The String Contingent

Hello from Tasmania!

We flew in to Launceston on Monday after an early start in Sydney, and played the first concert of our Tassie tour in Leith. We are playing 5 concerts this trip, Leith, St Helens tonight, the Lark distillery in Hobart on Thursday, Cygnet on Saturday and Bruny Island on Sunday. Details for all concerts can be found on our website, as always, and if you’d like to come to our Hobart concert book beforehand for cheaper tickets.

We have plenty of news, so I’ll keep it brief.

Our new album ‘TSC II’, won Best Album by a band featuring a fiddler at the Golden Fiddle Awards! Holly also won Best Composition for the first track on the album ‘Chorizo y Queso’; you can hear this track on our website on the ‘music’ page.

‘TSC II’ will be featured by Doug Spencer on ABC Radio National’s ‘The Weekend Planet’ on Sunday 19th of February. Details can be found on the Radio National website http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/weekendplanet/.

Next week we will be recording an album of Scottish fiddle music with Emma Nixon and Tony Vandemeer for the National Library Folk Fellowship. Emma and I (Chris) spent the two weeks before Christmas researching Australia’s Scottish fiddle heritage at the Library, and we’ll be releasing the CD and tune book at the National Folk Festival in April, along with a presentation/concert based around our research.

I am very excited to be teaching at the Sunshine Fiddle Camp, alongside George Jackson, Hanneke Cassel (USA) and Karen and Jacko Jackson, 28th/30th September. Details will soon be up on our website, but email me now if you are interested in booking a place, as numbers are limited and will book out early.

Looking ahead to the near future back on the mainland: TSC will be playing the Cobargo Folk Festival (NSW) on the 25th/26th of Feb, then head to WA for a short tour alongside Lucy Wise and The B’Gollies around the Nannup Music Festival (2-4th March). Then back to Victoria for the Port Fairy Festival and a special B’Gollies concert at Thornbury Theatre (Melbourne) on the 16th March. Among our other Victorian concerts TSC will be playing at the Brunswick Music Festival and Yackandandah Folk Festival before heading to New Zealand at the end of March.

Also in March TSC will be undertaking a composition residence at Cowwarr Artspace over 2 weeks (pending outcome of grant application), culminating in a concert of new works on the 22nd of March. Visit Cowwarr Artspace at www.cowwarr.com for more details, and keep an eye on our blog while we are there…we’ll be writing a daily blog over over the two weeks, keeping you updated with how the new music is progressing.

And that’s all from us for now, hopefully we’ll see you soon at concert or festival, and as always, thanks for your support of us and our music,

Chris, Holly and Graham.

Dear friends and fans of TSC,

Hello, and happy new year to you! We hope you had an enjoyable and relaxing time over the holiday period. Already it seems far away… The String Contingent, along with Lucy Wise and the B’Gollies were honoured to be a part of the fantastic Woodford Folk Festival over new year’s eve, where we played some great concerts and hung out with some amazing people and excellent musicians from all over the world. Large amounts of gratitude are expressed again to well-known Aussie musician Andrew Clermont, who leant me a guitar for our first performance upon my arrival from Scotland. Why did I need to borrow a guitar? Well, you’d have to ask the baggage handlers at Heathrow airport, who, I am forced to surmise, have an unhealthy obsession with my possessions, delaying their progress on long haul flights for the fourth time running! I have been ‘well recompensed though’, with ‘profuse apologies’ from the airline in question… Anyway, to business! We thought we’d get in touch to let you know what’s going on in the TSC camp for the next wee while!

