So when a camera crew from CNN showed up at our show at Once Lounge last week to record our performance to grab a few clips for a segment in their feature for their site Great Big Story, it felt pretty great. It was weird though, I mean, we were opening for bands with deep legacies (Trinary System featuring Roger Miller from Mission of Burma, and Black Helicopter featuring guys from 90s heroes Green Magnet School and Kudgel), and they packed up the cameras as soon as we were done. They’d actually been to our practice a week before and the results, well, are certainly great…

We’re off to Maine next Friday to play at the Portland Museum of Art, and have our June trek to the Greenville Drive In for their typewriter arts festival set as well. The artwork for the vinyl version of our EP is finished and it’s heading out to finally get pressed. And a story like this has been snowballing into other coverage and offers, so keep an eye on this space as we announce other shows. And if you’re on Instagram, make sure to follow us as we’ve nearly equalled followers and posts as we put up our 400th image.

Most bands spend half of their time at shows shilling for a table of merchandise hoping to make gas money to get themselves to the next gig. The last time I can recall that we even toted t-shirts to a venue, they never actually made it out of the trunk. However, the people they clamor for things and conveniently enough, we’ve got some new songs recorded to share with the world.

Instead of merely posting some songs on the internet and calling it a digital release and disappearing into the night, we’re gonna put these songs on vinyl. With 4 songs of an EP ready to go, we figured they’d fit nicely onto 10″s of wax. Plus that format evokes 78s which are as old as some of the manual typewriters that we use to make our music. We’re using the Kickstarter platform to crowdsource the funding of this project, so please donate and let other folks know what we’re up to

We hope that you’ll support our mission to put out a record. Please give all you can.

BTO Kickstarter

Sure, as the Boston Tpewriter Orchestra our sphere of influence is generally focused on the East Coast, having never ventured further than Washington DC for a live performance. Thankfully, one of the joys of making music in this era of technology is that recordings and videos can be seen and heard anywhere at all.

Now I’m not sure exactly how Doug Nichol came to hear of us, but he brought his cameras in and recorded us performing a few years ago. That footage has finally surfaced in the midst of his new documentary California Typewriter that debuted at the Telluride Film Festival this past weekend. While the film focuses on a shop in Berkeley, Jay and Chris both (separately) stopped in there with Doug while they were on vacations in the bay area.

For now all we get is that trailer, but we’ll keep you informed once it’s gonna be showing on this side of the country.

So we were on Google’s Doodle a few weeks back, now that we’re given them space, we’re showing off the process. We recorded this track with 6 of us mashing away at keys. To make it more “jazzy” Alex had a friend add a trombone track. The final result was us behind a piano track that Google found someone to throw on top of us. Choose for yourself.

Happy 113rd Birthday Langston Hughes! Amazingly enough, we have been asked by the Google Corporation to help celebrate the greatest poet of the Harlem Renaissance by providing a soundtrack to a Doodle on their website commemorating the date.

We’ll be posting our unadorned backing track later this week, as well as an alternate version with trombone rather than the piano version that is used here. But since that’s not around to link to just yet, we’ll toss this in your inbox: typist Jeff’s first Most Bitter album actually kicked off with an adaptation of Hughes’ poem “Sunset in Dixie.”