Hola! Bonjour! Konnichiwa! Ciao! Hallo! Goddag! Ahoj! Hej! Shalom! Geia! Privet! Salut!

Hello everybody! After some time of inactivity Mastermind is rumbling to life again. If you’ve been by the web site and read the blog you have an idea of what is going on. We’ll shed more light on why we took a break in the coming weeks, but it feels like the time is right to get going again. So what’s up you ask?

First off, we will be on The Gagliarchives progressive rock radio show this Saturday, May 24, 10pm EDT [*] discussing the past, present & future of Mastermind and spinning some new material for your listening pleasure! The show is broadcast in southern NJ on 88.9FM and is available streaming off the web at www.gagliarchives.com/

We have a new unreleased album that *will* be available later this year one way or another! We’re creating new music again and plan to record brand new music over the coming months. No, we don’t have a bass player currently, so no live shows in the foreseeable future. However, if a great opportunity comes up there are people we can call on if need be.

We’ve made our entire catalog available for digital download on mindawn.com. Mindawn is the only music service that offers FLAC audio for full CD quality downloads, and we want you to have full quality! To entice you to visit Mindawn, we’ve released two live archive recordings in digital format only…

“MASTERMIND LIVE 1995” which is quite a good recording of the original trio line up and what should have been our official live album of the period that has sat on the shelf for over ten years. This includes the only live recording of Tragic Symphony that we’re aware of.

“Another Cold & Rainy Night” (Conduit Club Live 2002) features the quartet line up with Tracy McShane performing classic Mastermind material at full throttle. Visit the website for a track listings and visit mindawn.com to hear both albums. Cover artwork for both albums is also available to download.

We have tons of stuff in the archives from live shows, demos, alternate recordings, unreleased material and video which we plan to offer in the coming weeks & months. It’s a mind boggling amount of stuff to sift through, but we’re hoping this will rekindle interest in the band and set the stage for a NEW album release, so please help spread the word. Over the years we’ve developed quite a loyal fanbase, we just need to remind some of you we are still here! We appreciate the great support we’ve received over the years from the prog rock community and hope to please you again in the near future.

Also as some may know, the brothers Berends have been performing locally as “The Berends Bros Band” revisiting our roots and keeping our chops sharp. We have some material written and recorded for this band and hope to get to that in the near future. For people in the Philly / New York area we have a few live dates coming up over the summer. Check our live shows page for details.

For the loyal subscribers to this Newsletter list we shall try and reward you with secret links to unreleased tracks and cool things like that. Feel free to visit the “Sound Off” page on the website and leave some feedback. Spread the word wherever you can and visit our website often to see what’s up!

mastermindband.com

OK that’s enough for now. Thanks for your interest in Mastermind!

Related links:
——————————
Latest News — mastermindband.com/blog/?cat=12
Sound Off — mastermindband.com/blog/?page_id=4
Live shows — mastermindband.com/announce.html
Press info — mastermindband.com/press.html
Mindawn — mindawn.com/artists/mastermind
Gagliarchives — www.gagliarchives.com

Mastermind Live 1995 — mastermindband.com/archive-live95.html
Another Cold & Rainy Night — mastermindband.com/archive-AC&RN.html

[*] Eastern Daylight Time is -4GMT for global listeners.

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It seems Firefox has issues with the BooMP3 Flash players, so now there’s a different one with playlist options on the music page. Works great with Firefox! But IE7 doesn’t like that one. Damn. Rather than fool around with this stupid crap forever (instead of making *music*) the half-assed solution is two different pages. The Playlist player and the BooMP3 players. Choose whichever one works best for you. Or you can just visit Mindawn.com and listen to everything. Computers suck. Enjoy the music!

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Check out our Music & Media page for new streaming audio from our catalog. Utilizing the file hosting site BooMP3.com and their cool little Flash player widgets, we’ve put together a collection of tracks you can listen to anywhere, anytime! Over 90 min’s of music. Click on the “open player in new window” link found there for a popup window to play Mastermind music while you surf the web. A broadband connection is most likely required.

You can also embed these players on your own site. Get the code by clicking the little blue squares or the song title on our music page. We’ve also put up a few other tracks from the new archive series on the Mastermind and Mastermind Live pages on Myspace to enjoy.

ps: sometimes it takes a moment for the track to start playing, sometimes it doesn’t. It also seems to work a little more quickly in IE7 than Firefox. Go figure. But it does work! Cool.

