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STEVE GUNN RELEASES ACOUSTIC VIDEO FOR ‘VAGABOND’
Marking the start of his European tour, Steve Gunn today shares a new acoustic video for stand-out single ‘Vagabond’, taken from the critically acclaimed new album The Unseen In Between
Filmed in London and made by The Mitcham Submarine, the sparse and haunting rendition highlights the song’s majestic fretwork and spellbinding lyrics, with their compassionate ode to the runaways, drifters, and vagabonds of our restless times.
Gunn’s upcoming European tour follows a US run which also saw him playing on CBS This Morning and KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.
Several of the shows were opened by the first ever US performances of psych-folk legend Sachiko Kanenobu, the story of which and the meeting between the two artists documented in a New York Times article.
An admired and in-demand collaborator, Gunn recently added further production credits to his name for Michael Chapman’s critically acclaimed new album, True North.
He will also be performing a special soundtrack to Andy Warhol’s Kiss alongside Kim Gordon, Bill Nace and John Truscinski, at the opening of Gordon’s Lo-Fi Glamour exhibition on May 16th, at the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh.
Over the past few years Steve Gunn has become one of American folk-rock’s most pivotal and regarded figures – conjuring immersive and psychedelic sonic landscapes live and on record, releasing a stream of lauded albums that have appeared in a multitude of ‘best of’ lists, and recording exploratory collaborations with artists including Mike Cooper, Hiss Golden Messenger, Kurt Vile and Michael Chapman. Written in the wake of his father’s passing, The Unseen In Between is Steve’s most accomplished and moving work to date, with sweeping and immersive songs showcasing his deft yet minimal guitar style to the backdrop of rich instrumentation, the lyrics meditative and mysterious yet intimate and poignant.
HOLLY HERNDON COLLABORATES WITH A.I. ON NEW LP PROTO OUT MAY 10
Holly Herndon operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical euphoria. Today, the acclaimed performer and composer reveals new single ‘Eternal’, a ghostly transmission inspired by ideas of eternal love through mind uploading; a modern-day vampire story. Punctuated by grandiose orchestration and the voices of her Berlin-based vocal ensemble, the accompanying video was constructed from footage processed from the perspective of an intelligent machine, analysing and searching for a face, yearning for a connection.
Holly’s third full-length album PROTO (out 10 May) isn’t about A.I., but much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. ‘baby’, Spawn.
For the album, she assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers and an inhuman intelligence housed in a DIY souped-up gaming PC to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing, and places an emphasis on alien song craft and new forms of communion.
PROTO makes reference to what Holly refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards?
‘Eternal follows the 2018 release of Holly and Jlin’s collaborative song Godmother. The skittering track, which was created by Spawn reimagining the artworks of her ‘godmother’ Jlin in a trained model of her mother’s voice with no editing or sample trickery, was praised everywhere from NPR to The Guardian to New York Times, and elsewhere.
You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace, and even eavesdrop on the live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions; a contemporary update on the religious gathering Holly was raised amongst in her upbringing in East Tennessee.
“There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing,” says Holly. “We stand in contrast to that. It’s not like we want to run away; we’re very much running towards it, but on our terms. Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I don’t want to live in a world in which humans are automated off stage. I want an A.I. to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty ”
Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own, all while studying for her soon-to-be-completed PhD at Stanford University, researching machine learning and music. Her LP Platform closed out 2015 by gracing year-end lists from Pitchfork, The Guardian, NME, and The Wire. In the aftermath, Radiohead hand-picked her to open up their European tour.
Just as Platform forewarned of the manipulative personal and political impacts of prying social media platforms long before popular acceptance, PROTO is a euphoric and principled statement setting the shape of things to come.
THE NATIONAL ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM I AM EASY TO FIND Out May 17th on 4AD
The National have announced I Am Easy To Find, due out May 17th, along with opening track ‘You Had Your Soul With You’ featuring the vocals of long-time David Bowie collaborator Gail Ann Dorsey.
I Am Easy To Find is the band’s eighth studio album and the follow-up to 2017’s GRAMMY®-award winning release Sleep Well Beast.
A companion short film with the same name will also be released with music by The National and inspired by the album. The film was directed by Academy Award-nominated director Mike Mills (20th Century Women, Beginners), and starring Academy Award Winner Alicia Vikander. Mills, along with the band, is credited as co-producer of the album, which was mostly recorded at Long Pond, Hudson Valley, NY with additional sessions in Paris, Berlin, Cincinnati, Austin, Dublin, Brooklyn and more far flung locations. The album features vocal contributions from Sharon Van Etten, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Lisa Hannigan, Mina Tindle and more.
