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November 15, 2007

Be sure to visit the MySpace page where we have posted the James Bratton remix of the track "Machine" from the new CD - The Machine EP.

Featuring the title track "Machine", and standout tracks such as the James Bratton remix of "Machine" and the new version of "Cold (the Coldest version)", continue to earn friends and fans throughout the world.

are currently in preparations for select live appearances through 2008. The touring line-up of features founding members Patrick Bamburak and Joe Gutsick, and they will be joined by veteran producer/performer James Bratton on bass guitar. - Newsdesk

August 20, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - to perform LIVE at select venues beginning Fall 2007 through Spring 2008.

For 20 years, have been mainstays on the indie music scene. With a catalog of CD releases covering ground from punk to rock, have continued their musical evolution while staying true to their "do-it-yourself" work ethic. These original punks have moved from their garage band beginnings to professional recording studios - and now for the first time in 13 years, they will be bringing their music to live audiences once again.

On lead vocals and guitar/keyboards - Patrick Bamburak is a founding member of the band. His musical work in and beyond extends from performing to songwriting and production. With over a dozen commercially released CD's, film and television soundtrack appearances, and numerous songwriting credits for other artists, Patrick is relentless in his pursuit to create new music.

On drums and percussion - Joe Gutsick is a founding member. In addition to being the man behind the drumkit, Joe, along with his wife Teresa, have been the main designers of the logos, album art, t-shirts, etc... It is Joe's artistic vision that has been at the core of 's existence from the very beginning of the band. Beyond his work in , Joe has extensive live performing and studio experience playing in the Virginia-based hardcore band Oedipus during the early 1990's.

And joining LIVE on bass guitar - James Bratton has an extensive music career that includes performing, songwriting, production, engineering, remixing... having earned Gold and Platinum certifications, the list of his accomplishments goes on and on. A pioneer of the New York underground dance music scene in the 1980's, James' record label 111East remains a milestone in the rise of house/dance music and its major impact on the American music industry. As a songwriter, producer, and remixer, James has worked with artists such as Sybil, Kelly Charles, Black Box, and Salt N'Pepa, among many others. James also worked extensively in the UK, where the effects of his musical output are still being felt. From electronic giants The Prodigy sampling his work in the 1990's to UK based trip-hop artist Plan B covering James' track "No Good" on his late 2006 release, James Bratton's music continues to reach new audiences worldwide. Most recently, James remixed the track Machine on the band's 2007 release The Machine EP.

Specific venues and dates for LIVE will be released right here on baitoven.com as they are confirmed. Ticket information for select venues will also be available at Ticketmaster as the dates are confirmed. Live date/venue information will also be posted on 's Messageboard at VH1.com as they are confirmed. Press inquiries should be directed to band@baitoven.com - *Please reference " LIVE" in the subject line on any email inquiries.

Also, joining as Support Artist on selected dates will be Chris Kudela. Singer/songwriter Chris Kudela has recorded and performed his original music throughout the New York area for well over a decade. With the upcoming release of his latest EP, "Blindfold the Sun," co-produced with Patrick Bamburak, Chris' music continues to break new ground and expand his ever-growing fanbase. - Newsdesk

June 18, 2007

's latest release, The Machine EP, is out now. Be sure to visit your favorite online retailer or digital download service to get your copy today. The new version of the classic track Cold, The Coldest Version, and the James Bratton remix of Machine, both continue to generate big buzz with friends and fans of the band.

We will shortly be announcing details on a contest for friends and fans of the band where you could win a Machine EP poster autographed by Patrick Bamburak, Joe Gutsick, and James Bratton. More to follow on this exciting contest...

Finally - for those of you who follow the other musical projects that Patrick is involved in, from performing to songwriting, to production, you can now view the music video collection from his pop-rock project Funhaus on YouTube. Be sure to go there to check out the music videos for Leave My Tears Alone and Abandoned City. Funhaus is a project involving singer Michelle Aversano, songwriter/producer Tim Keyes, and Patrick Bamburak. The group have released two albums on API Records and have had their music featured the national cable-network The Speed Channel. - Newsdesk

April 23, 2007

The Machine EP, the new disc by , is out now and will be available online through all of the major music vendors in the coming weeks. Be sure to keep an eye out for it - as it will be turning up everywhere from Amazon to iTunes...

With the release of this new album, the Newsdesk caught up with Patrick to get some answers on the lastest round of questions from friends and fans of the band.

What is the story behind the writing of the new track Machine? Patrick:
Machine is actually a very old song, at least in its original version. I wrote it over the summer of 1987 during the first jam sessions. When Joe and I played it back then, since it was just the two of us, it was performed live as bass, drums, and vocals. The bass riff is the core of the song. It was probably two years ago when I sat down with the original version of the song and decided to flesh it out into something more substantial. I rewrote all of the lyrics and expanded upon the bass riff so that the song had a better flow to it. I thought that it would be cool to release the revamped track as part of the projects we are doing to mark the 20th anniversary of the band. It is a song that was there at the very beginning, and like the band, has grown, evolved, and improved, but also has come full-circle in a way and moved back towards the sound and approach we first began with.

