I post a lot of musings from my brother Michael, but there's another Michael who appears here: Michael Levy. Michael Thiele makes hardwood music, but Michael Levy plays the ancient lyre, and he has a new album coming out. Read his announcement below. (The image above is not from his album, but I was trying to find something in the "ancient" theme.)
From Michael Levy:
I thought I would like to share with you the creative process behind the completion of my new album, “Enchantment of the Tortoise Lyre” - available now, from all the usual digital music platforms & available to directly download from my website, with lossless audio available from Bandcamp!
In developing my ideas for a new recording project, I usually first conjure up either a specific tune or a spontaneous improvisation for my lyres to quite quickly arrange & record … then spend sometimes months trying to think of some mythologically-based title to add the most amount of meaning to the feeling of each of these tunes (then spend years dealing with comments on YouTube from brain-dead 'fundamentalist religious types', who not being able to separate fact from aesthetic fiction & not being able to resist imposing their moronic mind-set on everyone else, think my music, all of which is just an evocation of ancient historical aesthetic fiction, is literal 'Hymns of Homage' to 'evil' pantheons of pagan gods'!!).
Despite this fact, in this particular project, I almost began to think that track 8, “The Hex of Hecate”, was literally ‘hexed by Hecate’, the terrifying three-headed ancient Greek goddess of magic! I realized a few days before the album was released, that I had uploaded the 'wrong' version of the final master!! Although pretty much nobody but myself can tell the difference between a few reverb overlays etc., this is just frankly too much for my 'nerdy/bordering on psychotic perfectionism to bear...
I then had to spend a small fortune on my cell phone from the UK to the USA to CD Baby, who distributes my music, to arrange to re-upload the ‘correct’ audio for the track…only for them to email me the next day, to say that the hyperlink I provided to the audio file did not work!!
I then had to try & use Dropbox to send the audio, which I had not used for over a decade & spent hours until the late hours attempting to get it to get my track across the Atlantic & across the continent of the USA from East coast to West coast, to the CD Baby offices in Portland, Oregon.
The corrected track finally arrived - but a day too late as the album had just been released!!
I then had to wait almost a week have to wait an infernal week, before the 'correct' audio master had finally replaced the 'subtely incorrect' one (which had by then, had gone out to about 50 digital music platforms!).
To hear the subtle differences between the audio I intended and the ‘incorrect’ version I spent so long attempting to rectify, compare the now thankfully corrected track on Spotify to the original incorrect version of the track which featured on my YouTube presentation of it, before I realized that this was the ‘wrong’ version!
