The Scottish Enlightenment: Archive

Orogeny

The mountaineering album, fabled, is our bag these days and is coming along at a moderate canter. We fully expect to leak new stuff by the height of summer, although we may get distracted. The world is such a wonderful place it’s all too easy for four young musical workmen to get sidetracked. But as it stands we’ve made headway with the following new lines and routes; Come North in...

Jan 31st

Summer n all...

The sun is scudding off the puddles. Currently listening to PET. Its 8:49 AM and The Scottish Enlightenment needs to get outside to finish building the dirty old green house, and needs to sell tickets to our show at King Tuts Summer Nights festival on Monday 18th July. We’ve never been good at retail - thats why we became a band instead. David ran a business and it went down the pooper...

Jul 10th

news n all...

Salut, We’re playing a bunch of gigs until July, then we’ll try to cut down a bit to get on with the mountaineering album. St Thomas is almost sold out - like 15 left or something. We might make some more. The PRS tell us we are popular for aerobics. Really? What kind of slow-ass miserable aerobics is that? Whatever, thanks for the dosh n ev. It will help us make the mountaineering...

Apr 23rd

More gigs...

Hello yous, Immediately, go listen to Lower Dens (the album Twin Hand Movement is on Spotify). They’re really good eh? We love ‘I Get Nervous’ and ‘Truss Me’. We all do (its a band edict). Now consider this: We, The Scottish Enlightenment, will be supporting them along with Edinburgh School For the Deaf at Edinburgh’s Sneaky Petes on the 27th March. Its going...

Mar 14th

Some gigs...

Hello all, In 2011 we will be playing some gigs. To get things going how about… Saturday 22nd January at the Wee Red Bar in Edinburgh, thanks to Song, By Toad Friday 18th February at Bar Bloc in Glasgow, for the second of Armellodie Records residentials. More after that too… We hope you can make it to one of those. If none of you can, it might be a bit embarrassing. And do make...

Jan 2nd

St Thomas has arrived...

Hello all, Finally, our album St Thomas is out. This is thanks to Armellodie Records, which we love very much. You can get it directly from us here. Or you can go to iTunes or Napster or HMV or Amazon or Play or Tesco or 7Digital or OVI. But get it from us. These people liked it. Look: “We’re smitten” Tom Ravenscroft, BBC 6 Music “one of the stand out albums by...

Nov 15th

St Thomas at the door...

Hello all, Tomorrow night, Fri 12th Nov, we’re launching our (very much literally) long awaited album St Thomas at The Wee Red Bar, Edinburgh (doors at 7). It seems to be forever ago we started writing these songs, so you might see a bit of a sigh of relief from us as we strum the last chord of…oh pants, haven’t worked out a set list yet. Will do, promise. We’ll have...

Nov 11th

1 note

Little Sleep EP and things...

Hello all, Pascal EP is all sold out now, so thanks to everyone who took a copy off our hands. Although its always going to be available as a download, its just not quite the same as having a beautiful hand crafted artefact is it? I know, its a shame. But wait, dry your eyes, because Little Sleep EP will be out in less than three weeks, and it is just as beautiful and just as hand crafted! You...

Sep 8th

Pitter patter...

Important things are happening in The Scottish Enlightenment. Not like ‘we wrote a new song’ important. Like the ‘whole world created anew’ important. Guitarist Dave and his lucky lucky wife are awaiting el bamino (or el nino, as the wry voice of experience would say, smugly). This is really important, because everything you have ever known started when you were born and...

Jul 28th

1 note

There’s still a few copies of the beautiful Pascal EP left, and you can get it here. We’re very pleased with what all the bloggers etc have had to say about it, but they obviously have too much time on their hands, so make your own mind up. Once again, here. As for us, we’re busy being normal people, so if you want to know what we’re doing then look at what you’re...

Jun 14th

Pascal EP is OOT!

Pascal EP is out now, and you can get it here. We’ve spent the last 2 years working on a whole load of songs and 5 of them are on this EP. The tracklisting is 1. Pascal 2. If You Would Just Try A Bit Harder 3. Riverbed 4. All Homemade Things 5. To The Dogs Pascal and All Homemade things have been part of our live set for a while now, and we played Riverbed, or a version of it, at...

May 9th

1 tag

New songs, new records, new shows...

Delightfully, we have a lot to tell. Records Hopefully you all got the 3 tracks we gave away a few months ago. The album they are from will be out later this year - after the summer. But we’re releasing lots of other stuff before then. First up we’re releasing a single - the song is Pascal. But we have a lot of songs that aren’t going to be on the album, so this single will...

Mar 7th

1 tag

Free tracks from St Thomas

Hello all, You probably already know through multiple internet channels that we’re giving you three tracks from St Thomas for free. Look… I hope that worked cos it looks weird in my blog preview. You can also download the Eyes EP for £2 if you dont have it already. Go to http://tinyurl.com/ykopr43 And be reminded, we are playing Electric Circus in Edinburgh on the 20th...

