Matt Burt And The Busy Dead - "Gravedigger's Blues" (LTD 500 copies 180G SMOKEY vinyl / CD Included)

Matt Burt And The Busy Dead - "Gravedigger's Blues"

FEATURING

Matt Burt - Vocals & Guitar

Mattis Kleppen - Bass Guitar & Stomp box

Kyrre Laastad - Drums & more

LTD 180G Transparent and black vinyl mixed / CD Included

As a bonus We're now also including (as long as stock lasts) a brilliant 18 track promo CD =  Matt Burt - "There Just Ain't No Insurance Policy For A Life Wasted" . It's an anthology of Matt Burt works including classics such as Motorpsycho’s Plan #1 and True Middle as well as songs by Spidergawd, Dog & Sky and Susanna & The Magical Orchestra....

DEAD1CGR123

Coverdesign & Layout by Håvard Gjelseth

Do you have enough attention span to last three sentences? If not, you can stop

reading now and french kiss the multi-headed mindless-distraction-monster-
machine of your choosing. That was your three sentences: You can go now.

You, me, we, whatever... We’re all in this together.
Written by a real life, real death, gravedigger: Gravedigger’s Blues ain’t there to
entertain ya. Your busy mind-hands already do a more than adequate job of that.
This life is only worth anything to the degree we use it to uncover what must be

uncovered. It will end soon and the window of opportunity is closing-Japanese-
bullet-train-fast. Our minds are filled with more distortion pedals than all the gains

of sand on this earth. The velcro-nature of our inessential busyness keeps us glued
to the mast of a sinking «I» «My» «Me» out-to-sea ship that doesn’t exist in the way
we think it does.
It ain’t gotta be like that. No time like right now to bury the shovel.
Recorded “front porch” style and saturated with errors, discrepancies and
contradictions.

Matt Burt (Vocal, Guitar)
Mattis Kleppen (Bass)
Kyrre Laastad (Drums, Guitar,
Vocal, Production)
Eirik Hegdal (Bb Bass Clarinet)
Siri Gjære (Vocal)
Kirsti Huke (Vocal)
— and if you dare, you the listener.

Matt Burt

first entered the public consciousness in the early 1990’s through a collection of microcassette tapes he recorded from which his friend Helge Sten (Death Prod) sampled in the spoken word piece Plan #1 by the Norwegian rock band Motorpsycho. Burt followed Sten’s footsteps by entering the Art Academy in Trondhiem 1995. Disillusioned with so-called Art’s endless postmodern B.S. blah, blah, blah... He formed a quirky little post-beat-punk-rock-poetry band called Dog & Sky that produced three albums («Lhasa Express’’, «Denver» and «Death’s Got Talent» before disbanding in 2017.
He also collaborated with the Norwegian componist Eirik Hegdal and the Alpaca
Ensemble to create two full length records («Elevator» and «Arrival Hall») that are of a
more jazz/classical/experimental music salt lick. Burt narrates a complete short story on each album to Hegdal’s genre border stretching and melting compositions.
Burt has never been a professional musician or artist but worked as a grunt in a
large landscape construction firm for ten years before taking over as the sexton and
gravedigger at Malvik Kirke just outside of Trondheim where he works today. He longer
writes or plays but uses what little time is left in this life to study and practice Tibetan
Buddhism -- the path of his calling since he was a teenager.
Gravedigger’s Blues was supposed to be a single or four song EP where Burt could «clean out the remaining paper crumbs in his filing cabinet» but eventually expanded into a full length album including several new songs such as Little Birds, Idiot’s Guide to Idiots and Marshmallow Caskets.

Mattis Kleppen

plays traditional music from the Telemark area of Norway where he
is from together with West African music on his bass guitar. Telemark is to Norwegian
folk music what Mississippi is to the blues. The foot tapping chains and coils of his DNA were born from, to and for rhythm. He is also a jazz musician with a doctoral degree in
artistic research from the jazz department at the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology.
In thirty years of non-stop playing he has worked together with musicians from all over
the world in over 25 countries and participated on over 30 albums in addition to 5 releases in his own name. He mixes genres and styles into a carefully crafted and uncompromising gumbo bearing deep respect for each tradition.

Kyrre Laastad

is a musician, producer and studio engineer living and working in
Trondheim, Norway. He places little to no value in genre, but loves a whole lot of different traditions. Starting out as the drummer in a local blues band at age of 15, he expanded into a large variety of fields: popular music, experimental music, jazz, etc.
Among others he has performed with composers such as Pauline Oliveros and
Michael Pisaro-Liu, worked as a producer on records for Jenny Hval, MoE and Matt
Burt & The Busy Dead, and engineered and/or mixed records for artists such as MoE,
Moskus and Lost Girls. He has worked on several records nominated for and awarded
Spellemannprisen (the Norwegian Grammy equivalent) and has toured Norway, Europe,
Australia and the U.S. as a musician many times over.