n early 2011, we created our second video art exhibition in collaboration with the Goethe-Insitut Nairobi. Titled “Kudishnyao!” (an onomatopaeic word for the sound kids make on the playground to represent gunshots), the exhibition involved using six screens set up around an exhibition space to provide six parallel views of a single story. The exhibition was shown at the Goethe-Institut (Nairobi) and the Rush Arts Gallery (New York).
It would be difficult to replicate the experience of the six-screen setup online, so we have reformatted the videos for a single-screen format.
We have created a playlist with some of these videos, which you can find here. Hope you like them 
The Just A Band Boxing Day Special
Our free/ pay-what-you-want Boxing Day special album is now up on Bandcamp! Get it while it’s hot!
New Year’s Eve Party!
We’ll be heading down to the Coast this New Year’s Eve!
We’ll be playing at Diani, and the party’s at the 40 Thieves beach bar. Come party with us as we welcome 2012 on an awesome beach, with good people, good food, and the night’s invited artists!
This is actually the first time the band is rocking it in Mombasa, so we’re really looking forward to it! It’s going to be epic.
A Boxing Day Special!
Come and have a cup of tea with us from wherever you are (really!) on our Boxing Day Google+ hangout this Monday, December 26th from 830PM – 930PM East African Time (GMT+3). We will be having tea ourselves together with some friends of ours at home (otherwise known as Just A House), and we’ll also have some musical surprises for you.
All you’ll need is a good Internet connection, a computer with a webcam, the Google Voice and video plugin (get it here) and your own warm beverage. It’s fun times and a big thank-you treat for everyone who’s supported us all these years. See you soon, and happy holidays!
Find out more about Hangouts on Google+ from this cute video and join us on our spanking-new Google+ page!
JUST A BAND ARE GOING TO SXSW!
Yes, yes, y’all!
It’s official! We’re going to be in Austin, Texas, this March, for the South By Southwest Music Festival! Please stay tuned for updates on the whens and wheres of our shows, but until then, there’s a writeup from the SXSW site here.
JUST A BAND ARE BACK IN THE STUDIO!
Hey people,
It’s been a couple of years since 82 came out and a lot of stuff has happened in the life of the band: we’ve been adventuring, and working on cool projects and things, but we’re happy to report that… weighty pause… we’re back in the studio working on a new album, woohoo!
We’re sure there’ll be traces of everything we’ve been up to in the new music. 
We’ll have more related announcements soon.
We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who’s been with us so far, and all the new friends we’ve made; this whole experience has been an amazing journey so far, and it’s you guys that have made it all possible, so… sniff… thank you!
Nairobi is full of laughing, creative people!
Here’s an enthusiastic review/introduction by the people at MTV Iggy, who say:
Judging from [Just A Band's] songs and music videos, Nairobi is full of laughing, creative young people who get together at somebody’s house on a Tuesday night and scream laughing, make out in closets, and if they’re not too drunk, lay down some tracks in a bedroom studio. Could Nairobi 2011 be like Paris in the ’20s, Greenwich Village after WWII, Mexico during the age of Diego Rivera?
Some of us haven’t made out in closets yet (we’ll work on that when we come back ) – but yeah, Nairobi is cool! Ha! Read the article here.
Coming to America can be pretty damn daunting…
Here’s an interview we did with the nice folks at Giant Magazine, in which we talk about coming to America, the BLNRB project and coming back home VERY different:
People are definitely looking at things differently here, because our work has a lot of references to things in Kenyan culture, but they still relate to the more universal themes.
Just A Band (Might Be) Coming To America!
Hey, party people! We finally have some details on our plans for a short visit to the USA. The primary focus of the trip is to exhibit “Kudishnyao!” – our second video-art installation – in two locations while we’re there.
The first exhibit is at the Rush Gallery in New York from 18th August – 3rd September, and the second is hosted by the good people at the Chinua Achebe Center of the Bard College from the 9th – 11th of September. While that’s happening, we’ll be hosting a talk on the 23rd of August where we will discuss all kinds of music and video stuff, and we will perform at The Drom on the 24th of August.
All these details are dependant on our acquiring visas from the US Embassy (you never know…), so it’s all still tentative at this point, but since there’s all these rumours floating around we thought we’d clear it all up and let everyone know what we’re working on. We’ll confirm dates and locations as we go. Pray for us!
KUDISH! The Sound of Soup
From the first time we ever went on stage (in August 2008 – nerve-wracking!) for live performances and/or DJ-sets, we’ve always prepared some remixes of our own songs (and other Kenyan songs we like) to play before we start or after we finish. We’ve never released any of those remixes until today!
We’ve been asked many times to put those mashups and remixes together, so after Daniel unleashed a particularly fun set at the Kudishnyao street party, we figured we should put them together. Here’s “Kudish! The Sound of Soup”, available as a free download courtesy of Bandcamp (which is the coolest music platform we’ve ever worked with). It’s a collection of music we wish we could hear on radio. Grab it and play it loud, and most of all – tell us what you think!
KUDISHNYAO!
3 years ago, the Goethe-Institut in Nairobi commissioned us to create a video-art exhibition. We had a month to come up with that, and the result was TRNSMSSN – an offbeat sensory overload installation that showcased all our videos up to that point, and some new material we created for the event specifically (such as music videos for “If I Could“).
TRNSMSSN went down well with young people who usually avoided staid art galleries, we had groups coming in over their lunch break to spend time just absorbing the work.
This year, we’ve been asked once again to come up with another video-art show. We wondered how we could make it different this time. First, we titled the show “Kudishnyao!” which – if you grew up in Nairobi (Kenya?) – you might recognize as an onomatopaeic sound used by kids – when playing games like cops and robbers, or any game requiring weaponry – to denote a gunshot (the less palatable “Dinyao!” denoted a gun with a silencer).
TRNSSMSN was set up to run 9 video loops at the same time, the largest projection was the only one with an audio stream. This meant that most visitors gravitated towards the large screen. Then we noticed some visitors would ignore the large screen and watch the smaller ones “with the wrong audio”, as it were.
Someone remarked to us, “It’s like remixing the video, by watching it and listening to the audio from another one.”
That remark stuck with us, and for this show we’ve decided to have six simultaneous video streams that are all connnected. The stories play out on all six screens at the same time, and you can watch whichever you want – hopefully, you’ll get different perspectives depending on which side you watch.
This is an experiment, and our fingers are tightly crossed! The exhibition opens on the 2nd of April at 8PM at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi, and will run from the 4th – 29th April from 1pm – 6pm daily.
RSVP on Facebook here and read more about it on the Goethe-Institut website.
We hope you’ll join us!
Kudishnyao!
Volunteer for Kuweni Serious’ 125/100
Our partners at Kuweni Serious have launched a project together with The Girl Effect to teach 125 young girls from Kibera and Baba Dogo how to tell their stories using technology. They need volunteers to make this happen – visit http://www.kuweniserious.org/2011/02/we-want-you/ – yes, YOU! Here’s a cute video about the program, featuring FunkyFineBeautiful from our Scratch To Reveal Album:
