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Indie Pop
myspace.com/minisnap thebats.co.nz
Contact: Paul Kean
Minisnap features the songwriting skills of Kaye Woodward along
with fellow Bats, Paul Kean and Malcolm Grant plus Marcus Winstanley
from The Undercurrents. They have released 2 EP's - In My Pocket which came out in 2002 while March Hare was released in 2004. These have been distributed on-line through Smoke CD's and to selected NZ stores. Manager and bassist Paul Kean talks to CHART about what they've been up to and their latest release and a free download...
Recording Minisnap's first full length album
The new album, Bounce Around, was mostly recorded at our little home studio. We have a G5 iMac set up with a Digi 002 as interface to ProTools. We hired a few extra good microphones from Rob Mayes, at Avalanche Records. It's been a long 2 year process since recording initial demos through to the final mastering on T-Racks in October.
The Bats
We have also released the Bats at the National Grid, toured USA that took in SXSW dates, recorded with the Archers (Hamish Kilgour and his partner Lisa along with Kaye and I), recorded 6 songs with Ladybird from France and recorded demos for a new Bats album. The Bats then relocated to John Kelcher's new National Grid studio in August this year to put down 15 new rhythm tracks for that album which we're now doing over-dubs and hope to have mixed and mastered by February 2008.
European Tour
We're also planning a tour of Europe in April/May 2008. The Bats have been invited to play at the PopRevo festival in Denmark. We have a couple of people booking other dates for us in Germany and Sweden. The indie pop scene is very healthy there and some say it's thanks to our influence. We have a lot of MySpace friends from Sweden and Finland. The Sambassadeurs have recorded a great cover of an early Bats song, Claudine.
The plan is to take Marcus along to do The Bats sound and play a few Minisnap sets. We are hoping to include dates in UK and France, maybe even Spain but we don't think we'll have enough time for that.
Funding
Funding is hard to come by, all this has been done while we work at day jobs which subsidise our creative careers. There are grants you can apply for but we always seem to just miss out. We applied for support to go to USA last years but lost out to several NZ bands that sing with american accents. We went anyway and paid for the trip through gig income, merchandise sales and a bit of support from our USA label, Magic Marker. Minisnap (minus Marcus and with Bob's help on a couple of songs) got to support the Bats at a few of gigs on that tour.
Video's
We don't have much luck with video grants either but John Christoffells has kindly made us a sweet little video for New Broom that hasn't broken the bank. I like the way it isn't cluttered with visual sub-plots to distract from the song and the band performance. Not that I'm dissing that style of video; we didn't have the time or money to do one of those but I think it's worked to our advantage.
Bounce Around has a few more songs we'd like to do videos for if there are any film-makers out there looking for a project.
Videos are fun to do and a very important part of getting your band profile up around the world. An animated video that Christian Carruthers made for The Bats song Flowers and Trees, (off The Bats At The National Grid) shot up from 1000 to 30,000 views on MySpace when it was featured for 24 hours last year.
Back to the Minisnap release. The artwork for the CD is from a print by Michael Morley, (the Dead C) which he's kindly given us permission to use. Rhythmethod have offered to distribute in NZ and Australia for us and they have now added worldwide digital music store distribution as part of their service. We have a few overseas indie labels that we're negotiating with for CD sales.
We committed ourselves to releasing Bounce Around in 2007 before continuing with the new Bats album but we're holding off to early 2008 to get distributed to stores. We're getting review copies out to mags and distributing to radio stations at the moment.
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Bounce Around is Minisnaps first full length album released Nov 30th 2007 through Pocket Music. The video for NEW BROOM is below and for a FREE SONG DOWNLOAD go to Minisnap's Myspace page.
Out now through Pocket Music Ltd
Available at Amplifier.co.nz
myspace.com/minisnap
thebats.co.nz
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If you have your latest release planned or major tour lined up, a Myspace profile/website, press release, photo's and video then email us with your plans so we can help promote your project.
New Broom (Video) by Minisnap
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