In 2004 after the release of his debut solo album, Saturday night believer. Melbourne based musician, songwriter Craig Westwood started work on a new batch of songs based around the idea of writing directly to memory and avoiding the use of any recording devices such as tape decks, computers or hard disk recorders. Basically isolating himself in a bedroom with a small 10 watt practice amp and a guitar. Craig emerged a few months down the track with a batch of songs and enlisting the services of friend Tom Jackman (Ricane, Deer) who he had worked with on his previous solo debut effort.
The first few months of jamming were liberating, no counting bars or sticking to rigid arrangements, "the music flowed and it felt great as a guitarist to have a drummer lock into what was in my head". Before long the two had a full set of songs and started performing small shows to give them a run in a live environment with one early success of snaring the opening support for Brant Bjork and the Bros on the Melbourne leg of his Australian tour.
Late December 2004 saw the two of them set about recording and tracking the songs with the assistance of Jason pc (Blood duster) of Goatsound productions. Over a period of 2 years Craig continued to tweak, manipulate and shortlist an albums worth of material down to just a 5 songs that has become a continuous 26 minute long ep with no gaps or individual track selections. The motivation behind this was to hopefully force the listener to play the entire piece from start to finish, denying them the ability to skip tracks and purposely setting out to annoy the current convenient music listening culture.
The ep will hopefully be released sometime soon in 2007 depending on whether someone out there wants to...
You can listen to a single track taken from this ep at myspace.com/sealfinger
Craig is currently working on a Christbait box set with a possible reformation show for the eventual sets release. Craig also reunited with his former Dernrutlidge band mates to form a new outfit, "Youngbreeder" as well as taking on bass duties for Australian heavy noise band, "Budd" which Tom also plays drums in.
Sealfinger is:
Tom Jackman: drums and percusion
other and/or previous bands: Ricaine, Deer, Hurdy Gurdy, Budd.
Craig Westwood: guitar, bass and vocals
other and/or previous bands: Christbait, DernRutlidge, Youngbreeder, Budd.