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April 26th… today is the day. Best wishes to the venerable Taurus on the skins!

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Our Mindawn launch is off to a good start and we’re still just getting the word out, so be sure to tell a friend! As promised we’ve put up digital archive titles on Mindawn. Click the covers for more info, but briefly these albums represent different periods of the band in concert.

Another Cold & Rainy Night



The 2002 quartet line up live with Tracy McShane singing.

Mastermind Live 1995



What should have been the official live trio album of the 90’s.

You can listen for free then purchase (if you choose) and print your own covers. It’s a pretty neat way to get music out to the public and FLAC is full CD quality audio. Also coming are various studio out takes, band demos, and more live shows. Some of the live recordings are not quite “release” quality, so we may make some available free for the po’ folk. Some old master tapes require baking so it may be a little while, but we’re working on it.

The truth is a) we want this stuff to be heard and b) it will help raise awareness and capital to get a NEW Mastermind album released and promoted. Maybe even *hire* a great bassist so we can get out and do some festivals. Our target goal is $5,000 USD and we’re just getting started. So if you’ve enjoyed the music of Mastermind in the past and would like more, purchasing these (and other) digital titles will help us move forward toward these goals.

In all honesty, after the trials and tribulations of the last few years, I had to step away from it for a while to clear my mind. Now we’d all really like to get rolling again and we’re asking our true fans, friends, and supporters both old and new to help out. Spread the word, visit mindawn.com, sign up to the Newsletter, and RSS bookmark this blog. Thanks! ~Bb

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We are pleased to announce the entire Mastermind catalog is now available digitally for the first time. We have chosen mindawn.com as our host service for its superior audio quality and progressive music origins. The links have been active for a few days but now it is official - Mastermind has joined the digital revolution! In addition to our release catalog we will be offering digital-only titles from our archives. The first is MASTERMIND LIVE 1995 online now.

Webmasters, bloggers, & media are encouraged to quote from this press release.

[Mindawn is currently the ONLY site officially authorized to sell Mastermind digital music. Anywhere else selling our music is probably a legacy venture (i/e former labels) for which we no longer see a penny, or a pirate site. Please do not use them! We would appreciate you bringing any of these places to our attention so we may investigate. Thanks.]

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Historians rate GW….

“George W. Bush’s record on running up debt to burden our children is the worst since Ronald Reagan; his record on government surveillance of citizens is the worst since Richard Nixon; his record on foreign-military policy has gotten us into the worst foreign mess we’ve been in since Lyndon Johnson sank us into Vietnam; his economic record is the worst since Herbert Hoover; his record of tax favoritism for the rich is the worst since Calvin Coolidge; his record of trampling on civil liberties is the worst since Woodrow Wilson. How far back in our history would we need to go to find a presidency as disastrous for this country as that of George W. Bush has been thus far?”

I know this has little to do with music, but I count the days until he is gone.

“it’s best to view McCain as part of a Bush-McCain continuum.” — US News & World Report

Think about it.

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Thomas Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times and one of the great thinkers of our time (IMO) and he says the world is flat. I believe him. Rather than reiterate all his points (which you can read up on here: 10 forces flattening the 21st century) I’ll focus on one…..

“the personal computer. With the PC, individuals could suddenly author their own content, words, photos, spreadsheets, videos [MUSIC - Bb] in digital form, etc. And once your content can be shaped, manipulated and authored in digital form, it meant that it could be sent to so many more places and distributed in so many ways”

He doesn’t mention music specifically, but music was the first media to really REALLY be affected by this new flat world. It devastated record companies, freaked out artists, and combined with Web 2.0 (MySpace cough cough), it pretty much allowed EVERYONE to become a recording artist. The democratization of music so to speak.

This is all well and good I suppose, but it sure kicked me in the ass. The real problem with this is there is SO much clutter on the flat horizon, you really can’t see the gems for all the garbage littering the landscape.

I guess what I’m getting at is like most other recording bands, we have had to rethink the traditional distribution model and are now joining the online digital music revolution. With some luck we can stand out on a flat horizon.

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The NEW & IMPROVED Mastermind / Berends Bros list mail server is now up & running so please go add yourself. It’s very user friendly, you can subscribe & unsubscribe yourself, set preferences, and outgoing mail isn’t uploaded in bulk from our local machine. Very cool. We will import the current list and you’ll receive a welcome message allowing you to confirm your subscription and a link to update your list preferences. Please be sure to enter your location so we may fine tune announcements. Click here and sign up today!

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