So, first up, we’re launching our brand new album ‘TSC II’ at a series of special concerts in the coming weeks. We hope you can make it along to one of them to help us launch it in style! First up is our Sydney launch, that’s happening at 505, on the corner of Cleveland St and Perry St, Surrey Hills, Sydney, on Thursday 19^th Jan. Then comes our Melbourne launch, we’ll be at Northcote Uniting Church, 251 High St, Northcote, Melbourne on Saturday 21^st Jan. Skip forward a week or two and you’ll find us in Brisbane at Saint Mary’s Anglican Church, 455 Main St, Kangaroo Point, Brisbane on Sunday 5^th February. We’re excited to announce that support will be provided at the Melbourne and Sydney gigs by the wonderful Lucy Wise, and in Brisbane we’re delighted to be joined on the bill by Little Creatures. Further details, times and addresses and the like can be found on our gigs page, where you can also pre-book your tickets for all three concerts; Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Next, we’d like to remind you about some of the festivals and other gigs we’ll be at in the near future. We’ve started the year off by touring as both TSC and Lucy Wise and the B’Gollies concurrently, and under this joint guise will be appearing at Illawarra Folk Festival this weekend, and Newstead Live Music Festival at the end of January. February will see The String Contingent touring Tasmania from the 13^th to the 19^th and also heading to the Cobargo Folk Festival. We’ve got a whole bunch of other gigs, house concerts, and workshops throughout the month and beyond, best bet is to check out the gigs page for details. March will see us head over to Western Australia along with Lucy Wise and the B’Gollies for the Nannup festival, and we’ll be in touch nearer the time with more details on our WA tour.

In other exciting news, The String Contingent, along with our new album TSC II, have been nominated in 4 categories of the Golden Fiddle Awards 2012! We are nominated for the following categories; Best Group featuring a Fiddler, Best Fiddler as a Soloist, Best CD by a Group featuring a Fiddler (you’ll recall of course that our debut album won this particular accolade last year…), and Best Fiddle Composition, for a number of tracks from the new album. The winners are announced at the Tamworth Country Music Festival towards the end of January, we’ll let you know how we go…

So that’s a bit of an update for you, as ever we’d like to thank you for your continued support for us and live music. We’ve only just started this tour and already the warmth and friendship we’ve experienced from audiences has been amazing. Long may it continue!

We look forward to seeing you at a concert or festival soon, warmest regards from Graham, Holly, Chris, and Wally the Wombat.

Dear Friends and Fans,

We are excited to announce that pre-sales for our new album TSC II are now open on our website! Head to www.thestringcontingent.com/purchase.php

We are celebrating the release of TSC II with a discounted price of $25 until Christmas, and we’ve also reduced the price of our first album The String Contingent to $25. We have added a cart to our Paypal system, enabling multiple copies of multiple albums to be selected and payed for in the same transaction (to make your Christmas shopping just a bit less painful!). If you’d prefer, just email us for alternative methods of payment.

With the aid and assistance of Australia Post, we’ll be able to get your albums to you before Christmas if you pre-order now, or at the very latest by the 19^th of December. To be sure, and particularly for international and interstate postage, please order early and give us and the Post a chance.

On our website you can hear tracks from TSC II and our other albums on the ‘music’ page, read the full track listing of TSC II and our other albums on the ‘buy’ page, and keep an eye on our 2012 concert dates on the ‘gigs’ page.

Thanks again for your support of us and our music. As always, you can help us by forwarding, posting and generally sharing this message to help us reach the masses!

We hope you enjoy TSC II, and look forward to seeing you at a concert in 2012.

Chris, Holly, Graham and Wally the Wombat.

Good news everyone!

Our new album, TSC II, is on its way to the printers! Many hours of composition, arrangement, rehearsal, recording, mixing, mastering, art, photography and graphic design have all been folded into a neat little package for your convenience! As with our debut album, The String Contingent, we have recorded live takes of our pieces in their entirety, this time in the large recording room of Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne.

As a thank you to our supporters, we are sending everyone on our mailing list a free mp3 of the first track, Chorizo y Queso. This piece was inspired by the experience of walking the Camino de Santiago or Way of St James, the ancient pilgrimage route through northern Spain. You can help us promote our new album by forwarding this email and mp3 to all your friends and family. Feel free post it, share it, burn in, download it, upload it, play it in private, play it in public and generally shout it from the rooftops. Please let us know what you think on our facebook page by leaving a comment and don’t forget to ‘like’ the page while you are there. If you are not on our mailing list and would like us to send you the free track, please sign up now!

For those of you don’t know, mp3 files are a smaller, lower quality file type, great for sharing music easily over the web. While this file will sound great on your stereo or through headphones, it  is no substitute for a high quality CD, played on a high quality stereo, which is exactly how we’d like you to experience our new album!

