Hans Erik will be performing live this Friday, August 6th, at Park Slope mainstay Bar 4.  Hans will be joined by Erik Naslund on bass and vocals and Chris Stromquist on drums and vocals.  Chris is coming off of several weeks on a European tour with the famed gypsy punk band Kultur Shock.

What:  Hans Erik Trio Live
Where:  Bar 4, 444 7th Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11215
When:  Friday, August 6th at 10pm
How much:  FREE!

This is only the second appearance of the trio anywhere in New York City and their second show at Bar 4.  The first was back in June of 2o10.  The venue is an ideal spot to take in live music due to the nicely tuned piano and intimate setting.

A little about Bar 4:

Bar4 redefines the term “neighborhood bar”. It’s a cozy lounge and music venue that serves up a tantalizing mix of live music and DJs, cocktails and draft beers at its candle-lit, copper bar. Favored by both Park Slope residents and local musicians, DJ parties and renowned comedians draw a diverse group of devotees.

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Hans Erik will be performing live this Thursday, 7/22/2010 at 8:30pm at Googie’s Lounge above the Living Room.  Hans will be joined by longtime friend and collaborator Erik Naslund on bass and backing vocals.  Erik has played alongside Hans for the past 5 years, joining the first inception of Hans’ band called HanZsolo and then for the later configuration called Hanz Erik and the Hims.  Both currently reside in New York City and have been performing as a duo and a recently created trio with drummer Chris Stromquist.

What:  Hans Erik and Erik Naslund live at Googie’s Lounge
When: Thursday, 7/22, 8:30pm
Where: 154 Ludlow St, New York, NY, 10002
How Much:  FREE!

A little about the venue:

Just up the rickety stairwell of LES institution the Living Room hovers Googie’s Lounge, a folksy venue posing as your spinster aunt’s dusty attic. Googie’s is more an appendage of the LR than a separate establishment, and it doesn’t have its own bar (waitresses in flats and tights climb 32 stairs to better serve you), but it does make for an endearingly ramshackle performance space, complete with musty curtains, scattered holiday lighting, and an ivory-white baby grand. Coated in a soft sky blue, the Lounge’s extremely casual air allows for the intimacy its music demands: A few low-lit tables place drinkers face-to-face with the brave song smiths. There couldn’t be a better place to catch your girlfriend’s best friend’s college roommate cousins’ CD-release party. — Patrick Coffee of NYmag

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  • Hans Erik Live at Googie's Lounge Above the Living Room Hans Erik will be performing Friday, May 21st 2010, at Googie's Lounge above the Living Room.  Hans will be joined by friend and long time collaborator Erik Naslund on bass and backing vocals.  Here are the details: What:  Hans Erik and Erik Naslund live at Googie's Lounge Where:  154 Ludlow......
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Band Promotion for every musican is the key to success. To sell your music online, promote your band, promote your music or just showcase your band to the world you need to be able to promote your music with success.
As you well know, blogs have been all the rage for the last few years and rightly so. Blogs provide the reader with current news and content rather than some of the out of date and stale content that may appear on a lot of websites. If you are a musician or have your own band then starting a blog could help promote your music. Band Promotion is difficult enough and this is just one way to help in promoting your band.
Blogs also rank highly in the search engines for a number of reasons, most notably for their current and relevant content. There are, however, several key elements to creating a successful blog about your band or music as outlined below. You are competing with thousands of other bloggers within your subject area of music so you need to be different and follow each of the key steps as outlined.
Do your research! You must know what is already out there in terms of competition. You can do this by typing in your blog subject matter into the search engines and seeing what appears in terms of blogs. Also, search the many blog directories to see who is already writing about your topic of interest. Use the Google keyword search tool to see what people are searching for each month in relation to your topic. For example, you would be best suited to focus on a topic that people are searching for and attracts more than 50,000 searches a month. When it comes to music, you could write about band promotion which has over 70,000 searches for these keywords each month. Or maybe write about how to sell your music online or a related topic that people want information about.
Find Your Niche! As already mentioned there are thousands of blogs out there on the internet about music, bands etc. They key is writing about a niche topic and then you will be more likely to attract a targeted audience. To try and compete with an already established blog that has high page rankings, a strong viewer base, and lots of existing content is going to just get you frustrated. Focus on one key area of music or playing in a band and you will create your own loyal fan base who will crave informative articles.
Think about your blog title, domain name, description and content. Take your time in thinking about a catchy but relative domain name. It is very difficult to find the domain name you want as most one, two and three word top level domain names