Having already announced “A Special Evening with The National,” five events happening this April in Paris, London, New York, Toronto and LA, the band has also announced a world tour beginning this June with Courtney Barnett and Alvvays opening select dates. Canadian dates include:
June 21st – Montreal Place des Arts
June 22nd – Hamilton Pier 8 (with Alvvays)
August 28th – Vancouver Deer Lake Park (with Alvvays)
Tickets on sale Friday, March 8th at 10AM local time
For tickets and more information, visit www.americanmary.com
More about I Am Easy To Find
On September 3, 2017, director Mike Mills emailed Matt Berninger to introduce himself and in very short order, the most ambitious project of the National’s nearly 20-year career was born and plans for a hard-earned vacation died. The Los Angeles-based filmmaker was coming off his third feature, 20th Century Women, and was interested in working with the band on…something. A video maybe. Berninger, already a fan of Mills’ films, not only agreed to collaborate, he essentially handed over the keys to the band’s creative process.
The result is I Am Easy to Find, a 24-minute film by Mills starring Alicia Vikander, and I Am Easy to Find, a 68-minute album by the National. The former is not the video for the latter; the latter is not the soundtrack to the former. The two projects are, as Mills calls them, “Playfully hostile siblings that love to steal from each other”—they share music and words and DNA and impulses and a vision about what it means to be human in 2019, but don’t necessarily need one another. The movie was composed like a piece of music; the music was assembled like a film, by a film director. The frontman and natural focal point was deliberately and dramatically sidestaged in favour of a variety of female voices, nearly all of whom have long been in the group’s orbit. It is unlike anything either artist has ever attempted and also totally in line with how they’ve created for much of their careers.
As the album’s opening track, ‘You Had Your Soul With You,’ unfurls, it’s so far, so National: a digitally manipulated guitar line, skittering drums, Berninger’s familiar baritone, mounting tension. Then around the 2:15 mark, the true nature of I Am Easy To Find announces itself: The racket subsides, strings swell, and the voice of long-time David Bowie bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey booms out—not as background vocals, not as a hook, but to take over the song. Elsewhere it’s Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan, or Sharon Van Etten, or Mina Tindle or Kate Stables of This Is the Kit, or varying combinations of them. The Brooklyn Youth Choir, whom Bryce Dessner had worked with before. There are choral arrangements and strings on nearly every track, largely put together by Bryce in Paris—not a negation of the band’s dramatic tendencies, but a redistribution of them.
“Yes, there are a lot of women singing on this, but it wasn’t because, ‘Oh, let’s have more women’s voices,’ says Berninger. “It was more, ‘Let’s have more of a fabric of people’s identities.’ It would have been better to have had other male singers, but my ego wouldn’t let that happen.”
I Am Easy To Find Tracklisting
1. You Had Your Soul With You
2. Quiet Light
3. Roman Holiday
4. Oblivions
5. The Pull Of You
6. Hey Rosey
7. I Am Easy To Find
8. Her Father In The Pool
9. Where Is Her Head
10. Not In Kansas
11. So Far So Fast
12. Dust Swirls In Strange Light
13. Hairpin Turns
14. Rylan
15. Underwater
16. Light Years
The National have established themselves as mainstays of arenas and festivals with sold-out performances and headlining slots around the world. With the release of their most recent album, 2017 GRAMMY®-award winning Sleep Well Beast, The National achieved their highest chart position in the US to date, coming in at #2 on the Billboard Top 200. In addition they scored #1’s in the UK, Ireland, Portugal and Canada and their highest chart position ever in a total of eleven countries. The National also claimed their first #1 at commercial radio on the Triple-A radio chart with ‘The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness.’ The songs off Sleep Well Beast are instantly recognizable as The National, but their sound has evolved and expanded.
More about The National
Both individually and collectively The National’s members have been involved in countless artistic, charitable and socio-political pursuits. The group released A Lot of Sorrow documenting their collaboration with installation artist Ragnar Kjartansson, that took place at MOMA’s PS1 and saw the band play their song ‘Sorrow’ for six hours in front of a live audience. They are behind the Red Hot benefit albums Dark Was The Night and Day Of The Dead, and the compilation boxed set titled 7-Inches for Planned Parenthood. Band members have received a Golden Globe Nomination for work on the score of the 2015 film Revenant, founded or play a major part in MusicNow, Eaux Claires and Haven Festival and Boston Calling, and participated heavily in both Barack Obama Presidential Campaigns, and much more.
2013 also saw the theatrical release of their documentary, Mistaken For Strangers set to the backdrop of the band’s 2010 release High Violet. The documentary was chosen to premiere on the opening night of the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival followed by a theatrical release in the US and worldwide distribution. Over their 16-year career the band has sold more than 2 million albums in the U.S. alone.
The National consists of Matt Berninger (vocals) fronting two pairs of brothers: Aaron (guitar, bass, piano) and Bryce Dessner (guitar, piano), and Scott (bass, guitar) and Bryan Devendorf (drums).
BIG THIEF Sign To 4AD, Announce New Album, Share First Single ‘UFOF’
U.F.O.F., F standing for ‘Friend’, is the name of the highly anticipated third record by Big Thief, set to be released on May 3rd.
Today, they share the first single, ‘UFOF’ and North American tour dates to add to their 2019 live schedule.
