TONY LEVIN To Release 'Bringing It Down To The Bass' Album In September
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Tony Levin and Flatiron Recordings have announced a September 13 global release date for a new studio album titled "Bringing It Down To The Bass". Today, they present the title track which can be previewed here.
The album will be available on double vinyl, CD, Blu-ray and digital streaming. The Blu-ray will feature Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD 7.1/5.1 mixes and hi-res stereo audio. The Apple Music stream will be available in Immersive Audio / Dolby Atmos. Thiago Lima at Iguana Studios in Toronto, Canada mixed the Atmos tracks.
"Bringing It Down To The Bass" has no shortage of wit and whimsy, and songs of power and profundity. Most are instrumental tracks, while a few feature vocals and spoken word. The sonic stew includes prog, jazz, thrash, classical, a whiff of barbershop quartet, and you won't be sure what's around the corner. And while it's called "Bringing It Down To The Bass" — and that's no lie — it's not all about that bass. Levin's seventh solo album, and his first since 2007, is an autobiography of sorts, with the themes drawn from Levin's musical life. It features a myriad of collaborators from his half-century-plus on the road and in the studio with Peter Gabriel, KING CRIMSON and many, many others.
"It could have been done a long time ago, frankly," Levin says of "Bringing It Down To The Bass", "but it's because of a problem I have, which is a very good problem to have. And that's that I have a lot of touring and that's what I love to do, playing live. It just didn't give me much time at home to work on finishing the album that I've been working on for five or six years."
"But," he continues, "a year ago May, I looked at my schedule and saw a lot of touring with Peter Gabriel for almost a year and then in November, 2023, there was a STICK MEN tour — and then in January a LEVIN BROTHERS tour — and I said to myself, 'If I take March, April and May off from any live playing and maybe even any recording for other people and really focus on this, I can finally get this album out.' It could have happened ten years before if I had the gumption to turn down tours."
"I had pieces very much in the prog-rock vein and I had pieces that were based on the bass," Levin says, "and somewhere around the middle of the record I made the difficult decision to toss the prog stuff — well, not toss it exactly, save it for another album — and the more I focused, I chose the kind of pieces that had to me a sense of unity to it in that it's about the bass. Not songs with singing about the bass, but each song is either based on a bass riff or a bass technique that I then invited some great rhythm sections to play on.
Over the past half century, Levin has been a prolific session player and one of the most active live performers on the planet. He's contributed his talents to over five hundred albums amongst which include 15 with Peter Gabriel and 18 with KING CRIMSON (counting live, studio, and compilations). Alongside contributions to the work of John Lennon, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, Herbie Mann, Paul Simon and many others. On tour, he's travelled the world many times over with the aforementioned KING CRIMSON, Peter Gabriel, and several of his own bands including STICK MEN. This fall, he'll stage 65 performances in North America as a member of BEAT, celebrating KING CRIMSON's '80s repertoire alongside Adrian Belew, Steve Vai and Danny Carey interpreting "Discipline", "Beat" and "Three Of A Perfect Pair".
(Source: www.blabbermouth.net)