have already been registered. You can buy one of these top level domain names from the owner but often the requested purchase price is unrealistic and just too costly. Also, try to get a popular domain name extension. Try to get the keywords in your domain name and blog title. This will help in the search engine rankings.
If you already have your own website then create a blog using your own domain name. Why? If you create a blog from your own band or music website then you will provide readers with the opportunity to explore and navigate to other pages on your website. This will also help in branding, brand exposure and providing one link for fans to find you.
If you don’t your own website and are not keen to start your own blog then try starting a blog on one of the top music network sites such as MyBandMate or MySpace. Both provide tools for musicians to promote their music in many ways for free and one is in the form of a blog. This way you will already have an established audience to read your blog. I would recommend doing this even if you do go ahead with your own independent blog. The more exposure for your band then the more band promotion you will achieve.
With your own independent blog it is important to develop keyword rich content with the keywords appearing in the title, description, first paragraph without going overboard. You will be penalised if you just “overload” your pages and articles with too many of the targeted keywords. You just don’t need to do it and Google is aware of all the tricks webmasters try to use when it comes to achieving high page rankings.
It’s all about the content! Readers will return to your blog if you provide them with informative and valuable content about the subject you are promoting. You are reading this article most likely because you want to start your own blog or are looking for ways to promote your music. As a result, if you gain some valuable information from this article then there is a good chance that you would return again to my blog to read other articles.
The content needs to be informative and relative. You will lose your reader just as quickly as you got them if you have nothing to offer. There is just too much competition out there so you must add top quality content. If you are not sure what to write about then read other blogs, not to copy their articles but to get ideas. There is nothing wrong with seeking out ideas and then writing your own article with a different twist or adding new material. If your readers like your blog they are likely to refer it to their friends which will increase your subscriber base.
Provide some incentive to get your reader to join your blog newsletter or RSS feed. One of the trends in recent times is to give away eBooks when someone signs up. You can create a 5 or 10 page eBook about your niche topic. It has to be catchy enough to get the reader to give up their name and email for it.
Promote your site via bookmarking. Some of the most popular sites include Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Jumptags, stumbleupon and many more but these are the top ones. You will be accused of spamming if you constantly promote and add your own content or site so get some of your friends to help you out with this. These sites will track your IP address and can permanently shut down your account so you will need to respect their terms of use. You can find that these “bookmarks” will give you some promotion on the first few pages of the search engines for your keywords.
Use RSS feeds. RSS feeds provide the reader with an option to receive updates when you add new content to your blog. Once again you will need to submit regular articles or news to your site and it needs to be worth reading to keep the reader subscribing to your blog. I have subscribed to blogs, newsletters and sites before only to be bombarded with emails selling products. I quickly went to the “Unsubscribe” button at the bottom of the email.
Encourage readers to submit comments about the various blog entries to submit. Your readers are there because they have an interest in your topic so try to create a bond with them in making them feel a part of your blog. If they leave a comment be sure to respond otherwise you will find that they are less likely to write a comment again.
You will need to market your blog. This can be done by submitting your blog to the various blog directories or by writing articles and submitting them to article directories with an active link back to your blog. Submit a free press release about your blog, get into related forums and include an active link. Be sure not to spam or just sell your blog as you will be expelled from the forum, be discrete in promoting your blog in these forums.
Form joint ventures with fellow bloggers or websites. Invite other bloggers to submit content to your site and in return you can submit content to their blogs and therefore cross promote. Most bloggers will follow up on a lead that will increase their exposure. As long as you are not in direct competition and only complement another blog then this can be a valuable option. You will also gain more content for your blog.
Make your blog stand out! Add other forms of media to the site. Add MP3s, videos, photos or even an audio interview. There are plenty of cheap ways to add this rich media content to your site. Make sure that they provide relative content that your readers are craving.