Adrianne Lenker (guitar, vocals), Buck Meek (guitar), Max Oleartchik (bass), and James Krivchenia (drums) have spent the last 4 years on an incessant world tour, winning the devotion of an enthusiastic and rapidly expanding audience. Their first two back-to-back releases, Masterpiece (2016) and Capacity (2017), have been analysed, wept to, danced to, critically applauded, imitated, hummed idly, and shouted out loud. They have sound-tracked crowded restaurants, difficult conversations, cowboy bars, yoga classes, night drives, and lonely bedrooms.
U.F.O.F. was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios. In a large cabin-like room, the band set up their gear to track live with engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums. Having already lived these songs on tour, they were relaxed and ready to experiment. The raw material came quickly. Some songs were written only hours before recording and stretched out instantly, first take, vocals and all.
“Making friends with the unknown… All my songs are about this,” says Lenker; “If the nature of life is change and impermanence, I’d rather be uncomfortably awake in that truth than lost in denial.”
Big Thief will support the release of U.F.O.F. with a slew of dates, including the following in Canada:
October 15th – Montreal La Tulipe
October 16th – Toronto Phoenix Concert Theatre
October 25th – Vancouver Vogue Theatre
U.F.O.F. is available for pre-order today on LP, CD, and digital. Limited translucent orange vinyl is available via the Big Thief store and 4AD store + your local indie retailer. Limited forest green vinyl will be available through Vinyl Me Please (VMP pre-order begins Feb 27).
NEW STEPHEN MALKMUS SINGLE “RUSHING THE ACID FRAT” OUT NOW
Stephen Malkmus had a vision … or so begins the lyrics to Rushing The Acid Frat, the newly released single from his forthcoming Groove Denied (out March 15th on Matador Records).
The song title, inspired by Stephen’s memories of a specific student fraternity (think less beer-pong-bros, more “Grateful Dead druggy tie-dye” vibe) at his University of Virginia alma mater, is a “Louie Louie”-style shindig rumpus, which he imagines as the soundtrack to a “Star Wars bar scene in such a frat … it’s kinda 12-bar but gigged with psych lyrics.”
Its accompanying video, created by Robert Strange, the visual artist of pop collective Superorganism, features an animated Stephen taking a trippy romp through LA’s Koreatown and Hollywood Forever Cemetery, followed by a trip to the moon, and back to a field on Earth, tinged with colourful hallucinatory enhancements.
When Stephen Malkmus first arrived on the scene in the early Nineties, as frontman and prime creative force in Pavement, the area of music with which he was associated couldn’t really have been further from the techno-rave sounds of the day. Electronic dance music, then as now, was about posthuman precision, inorganic textures, and hyper-digital clarity. Whereas the lo-fi movement in underground rock championed a messthetic of sloppiness, rough edges, and raw warmth – a hundred exquisitely subtle shades of distortion and abrasion.
Fast forward to the present and here comes Malkmus with Groove Denied – Stephen’s first solo album without his cohorts the Jicks since 2001. Made using Ableton’s Live, instead of a human-powered rhythm section, Malkmus’s arsenal further included drum machines, along with a host of plug-in FX and “soft synths.” He compares the process of track-construction to the way his kids “used to make these girls on my iPhone – choosing hair colour, dresses, etc. That intuitive swipe and grab thing. Chop and move the waves. Apple computer scroll style of thinking.”
This departure from the tried-and-tested stems back to earlier in this decade, when Malkmus spent a couple of years living in Berlin and was exposed to the city’s vibrant club scene. Back in the Nineties, Stephen had given rave culture a wide berth, in part because of bad personal associations with the drug MDMA (he’d had “a really really bad trip” on Ecstasy in 1987, bizarrely on a visit to New York to see Miles Davis perform). But in Berlin, thanks to a younger deejay friend, Malkmus made forays into the city’s world-famous all-night party scene and became fascinated by techno. “The music can be great… you can zone out, dance, and focus on music – or just get wasted!”
It would not be entirely off-base, or an overly cute rock-historical reference, to describe Groove Denied as Stephen Malkmus’s Low. Although largely recorded in Oregon, the bulk of the album was written while he was living in Berlin. And whilst the methodology behind Groove Denied is absolutely 21st Century, the reference points for the sound-palette hark back to the pre-digital era. “The electronic music side of the album, I wanted it to be sonically pre-Internet,” explains Stephen.
Groove Denied will shake up settled notions of what Malkmus is about and what he’s capable of, repositioning him in the scheme of things. But looking at it from a different angle, his engagement with state-of-art digital tech actually makes perfect sense. After all, Nineties lo-fi – the sound in which he and Pavement were initially vaunted as leaders and pioneers – was nothing if not insistently sonic – it was all about the grain of guitar textures, about gratuitously over-done treatments and ear-grabbing effects. Noise for noise’s sake
As Stephen tweeted recently on the subject of Auto-Tune’s omnipresence in contemporary music-making: “We long 4 transformation….and we humans fucking luv tools.”
