If you can get three people to put in a few hours of promotion a day, that equates to a lot of exposure for the band, and hopefully a better show draw because of it.

I’ve been quite behind in getting photographs up into Flickr and I’m starting to get back on track after being on the road for most of the last month. Here’s the photos from Honor by August’s trip to Los Angeles when we played the Viper Room.

London pix coming soon!