By hellomails.com:


Fresh Content! I can’t state enough how much your blog needs to contain fresh, informative and related content. It will take some work to maintain a dynamic and successful blog so devote at least an hour a week to working on your blog. Improve the appearance, promote it, add new content or pursue partnerships.
You can make money from your blog by adding Google Adsense, affiliate links or generating income from advertising on your blog. You will only gain interest from advertisers if you generate a significant number of hits each day. If your goal is to promote your music or band then don’t lose focus of this by distracting your readers. Good luck in promoting your music or band.

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In the interview we talk about the band’s rocky past and a few of our follies in the past, Owen’s live bra fashion show at one of shows, our influences, and our future direction, lyric writing, some random drunk guy (ANDY), and we crack some jokes with everybody! There are quite a few people mentioned in out interview! We also talk about the Name Olio!

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Second Song of my band. The Picture is a few minutes work in photoshop and only a prototype Line Up: Waldi – Guitars and Bass Nils – Vocals Mijl – Drum Programming and Lyric Writing By the Name of our Master,the Sovereign , we came down to earth, came to bring hate. Mankind, prepare for ages of total torture! We are the Legion of Scourge, killing in the Name of the Emerged Summoned by total hate We come to annihilate and mutilate We are the Legion of Scourge Coming to purge The World Overfilled with Human Scum We come to kill everyone Merciless Torturers as we are We go very far Amputating Limbs from Bodies While Raping virgin Hotties We are the Legion of Scourge Coming to purge This World We eat men’s Guts and Gore Fighting a total War We are on a Killing Spree A small Legion, only three, We are the Legion of Scourge Coming to purge This World

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by Scott James of blog.discmakers.com:

I remember back in the day when I played my first show with my first real band. We were really excited about the whole thing and eager to promote it. This was well before MySpace or Twitter or Facebook and at the time the obvious way to promote was to put up flyers. And put them up we did. We made tons of them. We made some really big ones too. Getting them in very visible or creative places was a source of pride. The theory was that if 0.01% of people who saw the flyer came to the show then we could pack the venue by making sure that 50,000 people saw the flyer.

The attendance at our first few shows was decent, so we continued with the plan. After trying this for a short while though, we just didn’t see any correlation between the flyers we put up and the attendance. The people who came to the shows were friends and their guests or people who had found out about us by word of mouth. We lost our enthusiasm for plastering the town with our propaganda.

This was always kind of a fuzzy topic for me for a long time. It never really clicked for me until I read something by marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson. He stated that after exhaustive tests experts found that on average it take 9 exposures to a product for someone to make a purchase. Suddenly this started to make a lot more sense for me. It’s something that I guess I knew on some level, but until that moment it was an abstract understanding of something that still frustrated me somewhat.

The truth is that virtually no one will act on your band’s marketing until they’ve had a number of exposures. Higher quality exposures can generate quicker sales, like if someone sees you as the opening act at a live performance, but advertisement requires repetition to work. I’ve seen artists make mistakes in this area at great cost to them.

It’s generally a very bad idea to purchase expensive advertising without the funds to launch a sustained campaign. You can’t spend a bunch of money on a full page add in a magazine and expect to get results, unless you can afford to continue targeting those same people over time.

As a web designer I saw the traffic statistics of a client’s website after an expensive national television commercial. The add was specifically designed to drive traffic to the site. The results of the first add? Well, let’s just say you could buy the same amount of traffic from Google pay-per-click advertising for the cost of a good meal. Ouch.

So what this means for you is that in order to be successful in your marketing you want to be persistent and consistent and promote in ways that you can sustain. Expect that people may have to hear about you from someone, see a flyer, see that their friend added you on Facebook, and then hear about you again before they decide to listen to your music. Then they may become a fan on Facebook, see one of your videos and think to themselves “I really should go see these guys”. Then they may see a post on Facebook and think about going to the show that you’re promoting. They may miss that show, but a month later their friend says something about your next show and they end up going.

