KingBathmat playing at Resonance Festival this Weekend

Just a brief update to let you know that KingBathmat are playing at The Resonance Festival in London this Sunday 3rd. Other bands playing on this day include BigElf and Anglagard + many others. The Resonance Festival is a 4 day event raising money for Macmillan Cancer. You can find details of the bands playing, the lineups, tickets etc at http://www.resonance-festival.com/

We have 2 other festival appearances lined up over the Summer and they are The Jackdaw Festival on the 16th-17th of August which is headlined by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown and we are also the opening act at The Summers End Festival on the Friday night followed by Touchstone and Lifesigns.
Details of these Festivals at links below
http://www.jackdawfestival.co.uk/
http://www.summersend.co.uk/

Other News

I'm Currently working on an instrumental album which is starting to sound immensely heavy, I've had to work hard at changing over a lot of equipment in the studio of late and its taken time to get used to using these new arcane tools but it is now starting to bear fruit. Hopefully should have something ready before the end of the year, if not earlier. Also this month I will start work on a 20 minute cover song of a 60s song which will hopefully be included in a vinyl compilation release for next year on an indie label, which would be great as I've always wanted to have something released on vinyl.

Oh yes and the remastered version of "Gravity Field" is still available for free download at http://kingbathmat.bandcamp.com/album/gravity-field-remastered-2014-edition if you wants it.



Thanks for your continued support
John Bassett and all at KingBathmat HQ

http://www.johnbassettmusic.com
http://www.facebook.com/johnbassettsolo
http://www.kingbathmat.com
http://instagram.com/johnbassettmusic

Interview with Rocktologist magazine

Here’s an interview I did recently with The Rocktologist magazine, they also reviewed both “Overcoming The Monster” and the more recent “Unearth”
http://www.therocktologist.com/interview-with-john-bassett.html

“Overcoming The Monster” Review
http://www.therocktologist.com/king-bathmat-ndash-overcoming-the-monster.html

“Unearth” Review
http://www.therocktologist.com/bassett-john-ndash-unearth.html

Cooking up some new sounds today.

"Stay Away From The Dark" on Prog Magazine COver CD out today

My song "Stay Away From The Dark" is on this month's Classic Rock Presents Prog magazine Cover Cd, the magazine is out today in newsagents up and down the country.

Interview with KaleidoscopeEars Radio

Interview - John Bassett (Kingbathmat) On His First Solo Album "Unearth" by Kaleidoscope Ears on Mixcloud

Video for song "Comedian"

Interview with Musik Reviews

Here is the english version of my interview with Andreas Schiffmann of German Website musikreviews.de

Original version can be found here 

First off, when did the idea to do a solo album come to your mind?

I've always wanted to do an acoustic themed album that was primarily focused on traditional song structures. I can remember when I first started to learn guitar I was more interested in creating original vocal melodic tunes over the chords I had just learned and I found this practice infinitely more intertesting and satisfying when starting out as opposed to learning a famous rock song such as purple haze or smoke on the water etc. I would spend many hours each night with a chord book, experimenting with various sequences of chords and inventing a vocal melody to go over the top of them, I would then record them on a cassette recorder, and take them down to my parents garage, where I would sit and smoke and listen back to those half formed tunes that did not exist earlier that day and had seemed to come from nowhere. With "Unearth" I wanted to recreate that feeling I used to have all those years ago when listening to that cassette recorder in the garage, but now with fully formed songs and production.

Again, some of the tracks, particularly the first two, seem to deal with paranoia and related issues; where does your fascination for that come from?

"Just because your paranoid, don't mean their not after you". From my perspective, the older you get, the more informed you should presumably become and yet the less sense I now make of it all. I was never one to be overly concerned with the state of the world until I first became self employed, and started utilising modern technology to make a living. It was then where I noticed numeric patterns occuring unnaturally and unfairly in a supposedly random and fair environment, how so much that I initially thought was random, haphazard and happened by chance, seemed to be anything but, and was all very systematic and predictable and yet I was being told the opposite. So any compulsion to misstrust the offical version of any story was born from then.

Why did "Unearth" have to be the title track?

Within the song "Unearth" is the lyric "reverse the curse", I was going to call the album that. But after a curious glance on the internet I found that this was a well used phrase and decided to go for the title of the song "UNEARTH" instead. I suppose the album is about unearthing emotions that have been buried for some time, and that by doing so it will "reverse the curse" that the failiure to acknowledge emotions can be overcome and that any detriment caused by them will be removed.

In "Pantomime" you seem to speak against material possessions. What is your stance towards worldly versus spiritual possessions? 

