*** Obligatory sales message ***
Yes, we have an album. If you're interested for whatever reason in buying the thing, you can do so here for only eight US dollars. If you want to look at the cover art and sample a few of the tracks first, you can do that here.
Greetings all.
This is the official website of the band known as Sea Water Bliss. (Also known, for Googling purposes, as "The band known as Seawater Bliss".) We're a rock-n-roll combo based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Unflattering photos, lyrics to many of our songs, mp3s, a synopsis of our rock opera, and lots of other random crap can be accessed using the menu at top left. If you're not sure who we are or what you're doing here, you might want to start by visiting our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Olin and I recently drove over to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and met up with an old friend of Olin's and a fellow songwriter, Michael Russell. He's a good guy and he's got some good songs, which you can listen to here.
PS. There's now also a "making of the video" video you can watch.
October 14 2007. Meet Squinty and Gummy.
Meanwhile, we had all this footage, so we decided to use it to create a music video for our song The ice age. The music video is pretty much exactly like the movie, only shorter and with no talking. You can watch it here.
Incidentally, that other music video, the one we shot in Vonda in July, is still coming. Just need to get Jay to kick his wedding-video clients to the back of the line and focus on the rock and the roll.
August 5 2007. Not that this has anything to do with anything, but...
June 27 2007. A few photos from Saturday's video shoot in Vonda. This is our director, JW Arnold, setting up for a shot:
Here's me teaching the lyrics to a bunch of young Vondanians:
And here's Tina - whose last name I never even learned - our last-minute fill-in waitress. At 11 AM on Saturday, she had no idea she would be starring in a low-budget music video that very afternoon.
June 23 2007. Just wanted to thank everybody who turned up this afternoon for the filming of our music video "You're not the one" at Sig's Place in Vonda, Saskatchewan. This includes all our friends who drove a half-hour from Saskatoon, and sacrificed a beautiful summer afternoon, to assist us; and the tableful of strangers who happened to be eating lunch "on set" as we filmed around them, and who allowed themselves to be talked into lip-synching the chorus. You guys were great. And I especially want to thank Sig herself, for being so incredibly accommodating. In the end, we'll be lucky if a few hundred people - most of them friends and relatives - watch the completed video when it's posted on YouTube. But Vonda treated us like rock stars. More on the video soon.
March 4 2007. We're still a band, really we are. Andrew and I practice at least once a week, except when we don't. We still develop new songs, which every year or two we play in front of outsiders. We've got an album, which strangers are encouraged to purchase for $10 (Cdn).
We also do this sort of thing:
People might get the impression, scanning the last few updates to this website, that the only thing Sea Water Bliss does nowadays is create Flash animations that are only tangentially related to their music. Not true. We also play Scrabble sometimes.
January 29 2007. Happy new year. Having time on my hands (being still unemployed), I recently completed a second Flash animation. This one features me talking about the music video for our song Half my age, so if you haven't watched the video, the animation probably won't make much sense to you.
December 12 2006. A few months back, when every band in the world was promoting itself on MySpace.com, we were happy to remain aloof and cultivate our quaint, quiet, non-interactive website, safe from the scrutiny of rowdy youngsters, unburdened by the pressure of convincing perfect strangers to become our "friends" and leave dumb comments at the bottom of the page:
DOOMSLAYER999: u guys rock!!! ;-P
I never really got the point of MySpace anyway. I guess if you were too busy or lazy to create a real website, then maybe you'd be willing to settle for a fake, ugly one. But if you've already got a website - as most modern rock-n-roll outfits do (even us) - why do you need another one? Mind you, as the boxes of unsold CDs in my closet will attest, I know squat about marketing.
I don't hear anyone talking about MySpace anymore, so maybe that fad has passed. But YouTube is still going strong. And as much as I generally despise the sparkly and the newfangled, I really like YouTube. Check out this video of Leon Redbone jamming with Alf. How cool is that?
