Well, it’s been a very long old road but here we are, Ursa Minor, our second studio album is now available.

It can be downloaded from Bandcamp, Amazon MP3 and iTunes. It is also available on limited edition CD from Bandcamp with TWO extra tracks, Beyond you (which happens to be Rob Overseer’s favourite) and Spent.

Thanks to everyone for bearing with us over the last two and a half years. It’s taken vastly longer that we thought it would but I think it’s been worth it. I love this album and I hope you will too.

Rachael x

http://kanute.bandcamp.com/album/ursa-minor

The lovely people at BBC Coventry & Warwickshire have played tracks from the new album on the last two shows. Which is marvellous of them. Thanks to the wonders of listen again, you can hear the last show for another few days…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01tn4tr

(If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, about six minutes in)

We’ve been busy filming ambient videos to celebrate the release of the new album, Ursa Minor, on 28th March.

http://m.youtube.com/channel/UCyA_jVCFCvYm8pJPxsUW3aw

I was born in 1977 in the middle of a forest (don’t worry, conveniently there was a hospital in the forest). I hold this early connection with nature responsible for my love of all things outdoorsy … well, except hiking or biking or sporting activities of any kind. More just sitting by the sea or sitting by a babbling stream, that sort of thing.  Feeling close to nature without any pesky activity getting in between us. The younger of two children I was labelled the “nice one” at an early age and my sister the “clever one”. This level of disappointment in my potential from my parents gave me the opportunity to spend countless hours on my own playing make believe with dolls and the like, while my sister was busy adding things up and discussing politics.

It was all change when I hit secondary school though, the largeness of the school finally allowing me to claw my way out from under my sisters shadow and it turned out I had hidden talents, i.e. learning things and thinking and so on. I was near the top of the class for pretty much everything. Never the brightest star, but able to tap the brightest star on the back if I really, really went for it. My greatest loves at this point were English, Music and Art.

I then pretty much chucked the towel in on everything to concentrate on my music and a new found random love of photography, and joined the family firm to keep me in penny sweets and teenage angst while I did. I signed my first record deal with a small indie label when I was twenty three and thought I’d finally made it…unfortunately, the world does not work that way and actually it was just the start of a hell of a lot of hard work, a battle to find anything like a musical direction, a battle to get out of the contract four years later to work with Overseer on my terms (they didn’t think it was that good – favouring my girlie piano material – clearly idiots) and a battle between me and Overseer as to when exactly, would I feel grown up enough to drive on a motorway, what with him living seven hours away and all.

Still, it all worked out okay in the end. Except the motorways. Never gonna happen Rob, never gonna happen…

Hi, I’m Rob – captain of the good ship Overseer. I’ve been blasting beats and tunes for the past 10 years or so. Born in Oxford, went to uni in Leeds, then forgot to come home and stayed there so long people think that’s where I’m from. Mostly I’m known for the tracks that get used in various films, trailers, TV, adverts and computer games. I’ve released an album, Wreckage, on Columbia Records in the US (When! Records in the UK) that travels from massive superheavy electronica (I’d call it breakbeat) like Supermoves to blissful chilled-out epics like Sparks. You’ll have heard these tunes in adverts (Mitsubishi, Vodafone, Smirnoff etc), computer games (Need for Speed Underground, GT3 etc) and films (Matrix, Snatch, Blade 3 and more).  When I’m not making music I’m mostly enjoying living by the sea and playing with my insane cat, Peanut. And also trying to fathom what the hell is wrong with Rachael – why can’t she just get in a god damn car and drive on a  big road? Oh, and I invented the internet*

*added by Rachael, not actually a fact. You say something ONE TIME and no one will let it lie…

Proof that it DOES exist…

http://cubicscats.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/ursa-minor-by-kanute-it-will-grab-you-by-the-metaphoricals/

If you can’t wait three weeks for the new album to come out, “Waiting” by soulplusmind featuring Rachael Gray is available now…

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Waiting-feat-Rachael-Kanute-Soulplusmind/dp/B00I8IAHPE/ref=sr_1_3?s=dmusic&ie=UTF8&qid=1393921390&sr=1-3&keywords=Kanute

I am delighted and relieved to be able to announce that our second studio album, Ursa Minor, will be released on 28th March. That’s this year, incase you were worried.

It’s been an incredibly long road to get here as it was over two and a half years ago we kicked things off with a ‘song a day’ week long project. Every day Rob Overseer would write a brand new track from scratch then every evening he would send me what he had done. I would then work on my part the next day while he got on with the next track. At the time, my daughter was still little enough to have naps and I’d write the song in the hour or so she was asleep over lunchtime, then record and send it when she had finally gone to sleep in the evening. I had so little time to work on it I didn’t have time to stress about it either and it seemed to work better than either Rob or I ever imagined it would. Four of those tracks made it onto the final album. Not bad for a woman with nappy head and a man with a profound inability to finish things because they need to be perfect.

I’d not had a chance to write a single song for a good long time and I was seriously concerned I just wouldn’t have anything to say or worse, I wouldn’t remember HOW to write. Actually, being forced to write in a completely different way was the best thing that could have happened and I found a whole new formula for the process. Gone were the days of completely literal lyrics about one specific event happening then and there in my life. Instead I took pieces from past experiences and stitched them together with what was going on in my life now. 

The result was a collection of songs that we are very, very proud of.

We just hope you like them too. Thank you all so very much for sticking with us. I know it has been frustrating, believe me it has been just as frustrating for us. We’re so happy that we can finally share what we have been doing…

Rachael x