in conjunction with Electric Black, we’ve mixed and added production to their BP protest song “Top Kill” and also created a music video for it. It’s featured on Prefix Mag currently, spread the word!  

“We organized this protest with the intention of creating a multimedia performance piece aimed to fan the fires of outrage against BP, TransOcean, and Halliburton, and to spread consciousness about this abomination,” says organizer and lead singer of Electric Black Johnny B.

http://www.prefixmag.com/news/bp-protest-video-top-kill/40976/

Top Kill by Electric Black from Electric Black on Vimeo.

We spent some time in March and April scoring a fashion film with Director Zach Gold for designers A.F. Vandevorst, and the results are some of the best work we’ve ever done.  All video was done here at our new home, Lovescool Studio.  

http://www.vogue.com/voguedaily/2010/05/a-girl-on-film-an-a-f-vandevorst-movie-by-zach-gold-david-dumas/

It’s been a good long while since we’ve done any blogging out of our lovely Casa Nova Studios, but it’s not without good reasons.  Let me give you a little recap of what’s happening in our crazy world of audio.  

The biggest thing to happen in the past year is our current transition into a new studio.  Yes, after 4 years we’ve decided to move on from our home behind Main Drag Music and move….a half a block away!  

Why would we do this?  Well, I tell you!

Over our years in our two previous spaces, we’ve had a lot of ideas about of the things we want to accomplish in both audio and multimedia.  We’ve been involved in throwing events/music and art shows, producing bands and singer/songwriters, creating a huge amount of music for corporate sources (commercials, movies, trailers, product releases, events) and had a wonderful parade of all walks of life be a part of our studios.  We feel very blessed and lucky to have done all that we have up to this point.  But even with all that, there was a lot missing from how we wanted to be able to work, and most importantly, the scale of what we wanted to accomplish.  Its always been our dream to be a much more capable video/photo facility as well as a full fledged audio production company, and now, it seems as if our dreams are about to come true.

So we’re officially announcing our relocation to our good friend Zach Gold’s visual facility,  Lovescool Studio.  We’re taking up an audio residence inside this beautifully bare 4000 sq. ft. studio with full lighting and video facilities and intend to bring a new level of sophistication, crazy, and technology savvy to their already intensely high level of production value.  Be sure to check out their links and see what sort of amazing projects they’ve been working on over the years.  

With this merger, we’re going to complete our path to becoming a much more wide-ranged facility and are already embarking on some very amazing projects with them, a couple of them being scoring a short film and some high-profile ad work.  We couldn’t be happier about the full potential of all of this coming together, and will most certainly be announcing an opening party which will show you what we’re made of!  

This also, however, means we are in the middle of building our new studio, which means we’re not fully tracking capable in the month of March.  At this very second, I’m typing and composing music from an undisclosed location in Williamsburg with our two Pro Tools HD rigs and a rack of toys while we wait for our wonderful new facility to be constructed.  

There are a TON of things going on, and I’ll be posting a lot in the coming days and weeks about our adventures.  In the meantime, here are some images of our tearing down and moving the studio, only pictures can describe what sort of endeavour that was!!  A big thank you to all the friends who came to help us haul stuff down the street in the middle of a blizzard.  It was trying, but we made it through unscathed and are stronger for it.  

There will be more pictures coming in the upcoming days, we’re just getting really settled in the new joint.  Building progress pictures to come as well!

you know what’s really fuckin hard?  coming up with a band name in 2009.  Even if you’re amazingly brilliant, well read, and have more internet geek knowledge than 50 nerds, chances are, most of the cool or semi-cool ideas you had for bands names have been bands that suck for a long time.  True story.  

I named my own band, Nova Clutch, years ago walking through this cool neighborhood I’d been to one other time at that moment, DUMBO.  I thought it was so mysterious and so fucking New York.  That’s basically all gone now, including the namesake of my band, which was torn down so douchebags can park their Hummers in a paved lot.  The Nova Clutch building was one of the first buildings on the waterfront at the turn of the century.  When I was leaving the neighborhood after having a rehearsal in an underground theatre with my at the time unnamed band, I looked up at this building and said, hmm…Nova Clutch…I think that’s the name of the band now.  Well, we’ll use it until something cooler comes up.  But nothing did.  And years after, I’m glad nothing else did.  It still makes me happy to think about it, especially after moving there another 6 months later, it became the spiritual home of my band (the neighborhood, not the building), and it was there that it grew (and I grew) to become what it was to become.  I haven’t lived in DUMBO for years now, and neither has my studio been there, but to this day the name continues to have more meaning for me.  Not bad for looking up and seeing a sign, literally.  

But when being asked to name new projects or other friends’ projects, damn, its HARD!  I’m sure many of you have gone through this same process, maybe resorting to dictionaries, encyclopedias, wikis, etc etc.  But to find a truly good name, it just kind of has to hit you.  Last night I named a new project, which will be announced soon, and after searching for days and weeks for something, my brain sort of combined all the things it was looking for in one name.  This was the video that led me to my conclusion: