Rich Batsford » News

Mindfulmess at mac reviewed by B13 magazine

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:10:43 +0000

“I cannot stress enough how talented this man is – you could almost hate him for being this good if it wasn’t for his gentle mannerisms and warm sensibilities”

Mindfulmess at mac reviewed by BrumNotes

admin — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:30:09 +0000

“an intimate evening of exquisite music played with the kind of understated charm that makes a real connection between performer and audience”

Mindfulmess – free MP3 previews

admin — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:58:52 +0000

Hello and thanks for visiting. Ive very nearly finished recording my new album and am really looking forward to performing it in concert at mac (the Midlands Arts Centre) in Birmingham on Saturday June 11th.

To give you a flavour of whats to come, below you can listen to and download a special 3 track demo EP. Some of you may already have heard Listen In from an earlier message, but Easier for Her and Your Thing are published here for the first time in any format.

Just click to listen:

1 Easier for Her demo

2 Listen In demo

3 Your Thing demo

I hope you enjoy the songs, I think there’s often a really lovely, intimate feel to home demos. Im also very excited about the studio recordings, particularly as Im doing lots of lovely, rich* backing vocals.

Please remember that Saturday June 11th is the date when I will be performing these tracks and many more at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham – please click here for more info or to buy tickets – it should be a great concert with beautiful visuals and a very talented special guest – Jules Gray.

The finished album will be on sale at the mac and also via this website.

thanks, Rich.

* pun intended

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Mindfulmess – Concert and Album Launch

admin — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 15:26:15 +0000

To celebrate the release of my new album Mindfulmess, Im going to be performing at the Midlands Arts Centre on Saturday June 11th – something which Im excited about in all sorts of ways. This is going to be the biggest fully solo show Ive done yet and Im really looking forward to the chance to play a lot of the songs and pieces that I dont have the chance to perform in half hour sets.

Some of the songs on Mindfulmess are very personal and (I think) kinda beautiful, so the chance to share some of them with some friends and fans is going to be very special indeed.

The album will be ready by then and Im planning a special limited edition CD release – maybe as few as 150 copies – to mark the occasion.

I’ll be joined by VJ Chromatouch who is working on some special visual delights and another friend who is a very fine singer/songwriter will be joining me as a special guest.

Tickets for this very special evening are on sale for £7 or £5 concessions – please order online via the mac box office or call them on 0121 446 3232.

Listen In – a start on my new album

Rich — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 17:03:58 +0000

Its a moment Ive long been waiting for. Much as I love my piano, singing has long been a passion of mine and so it feels like a bit of a landmark to have made a start on recording a demo of my first album of songs.

The album, Mindfulmess will be coming out later this year – but in the meantime, Ive been practicing the songs to get them up to recording scratch and using my little home recording set up, Ive now produced a demo of about two thirds of the songs (the rest need more practice first).

Have a listen to one of the first results, a nice little number about one of my favourite things to do: Listen In demo and let me know if you like it

Meanwhile, I’ll keep practicing – more news on the album soon.

Improvisation 1 – the video

Rich — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:23:50 +0000

I’ve rather grown to love my first foray into recorded piano improvisation, so I’ve gone one step further and produced a video for it. What Ive done is pretty straightforward, setting the piece to a series of my favourite photos from last year, but I think its come out quite effectively, the changes of images working with the changes in the music and the sequence as a whole offering a nice little audio/visual journey through themes of change, impermanence and beauty.

I hope you like it – if you do, please let me know what you think and please do share this with your friends using the various social networking buttons below this blog post, or liking or commenting on the youtube page, or simply emailing the link on to a friend. Thank you.

Also, dont forget there are some other videos of my piano music on the video page of this site.

Improvisation

Rich — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:14:28 +0000

As I often do on a Sunday afternoon, Ive just found myself improvising at the piano. This particular occasion is an exciting one for me, not so much because its one of my best ever attempts (tho I reckon its quite pleasant), but because this is the first time Ive made use of my little home recording set up to record my meanderings.

So, Id love to share it with you – please let me know what you think and if you like it, do keep in touch because theres many more to come!

and do please share it around: Improvisation 1

Entertaining Huntsville

Rich — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:29:40 +0000

Thanks to the modern marvel which is the internet Im starting to make new friends and garner fans of my music right across the globe. Recently one such, the very charming Bob Baker, interviewed me for a magazine promoting live events in no less a place than Huntsville, Alabama.

With thanks to Bob for the opportunity and a nice little interview, please check it out:

Pilot Project Takes Off

Rich — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:46:26 +0000

A very exciting project for music in the West Midlands is now live:

The Pilot Project started when local music enthusiast and one time BRMB broadcasting legend Robin Valk realised that with the ongoing demise of CDs and records, there was a danger that the best in new and contemporary music was no long being catalogued as it would have once been by the British Library. Conscious that there’s a staggering amount of quality music in the region that might not otherwise be around for ever, Robin has put together an amazing team and created the Pilot Project.

With a lot of nous and clever work from the guys at Carousel Digital, the team have created something much more than simply a time capsule for future music historians. Instead we have a wonderfully user friendly and accessible data base of hundreds of tracks of astonishingly high quality music in a vast range of styles.

I really urge you to explore this archive and experience the breadth and quality of music around – you can listen by style, search by region or look up your favourites and click on from there. Spend a few minutes on the site and you are absolutely bound to find some new artist that floats your boat.

Birmingham has long had an amazing number of quality artists in a truly diverse range of styles – so much so that the area’s very diversity has probably held it back in the sense of developing a strong, cohesive “scene”. But now, innovations like the Pilot Project offer not only a fabulous snapshot of where that scene is right now, but also a very real and practical method for enabling that scene, no, that community, to really blossom and grow.

Stasis – Free MP3 download

Rich — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:37:46 +0000

Its good to share, so please accept this gift of a free MP3 download of one of my latest pieces of piano music, Stasis.

Just click the link below if you want to hear it right now in your web browser, or if you want to download the MP3 and take it with you, just right click and select “save link as ..”

Stasis

Im going to be giving away much more free music in the future, so if you want more, please keep in touch either via email or by liking my facebook page.

Id love to share this far and wide with other people, so please take a moment to spread the love: