I started this project around april of 2007 with the song "dissappear", as the basis of what i wanted the band to sound like. I have been working with electronic music since the mid 90's. Since the project began it has moved around a bit. I'm in Cincinnati now putting together a lot of new stuff that i'll be posting up here.

I've been playing guitar, and piano since i can remember. The electronic part of my music originally came as a way to fill out the rest of my songs without an actual band. I wrote under the name "wintermute" from '98 til about 2002, then was one half of the band "Aidmn" with Andy Rivas (now of the band Bad Employees, also on LBA records).

in 2003 i moved to Monterrey Mexico, played a lot with just guitar, and vocals, picked up what i could from the music there, which i get a lot of inspiration from even today.

I also get a lot of inspiration from IDM, and early industrial bands. As far as writing goes there are no loops in any track i put out for the purpose of keeping everything original, just sequencing, and sampling. The occasional piano or guitar.

If you like what you hear, spread the word...

Bad Employees are on thin ice. Their boss will not tolerate the duo’s electronic rock for much longer. He is especially fed up with the way synth programmer/studio technician Andy Rivas combines his immersive, psychedelic beats and machine bleeps with singer/guitarist John McComas’s melodic vocal arrangements. Based in barely-on-the-map Huntington,WV, Rivas and McComas maintain the 8 to 5 grind, but after hours the real work begins. The group meticulously perfects its formula until each track embodies the emotions each visionary wants to express.

Dave Lavender, writer for Huntington’s local newspaper The Herald Dispatch, refers to the band as ‘the two-man kindred spirits of experimental rock.’ This may be true considering from the time the two met their freshman year of high school they shared an instant respect for each other’s diverse musical interests—McComas rocking out to Black Sabbath , The Beatles and The Clash; while Rivas pursued an endless search for electronic and hip-hop acts including The Beastie Boys, Daft Punk and The Chemical Brothers. In fact, after the two attended a life-changing Chemical Brothers concert Rivas vowed to start his own sonic revolution. McComas would not join him for several years as he was busy with various rock bands.

On the surface, Bad Employees make you want to dance or jump around, but McComas explains “the songs serve as outlets for anything that makes us feel helpless: consumerist debt, the corporate system, even small town gloom, but paired with the easily-accessible beats and melodies, the whole thing’s not so dismal.” Not so dismal indeed, in fact, you may just have the time of your life venting frustrations at a Bad Employees show. As opposed to just simply listening to their CD the live experience offers audiences more. A typical performance is in itself not at all typical, since songs are modified from night to night. The liveaspect also showcases a visual artistic side. Projected on stage are atomic explosions, skeletal x-rays, and orchestrated shapes and colors that pulsate with each note. Sound and vision unite as the two employees take you on a visceral journey that is equal parts performance art and big-beat rock show.

We've always had a kind of love-hate relationship with most electronic bands. Some seem to go overboard with the knob tweaking and seem to lose direction, forgetting to write actual rock songs with hooks. We love the sounds and textures of a lot of electronic bands, but the songs, structurally, are no good. On their debut effort "No Star Could Be As Large," Huntington's Attack Flamingo presents us with the perfect mix of hard driving space rock, heavily textured with synth, with actual drums, killer guitar solos and emotive, powerful vocals, with lyrics that read like they're straight out of an astronaut's diary. It's basically a concept album about an astronaut's trip into outer space, beyond the moon, sun and stars, and into a meeting with god at the edge of space. Think Bowie's Major Tom meets some Smashing Pumpkins with God Lives Underwater's "Life In The So-Called Space Age" thrown in, and you're not too far off.

The band (Sean Knicely: vocals, guitar; Marty Brown: guitar; Joey Spurgeon: synth; Phil Smith: bass; Sam Hodge: drums) definitely combine for more than the sum of their parts. Broken into "Earth," "Moon," "Star" and "Hero" themes, the CD is one of the rare occasions where a band's image (CD cover) and sound converge perfectly. That'll stay the way it is as long as Dido and her lawyers don't get their way. That's another story. Right in time for the lucrative space tourism industry to take off, Attack Flamingo presents us with their own 2008 space odyssey. The CD opens with the somber, slightly overdriven piano on "Songs of Home," which gives way to synth, as "The summer sun is singing songs of home" and "darkness surrounds" upon leaving Earth. There's more fat synth on "The Earth Grows Small Below" on the way to the moon, as there are "no more skies, hindering my eyes."

"Rocketship" enters "The Star" with hard rockin' guitar and an abandoned ship, leading to the instrumental "Drifting." "Burning" is one of the more rockin' tracks on the CD. On "A Small Voice" the astronaut finds "The Hero" growing inside, as Knicely sings "Come with me and we will fly Come with me and we will never die" The song has cool acoustic guitar with tribal sounding tom; a laid back sound that rolls right into the last track, "Breathing," the final meeting between the astronaut and the star. "Breathing" has a really cool kid chorus and, has the astronaut flying away with the star. While the lyrics reflect a spiritual yearning, and the spacesuit is but a thinly veiled metaphor for the flesh, the songs don't come off as something preachy, just deep.

Working with Broadmoor's Russ Fox seems to have helped emphasize the band's spacy sounds; panned synth accent the songs, with cool layered vocals, sometimes with cool effects. Fox, who plays guitar and sings in the atmospheric Huntington-based rock band The Red Velvet, lends his talents well on the CD. Listen to it with headphones for the maximum effect. And while we here call the band "electronic" they're really a rock band with heavy synth elements. They call themselves "elecrtonica" and that works for us. The songs are mainly guitar-based rock with atmospheric synth. HEAVY atmospheric synth. This is one of the coolest CDs we've came across this year, and has been in the stereo steadily since we got it a while back; hence the delay for this review.

It'll be interesting to see where the band goes from here. They've recently added Barboursville-based DJ SirBoy (Hodge), and they've posted remixed versions of a few tunes on their MySpace profile, so that's promising. They've also just anounced they've signed with Sarasota, Florida-based LBA Records. And, after going to the end of space and beyond, maybe they'll come back down to Earth on their next effort. Either way, whatever direction they take, for Attack Flamingo, the sky is obviously not the limit.

Check out this nice review of our cd from the folks at WV RockSCENE.

Dancing For Architecture is the compositional world of composer Matthew Richards, from the south western pocket of England. He describes his music as the 'enveloping' of different genres in a familiar ambient sound world. The Dancing For Architecture sound can skirt the fringes of metal, free jazz and funk but without ever delving in too far to be considered them. Ultimately, because of the idiosyncratic nature of the composer, the music will always make for an intoxicating listening experience.

Dancing For Architecture is:
Matthew Richards- electric Guitar, bass Guitar, synths & piano, violin, drum programming, sound world technician, producer and composer

The Sunshine Kids EP' is the debut release from 'Karno's Army'. Formed in early 2006 this Bristol Powerpop trio have supported bands such as The Wombats, Bluetones, Yeti, The Draytones, Harrisons and The Jam. They have received airplay on BBC and University radio stations and radio shows as far as Germany and Japan. A buzzing launch party in their home city, playing city centre clubs, numerous headline slots and London gigs are helping to promote and expand the bands fast growing fanbase.