Wild Mercy News

April 8, 2007

Wild Mercy Lights Out for the Future . . . with a New CD

Barry reporting: The third Wild Mercy CD is nearing completion! It started when the band added "Bedlam Boys" to the repertoire and Barry just happened to have a set of science-fiction lyrics he'd written to the same tune in the 1980s -- part of a song cycle that Barry and Sally had performed (in part) with the Black Book Band at SF conventions in the '90s. The cycle had languished unfinished for years. But now Debbie and Jen inquired about it, Barry ran some of the tunes past the band, and before you could say "thousand-year human interstellar migration" (which is what it's about), Wild Mercy had settled on the entire song cycle -- "Dream of a Far Light" -- as a new and ambitious CD project. Barry (can you say, "delighted and flabbergasted"?) got cracking and gave all the songs their final basic form by October 2006, using the Dodeka Records Roving ADAT rig.

Since then each member of the band has been adding exciting vocal and instrumental colors, shaping the arrangements, bringing the complete cycle to life. It tells of humanity struggling through centuries of dystopia and jihad to reach into the stars -- and the future -- with lightsail-powered spacecraft. The styles range from traditional Celtic to folk-rock, blues, and jazz, the moods from sardonic to ethereal to aggressive. The CD project should be mixed and ready for release by Fall 2007 -- if we can get the big galoot who wrote it to stop grinning long enough to sing.

April 7, 2007

Wow... a site update!

Debbie reporting: I've been astonishingly remiss in updating the site. It's all my fault, I swear... mea culpa and all that jazz. (Hmmm... can you do Mea Culpas as a jazz waltz?) The dates page is up-to-date and boy are we busy over the next few months, starting with a lovely arty gig at the Stutz Artists Coop's open house at the end of this month and then we're working our tails off to get ready to be guests of honor at Conterpoint in late June. Mix in concerts at NASFIC and ConClave, and random day trips to other area cons, and we're going to be meeting ourselves coming and going while we try to finish our newest CD project, which blends Wild Mercy harmonic stylings with a story arc that Barry's been writing for the last mrphl years. Watch this space for more details over the next weeks!