Cosine Wizards

Productive sesh on Sunday. We finished off two tracks ('In Banks We Trust' and 'Short Stack'), so they can now be added to the 'squad' of songs we can perform live - and at 12 we've probably now enough for a whole album. Plus we've got 4 or 5 other tracks which we're going to be working up in the coming month. 

In November, we're hoping to:
 
- Put a video of 'Dis Wizzad' on YouTube;

- Get 'Lucy Lu' mastered professionally to see how much better they can make it. If the answer is "a lot", then we'll see if we can sell it on iTunes and gradually start doing that with all the tracks;

- Get another track on the website ('Pipeline').

We're also going to enter the Glasto battle of the bands thing when they open the competition. We were there earlier in the year as punters, and are hoping to be there next year as performers!

We put in a solid session of work this Sunday, with Cedric Devious in a remarkably hyperactive mood following a Happy Mondays gig at Brixton Academy the night before. They actually gave a very entertaining performance! Bez might as well have been the front man, leaping about from one side of the stage to the other repeatedly for the entire one and a half hour set. Presumably he wasn't just on the lucozade. Shaun Ryder delivered all of his vocals in a strangely withdrawn position, at one point sitting at the foot of the drum kit! I guess you'd call that understated.

We've now rerecorded parts of the vocal take to our existing demo track, 'Pipeline', which we weren't entirely happy with, and following some rearranging and final production, we'll be adding this to the three tracks already on the website.

Also in a spontaneous moment of inspiration we laid down a template for a new track, 'Cedric Devious'. Just penned a few lyrics, belted them out to a drum beat and wove them in with a typically sick Tapper riff. Then threw in a couple of other musical ideas and harmonies. We're liking the sound of it already, hopefully can work it up with full lyrics and arrangement fairly soon.

Cosine Out

We have to say we're a bit annoyed by the recent decision by The Charlatans and Radiohead to make their latest albums available for free download. Okay, so fans will be invited by Radiohead on their website to pay anything they want for 'In Rainbows' on its release on 10 October, but in practice it seems difficult to imagine most customers opting to pay more than just the credit card handling fee (45p). The Charlatans' reasoning is that they would rather increase their potential live audience through free downloads, than get ripped off by their record company in order to sell CDs. OK. But have they thought for one second about the possible implications this could have on peoples’ expectations?

Market and media forces are very powerful: as soon as a few big names start giving their material away for free - especially cool bands like Radiohead - it is not difficult to imagine this encouraging, possibly even shaming, more and more high profile bands and artists into following suit. At first glance this may seem great, but of course, this only favours those acts with established back-catalogues who can realistically expect to make a decent living from playing live (like, say, Radiohead and the Charlatans). Where does that leave those artists whose main source of income is the records themselves? Let alone unsigned acts like ourselves.

In an ideal world we'd all be giving away our music for free, but the truth of the matter is we need money to do the essentials: book studios for rehearsals and recordings, mastering tracks, buying instruments and equipment. etc. Presumably it is so long ago for acts like the Charlatans that they have forgotten they were once in this boat themselves.

Obviously, we're not saying here that we, or any other unsigned act, has a right to a living in the music business. But at the same time, it is simply impossible to expect people to produce new music if there is so little money in the industry that they cannot even aspire to so much as giving up the day job.

We want to make a selection of tracks accessible on our website for free, but with a facility to download, which we currently have off site on amazingtunes.com, for 79 p a track. This is something that we are looking to build into the site, and beyond that we are planning to juggle the tracks that are available on the site / for download from time to time, and making a CD of a range of tracks purchasable for a couple of quid. We see this as saying, thanks for your support, and if you want to check out more of our stuff, please help us in our efforts to dedicate more time, effort and resources to new and existing material.

Cheers,

Cosine Wizards

While not immediately relevant to the more pressing travails of the Cosine Wizards, I've recently been experiencing the deep frustrations of trying to find affordable left hand guitars. Obviously I wouldn't expect there to be that great a choice, but still, there are far less left handed guitars on sale than there are say sets of left handed golf clubs in the shops. But then, that's still more than left handed hockey sticks so I suppose I can't complain. I am left handed by the way, by design rather than choice, that is.

Anyway after getting outbid by 16 seconds on ebay last night the seller's come back to me with a slightly higher offer of £120 for a brand new acoustic-electro guitar, same version of the 'used but new condition' one I bid for (apparently worth £350). I'm going to go for it, as it just seems incredibly difficult to find anything under £100 (other than quite a few value guitars than don't ship from the United States). For those guitar geeks out there, its a Tanglewood TFCE-SCT super folk cutaway guitar with a cedar top, Rosewood back and sides, celluloid bound body, Rosewood fingerboard and bridge, nickel silver frets and a tanglewood EQ system. Not that I have any clue what any of that means. I was definitely sold on the description alone.

I did put a bid in for another one on ebay but I can't take the uncertainty of having to wait five days and not knowing whether you're going to get anything at the end of it. I just want a frigging guitar !

Dev

It was pointed out to us today that all the photos uploaded to our website are actually not our property - they were in fact taken by our good friend, Miracle. We have therefore added an acknowledgement on the end of the slide show on our website and appointed Miracle aka Tarquin Otter, Roachfather, Snakeroach and Roachface official band photographer and hopefully this will help prevent a premature lawsuit.

Also, the band was out on the town last night for the homecoming of Miracle following his three week odyssey round Japan. Cedric Devious turned up sporting a classic eighties style, crescent shaped moustache, and we just had to add the photo below to our website. Looking uncannily like Lionel Ritchie, the novelty one-night only tash was shaved off this morning.

Today we worked on a new vocal take to the rap parts of Dis Wizzad, with the aim of giving them greater prominence in the mix. We spent most of the day getting this where we wanted it and added in an extra vocal part too, through sheer accident (often a primary source of creative ideas). Rudi Tapper has discovered a way to add more punch to tracks essentially through a process of double tracking: he will be applying that to all three tracks on the website and we will then re-release them.

Beyond that we are going to get Lucy Lu mastered, just to see for starters how mastering can improve the sound of our tracks, as we have exclusively been using Cubase. The idea is to get all our tracks mastered, so that we can get them sounding properly professional.

Laters,

Cosine Wizards

Thought we'd feed our stuff to the wolves and see what happens. You can view our page here at http://www.amazingtunes.com/users/cosinewizards .

Hasn't been much of a response recently, though we only added the tracks at about 4am last night! The great thing about doing this is that it really sharpens the mind, we're already starting to see what we might need to do to make the stuff sound better.

Over and out,

Cosine Wizards
 

Hi there 

The Cosine Wizards are a melodic spoken word fusion act comprising Cedric Devious (lead vocals) and Rudi Tapper (keyboards/backing vocals), aka Frustrated Civil Servants Anonymous. 

We have launched our new website at cosinewizards.net , with our first three demo tracks for you to check out, numerous photos and an interactive forum. We hope you enjoy it. More music and web features will be coming soon, as will our first video, so watch this space.

We are also currently planning to gig later in the year, and we'll be back to you with dates as soon as we have them.

Thus far we've been working on composing, fine tuning and producing around 15 tracks over the past two years, with our creative nexus veering somewhere between Sutton and Balham and channelled through Cubase. 

So far it's been a very stimulating escape from the mundanity of the everyday 9 to 5 slog, albeit hard work in itself. We are now really excited about taking the Cosine Wizards to the next level. This blog will not only cover the latest news on the band, but will also allows to communicate our thoughts on anything and everything. 

Easy now, 

Cedric Devious

Rudi Tapper