Capital Region bands find hope in collectives as the recording industry changes

 By TOM KEYSER, Staff writer 

First published in print: Sunday, February 21, 2010

When Sgt Dunbar & the Hobo Banned, the Albany folk-rock group, received an invitation to play the prestigious South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival last year in Austin, Texas, it came via the Internet. A national record company had no hand in securing the invitation, booking the engagement or getting the band to the show.

Alex Muro, the manager of Sgt Dunbar, had posted a comment on an online music forum. The comment contained a link to the band's Web site. A representative from SXSW noticed the comment, clicked on the link, listened for free to the band's music and, duly impressed, sent Muro an e-mail inviting the band to play.

That's how things happen in the music business these days. As major record companies have consolidated and downsized, and as technology and the Internet have allowed musicians to record at home and distribute their own songs, the big-business model has yielded to smaller, regional companies and given opportunities to previously overlooked musicians.

Collectives have sprung up to help like-minded artists record and sell music on iTunes, eMusic and Amazon. Musicians still long for the financial rewards that signing with a major label can provide, but the action has shifted to the grass-roots level.

"For a long time, getting a major-label deal seemed like the only way you could connect meaningfully with large numbers of people," said Paul C. Rapp, a lawyer in Housatonic, Mass., who specializes in art-and-entertainment matters and represents musicians and record companies in the Capital Region. "The Internet and digital technology changed all that.

"Now, these collectives are putting out a remarkable amount of music, and it's all very high quality. Add to that the dozens of bands who are putting out their own stuff, and you have more good music being written, recorded and released at a pace that the region has never seen before."

It's hard to pin down the exact number of record companies and collectives in the Capital Region, but those involved identify about a dozen. Some operate out of homes. Others fall dormant for long periods. They range from Equal Vision Records in Albany and Sundazed Music in Coxsackie -- companies with national profiles -- to homegrown operations that release a handful of records a year.

Sgt Dunbar & the Hobo Banned is part of the collective known as the B3nson Recording Co. The name comes from the house at 3 Benson St., where, starting in 2005, a group of musicians lived while attending the University at Albany.

They played music together and formed bands that shared musicians and recording equipment. In 2006, they formed B3nson, and the next year they released their first CDs. Now B3nson represents about 40 musicians who play in seven primary bands and nearly 30 side projects. Its 25th release comes out Friday. Most bands print a few hundred CDs and consider it a success if they sell enough to cover manufacturing costs, Muro said.

"We have enough equipment and knowledge that we can record an album from scratch," he said. "And we can help whoever is putting the album together do the packaging and all that. We're certainly not a traditional record label. It's more that everybody sort of helps promote everybody else's stuff."

The musicians hold meetings every other Thursday and vote on financial matters. They work or go to school; no one makes a living from music. But last year, while playing at SXSW, Sgt Dunbar piqued the interest of National Public Radio and was featured on its "All Things Considered" show.

"We sold a couple of thousand songs on the Internet last year, which is not paying anybody's rent, but it helps keep the band moving forward," Muro said. "And half of those we sold on the day of the radio show and the day afterward."

The most popular site for selling music is iTunes -- and it's surprisingly reasonable to get involved. It costs from $30 to $60 to put an album on iTunes, and the site allows customers to download most songs for 99 cents and most albums for $9.99. The bands receive 77 percent of that.

"It's a great cut," Muro said. "For a really low upfront cost, bands that previously would not have had access to a national market suddenly have access to everybody in the United States."

Three other small companies formed in the Capital Region in 2006, the same year B3nson did, and for the same reason.

"We started it sort of as an umbrella to group together some of the music we were really excited about at the time," said Matthew Loiacono, who started Collar City Records with bandmates in The Kamikaze Hearts and now runs it out of his home in Ballston Lake. "We invited some of our friends. We figured that the combined power of all of our albums together would be stronger than if we were just putting out our own albums."

Nick Cosimano started Indian Ledge Records primarily to showcase his friends' band, Alta Mira. He matched the band with a production team that included two Grammy winners, and Alta Mira's self-titled CD, recorded in a studio near Boston, came out late last year. It has garnered rave reviews.

Nick Reinert, Indian Ledge's creative director, said the company hopes to sell 40,000 albums at the online sites, the Indian Ledge Web site store and Alta Mira's concerts. That's ambitious, he said, but it's a long-range goal.

No matter how fun it is making music with friends, musicians still want to make it big. And that, in most cases, still means signing with a national label. The two-member Phantogram, which started on the Saratoga Springs' Sub-Bombin Records, one of the companies that started four years ago, has come closest to that.

The duo of Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter signed in 2008 with the national indie label Barsuk Records, based in Seattle. Barsuk executives discovered Phantogram's music on the Internet. Barsuk released the band's first CD earlier this month and now has Barthel and Carter on a national tour.

