Piecespeak #1 - 30-03-09

Welcome to Piecespeak. Pieces are a band from London, and this is their online outlet for their weekly thoughts, musings and wonderments.

As this is the first Piecespeak post, it might as well provide a small potted history of the band. Pieces started in October 2008, when Luis, Nischa and Peter joined together to find a way to channel their frustrations at the world into something beautiful. We started to make music together because we had to. Frenzied nights in a small bedsit in Clapham were spent in a musical playground where Pieces played with all kinds of music that excited us, charged us, reignited us when the world had dampened our fire. After three months of this strange existence, Pieces moved house to north London, where they have been busy recording their first album ever since.

So, here in March 2009, Pieces are a band wanting to share their music with the world. As we try to press our music onto whichever ears will listen, inevitably Pieces are asked to describe what we sound like and what we stand for. As we actually find it quite difficult to remember our own names sometimes when we’ve been rehearsing for a little too many hours of a day, we found it easier to come up with a few things that Pieces definitely ISN’T…

Pieces is not a song on an iPod commercial.
Pieces is not a list of ‘influences’ that may as well be a list of bands we plan to rip off.
Pieces is not a clothes line in Topman that makes us more money than music.
Pieces is not on the cover of FHM or Heat before NME or Q.
Pieces is not a ‘difficult’ second album that just picks up scraps from the floor of the first.
Pieces is not an economy that does not value skills.
Pieces is not karaoke versions of pop stars with no pensions.
Pieces is not Product.
Pieces is not interested in whether you’ve had an accident in the last 5 years, and won’t give you 100% of the compensation you’re entitled to (sorry).
Pieces is not ‘Sound of 2009’ (or any year).
Pieces is not out to make you want what you can’t have and buy what you can’t need.
Pieces is not ever going to give it 110%. Anyone who has a problem with this can suck on the percentages from 101-109. Except they can’t, because they don’t exist.
Pieces is not a studio apartment on the 20th floor of a block of 200 with scum on the walls and no heating that pretends to offer you ‘independence’.
Pieces is not cheap art as a substitute for character.
Pieces is not stage-diving to compensate for a lack of tunes.
Pieces is not plastic surgery as a cure for vapidity.
Pieces is not a mockney accent.
Pieces is not an illusion of wealth propped up by unimaginable cruelty.
Pieces is not the UK’s no.1 provider of anything.
Pieces is not a Deluxe version of an album you bought 6 weeks ago asking you to pay another £12 for the only two songs you really wanted in the first place.
Pieces is not a self-help book blaring the same message, the same lie from every bland, overpriced page.
Pieces is not a £5 pint of beer at a charity concert.
Pieces is not a glockenspiel tacked on to make us seem ‘quirky’.
Pieces is not ‘quirky’.
Pieces is not ‘on a journey’.
Pieces is not a 20-second commercial, that no-one will watch, that could pay for a lifetime’s support for any number of the billions of human being who will live their whole lives without adequate water, food or shelter.


And finally, Pieces is not serious about most of the above. It’s just a bit of fun. Really.


See you next week for more.


Pieces x