The rules are dead simple. You have two options to enter the giveaway:

• “Like” the Dotted Music page on Facebook.
• Share the message about the sweepstakes on Twitter (and don’t forget to follow me).

Or do both ;)

The winner will be announced later in June (the end date has been pushed back).

1,2,3

Confetti 7" Cover

A little background on 1,2,3, signed to almost as much young Ooh La La Records, a boutique artist development company and record label from Brooklyn, founded by producer Theo Aronson.

The outfit consists of Nic Snyder (vocals, guitar & keys) and his long-time pal Josh Sickels (drums). 1,2,3 hail from Pittsburgh and are late of the well-known power punk outfit, The Takeover UK.

“I’m really excited about this new band,” Nic proclaims, “It’s what I’ve always wanted a band to be.”

1,2,3 is the platform for some very smart songwriting, for example, “Confetti,” a tune about death that quite happily sounds like the orgasmic collision of latter day Beatles (definitely a Lennon tune), Gram Parsons and Big Star, and “Can’t Bribe God,” a kind of slow, Gospel shuffle that finds Snyder displaying simply the most viciously visceral vox work this side of Prince Rogers Nelson with a middle eight that feels curiously like ELO… in a good way.

Both songs were recorded last Fall at Aronson’s Brooklyn recording studio. Inquiring minds can expect to hear them very soon, followed by a full album in early 2010. Check out the band’s MySpace page for a sneak peak. “Confetti” is available in the Ooh La La Records online store.

The owner of a Leonard Cohen Isle Of Wight 1970 LP vinyl is:

• Hannah Turner

Aaaaaand a pack of beautiful STS9 merch (a hat, a tee, and a pair of SOCKS) goes to:

• Kimball Packard

Congratulations!!!

Thanks to everyone for participating, stay tuned for more contests on Dotted Music!

If you want to get a copy of a Leonard Cohen Isle Of Wight 1970 LP, pressed on 180 gram audiophile vinyl, just contact me via this form. You can leave the message’s body blank if you want, just mention Leonard Cohen in the Subject field and use your real email address. Your contact information will never be shared with a third party.

NOTE: Sorry, but this is only for the US citizens!

The winner will be picked randomly.

Look forward to getting your emails, you’ve got time until December 31st.

Good luck!

PS: To all my dear readers, especiall the RSS ones: thanks a lot for your support during the early months of this blog’s existance. You rock!

I dubbed the giveaway “In Defence Of Vinyl” because of a strong personal passion for vinyl records. If you care about Technics axing its 1200 and 1210 turntables, or worry about low 12” sales – enter the giveaway as well, it’s so easy! And there is no better way to support vinyl than by adding more records to your vinyl collection.

What you need to get the prizek

The rules are similar to the STS9 giveaway.

Subscribe to Dotted Music blog using this RSS link, or subscribe via email (in the sidebar on the right side). On December 28th, I will publish a post with simple instructions on how to claim your giveaway entry. Only subscribers will see that post.

Remember, entering this sweepstakes gives you a pretty high chance to win, so subscribe now! I hope that you’ll enjoy the blog and find info from the feed informative enough to keep it landing into your RSS reader or email box even after the promotion ends.

Please note: this contest if for the US residents only.
The prize won’t be shipped until early January.

About the release

Leonard Cohen

Nearly 40 summers ago on August 31, 1970, 35-year-old Leonard Cohen was awakened at 2 a.m. from a nap in his trailer and brought onstage to perform with his band at the third annual Isle Of Wight music festival. The audience of 600,000 was in a fiery and frenzied mood, after turning the festival into a political arena, trampling the fences, setting fire to structures and equipment – and stoked by the most incendiary performance of Jimi Hendrix’s career, less than three weeks before his death.

As Cohen followed Hendrix’s set, onlookers (and fellow festival headliners) Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins and others stood sidestage in awe as the Canadian folksinger-songwriter-poet-novelist quietly tamed the crowd. Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner, whose footage of the 1970 festival did not begin to see release until 1995, was able to capture Cohen’s performance. Likewise, Columbia Records staff A&R producer Teo Macero, who was ostensibly there to record Miles Davis’ set, did a brilliant job of supervising Cohen’s live recording as well.

Leonard Cohen Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 is a fascinating and timely portrait of the artist as a young man, just three years into his recording career (though he was already a published poet and novel­ist for 15 years). As he mesmerizes the Isle Of Wight audience, Cohen intersperses a baker’s dozen songs with tales both real and apocryphal, as well as a handful of his poems. In pristine condition after nearly four decades in the archive, the video and audio programs will be available together as a deluxe two-disc DVD+CD package at all physical and digital retail outlets starting October 20th through Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY MUSIC ENTER­TAIN­MENT. A double-LP vinyl set will be released on the same date.

Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 will also be available on Blu-ray, exclusively through Amazon.com.

The CD (and double-LP) of Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 represent the 77-minute concert set as performed by Cohen and his backup band: Bob Johnston (Cohen’s Nashville-based Columbia A&R staff producer), and Nashville musicians Charlie Daniels (electric bass, fiddle), Ron Cornelius (lead guitar), and Elkin ‘Bubba’ Fowler (bass, banjo). They were joined by backup singers Corlynn Hanney, Susan Musmanno, and Donna Washburn. During the course of their European tour – which Cohen only agreed to undertake if Johnston (producer of Cohen’s most recent LP, Songs From A Room) would manage him and organize the band – the group began to call themselves The Army, owing to the battles they were subjected to by audiences on the road.

The DVD (and Blu-ray) of Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 is a masterwork by Murray Lerner, known for his work on Festival!, his Oscar-nominated 1969 documentary of the Newport Folk Festivals. His work on that film spurred the Isle Of Wight promoters to bring him aboard and document their festival – whose violence turned it into the last of the three original Isle Of Wight festivals of 1968, 1969, and 1970. (Bob Dylan put the festival on the map when he performed there in 1968, his first public performance since recovering from his fabled motorcycle crash of 1966.)
Lerner’s Isle of Wight footage went unfunded for decades until 1995, when the multi-artist Message To Love (with its brief snippet of Cohen singing “Suzanne”) was finally issued on video. Since then, Lerner’s documentary-style Isle of Wight videos on the 1970 performances by Miles Davis, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix have inspired a new generation of music fans. In 1980, Lerner’s From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern In China won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 cover

Adding further historic provenance to Live At The Isle Of Wight 1970 is a newly commissioned 2,000-word liner notes essay written by veteran British rock journalist and BBC commentator Sylvie Simmons. Author of well-received biographies on Neil Young (Reflections In Broken Glass, 2003), Serge Gainsbourg and others, Simmons previously wrote liner notes for the 2003 Sony International compilation MOJO Presents An Introduction To Leonard Cohen.

“Before he sang,” Simmons writes, “Cohen talked to the hundreds of thousands of people he couldn’t see. He told them – sedately – a story that sounded like a parable and a bedtime story, that worked like hypnotism and at the same time tested the temper­a­ture of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn’t much like circuses, but he enjoyed the part where a man would stand up and ask everyone to light a match so they could locate each other in the darkness. ‘Can I ask each of you to light a match,’ Leonard asked the audience, ‘so I can see where you all are?’”

UPDATE: The contest is now closed, and the winner is Hannah Turner. Congratulations!

Accidentally, we’ve got few examples of these cool merch products, and we are going to give them to you! I don’t expect that you are a fan of STS9, but isn’t it a great chance to become one, or at least get a couple of geeky clothes for free, as an Xmas present?

What we are giving away

• White STS9 Derby Hat
• Red STS9 T-Shirt
• White STS9 Socks (yes, a pair of branded socks)

The photos are at the bottom of the post.

What you need to get the prize pack

Subscribe to this blog. Dead simple! Just use this RSS link, or subscribe via email (in the sidebar on the right side). On December 22nd, I will publish a post with simple instructions on how to claim your giveaway entry. Only subscribers will see that post though.

The catch? Dotted Music doesn’t have that many subscribers, as of yet, so entering this sweepstakes gives you a pretty high chance to win.

Of course you can unsubscribe anytime, and you can just check the feed on the 22nd, but I do hope that you’ll enjoy the blog and find info from the feed informative enough to keep it landing into your RSS reader or email box.

Please note: this contest if for the US residents only.
The prize won’t be shipped until early January, unfortunately.

About the promotion

STS9 will release their new studio effort Ad Explorata tomorrow, December 8, through 1320 Records. It’s the tenth release in their discography.

As the band explains, “Ad Explorata was inspired by the idea that there is always more to be discovered, manifested by the belief that you can always push towards the unknown and unexplored, and created by the will and desire for constant artistic evolution, expression and change.” Visit their website to read the full “Genesis of Ad Explorata” (check it out, awesome story!)

More info on the band can be found at their MySpace and Facebook pages. Follow STS9 on Twitter.

You can also listen to some of the band’s tracks, including the latest single, “Oil and Water” (always a pleasure to use the Topspin player):

More about the prizes

Here are pics of the sick prizes:

UPDATE: The contest is now closed, and the winner is Kimball Packard. Congratulations!