Thrill Jockey 20th Anniversary
Tortoise
Future Islands
Matmos
Liturgy, D Charles Speer
Sat, September 15, 2012
Doors: 5:30 pm / Show: 6:30 pm
Webster Hall
New York, NY
$20
Tickets
This event is 18 and over
http://www.bowerypresents.com/event/143921/
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Tortoise
Tortoise's almost entirely instrumental music defies easy categorization, and the group gained significant attention from their early career. The members have roots in Chicago's fertile music scene, playing in various indie rock and punk groups. Tortoise was among the first American indie rock bands to incorporate styles closer to krautrock, dub, minimalism, electronica and various jazz styles, rather than the standard rock and roll and punk that had dominated indie rock for years.
Some have cited Tortoise as being one of the prime forces behind the development and popularity of the so-called "post-rock" movement. Others, however, have criticized Tortoise's music as being derivative of progressive rock and argue that Tortoise have been subject to much undeserved hype for such a relatively new ensemble.
Other groups related to Tortoise include The Sea and Cake, Brokeback, Shrimp Boat, Isotope 217 and the Chicago Underground Duo. Tortoise records on the Thrill Jockey label.
The group's origins lie in the late 1980's pairing of McCombs and Herndon, who imagined themselves as a freelance rhythm section (like reggae legends Sly And Robbie). That idea never saw fruition (but in the summer of 2007 they formed the group Bumps and released a record with the same name on indie hip-hop label Stones Throw records, their interest in grooving rhythms and recording studio trickery led to McEntire and Brown (both formerly of Bastro) joining, followed by Bitney. Though songs are credited to all the musicans, McEntire quickly became, if not the acknowledged leader, then the group's guiding force, at least via media perception. In reality his extra contributions mainly took the form of being the recording engineer and mixer.
Some have cited Tortoise as being one of the prime forces behind the development and popularity of the so-called "post-rock" movement. Others, however, have criticized Tortoise's music as being derivative of progressive rock and argue that Tortoise have been subject to much undeserved hype for such a relatively new ensemble.
Other groups related to Tortoise include The Sea and Cake, Brokeback, Shrimp Boat, Isotope 217 and the Chicago Underground Duo. Tortoise records on the Thrill Jockey label.
The group's origins lie in the late 1980's pairing of McCombs and Herndon, who imagined themselves as a freelance rhythm section (like reggae legends Sly And Robbie). That idea never saw fruition (but in the summer of 2007 they formed the group Bumps and released a record with the same name on indie hip-hop label Stones Throw records, their interest in grooving rhythms and recording studio trickery led to McEntire and Brown (both formerly of Bastro) joining, followed by Bitney. Though songs are credited to all the musicans, McEntire quickly became, if not the acknowledged leader, then the group's guiding force, at least via media perception. In reality his extra contributions mainly took the form of being the recording engineer and mixer.
Future Islands
FUTURE ISLANDS are a post-wave dance band from North Carolina, now residing in Baltimore. Future Islands play a terse yet passionate music wrought from a stripped back palette. Gerrit Welmers' cartwheeling synthesizer melodies tumble across the austere wilderness of William Cashion's post punk bass pulse, driven ever forward by Erick Murillo's ecstatic feel for rhythm.
Samuel, William and Gerrit had been writing songs together since 2003 in the guise of absurdist party project Art Lord & The Self Portraits, however it was with the arrival of Erick Murillo on drums that the band rid themselves of the mythology and masks, taking on a new motive and the name Future Islands. With the change their sound became exponentially faster and surprisingly more powerful. They quickly wrote and recorded an EP entitled 'Little Advances' in time for their first tour late 2006 and haven't looked back since.
~ www.jambase.com
Samuel, William and Gerrit had been writing songs together since 2003 in the guise of absurdist party project Art Lord & The Self Portraits, however it was with the arrival of Erick Murillo on drums that the band rid themselves of the mythology and masks, taking on a new motive and the name Future Islands. With the change their sound became exponentially faster and surprisingly more powerful. They quickly wrote and recorded an EP entitled 'Little Advances' in time for their first tour late 2006 and haven't looked back since.
~ www.jambase.com
Matmos
It's time to get a little crazy as MATMOS are on a North American tour supporting a new record with a unique new live performance! The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast is the new record by the San Francisco duo. It's a series of "sound portraits" of a pantheon of people that they admire. A musical attempt at biography which is loose in some places and very literal in others; taken as a suite of stylistically disparate songs, you get a kind of fractured family album, a historical pageant. It's at once Matmos's most melodic and most conceptual record.
Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. They make music out of the sounds of objects, animals, people, and actions. They have collaborated with Rachel's, So Percussion, Jay Lesser, Alter Ego, People Like Us, Kronos Quartet and Bjork. They have shared stages with Slint and Wolf Eyes, remixed Foetus and Erase Errata (and many others), taught seminars on sound art at Harvard University and the San Francisco Art Institute, and DJed at proms for homeless teenagers. They have had pieces in the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, did a 17-day live performance at the Yerba Buena Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, and have scored the soundtracks for five gay porn films, one pinball machine, and one NASCAR television commercial.
Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. They make music out of the sounds of objects, animals, people, and actions. They have collaborated with Rachel's, So Percussion, Jay Lesser, Alter Ego, People Like Us, Kronos Quartet and Bjork. They have shared stages with Slint and Wolf Eyes, remixed Foetus and Erase Errata (and many others), taught seminars on sound art at Harvard University and the San Francisco Art Institute, and DJed at proms for homeless teenagers. They have had pieces in the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, did a 17-day live performance at the Yerba Buena Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, and have scored the soundtracks for five gay porn films, one pinball machine, and one NASCAR television commercial.