On another newfangled note, I've used my most recent period of protracted unemployment to teach myself Flash animation:
So between the Flash cartoons and our ongoing affiliation with local director JW Arnold, the plan is to go on posting videos here and on YouTube until someone out there notices that we exist. Then watch us rocket to stardom!
...Oh, yeah, in our spare time we'll continue making music.
November 27 2006. Our thanks to everyone who came out to see us at McNally Robinson last week. We had a pretty good time. A couple kind folks even bought our album. Hooray! At this rate it should only take us a hundred or so performances to get through the four boxes of unsold CDs currently piled in my hall closet.
To tide fans over until we schedule our next performance, I've uploaded some demos to our Recordings page. We've been sitting on these and a couple other unfinished songs for a while, waiting to build up a little money in the band account. A few more successful shows like this McNally Robinson gig and we'll have enough to record our next album. I just hope I can find room in my closet...
PS. To learn about other fine Saskatchewan recording artists please drop by The Heartland Music.
August 21 2006. Always looking backwards, I've considerably expanded the section on our 2002 rock-n-roll show at the Mendel Art Gallery, Room To Breathe. There's now a diary recounting my struggles to get the thing written, and my subsequent struggles with the director to get the thing re-written. Also I've invited the director, Warren Cowell, to chip in his reflections on the project. He's surprisingly upbeat about the whole thing.
July 23 2006. Album's ready. Check it out.
May 7 2006. While the band is still in hibernation, I amuse myself by expanding the Michael A. Charles Archive. Eager to hear my views on Canada's declining birthrate, Paul Wolfowitz's selection as President of the World Bank, and the surprising commercial failure of "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow"? Go thither.
Meanwhile, Troy Mamer is working on our album cover. (Click here for a slideshow of the development of the album art.)
For previous updates to this page, click here.
Recent news.
March 18 2008. I'm posting this update from Olin's apartment in Houston, Texas. I've been down here for six weeks already, and it'll probably be another six weeks before I come home. I haven't really been conducting any band-related business - it's been an uninterrupted hiatus from responsibility - but I did take the time to upload some old video footage from our performance at the 2005 Weinstein Follies show in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. Please enjoy:
Olin, Michael Russell, and your bearded correspondent.
November 22 2007. Kinda late notice, but if you find yourself in Vonda, Saskatchewan tomorrow night (Friday, November 23rd), you should drop by Sig's Place and join the small get-together which we will be hosting in the back room. It's the world premiere party for our music video You're not the one and director Jay Arnold's birthday. We'll be playing some rock-n-roll and posing for suggestive pictures with the big moose head on the wall.
September 30 2007. A few years back I wrote the script for a short film entitled Haunting Simon. Pretty simple little story about a depressed ghost and her nose-picking, porn-addicted boyfriend. Last summer Jay and I filmed the fifteen-minute movie with Kendra Andrews in the role of the ghost and some homely dude in the role of Simon. Of course, fifteen minutes is too long to post on YouTube, so now we're trying to figure out what to do with the sucker. Maybe re-edit it to get it down under ten minutes.
An unfinished video for "Theme from Teen Wolf Too".
The story behind "Half my age".
A message from Michael A. Charles.
December 4 2006. Earlier this year Jay Arnold, the director of our rock opera, helped me create this music video for our song Half my age. I always said I was gonna put it online, but I was waiting till we had properly mastered the recording. But Jay grew tired of my procrastination and posted the video on YouTube without telling me. What the hell, it's out there now.
November 13 2006. Well, on Friday Andrew and I had our first public performance in a couple years and it went...uh... well, it went. Not much of a turnout, but Mystic Java is kinda out of the way, and it was a cold night, and...um. Anyway, we worked out our first-show jitters in front of six friends and a few people at the back of the room that couldn't have cared less. So that's a plus. In a couple weeks we're doing McNally Robinson. Then maybe we'll regroup over the holidays and plan to accelerate our world conquest beginning in the new year.