That’s just one example of how it might go down, but the point is that it’s a process. You need to generate as many exposures as you can for your target audience and you should expect your marketing to take some time to produce results. If you don’t reach your potential fans enough times then you can be sure that very little will happen. What I wish I would’ve known with my first band was that 0.0% of all people who saw my flyer only once would actually go to a show, but if we had stayed with it and continued using other avenues of promotion as well then we could have gotten much better results in the long run.

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By Brenna Ehrlich of Mashable.com:

Wondering which bands garnered the most buzz at SXSW this year? Well, stats service Next Big Sound has the answers, and it’s a hearty mix of up-and-comers, music vets and under-the-radar stalwarts.

Next Big Sound created two lists of buzzed-about bands by counting increase in social media activity during the period that encompassed SXSW, the first being a list of the fastest growing bands at SXSW and the second being the bands that gained the most fans overall during the fest.

At the top of the first list are a trio of lesser-known acts — for you music snobs out there, only one of them has been reviewed on Pitchfork: the band holding court at the number-one spot, Fang Island, which garnered a review of 8.3 from the music site for their self-titled debut album.

The preponderance of smaller bands on this list is due to the fact that it shows biggest percent change in buzz, meaning that a band that went from zero to thousands of fans during SXSW week would rank pretty high on the list.

There are, however, a few more well-known bands on the list, such as GZA of Wu-Tang Clan fame and The Antlers (whom we have just added to our SXSW music video post), who were considered one of the break-out bands of 2009.

Here’s the full top ten list, head over to the Next Big Sound site for a more detailed breakdown of where these fans are coming from:

1). Fang Island
2). Neon Trees
3). XV
4). Oddisee
5). Jonna Lee
6). Matthew Mayfield
7). Evergreen Terrace
8). The Antlers
9). Phantogram
10). GZA

In terms of bands that netted the most fans overall, the mix is rather eclectic. At number one is indie/emo act NeverShoutNever, whose Butch Walker-produced disc What is Love? just dropped in January; followed by The xx, a British indie rock outfit whose debut album showed up on scads of top 10 lists last year (and got the consummate nod from the teen pop culture set when hit single “Crystalised” made it onto Gossip Girl); and Wale, a D.C. rapper who has been recording music since roughly 2006 with a debut album Attention Deficit dropping in 2009.

Also present on the list are experimental/ambient indie band Broken Bells (composed of Danger Mouse and James Mercer of The Shins) and Sum 41 (who were super popular when I was in high school). Here’s the complete list:

1). NeverShoutNever
2). The xx
3). Wale
4). Broken Bells
5). Sum 41
6). Blair
7). The Temper Trap
8). Miike Snow
9). Local Natives
10). We are Scientists

And since it wouldn’t be a music post without some actual jams, here’s a couple of songs from the number-one acts on each list. Did any of your faves makes the cut?

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By Trevor M of soundsxp.com:

I had always dreamt of running a record label, right from the time when I first got my mitts on a 7” single in the early 80s. When I was in my mid 20s in the time before the internet had really taken hold. I tried, and failed, to start a label from my bedsit in Wales. The band I wanted to release sounded a little like the Orb. They made sounds on their Ataris. I liked it. The label was going to be called Symphobia.

Rewind to my student days in Newcastle in the early 90. Inspired by John Peel and the fanzines I had been buying in my teenage years I had started a proper paper fanzine. ‘Wiremesh’ didn’t last long. I think I did 3 issues. All long lost and forgotten with features on bands like Sofahead and Leatherface. I didn’t find it easy to build and copy zines when I had bugger all money coming in. But I still had a DIY itch that I wanted to scratch.

