re: Michael Masley/reviews/fretless guitar

[Steve Lawson <steve@steve-lawson.co.uk>]

>>>It was definatly Micheal Masley.Being an East Bay person I have seen and
heard him for years.He invented the hammers which (I believe) have very
small grooves cut into them.<<<

...and the band that features him with Michael Manring is called 'Cloud
Chamber' and is brilliant. Their CD is weird music heaven! :o)

there's a great review of it at http://www.collective.co.uk/misfitcity/ -
which is the home of the Misfit City e-zine, edited by Dann Chinn, and is a
great read (especially the wonderful review of a gig of mine from the end 
of
last year)

talking of reviews and cool sites, http://www.bassically.net and
http://www.aural-innovations.com have both just added reviews of my album.
Bassically is a bass site, with a heavy emphasis on solo bass stuff, and
aural innovations is a space-rock/ambient/electronica site, with some 
really
interesting stuff there.

and finally, following on from the recent discussion about fretless guitar,
I've just got back from 'la nuit de la fretlesse' - a fretless festival in
Mende, France, which this year featured me, ned evett, fretless machine, 
yan
vagh and ron thall (though as far as I saw, neither Ron nor any of his band
played anything fretless through-out their whole set, which was a little
confusing...) 

Ned was playing his Fernandes glass fingerboard creation, which sounded
brilliant, Yan was playing a 10 string fretless guitar (the lowest 5 from a
normal guitar, doubled like an Oud), which also sounded fantastic (and he
used a headrush on a couple of tunes), and Franck Vigroux with Fretless
machine played a Vigier (co-sponsors of the event) fretless with a metal
fingerboard, and has a fantastic sound. You might think that a fretless
festival would turn into a temple to duff intonation, but fortunately all
the attendant musos were great - that's the second bizarre niche festival
I've played this year, after the solo bass looping show in Santa Cruz, and
both have been such great events. It's heartening to find non
commercially-scheming musicians putting on such great events and doing it 
so
well! Time to start thinking about a London looping/bass/weird shit fest 
for
the end of the year methinks...

Steve 
www.steve-lawson.co.uk