"The cooperatives look for something like what happened to Phantogram to happen to one of their acts with the belief that the high water will lift all the boats," said Rapp, the entertainment lawyer who includes Phantogram among his clients. "The hope is that once somebody out of the cooperative gets signed, and is successful, that people will look back at the cooperative as the breeding grounds and look for more of the same.

"Phantogram is the perfect example of how it can happen. You start out on one of these local cooperatives, and your music starts circulating around the Internet, and people find it."

Tom Keyser can be reached at 454-5448 or by e-mail at tkeyser@timesunion.com.

Music makers

Here is where you can go online to find music by Capital Region companies mentioned in this article:

Equal Vision Records: http://www.equalvision.com

Sundazed Music: http://www.sundazed.com

B3nson Recording Co.: http://b3nson.net

Collar City Records: http://www.collarcityrecords.com

Indian Ledge Records: http://www.indianledgerecords.com

Sub-Bombin Records: http://www.sub-bombin.com

Unfortunately it appears the 3D video experiment from iPix has not gone well, and the video got corrupted from the stage vibrations. We were all excited to potentially have some wiked cool video of the Alta Mira release show.. Sorry!

First published in print: Friday, January 15, 2010

CAPITAL REGION MUSIC  

Alta Mira, "Alta Mira" (Indian Ledge)

You can lose yourself on the journey through this intriguing CD, the first full-length album by one of the Capital Region's most highly acclaimed bands. It's imaginative, expertly produced and a showcase for the strong, expressive vocals of Joe Michon-Huneau. 

It's not always easy, however. Promotional material from Indian Ledge Records in Delmar describes the songs as "poetic, intricate, textured, time shifting, art rock" that "challenge the listener's ears, emotions and expectations." 

Original Link http://www.inyourspeakers.com/content/alta-mira-alta-mira

Albany, NY based Alta Mira's eponymous debut has been over two years in the making and gives off every impression of being a labor of love. The album flows more smoothly than expected, given the wide range of moods it covers. The time and effort put into this album shows not just in the well put together package of songs, but also in the comfort the band clearly feels with the material. There is a confidence in these songs not usually found on a debut album.

According to the band, the environment of Barefoot Studios, where the album was recorded, was highly influential on the finished product. Barefoot Studios is a large studio space housed in a former mental hospital. Bassist August Sagehorn likened the place to Hell in an interview with the Albany Daily Gazette. But the dark mood that atmosphere must have inspired does not completely permeate the album. It is difficult to pin down a specific emotional tone for the album as a whole; indeed it is sometimes difficult to pin down the emotional tone of individual tracks. Many of the songs go through several tempo changes while vocalist Joe Michon-Huneau effortlessly brings the audience along for the ride.

Alta Mira has already been compared to a multitude of different musical acts, ranging from Radiohead to the Beatles. All of these influences are clear on the album, and with so many influences pulling the band in so many directions, it would be tempting to classify Alta Mira as an album with too many personalities. But that would not be fair. The band's influences are clearly stamped on their sound, but they have done something unique with all of it, and created something new.

While Michon-Huneau's vocals are quite flashy and seem to overshadow much of the album, a close listen shows Sagehorn's bass to be more of a driving force. Sagehorn steers the songs seamlessly into one another, allowing Michon-Huneau to dazzle us with his not inconsiderable talent. Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in “Sinker/Or” with Sagehorn's modest, yet powerful instrument gently steering the song.

In fact, August Sagehorn dominates the album enough that it is sometimes to the detriment of his brother, Hunter, the band’s lead guitarist. The only tracks of the album in which Hunter manages to outshine his brother is the excellent “Din & Drone” and “Harder They Fall” which manage to feature the guitar playing above the competing efforts of singer and bassist. Underneath the overpowering talents of Michon-Huneau and his brother August, Hunter Sagehorn does display a promising ability, and one hopes that further releases from this band will allow him greater opportunity to shine. But on this disc, he is underwhelming, or at least seems that way in comparison to his bandmates.

Drummer Tommy Krebs, while also playing second to Sagehorn's bass and the vocals, holds his own. Unfortunately, he never has a moment to truly shine, though he comes close in the prog-rock style “Harder They Fall,” a track that brings the Mars Volta to mind. Krebs opens the track with some deft work, though it quickly takes a backseat to the Sagehorn brothers’ intricate playing.

Posted on December 31st, 2009 (2:27 pm) by Andrea Martin

We think The Chase Factory Killed this video!!