Oct 13th

2 tags

Oh no...

Its 11pm, I’ve had a bit of wine, and i’ve decided to blog. Why isn’t there a setting on firewalls for stopping this kind of activity? We can put a man on the moon but we can embed alcohol sensing technology in the keyboards of budget laptops to stop chemically affected public wordcasting? Jeezo! As it happens, the track listing for the album is almost licked, and i’ve...

Aug 18th

2 tags

Recent doings

Things have become rather ragged of late for The Scottish Enlightenment. We’ve not played together for a couple of months now, and our communication with you patient people has been a bit lacking. Our new website is still languishing under a secret url because it’s still not right, and the Scottish Enlightenment tea towels haven’t arrived yet. But the music is doing fine. Hand...

Jul 7th

2 tags

Nearly there...

If you’re still listening, thank you for your marathonesque patience. The Scottish Enlightenment has nearly finished all recording for the new album. All that remains to be done is to return through the green door of the Green Door Studio to do some more overdubs, and then some mixing, and that’ll be it.Should be done by the end of June. We hope that we’ll have tracks to give...

May 11th

2 tags

Bus-wire-insight

04.Apr.2009 I missed my bus home from work on Tuesday - by an agonising margin - so to comfort my sorry soul I permitted a trip to the venerable WH Smith’s in Buchanan Bus Station, to the magazine shelves. Eventually, it came down to two, and I plumped for Wire magazine, thinking it was Wired magazine. I was a bit gutted, as the bus pulled away from Glasgow - a city with a big art heritage...

Apr 3rd

2 tags

Sorry...

11.Mar.09 …to leave it so long. The Scottish Enlightenment has been hard at work, but thats no excuse. We’ve been toling away on the album, as well as dealing with the ups and downs of li…lets Ronan it up: Life is a rollercoaster you’ve just got to ride it. Well we’ve barfed and larfed. But we thought it was important to reassure you, on of the few faithful, that...

Mar 10th

2 tags

The green green doors of studio

5.Dec.08 Last weekend (that is, future people, the last weekend of November 2008) we were in Glasgow recording some more songs for our next record. There’s too much to say about it, so lets filter… We record mostly live. We decided to do it that way because the recordings we make at rehearsal - with a tiny japanese digital 4 track in the middle of the room - are always kind of...

Dec 6th

2 tags

oh a band with a plan eh?

16.Nov.08 I’ve been thinking today about starting a podcast based around gigs in Scotland, and playing tunes by bands that will be playing in the week ahead. Its a good idea is it not? Don’t care what you think anyway, the point is I was thinking about gigs, which we haven’t done many of this year - although supporting Idlewild in may and De Rosa (much undervalued these days I...

Nov 15th

2 tags

Pant-flung rehearsal in the restaurant of the...

22.Oct.08 I’ve been up for hours now trying to tighten the last nuts on our website. Im an unscrupulous css hack, with no coding morals at all, and its a gruesome result, but it works. Enough geek. At our last rehearsal an unknown individual threw a pair of pants in the door and ran off. Giggling. We, of course, lined up at the door ready to squelch eyeballs with drum sticks, tighten...

Oct 21st

2 tags

Treatments/Tactics

30.Aug.08 Music is a treatment for a problem, but never solves it. Band rehearsal, wednesday last week, had been looking forward to it so much, and Taxidermy of Love grew some juicy fruits and at the end of the night it was looking lovely. Thats what i wanted. Hit the spot. But i go to bed head buzzing and wanting to tell lover how great it is and show her all the colours we painted in....

Aug 30th

2 tags

...progressprogressprogressprogress...

02.Aug.08 On Wednesday last week a bunch of employers had half days landed on them, by us, that is to say, us from The Scottish Enlightenment who do the singing, and Dan from Dan Lyth, who is mixing our songs for us, and helping us record vocals and cornet, and other noise we haven’t done yet. So we did a bunch of noise on Wednesday avo, Joe Mangle, and as a result we’ve got 3 tunes...

Aug 2nd

2 tags

There were 16 in the bed...

06.Jul.08 We’re all in about our first album. And it’s a process that works, for us, like this: There are many songs, our musical cups run over, and there will be spillages. So there are are 16 songs, and we play them every week at our get-togethers. Gets-together. No, get-togethers. Hmm…I’ll check that out with my Dad later. Now, I’ll tell you the 16. Here: ...

Jul 6th

2 tags

Man blues

02.Jul.08 Being part of a male herd is easy. We do not ask each other how we feel, nor cast burrowing looks at our comrades trying to work out ‘whats really going on inside’. We do not arc vulture-like over the remains of a night out and pick at the bones until we know exactly who was off with who and which were the best dressed character flaws. Nor do we involve ourselves much in the...

Jun 2nd