Here’s an early live improvisation with our friend Mack Hagood on rhythm guitar and drum machine. This jam, like many of our other tunes was recorded to 4-track cassette in our 8th floor practice space in the former Hotel Fontainebleu on Tulane Avenue. Lead guitar is Rick 12-string through old DOD delay pedal.
Ah steak…. an american favorite!
Here’s another one from around 1999 — a noise track with guitar, bass, and voice samples that fell off the back of a truck. (I can’t say where I got the voice samples from but working in multimedia has had its advantages…)
You know how some bands have a song with their band name in the song/title? Yeah, it’s pretty cheesy most of the time, but how often does it use vocal synthesis?
"Chef Menteur Hwy" by Chef Menteur
This was one of our very first songs: drum machine, bass, Farfisa, K2000, and a nifty program for the Mac called VocalWriter that let you pitch shift and control the Mac voice engine using phonemes.
Outro has bizarre Woody Guthrie reference.
In anticipation of our upcoming double album, I would like to present to you the first of many tasty treats; in order to demonstrate the vastness of our culinary acoustical journey, and in the interest of your auditory salivation and salvation, I’m going to be dishing up some golden oldies from Chef Menteur’s first menu.
Here’s the first song we finished, entitled “Shotgun” –named after the style of New Orleans house I was living in at the time, not the gun.
Gear: Boss DR-550 drum machine, bass through distortion pedal, Farfisa organ through wah pedal (which I had just discovered) and sound processing using version 1.0 of an application called SFX Machine.
After some serious consideration, we’ve decided to release the newly recorded album, East of the Sun & West of the Moon, on double vinyl — the way we originally envisioned. But we can do it only with your help, thanks to Kickstarter.
Kickstarter is a great way for creative people of all stripes to get their projects funded by the people who really care. We’ve seen it work for some of our friends and we decided it was our best chance to get the album we’ve been working on for four years into the world. The project only gets funded (and the supporters only get charged) when/if the project meets its goal.
Check out the video we made for the Kickstarter project.
We just launched this page and we’re already up to over $700 thanks to some of our most awesome friends and fans…. We have still got a long way to go, though, so please consider supporting us!
Love,
Chef Menteur
[Apologies to our faithful readers. This news is at least a month old but somehow wasn’t posted here…. until now!]
Chef Menteur will be opening for Cloudland Canyon and White Hills on Thursday, April 28.
Also playing will be Pontiak. All four bands specialize in different flavors of contemporary heavy psychedelic music; although Chef Menteur and Cloudland Canyon come from more electronic beginnings.
Siberia is the venue. If you haven’t been there yet it’s at 2227 St. Claude Ave., near the Hi-Ho.
White Hills and Pontiak are on Thrill Jockey and Cloudland Canyon were formerly on Kranky and are now on Holy Mountain. All three of these bands will be playing the Austin Psych Fest on Saturday April 30.
Shout out to Nick for putting this together.
More info available at backporchrevolution.com
All the music from the new album has been finished! We’re currently working on finalizing the mastering, and coming up with artwork; as well as planning the release schedule.
We’re sticking with the plan of releasing the new album on double vinyl (that’s 4 sides for a total of 72 minutes) with hand printed covers in a limited edition. We will let you know more as we can.
Meanwhile the three of us have been getting together with Phil Rollins (of the Gubernatorial Candidates) and started rehearsals again for our next world tour.
We may have some interesting news here soon. Keep checking back.
Here’s a demo of the song “1491” from our last album. It’s about 100 times faster than the song ended up being.1491 (original demo).
You can hear the original song on this page.
Disclaimer: for entertainment purposes only.
There will be no CD version. The album will contain two LP’s and a certificate for mp3 download.
That is all.