How did James Bratton become involved in creating the Machine remix? Patrick:
I have always been interested in pushing the boundaries of the " sound" so I am really excited about the Machine remix on the disc. It has a Euro-club feel to it, with some edgy electronica elements to it too. I've known James for a number of years and have a lot of respect for him as an artist and producer. He has a great body of work - with platinum and gold record awards. He is a serious artist. We've been wanting to collaborate on music together for quite some time, so with the Machine EP coming up, he and I decided to start there. I sent the tracks from Machine over to his studio so that he could work on a remix version. James is such a versatile musician and producer, so this remix represents just a first step in the possibilities of the types of music we can collaborate on. The new music that James is working on for his own upcoming project is really cool too.

What do you think of the buzz surrounding the new version of Cold - The Coldest Version? Patrick:
As the EP was being put together, the feedback on the new version of Cold was so positive, I decided to switch the running order on the disc and put the track first. I think the strength of the new version of the song is built firmly on the foundation of the original. In the mid 1990's, I did a revamped version of Cold that is the template for this new version on the EP. I thought that if I took the guitar riff and put it over a hard-edged swing, that the track would really take off. I was so happy with the results that at the time I sent a music-only version of Cold over to the WWE wrestler Chris Jericho for him to check out as an entrance theme-song. Last summer, when I was assembling the music for the Machine EP, it seemed to be a perfect time to revisit Cold, so I basically recut all of the parts from that mid-90's version and tightened it up into The Coldest Version that is on the EP.

What is the Big Top Fusion on the track 74 Words? Patrick:
For those of you who don't know the story of 74 Words, when we recorded the original version of the song in 1988, Bob Medvedz performed all of the music on his keyboard, including using some cool samples and loops he made, and then he and I did the vocals together. That version of the song was done on a 4-track machine, and at some point shortly after we recorded the song, I mistakenly taped over half of the track when I loaded the tape upside down in the unit. The only surviving version of the song that we had was a mono-mix that Joe Gutsick and I made when we were editing a music video for 74 Words. That mono version of the song ended up on the Ugly Songs compilation CD, and when we later re-released the Cold album on CD, Tim Keyes at API Records made a new cross-fade version of 74 Words that used the original stereo mix up until the point in the song where the tape was recorded over, which then crossfades perfectly into the mono version from the music video. The Big Top Fusion version of 74 Words is a recording I did a few years ago where I took the piano-riff from my song Big Top World and used it as the basis for a revamped version of 74 Words. When Bob and I did the original vocals, we sang a bunch of atonal harmonies to give the song a spooky feel, but for the Big Top Fusion version, I decided to sing the harmonies as almost perfect fifths. Like I said with Cold, the original version of 74 Words was so strong that it made it easy and cool to work a new variation on it. - Newsdesk

upcoming CD release The Machine EP was recently mastered by Eric Rachel at Trax East studios. The EP will be released by CastleGar Productions in the near future.

March 21, 2007

The upcoming CD release The Machine EP was recently mastered by Eric Rachel at Trax East studios. The EP will be released by CastleGar Productions in the near future.

Patrick Bamburak was joined at the session by record producer James Bratton, whose remix of the track Machine appears on the EP. Jame Bratton's long list of prior credits include a platinum-selling single when his work was sampled by the UK's electronic act The Prodigy. Most recently in 2006, UK trip-hop artist Plan B reworked James' track "No Good" as the first single from his new release.

The tracklist for 's The Machine EP is as follows:

Cold (the Coldest version)
Machine
I Cherish You (the Loneliest version)
74 Words (Big Top Fusion version)
Only You
Machine (remixed by James Bratton)

In addition to the new track Machine which is featured on the EP, there has been alot of interest generated by the new version of the classic track Cold. Since being reissued on CD and available for sale as a digital download, Cold continues to be one of 's top-selling tracks of all time. The new version of Cold - the Coldest version - promises to continue that tradition.

In other CD news - API Records will release REMIX, a synth-remix album of classic tracks. Patrick Bamburak is currently working with producer Tim Keyes on the final master for the disc. We'll have more details here at baitoven.com as soon as they are available. - Newsdesk

January 18, 2007

Happy 2007!

Way back in the summer of 1987, Patrick Bamburak, Joe Gutsick, and Robert Medvedz gathered their guitars, drums, and keyboards in a sweltering garage and thus was born. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the band, and on this special occasion the usual New Year's greeting by Patrick and Joe will be forgone, allowing them instead to recount some stories from so many years ago...