Liturgy
Brooklyn based Liturgy is Hunter Hunt Hendrix, Greg Fox, Tyler Dusenbury, and Bernard Gann. Aesthethica, their second album and third release, shows the band exploring, in greater depth, themes initially touched on by their critically acclaimed debut album, Renihilation. The band used every instrument, literal or figurative, to produce meaning and intensity, disregarding the genre boundaries of black metal, hardcore and experimental music.
On Renihilation, Liturgy made use of simple song structures, and concentrated on sustaining a blindingly high intensity level from start to finish. Aesthethica, a more controlled and polyvalent effort, finds the band operating at multiple levels and using more varied forms. The music is both elaborately crafted and chaotically performed. Songs often begin in the form of a simple chant or hypnotic abstraction, then evolve into something dense and complex. A constant sensitivity to the states of attention that different musical patterns activate and foster, yields a paradoxical result: the more complex the music, the simpler the message. Cycling through the fundamental modes of being: stasis, chaos, repetition and entelechy, Aesthethica is a metaphorical exercise in affirmation.
The record is a unified whole. A major concern, sonically and lyrically, is the question of what it is to be meaningful, and how intensity relates to emotion or affect. Many of the songs activate and manipulate cliches relating to heroism, tragedy, hope, and so on by connecting black metal techniques to the spirit of film score writing (Vangelis, Badalamenti) and post-Romanticism (Scriabin, Sibelius). "High Gold" presents a vision of apocalypse, "Harmonia" presents a judgment on the meaning of life, and so on. The resulting collection of songs, at once, embodies and transcends these tropes. The music is supersaturated with lofty melodies and lyrics, bursting with frenzied execution, and builds to a boiling point of chaos, distorting all meaning and distilling to reveal the raw core of pure sonic joy. Liturgy surrounds these fractured islands of meaning with a sea of a-signifying ritual repetition and sound (Branca, Sleep, Lightning Bolt). Tear at the seams of the straitjacket of ordinary life, release the energy from the field of potentiality that it binds, enter the realm of the good and the beautiful, so commands Aesthethica.
Highly technical musicianship, poetico-mystical gesturing, and a minimal directness; all singular elements, whose interactions and reactions are contained in and bursting from a black metal framework. Revelatory contrasts presented in an intensely physical performance whose energy is palpable and whose abatement is as illuminating as its arrival.
On Renihilation, Liturgy made use of simple song structures, and concentrated on sustaining a blindingly high intensity level from start to finish. Aesthethica, a more controlled and polyvalent effort, finds the band operating at multiple levels and using more varied forms. The music is both elaborately crafted and chaotically performed. Songs often begin in the form of a simple chant or hypnotic abstraction, then evolve into something dense and complex. A constant sensitivity to the states of attention that different musical patterns activate and foster, yields a paradoxical result: the more complex the music, the simpler the message. Cycling through the fundamental modes of being: stasis, chaos, repetition and entelechy, Aesthethica is a metaphorical exercise in affirmation.
The record is a unified whole. A major concern, sonically and lyrically, is the question of what it is to be meaningful, and how intensity relates to emotion or affect. Many of the songs activate and manipulate cliches relating to heroism, tragedy, hope, and so on by connecting black metal techniques to the spirit of film score writing (Vangelis, Badalamenti) and post-Romanticism (Scriabin, Sibelius). "High Gold" presents a vision of apocalypse, "Harmonia" presents a judgment on the meaning of life, and so on. The resulting collection of songs, at once, embodies and transcends these tropes. The music is supersaturated with lofty melodies and lyrics, bursting with frenzied execution, and builds to a boiling point of chaos, distorting all meaning and distilling to reveal the raw core of pure sonic joy. Liturgy surrounds these fractured islands of meaning with a sea of a-signifying ritual repetition and sound (Branca, Sleep, Lightning Bolt). Tear at the seams of the straitjacket of ordinary life, release the energy from the field of potentiality that it binds, enter the realm of the good and the beautiful, so commands Aesthethica.
Highly technical musicianship, poetico-mystical gesturing, and a minimal directness; all singular elements, whose interactions and reactions are contained in and bursting from a black metal framework. Revelatory contrasts presented in an intensely physical performance whose energy is palpable and whose abatement is as illuminating as its arrival.
D Charles Speer
Born and raised in Atlanta, GA, David Charles Shuford is the body behind Speer. After moving to New York City in the early 90s, Shuford forged a path as a musician adept in multiple sounds and styles. A member of the No Neck Blues Band for 15 years and running, he has also engaged his mind and fingers in other groups such as Enos Slaughter, The Suntanama, Egypt Is The Magick #, and Coach Fingers. Through a steady series of home recordings, the Speer trajectory began to take shape in the early 2000's. Assembling of masses of vibration bearing wood was needed to fulfill one man’s band obligations. The full instrumental ensemble of a Middle Eastern belly dance troupe and a selection of voices from a Cajun band were thereby smashed together to engender a sound wildly alive. After a self released debut solo LP Some Forgotten Country in 2007, Speer then sought out a public performance outlet with the killing-est band in the land, the Helix. His second solo LP Arghiledes brings a return focus upon acoustic instrumentation, with a still healthy dose of electric effects and speaker fry.
