The LP cover

I marvel. I hope you do too. Photo by Sherry Heck, design by Simone Rubi.

Releases March 2011!

donations still going on here.

New album pre-order and donation site

The album is now mastered and being given 'brilliant colors' by Simone Rubi!! I've decided to use RTI to press the vinyl - they're the best in the business (plus they have photos of every single employee on their website) - and since it's a little pricier than other options, I'm making the album available for pre-order on this IndieGogo platform to raise a little more green. Click on the photo to read all about it, and please spread the word!

Pre-order The Deer Convention:

(photo by Danielle Rubi, taken in Brittany, France)

And, you can even get a song written just for you!!

Mastering The Deer Convention

Mastering session yesterday. I'm listening on different sound systems now, it's so much better than the unmastered version!

the tape machine we ran all the tracks through, to give them that special flavor.

the yellow blurbs are sound waves. when they're magnified a lot they look like a bunch of little fish bones on a string!

Flying High

Happy New Year! I started the year by experimenting with protools, so here is the result: my cover of a Bridget St John song - to you, in the hopes that you may all fly high this year indeed! I also played around with it and made a little movie, using some images from trains and buses I traveled on this year. You can watch it here.

Fly High (Bridget St John) by wingeddeer

Unearthing

Sad as the breeze from Helene Renaut on Vimeo.

I don't play this song anymore so it was fun to hear it again, especially with Jessica and Miranda singing harmonies...if you go to the vimeo link there are more songs from the same concert (I just learned how to cut up videos, yay!)

*

And this one I wrote for my nephew (he turned 5 yesterday!...):

To Be A Child from Helene Renaut on Vimeo.

A perfect day to read

This weekend brings us rain and winds and even a storm, and the perfect excuse to curl up on the daybed with a book. A good book. 

I've been on somewhat of a reading rampage lately, currently enjoying Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies- which seems to be one of his best recent books, on par with the adventures in mankind of the early ones. So far, even more exciting than Invisible, of which I thought the same thing (and I wasn't disappointed) when I started reading it a few weeks back. 

Another book that kept me reading all day last weekend was Houellebecq's La Carte et le Territoire- which just won the Goncourt prize in France, to great controversy (but don't the French love controversy?). Despite all the bad rep he's garnered with the critics and the press in recent years- not being quite PC enough for Paris' liberal intelligentsia - I still think he wrote yet another great book, one with unexpected depths and layers. One only has to look at his brilliant passages on the nature of creation and art, the fascinating (and hilarious) use of himself and other public figures as characters, or his astute vision of his country only a few years ahead, with a countryside revitalized by tourism and the young eco-entrepreneurs. He's merciless in his analysis of the modern world, yet almost tender when it comes to humanity, but without any sentimentalism. And need I say, it's all extremely well written.

(Have you noticed, I'm actually reading male writers? it had been a while. But I still want another Pagano for Christmas, and a Hélène Bessette is next on my shelf.)

What have you been reading lately?

Expecting to fly

So ecstatic about the Kickstarter project being completed and successful! It was an epic last 24 hours but we made it. Thank you everybody! I feel a little bit like this woman, ready to take flight but still a little afraid:

(photo borrowed from an online friend, source unknown to me...)