Favorite jam moment:
Patrick: We probably spent hundreds of hours jamming in that garage. I remember one time, when Joe's drumset was a Roger's kit (which I think was from the 1960's) we were in the middle of a song and he hit the cymbal pretty hard. I noticed that the cymbal made more of a clang than a splash, and almost immediately, a huge chunk of cymbal flew past me, skipping off the guitar, before hitting the floor on the opposite side of the garage.

Joe: has always been a bit theatrical for a garage band. We arranged the garage like a stage, complete with a flying PA system and lighting rig. In an effort to provide some mood lighting, we added some small white lights on the floor that would provide sort of a back lighting effect. As we started the Cold jam sessions, we were showing off the lights to Bob, and we mentioned that we could turn them on or off with a foot switch. "You mean like this?" Bob asked before stomping the lights with his combat boot. The lights were never the same after that. Actually, they were broken and had to be thrown out.

Favorite recording moment from the early sessions:
Patrick: Before we had a 4-track recorder, we used to just set a boombox down on the opposite side of the garage and keep it going until the tape ran out. We would play song after song, with tons of talking and joking in between. One of the good things about just letting the tape run is that if we were writing a song, we would basically capture the process from the first idea to somewhat of a finished form. I recently transferred from tape to digital a pretty long sequence, maybe 15 minutes or so, of Joe, Bob, and I working together to write "Political Life". Of course, there's about 5 minutes of music in the sequence, and 10 minutes of joking and cracking up.

Joe: Being high school students with minimum-wage jobs ($3.25 per hour back then, for you young people out there), we didn't have a lot of money to spend on equipment. The local Radio Shack provided us with our only digital effects box, which we used for the vocals. It sounded like we were singing in an empty metal room - about as far from a natural sound as you could get. We were young rockers, though, so we didn't care!

Necessity is the mother of Invention... (Memories of the famous "lighting rig"):
Patrick: We did have a pretty cool light show in the garage while we jammed. The bars that we attached the lights to were actually metal cross beams from a bed frame. We screwed eyehooks into the ceiling rafters, and then used metal cable to suspend the bars. Attached to the bars were a bunch of clip on lights with colored lightbulbs: red, blue, green and yellow. It was a manual process to set the lights to the pattern you wanted - basically switching them on and off one by one, so there was no blinking going on. But, when the garage light was off and the stage lights were on, it was a pretty cool effect. We made a bunch of different variations on the rig itself including using pulleys to have the suspended beams actually move. Looking back, it reminds me of the Little Rascals and the Silver String Submarine Band, because we were building an entire stage show from junk we found in the garage. I might as well have been playing a jug with Joe scraping a wooden spoon on a washboard.

Joe: I'd have to say that the best lighting rig we ever constructed was the flying triangle lighting rig, inspired in part by Stryper's To Hell With The Devil stage set. We fashioned a large triangle out of metal frames and stretched white fabric across it. Clip on lights were mounted on each of the corner and directed at the sheet. The entire contraption was suspended from the ceiling by a series of pulleys, which allowed us to raise and lower the rig, putting it in countless configurations. We definitely could have used a roadie to help raise and lower the rig during songs, though.

Funniest moment from the early days:
Patrick: There are millions of them, because it was nonstop comedy. Joe had this bit where he would mimic the moves of about a half-dozen hair-metal drummers rolled into one. I forget which song we were playing, but he decided that in addition to having his drumset sideways, he also wanted all of his cymbals behind him like a certain-metal-drummer-whose-name-I-will-withold. Everytime he hit the cymbals, his arms flew backwards over his head, until the cymbals themselves tipped over. I would also crack up when he did the pointing the stick at you routine, where he would keep pointing one stick at you the whole time, while keeping a very metal facial expression and playing the snare and high-hat with his other hand. There was also the time when Joe and I had gotten these white lights, which were actually the mirror lights from a bedroom dresser/drawers set, and we put them around Joe's drum kit to light it up. Bob walked into the garage, up to the drums, and stomped on the swtich so hard that he immediately broke the lights! He didn't realize that since we were in our Little Rascals junk phase, the light switch was actually designed for use by a finger, and not a foot in a Doc Marten's boot. Some of the funniest moments with me involved singing cover songs from artists whose voices were many octaves far above my baritone range. I often sounded like a Chipmunk.

Joe: It would probably have to be during the Cold recording session. We had finished laying down the basic instrument track for Twenty-Fifth, and Bob was in the garage laying down the vocals. When we had jammed the song, Bob sang in a rather reserved fashion. As we sat upstairs drinking tea, we heard Bob shouting the lyrics at the top of his lungs. Patrick's father walked by the kitchen, shook his head, and laughed. I couldn't help but laugh, too. Having a garage "studio" always brought with it some complications. There were a number of occasions where we would be recording vocals in the garage, and one of Patrick's parents would walk in and carry on a conversation with us. Ah, the trials and tribulations of rock stars!