Alta Mira set to release new album

Long recording saga took place in studio with “creepy” history

Recording a debut album has been a bit of an adventure for Albany-based rock quartet Alta Mira. The group's self-titled effort on local indie label Indian Ledge has been in the works for approximately two years, and follows 2007's “Fables and Fabrications” EP. While total recording time only added up
to about two weeks, the group's members commuted to Barefoot Studios in Brighton, Mass., near Boston, whenever they had time, eventually amassing the album’s 12 songs.
And the studio itself, a former insane asylum with roughly 500 band practice rooms now housed within, provided its own challenges. In fact, the “creepy” atmosphere in the building helped lend a hand in
creating the album's dark moods.

HAUNTING QUALITY
“I've been told that it has sort of a haunting quality to it, and I can definitely see that on a couple of tunes,” said vocalist Joe D. Michon-Huneau from a coffee shop in Albany. “I don't think it was ever
really intention, but being in that atmosphere, it was pretty interesting.”
“We used to walk out of the studio in the hallways, and there were 30 bands playing in different rooms,” added bassist August Sagehorn. “It was like walking through the gates of Hell.”
The resulting album blends influences ranging from Radiohead to The Beatles to Tool, switching from pensive verses to full-throttle walls of distortion at the drop of a hat. It will be released at Revolution Hall on Saturday night at a performance featuring Railbird, Mathew Loiacono and Matt Durfee (who will also help Alta Mira fill out its sound during the show).
In keeping with the band's experimental tendencies, the release show itself is being dubbed an “experiment”. Along with performances, the hall will play host to installation artwork by Nick Reinert, and the band has teamed up with iPIX to record the show in 3D and make the video available online at a later date.
“We don't even know what it's going to look like; we haven't even been shown the technology yet, but from what Nick Cosimano [head of Indian Ledge] says, it's pretty mind-blowing,” Michon-Huneau said. “He said the only way he can describe it is that it sort of feels like you're expanding your peripheral vision.”
The band – featuring Sagehorn's brother Hunter on guitar and Tommy Krebs on drums – first came together in 2004, Michon-Huneau, at the time playing guitar in an acoustic duo, tried out as vocalist for the then three-piece band, which at the time was also acoustic. “We didn't have very good equipment at all,” Michon-Huneau explained.
The band's initial funk-driven sound presented a challenge to him vocally. “I wasn't really used to that style, but I was like 'Oh, I'll give it a shot,'” he said. “I never really tried to get outside of my range before. These guys constantly push me to do different things with my voice that I didn't think I could do with it.”
Soon the groups began gigging at coffee shops in the area. “We used to play Caffe Lena's a lot – I think they were sick of us after a while,” Michon-Huneau said.
By the release of the band's first EP, the music had gone completely electric. The self-titled debut continues in the vein, with songs such as “The End of My” built around multiple guitar lines and
rich vocal harmonies.

RECENT SONGS
Roughly half the songs on the album were written only this year, although others such as “To Clear the Moon” have been in the band's repertoire for some time now. The group's members filled out the album's sound with piano, mandolin and guitar effects that were found in the studio.
“Taylor [Barefoot, studio owner] has just a wall of guitars and a floor's worth of effects pedals that we were able to screw around with at will,” Michon-Huneau said. “He had, I think, two different, or
three different rooms that we would try to record different parts in. I know I did vocals in four different areas.”

- Brian McElhiney

Daily Gazette, 12.3.09

Original Link: http://www.nippertown.com/2009/12/04/cd-alta-miras-alta-mira (Indian Ledge Records, 2009) We first heard Alta Mira three years ago, when they were sharing the stage with the haunting Lisa Germano at Valentine’s Music Hall. We immediately became fans. A year later, the young quartet released their debut disc on Indian Ledge Records. The EP “Fables and Fabrications” caught a lot of ears and garnered the band lots of great press. Now they’re finally unleashing their first full-length album. It’s about time. And it’s worth the wait. Alta Mira’s sound is difficult to pin down. It’s certainly not any kind of straight-forward rock formula. It’s complex, intoxicating. This is challenging stuff. Joe Michon-Huneau’s passionate, open-hearted vocals immediately leap to front-and-center, while drummer Tommy Krebs and brothers Hunter and August Sagehorn (on bass and guitar, respectively) mold the songs with intricate, imaginative arrangements like seasoned sonic sculptors. Tempos and moods shift 180-degrees in a heartbeat. And back again. Is it art-rock anchored in funk? It shimmers as much as it shakes. It’s delicate, yet dynamic. It’s purposefully disorienting. There’s genuine drama here. Take, for example, “The End of My,” which sounds something like Jeff Buckley singing an incredibly contagious Marshall Crenshaw song backed by the Police’s Andy Summer. And that’s followed by the compelling, yet understated instrumental “Interlude.” The band’s sound has drawn comparisons to such diverse influences as Radiohead, Incubus, the Beatles, Talking Heads, Verve Pipe, XTC, Jerry Cantrell, the Mars Volta, Tool, the Sea and Cake. They’re all right. And all wrong. Alta Mira’s music unfolds at its own pace to reveal its altogether unique inner beauty. Alta Mira celebrates the release of their self-titled album debut at Revolution Hall in Troy on Saturday (December 5). They’re calling it “The Alta Mira CD Release Experiment,” and the festivities includes art installations, interactive 360-degree video and music by Alta Mira, Railbird, Matthew Loiacono and Matt Durfee. Doors open at 7pm. Admission is $10, which includes a copy of the new CD.