Theres nothing wrong with material possessions. I like getting things. You have these stereotypes of guru's giving up there earthly possessions in order to allow them to gain access to some form of spiritual gain, and yet therefore then subjecting themselves to abject poverty. Thats gotta be kinda silly, isn't it? The problem I forsee is when the accumulation of things becomes the main objective of life. If we look at advertising it makes you believe that everyones goal is to get a bigger car, or upgrade their house, that your status can only be elevated by the lofty price of your acquisitions. Charities are supposed to be benevolant organisations whose main purpose is to help, and yet many of them are business's run by ex-bankers that exploit the impoverished in cynical tv ads in order to extract a feeling of guilt from you and to encourage you to donate money on a monthly basis which they then take and then invest tens of millions of pounds of that money in tobacco, alcohol and arms companies. That don't sound like a charity to me? That sounds like a modern idea of a charity thats been twisted into life by a culture that is predominantly concerned with the acquisition of material things.

Is "Kylerhea" a simple hommage to the place?
 
Well I wasn't really thinking of "Kylerhea" when I first started composing that instrumental, but whilst I was recording it, it started to come to mind. So I suppose it is. "Kylerhea" is in the Isle Of Skye and I spent a week there a few years back, and I don't think I've ever felt so chilled out as I did that week I was there. So if anything the tune is more an expression of that feeling that was coerced from being in Kylerhea at that time.

"Keep Dear" expresses regret when it comes to the passage of time and the precious value of memory; isn't this essentially the tragedy of the human condition?

Its not a tragedy for me, its what makes life worth living. Isn't life just an ongoing expedition to amass an ever growing collection of stored memories with which you can then access with your brain? A tragedy would be to live a long life and have no memories worth revisiting or either you lose the ability to access those memories. That would suck.

Does "Comedian" address the fact that we often wear mask and act untrue to ourselves?
 
"Comedian" is a song about a personal event that happened to me as a child, nothing too heavy!!, but I was told something very miserable early one morning which made me very sad, and I can remember, moments, after I had been told, I was standing in the living room, the television was on, and some light entertainment comedian was being interviewed on a breakfast tv show, and he came across in a very false and unfunny manner and the whole premise of the show, the presenter, the comedian and the whole pointlessness of it all really hit home to me. I couldn't comprehend how that nonsense was happening on a television while my world, was, in my mind at least, falling apart around me. So that song "comedian" is an attempt to encapsulate that very personal momentary emotion that I felt from that morning in song form.

What can you tell us about your drummer Nathan? 
 
I've never met Nathan, I have only corresponded with him virtually through email. He is a big fan of kingbathmat who has been in contact since the first records I put out, he offered me his drum services which I duly accepted, all drum tracks were sent to me through the net. At first I was a bit dubious at how this arrangement would work out but It turned out much easier than I first thought it would be.

For a long time, you were shy about exposing yourself on the internet, now you do extensive promotion on the web; how do you want to handle walking the thin line between privacy and self-advertisement in the future?
 
Exposing yourself on the internet, that can get you into a lot of trouble, whether you are doing it for personal reasons or promotional reasons, either way you are offering yourself up to a huge spectrum. I find promotion difficult, it doesn't come naturally to me, I feel conflicted when I send out an email offering up something for which I hope to get paid for. I have to find a way of making it enjoyable and interesting for myself and then that should hopefully transfer over to somebody I'm hoping to contact.

Which goals do you pursue with this project aside from King Bathmat? Will it be possible some day to see you outside your home turf? 

 I'd love to play anywhere, all anyone has to do is ask me. As for goals with this project, I can see me making more John Bassett albums in the future. I've also got some other plans as well as the next KingBathmat album. At this moment I'm analyzing whats the best method and format for releasing my music in the future. As the method I'm using now is the tried and tested 10 track album method used by the music industry and record companies which I don't think suits me or my situation. I just want to make more music and get it out there, and this method is a huge time sucker. Surely there must be a method I could use that is more tailor made to my needs and would free up more time for what I really enjoy doing. Thats something I'm thinking about right now.

"Unearth" Radio Interview & Live acoustic songs

I did a 3 hour show on internet radio last night, talking about the new album "Unearth" and singing some songs live. You can listen to the entire show at

Watch live streaming video from aiiradionet at livestream.com

"Unearth" Released Today - Full Stream on bandcamp

"Unearth" is finally out and you can stream it in full on bandcamp.



You can play it on Spotify

You can get it on Itunes

And also on Amazon UK

More recent reviews For Unearth

More Reviews in for "Unearth" (released on Monday)

 Progarchy - "Musically, the songs range from the sublime (this word seems to fit more than does “beauty” for Bassett’s music) and the delicate to the clever and the intricate."
http://progarchy.com/2014/03/23/integritys-minstrel-john-bassett-unearth-2014/

Sonic Abuse -  "Lush, elegant and poignant, ‘unearth’ is a stunning work from one of the UK’s foremost progressive artists and it deserves to be heard far and wide."
http://www.sonicabuse.com/2014/03/john-bassett-unearth-album-review/

Mediaversal - "Bassett  easily takes the listener on a journey where a modern early day Pink Floyd might have visited"
http://www.mediaversal.com/review/38-art-rock/141-john-bassett-unearth.html

Debussy & Dorsey - "The value of this album for me is that Bassett has created something very original, exhibiting exciting possibilities for acoustic music."
http://danddmusic.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/john-bassett-unearth-out-march-31/

Some early Reviews in for "Unearth"

Heres an update of some of the first reviews that have come in so far for "Unearth" which is released on March 31st.

