Greetings folks! Some updates from the Berends/Mastermind camp…

First off, a reminder The Berends Bros Band is playing at The Country Lakes Pub (NJ) Sat. July 31, we hope to see some locals there. This is a 3 set gig so we’re playing a wide variety of material. At the last Berends Bros gig we played some old Mastermind trio material, but quite honestly, it tends to clear room of average folk… so if enough Mastermind enthusiasts show up we could whip some out. Otherwise lots of vintage rock with plenty of new material added to the set list.

Sat. July 31, 2010 – Country Lakes Pub – Browns Mills, NJ
558 Lakehurst Road, Browns Mills, NJ – 9pm to 1am, 3 sets, 21+, no cover
For map link visit – http://tinyurl.com/bbgigs

There are some new BB/MM interviews posted talking about music, Mastermind & more. These may give you some insight into what is going on and what is coming in the future. For links visit http://billberends.blogspot.com/

In MASTERMIND news, the INSOMNIA album has been fairly well received with lots of nice reviews (and a few clunkers-can’t please everyone). We hope you have purchased your copy! Visit http://mastermindband.com/store to order. Also available on iTunes, Amazon.com, and CDBaby.com

We have reached out to some of our prog rock contacts to inquire about possible Mastermind live shows, but the responses have been slow in coming. If you would like to see future Mastermind shows, reach out to some of these festivals and promoters and let them know you would like to see Mastermind live!

A technical update: our website “mastermindband.com” will be changing hosts in the coming weeks, so if the site goes missing or domain mail bounces, never fear, it will reappear. In the interim use “mastermindband@yahoo.com” to get in touch and bookmark http://billberends.com for news, links & updates. Thanks.

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer and we hope to see you soon!

Bill c/o Berends Bros & Mastermind

ps: more new music is on the way.

09/09/09! Wow, time sure flies… I haven’t blogged here in months. Probably because nothing concrete has been going on in the world of Mastermind the band, but lots of little things have happened over the last few months, so here are some quick updates…

We’ve got a new download page at bandcamp.com which is very user friendly. There you can listen (free) and download Mastermind in a variety of formats [mp3, VBR, ACC, Ogg, Flac, Apple Lossless] for just one low price. The URL is easy to recall: mastermind.bandcamp.com and 100% of your purchase price goes directly into our artist Paypal account which is nice.

There is also an option to pay whatever you’d like above the suggested price if you’d care to help fund future endeavors. We hope some of you choose that option! There are web widgets under the “Share” link so you can stream Mastermind tunes anywhere on the web. Very cool.

The complete Mastermind catalog is still at Mindawn and we’re pleased with them, but we want to reach more people – so check out mastermind.bandcamp.com – you’ll like it. We’ll have more titles online soon. The Broken EP is also now available as mp3 from Nimbit too, another site with a widget. Check that out on our digital download page.

Since we are without a record label a the moment, getting this online thing going is really our best shot at carrying on… so we do hope you choose to make a purchase! That’s the best way to show your support and improve the odds of us getting back on our feet again. Thanks.

Next up, I’ve started billberends.com in order to keep other music and personal rants out of the Mastermind legacy so to speak. Not much there now, but there will be. I have completed an instrumental guitar solo album as mentioned previously which I hope to release within my lifetime. If anyone would care to kick in a little funding to get things rolling, do get in touch!

I’ve also set up a blog to talk about guitars (and whatever) at billberends.blogspot.com and a new youtube channel for anything else comes that to mind at youtube.com/billberends so go have a peek. The first thing I did was a little shred video… I have some video ideas for the guitar album coming. It’s a youtube world.

There’s a new Mastermind Facebook page too. Facebook is the new Myspace it seems, so stop by and add yourself. Write something nice on our Wall there. Let us know you care!

Most significantly tho’ today – and I find this hard to believe myself – it’s been ten years to the day since we finished mixing Angels of the Apocalypse our last full studio release. I never expected that to be the last hurrah and still don’t feel like it was… we did finish another album, but never managed to get it released for a variety of reasons. The good news is someone has expressed an interest so there is hope it may eventually see the light of day. That would be great. Plus, we have begun recording new material as well.

Anyway… after all this time I am still amazed by the people that come out of the woodwork to express their appreciation for the music we’ve made over the years. Some are long time fans, others just discovering us, but it has been a steady flow. So I will never say never. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another ten years! Regardless of what the future holds, I thank you for your interest in Mastermind. Till next time…

-Bb

ps: a couple Berends Brothers Band gigs this month too. Hope to see you there!

We’ve finally gotten ’round to getting a page up on Facebook.

facebook.com/Mastermindband

We hope all you Facebookers will join us there!

Bill Berends here. Since I am doing some solo guitar material I thought I should have a place to shoot my mouth off about it, so I started a new blog at blogspot. Also started a Twitter account for whatever reason lol… but feel free to follow if you’re interested. Oh right, I’m on Facebook as well, look me up. I am totally connected! To what I’m not sure, but I am. Anyway I invite you to check it out….

billberends.blogspot.com
facebook.com/billberends
twitter.com/billberends

Recording update and new music coming VERY soon!! I’ve been very busy!

Our interview segment on The Gagliarchives progressive rock radio show May 24, 2008 is now being Podcast. Since it was a Saturday night on Memorial day weekend it *is* possible some of you weren’t at home listening to the radio or computer! Listen to (or download) the entire hour long interview segment at gagliarchives.podbean.com or just click here….

In this program brand new music is debuted as well as selections from our recent offerings on Mindawn.com. Bill & Rich Berends discuss the past present & future of Mastermind. Special thanks to our host and long time friend of Mastermind – Tom Gagliardi – who has been serving the prog-rock community on the air for over fifteen years. Enjoy!!

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!

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.

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.]

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.

Bill Berends here, the mastermind of Mastermind so to speak. This is my first blog after learning how to install Wordpress and setup a MySQL database on the mastermindband.com server. Apparently I must have something to say… or perhaps will, to go thru all that (more than I wanted to know!). So check back often to see what it may be… at least somewhere near the end of the this month (March).

I really don’t know much about the etiquette of the blogosphere, but I figured I should have my own, so here it is! It may get more interesting, or I may not have time for it. Dunno yet. Anywho, like I said, at least stop back in a couple weeks & see what’s up.

Thanks for reading!