My dream of getting Symphobia off the ground was always going to be an uphill struggle. I didn’t have the money or the know how for a start. What was a DAT tape? What was mastering? How do I get my records into record shops? (more on this later). How did record contracts work? I probably trawled the back pages of Sounds, NME and Melody Maker looking for adverts from pressing plants that did small runs of vinyl. Because even back in the mid 90s, when vinyl was a dirty word, I still wanted to do my releases on vinyl. After finally getting all the information I required, the band I wanted to release (name not remembered, as they never settled on one) decided to call it a day. So, I was then stuck with the idea of a record label and no one to release. And the local gig scene wasn’t inspiring me to take my dream further. I really didn’t want to release a death metal band from Ystradgynlais.

Fast forward 10 years. The Internet is established. I can browse to websites set up by enthusiastic unsigned bands or even use myspace and hear an unlimited number of unsigned bands making the kind of music that makes me want to release records. Again. Or in reality for the first time. I started out by revisiting the fanzine idea and in October 2004 I started my first proper blog – Lostmusic. Within a few years this had morphed into putting on shows in London and yes, a proper record label, with 7” singles. Some of them even made it into shops and everything.

What had changed? Well, alongside all the bands being readily available, CDr’s were invented and also acceptable and they were cheap to buy and use. So there was no fretting over DAT tapes and other confusing things. The internet also made the doing part of DIY easier. I could easily research pressing plants and record manufacturing online – finding places that were happy to do smaller runs to cater for the micro labels like Lostmusic suddenly made it all more affordable. I could make 500 7” singles for £800. Not exactly cheap – but split between the three partners in Lostmusic it was within reach.

And it’s only when 6 boxes with 500 pristine platters arrive at your door do you realise that making the records is only half the battle. You’ve got to be abIe to flog them, too. So I crudely built a paypal shop on the website to sell the records – I have limited web building skills and the shop was a source of much frustration over time and I have since, for a modest fee, upgraded to a properly designed web shop. I still haven’t really sussed out the distribution malarkey, to this day. I am currently in talks with Cargo about taking my stock.

What I did do was this: I sent the records out to interested outlets like Norman Records, Rough Trade and a handful of others. I then found collecting the sales money is time consuming, especially as these stores take the stock on a sale or return. At first I even found that I was being paid less than it cost per single to make by some of the stores. Talk about putting you off before you’ve barely had a chance to begin.

You can also use specialist distros that abound on line. They often pay in advance for stock and they’re a great way of getting your records to more people. There are places like Fraction Discs in Sweden or Thee SPC here in the UK that often take a few copies and help get the records you’ve spent your money on out to people that might want to hear them! Lostmusic muddled through and after a number of 7” releases and a few home produced CDr releases – I decided to go it alone and my current label Odd Box Records was born just under a year ago.

If I was advising anyone on setting up a small DIY label I think I’d stress the following:

  • be prepared to lose a bit of cash along the way – releasing records isn’t cheap.
  • only release bands you really believe in, regardless of whether you think they have the potential to make it.
  • do it at your own pace.
  • try and build a list of useful contacts (be that blogs that like what you are releasing, radio stations and DJs that also like what you are doing or press contacts). You can then write that all important press release to send out with promo copies of your latest release.
  • putting on live shows can be a lot of fun but also a lot of stress. It’s also a good way to sell your records/CDs direct to the fans of the band.
  • try and get distribution sorted. It’s a nut that I’ve yet to fully crack, but being able to sell your records is a key part of actually running a record label. Without selling records you are nothing more than a warehouse, really.
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Third Song of my band. The Picture is a few minutes work in photoshop and only a prototype Line Up: Waldi – Guitars and Bass Nils – Vocals Mijl – Drum Programming and Lyric Writing Chasing Humans is a Pleasure Not just killing, also enslaving We use them for our Needs Put the weak ones in Jail and Torture Chambers (Enslavement of the Human Race) (We love to torture) (Enslavement of the Human Race) (For what Reason? ) (Enslavement of the Human Race) (Because we are merciless) Doing Experiments with the useless Ones Removing Organs from living Victims Just to hear them scream Just to make them suffer (Enslavement of the Human Race) (We love to torture) (Enslavement of the Human Race) (For what Reason? ) (Enslavement of the Human Race) (Because we are merciless) Death Gore For our Master

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