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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Check out our Music & Media page for streaming audio from our catalog. We’ve put together a collection of tracks you can listen to anywhere, anytime! Over 90 min’s of music. You can also embed [update: bandcamp and youtube] players on your own site. We’ve also put up a few tracks from the new archive series on the Mastermind and Mastermind Live pages on Myspace to enjoy.

[UPDATE: deleted ancient dead links. Most links on the sounds page should work. -Bb]

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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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Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The New York Times, says the world is flat. Rather than reiterate all his points (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.

[UPDATE: Friedman’s cheering on the Iraq invasion made me decide he is a total dick. -Bb]

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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!

[UPDATE: the mailing list has been moved to: billberends.com/list/ -Bb]

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Five years ago today at around this exact time the United States of America – MY country – attacked Iraq in a preemptive war. I recall vividly the sinking feeling in my gut as I watched with horror the initial “shock & awe” bombardments on live television… like seeing a loved one in car accident, I could feel a dark cloud of despair move in over top of me.

This was not MY country doing this, it was the Neocons who have hijacked the place. There are a million other web sites discussing that so I won’t get into it here. What I want to say today is the dark cloud that hangs over us all really put a damper on my enthusiasm for… most things. Including making music.

I have said in passing that I am waiting out the current U.S. administration to be able to breath again and I really think this is true. Looking over old date books, the final mixing sessions for (what may someday be) the 7th Mastermind studio album were during that fateful month of March 2003. In fact they were during the two weeks preceding the attack.

There are other factors that contributed to Mastermind getting bogged down which I shall discuss at some point, but I can’t relax and feel creative when so much is wrong in the world. The insidious feeling of something major gone awry made music seem so trivial. Ignore the smoke and smile…? I couldn’t do it.

Since 9/11 (and I don’t believe the “official” story for one moment) the world is a different place. An uglier, less friendly place. And I don’t like it, not one little bit. Now I feel at least a faint glimmer of hope as the 2008 Presidential elections loom. Not that the choices are all that good, but at least it is SOME kind of change. Ron Paul is the only guy who seems to be telling the truth in any fashion, but I’m not holding my breath… oh wait, yes I am.

[UPDATE: learning more about RP and his libertarian B.S. I decided he is a total dick. -Bb]

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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!

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