In the spotlight
December 3, 2009 Alta Mira

Capital Region up-and-comer Alta Mira is throwing a party Saturday night to celebrate the release of its new self-titled CD, but it's not all about Alta Mira. This show features a number of prominent artists; Railbird, Matthew Loiacono and Matt Durfee.

In fact, the event is billed as "the Alta Mira CD Release Experiment."

There will be cutting-edge 360-degree video being filmed, and large-scale sculpture and light-based installations will be interspersed throughout the venue. Collaboration will be the underlying theme of the evening.

That and music. Recorded at Barefoot Studios in Massachusetts over a two-year period, the new album shows that the band -- Tommy Krebs (drums, mandolin, piano, vocals) Hunter Sagehorn (guitar, banjo, slide, piano vocals) August Sagehorn (bass, vocals) and Joe Michon-Huneau (vocals) -- have taken it up a level since 2007's "Fables and Fabrications."

From the riveting "Tambourine," soothing "Sinker/Or," sinister "Slumberjack" and the layered "Harder The Fall," as a unit Alta Mira has grown far more compelling and intriguing, as singer Michon-Huneau has come into his own with his impassioned delivery and conviction.

At a recession-friendly $10, this could be the party of the year. Don't miss it.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Revolution Hall, 425 River St., Troy
Tickets: $10
Info: 274-0553; http://www.revolutionhall.com/

-David Malachowski

Alta Mira and Indian Ledge Records in conjunction with Guthrie/Bell Productions are working with filmmakers, friends, musicians, maniacs, and artists to present a truly unique experience that is being dubbed “The Alta Mira CD Release Experiment”. The event will present collaboration on a grand scale and feature an eclectic mix of music from Alta Mira, Railbird, Matthew Loiacono, and Matt Durfee. The Revolution Hall in Troy, NY will be transformed into a space that excites your ears, your eyes, your taste buds, and your touch. Oh, and it will be a great place to party too! The fun kicks off at 7PM, and $10 will get you into the show, and a copy of the new Alta Mira CD! There will be plenty of contests and surprises awaiting participants that night too.

The experiment doesn’t stop with basic procedures… everyone in attendance can play a part in the operation. We are excited to be working with IPIX, a company from Cohoes, NY that has patented some extremely unique technology. IPIX will be filming 360 degree video of the release experiment. We intend to compile the footage into an interactive documentary of the affair. Viewers will be able to revisit the experience as an engaging film where one can zoom in and out, walk around onstage, and turn around on the screen with the click of a mouse, essentially creating a different experience every time you “participate” in the video.

Large scale sculptural and light based installations will convert the Revolution Hall into a venue for the delight of your senses. Melanie O’Malley and Alta Mira will be the masterminds behind the installations and have been concocting objects and working at the drawing board to create a visually and sonically pleasing environment. Melanie recently had a hand in the wildly enjoyable “Paper Girl” project in downtown Albany where enthusiastic artists hand delivered art to an unsuspecting public via bicycle. Melanie also participated in the Flux event at St. Joseph’s church in Albany. At the Rev Hall, Alta Mira’s contributions will take the form of a radiant stage design, and their choices of exceptional musicians to share the stage truly complement and accentuate the collaborative night. You may want to bring your sunglasses. Ok no more hints for now.

Musically we can only say that you are sure to hear some beautiful folk, intricate rock, wacky psychedelia, acoustic finger picking, mandolin, banjo, keys, harmonica, sing-alongs, tambourines, and a whole slew of other music-making devices. There will be poetry galore in the form of delicate vocals and some primal, emotionally charged wailing. The only thing we know for sure is that the bands will deliver something new and exciting.
The Alta Mira CD Release Experiment is a follow up to the release event for the Alta Mira “Fables and Fabrication EP” in late 2007. If you were lucky enough to get into that sold out show at Red Square you will remember how exciting the event was for both the ears and the eyes. December 5th is going to be even bigger and better. Indian Ledge Records believes the release of a great CD requires a grand kickoff to celebrate all the hard work that has gone into making the music. You won’t want to miss it.