We hope you enjoy Chorizo y Queso and look forward to sharing the full album with you. You’ll be able to pre-order TSC II from our website www.thestringcontingent.com from the 5th of December – the album itself will be ready to send on the 12th of December, to give your copy time to get to you before Christmas…

Many thanks and happy listening,

Holly, Chris and Graham

Dear TSC friends and fans,

We hope you are reading this from the comfort of your favourite chair, ideally with a cup or glass of something nice. That’s exactly where we’ll be headed very soon, but first we have a tour to finish and a brand new album to finalize for you… Let me tell you a little about what we’ve been up to since I (Graham) arrived in Sydney at the start of October.

It’s been a busy few weeks for us – I’m only on this side of the world for 6 weeks total this trip! We tried to pack as much into this period as we could, with the result that only now are we updating the blog! We started straight into gigs, in Canberra, Bendigo and Castlemaine to name but a few, and then a one day festival in NSW, Folk in the Foothills. This meant jet lag was a non-option as we quickly settled into playing together again, having been apart since I flew home from Perth, WA in May. An appearance as part of the exciting ‘Twist’ concert series at Sydney’s Curious Works venue followed and then we were off to New Zealand for the weekend to play at Wellington Folk Festival. We had a great time there and received amazingly warm responses from a lovely festival audience – perhaps partially spurred on by the twin factors of nice weather (gumboots are usually essential at ‘Wellyfest’) and NZ winning a certain sporting event….

Our NZ banjo-playing buddy BB joined us for a unique rendition of King Offa at Wellyfest - thanks to Don Laing for the great pic!

Back in Aus and back down our old friend the Hume Highway towards Melbourne for a couple of exciting gigs there – notably a support slot for Scottish/American fiddle/cello duo Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas. This one was recorded by ABC Radio National for broadcast on a yet-to-be confirmed date, we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as we do! Then it was off to Maldon Folk Festival for performances there, both as TSC and as Lucy Wise and the B’Gollies, and then it was time to record our second album!

We’ve been working on new material all year and have been looking forward to recording a follow up to ‘The String Contingent’ ever since the first copies came back from the printers in March last year! Once again we chose to work with sound engineer-extraordinaire Mischa Herman, and once again we resisted temptation to edit, overdub, or alter anything in our playing. What you will get in the new album is what you got in the first album, just us, playing our music into some very expensive microphones! This time around we chose to work in Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne in their beautiful live room. We were delighted with the way our compositions went down onto tape (well, Pro Tools) and have just finished the mixing process, with mastering being booked for later this month. We have some great artwork ideas lined up too, but that’s a bit of a secret… you may have to wait for things to unfold in their own time… We’ll be sure to email again as soon as they are ready, but we expect to have it good to go by mid-December – just in time for Christmas! I’m confident they’ll make great presents for all ages…

Other things we have been up to have included booking gigs and finalising plans for our next tour of Australia and New Zealand, commencing with performances at Woodford Folk Festival, held over New Year in Queensland (www.woodfordfolkfestival.com, check out the program for a great line-up!) and then continuing with a whole heap of other festivals. Some already confirmed include Illawarra, Newstead, Cobargo, Nannup, Music Muster and Winter Moon. We’ll also be heading over to New Zealand for a two week tour in late March/early April, and are planning a jaunt down to Tasmania in February. We’ll also be planning official CD launch concerts around Australia in the early part of the year, more info on these as and when we have it. As ever we’ll be looking to play as many concerts as we can and generally work as hard as possible. If you might be able to help out with a house concert venue, or think your local school would be interested in having us for one of our schools workshops, please let us know!

Before I head home on November 14^th, we have our last festival of this tour, Music at the Creek, held in Majors Creek in NSW. Details on our gigs page or the festival website is www.musicatthecreek.com. We’ll be playing tracks from the new album and some brand new material as well.

As ever, we would like to thank you for your on-going support and friendship. We couldn’t sustain what we do unless people enjoyed it, so thank you for supporting us, putting us up, hanging out with us and buying our music! We are eternally grateful. Keep checking back on our website for the latest TSC happenings.

Thank you, and we hope to see you soon!

Graham, Chris, Holly, and Wally the Wombat