Feeling Big in Our Britches

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.

Kick Out the Jams

So thanks to the miracle of the internet, we’ve secured the financing to manufacture vinyl for Termination Without Prejudice, Volume 1, a 10″ EP set to feature some of our songs (we’d originally figured on 4, but we’ve been thinking of expanding it to add another track to each side for a total of 6). There’s still time left to pledge until 8pm EST on Cyber Monday (11/28). If you miss that deadline, we’ll be putting a pre-order option on our bandcamp page once everything is mastered and ready to roll.

We also announced that our cover art is being done by Brian Dewan, artist/sculptor/renaissance man extraordinaire who’s know best in the music world for the art on the cover of They Might Be Giants’ Lincoln album and on the inside of Neutral Milk Hotel’s On the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

While our last show of the year will be Chandler Travis’ Christmas bash at Once Somerville on Wednesday 12/21, the band is also in the midst of working on scheduling events for 2017, so if you’d like to see the band play near you, let us know the name of art galleries, museums, or other venues across the Northeast that might serve us well so we can present our sounds. Already in the works is a return to the Catskills for the 2nd Annual Typewriter Arts Festival in June and we’re looking to perform around the area when the documentary that we’re featured in, California Typewriter, premieres at a few locations around New England.

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We’re open to further treks, but getting us there is a bit prohibitive, so let us know…

 

 

Starting to Kick

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

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

BTO Kickstarter

 

Type Witch Way

Thankfully by the time we next play in Salem, the waves of tourists that gather over the days around Halloween will have waned. That means there should be a place to park when you come to see us perform at the Peabody Essex Museum for their Thursday night PEM/PM After Hours Party on November 17.

After performing in the auditorium earlier in the year during the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, this time we’ll be right in the atrium for everyone to see and hear as folks gather for their Signals event. It’s a celebration of Samuel Morse and will include a camera obscura and lots of code-breaking fun.

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Thursday, November 17, 2016
PEM/PM “Signals” 6-9pm
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
free to members, students, and Salem residents. $12 nonmembers

 

 

News of the Word

Everyone tells us that newspapers are dying. That the printed word isn’t printed anymore, it just flashes by in moments on LED screens. But the word is still around and occasionally there are tales of journalists that still do the bulk of their work on an old Underwood. In Boston the spirit of the old hardscrabble reporter hunting down leads (and filing FOIA briefs) exists in the form of the Boston Institute for Non-Profit Journalism.

Now why that might sound like an overly serious group that spends their time thinking about overly serious topics, it seems they do know how to party. Inviting us to come play at a brewery in Somerville is precisely the right way to approach things. So come and enjoy the day and we’re gonna play somewhere sometime in the midst of the mayhem. If we get a more precise read on things, we’ll let you know, but you know how journalists are, they do want all the information for themselves and love to push deadlines….

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Saturday, November 12, 2016
Holiday BINJ 2: Journalistic Boogaloo noon-5pm
Aeronaut Brewery, Somerville, Massachusetts
free, benefit for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism

Thanks Vermont

Weirdly there was more color on the leaves of southern New Hampshire than there were in the still verdant Green Mountains, but aside from the lack of crayon box foliage, we had an awesome time. Along with Martha Barnette, we were able to have a standing room only event to benefit the Burlington Book Festival.

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Plus we did find good places to stop along the way.

And while we haven’t read any reviews of our performance, we got great press in advance from Pamela Polston at Burlington’s Seven Days.

Going Green

You know how Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees? That’s sort of like what’s going on here as we’re in the opening slot of the centerpiece, Saturday night benefit concert at the Livak Ballroom at the UVM Davis Center. We’ll be warming up the crowd for Martha Barnette of the public radio program A Way With Words.

Somehow it’s taken more than a decade for it to happen, but BTO is finally getting the last check mark to complete the New England states where we’ve played concerts. We’ll be in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, September 17 as part of the 12th Annual Burlington Book Festival. Apparently these people didn’t realize that we don’t actually type words when we bash away at our typewriters, so don’t tell ’em until afterwards and we’ll see just how much fun we can have. And seeing as this is Vermont, we’ve even worked up our first bona fide Jam that we’ll be premiering at the show.

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Saturday, September 17th, 2016  
A Very Special Benefit for the Annual Burlington Book Festival 7pm
Livak Ballroom, UVM Davis Center, Burlington, Vermont
$20 in advance/$25 at the door

Going Coastal

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.