Prog Magazine - http://www.progrockmag.com/

Sphere Music - Full Review @ http://spheremusic.me/2014/03/12/john-bassett-unearth/
"I think the strength in his tracks is his ability to assimilate pop elements like in Nothing Sacred but at the same time keeping everything in borderline. It means that years from now, these songs will never sound outdated in a sense that the sweetness is all over the album but he layers it with other  elements. This reminds me a bit of OK Computer by Radiohead. Unearth is a must-have album if you want something timeless but sounds like the tunes are what you hear on the radio."

Lady Obscure - Full Review @ http://www.ladyobscure.com/albums/john-basset-unearth/
"It is a shining beacon of simplicity in an over-complicated world and an antidote to the ponderous, heavy and dull music that can clog up our airwaves in this industrial age."

Bucketlist Music Reviews - Full Review @ http://bucketlistmusicreviews.com/john-bassett-unearth/#.Uyse2qIuey-

It is a shining beacon of simplicity in an over-complicated world and an antidote to the ponderous, heavy and dull music that can clog up our airwaves in this industrial age. I will tip a nod to the master Leonardo Da Vinci and finish with one of his quotes, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. - See more at: http://www.ladyobscure.com/albums/john-basset-unearth/#sthash.lV5Om1Bn.dpuf

It is a shining beacon of simplicity in an over-complicated world and an antidote to the ponderous, heavy and dull music that can clog up our airwaves in this industrial age. I will tip a nod to the master Leonardo Da Vinci and finish with one of his quotes, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. - See more at: http://www.ladyobscure.com/albums/john-basset-unearth/#sthash.lV5Om1Bn.dpuf

"Running the gamut of time signature changes effortlessly while handling every instrument is always a tricky task, and Bassett pulls it off majestically. The compositions flow and ebb, the guitar always casting a spell and taking the listener to a far away land"

Nick's Album Reviews - Full Review @ http://nicksalbumreviews.net/2014/03/05/unearth/
"Unearth is the mark of a great songwriter when the songs themselves can feel special" 

Athos di Mat2020 - Full Review @ http://athosenrile.blogspot.it/2014/03/john-bassett-unearth.html
Groundcast (Brazil) - Full Review @  http://groundcast.com.br/review/john-bassett-unearth-2014/

Video for "Stay Away From The Dark"

Here is the Promo Video for "Stay Away From The Dark"
Filmed on location in and around Hastings and St Leonards on Sea, East Sussex.

"Stay Away From The Dark" available when you pre-order "Unearth"

"UNEARTH" pre-order is now available at bandcamp.
Track 1 "Stay Away From The Dark" from "Unearth" is now available to stream on youtube

 

You get an immediate download of "Stay Away From The Dark" now, when you pre-order the album in CD or digital format.
http://kingbathmat.bandcamp.com/releases

"Unearth" Album Video Trailer

Album Trailer Video for "Unearth"

Just posted a trailer video for the forthcoming John Bassett (kingbathmat) album "Unearth"

The album will be available on March 31st
"UNEARTH" is described as "a darkly lush collection of 10 finely crafted acoustic songs that inhabit a melancholic progressive dreamscape"

Track 1 "Stay Away From The Dark" and Pre-Orders for the album from bandcamp will be available from next week.

New website to support this release is now live at http://www.johnbassettmusic.com  - come and say hello, and sign up to recieve some secret unreleased stuff!

I've also recently started up a facebook group for KingBathmat/John Bassett related music and news etc, you can find it at https://www.facebook.com/groups/kingbathmat/


Thanks for your continued support
John Bassett

New Album "UNEARTH" Artwork

Heres the cover for my new album.
Its called "UNEARTH". 
Its out on March 31st on Stereohead Records and distributed by CODE 7 Distribution

Inside pages booklet artwork

This pic goes across a couple of pages from the booklet of the new CD, will post the album cover next week.

New Album Status Update

* New Album Update * - The new album is now mastered, the artwork is finished and is now in the process of getting manufactured, I'm very, very happy with the finished article. Details have been sent off to my distributer code 7, and it will be released late March (details, pre-order to follow in the next few weeks). 

Will be out and about recording the video for the first song from the album next week. Thanks Annie, for your help with promo shoot!