3 Years Without Bandmaster

Hi! Andis here. It has been almost three years since Bandmaster released new music. I wanted to share what happened and what awaits us in the near future.

year 2017 for bandmaster

So in 2017 we released our first EP entitled Stay Awake, for which we later won our first Annual Latvian Music Recording Award (or “Golden Microphone”) as the best electronic / dance record. We also played 17 gigs that year in 5 different countries. Some of the gigs were truly amazing – we got to open for The xx in Estonia and Latvia and Phantogram as well. Playing for a packed venue of 5000 people was something I will never forget. A lot of friends were in the attendance, some of them told me they cried during our set.

But then there were some other gigs – those where I felt nothing at all. One of those was Positivus Festival, where we got to play in front of 2000 excited people, but I felt absolutely nothing, no emotions at all. That was also our first gig where I noticed people leaving our show. I knew something was wrong. The environment in the band had become tense, we couldn’t agree on anything – everybody wanted to do something different. As all of us were feeling that way, we decided to take a break. Although at that time it felt like the end of Bandmaster.

The three of us didn’t talk for almost a year. Me and Zelma decided to do a sideproject and released 2 songs under the name AUTOGRAPHIC. Zelmas solo career as VIŅA took off after she released a banger called “Tēja ar karalieni” (Tea with the Queen). Rudd produced quite a few hit songs for other Latvian artists.

new bandmaster music Soon

One year passed, Rudd suggested we go see the Bohemian Rhapsody movie together and after that sit down for a few drinks and talk – how each of us felt and what had gone wrong. So we did, quite a few times. Talking our hearts out, we all came to the conclusion that the music the three of us had made was still really cool and we want to keep doing that.

During the last year we have worked intensley on new music and I can’t wait for you to hear it – really excited about that. But before we release it, we decided to celebrate the first 3 years of Bandmaster and gather all the best recordings of our live shows and release them as a live album – called Still a Live.