Whirr's Around EP to be Released via Graveface Records July 9th - Stream New Track, Drain, and Pre-Order Now.

WHIRR: AROUND EP
LP / CD / Cassette / Digital Download

Release date: 7/9/13 

Graveface Records

Whirr returns with Around, an EP that finds the group restrained, but no less dark. Here, they explore longer songs, with their shortest clocking in at just under six minutes. Catchy melodies, traditionally a part of the band’s wheelhouse, give way here to a droning ambience, shifting Whirr slightly from their shoegaze core toward a dour post-rock sound.

Vocalists Kristina Esfandiari and Loren Rivera keep their contributions misty and abstract, serving here as additional instruments more than messengers. But the thunderous drums and lavish guitar work remain — albeit in a colder, glassier form — making Around both a departure and a logical step forward from Whirr’s previous work.

AROUND track listing:
1. Drain
2. Swoon
3. Keep
4. Around

New Video: Washed Out. Don't Give Up (Official). Upcoming LP Paracosm to be Released via Sub Pop August 13, 2013. Pre-Order Now.

Via Sub Pop:

The music recorded by Ernest Greene as Washed Out has been nothing if not dreamy, and on his second full-length, Paracosm, he takes the dreamlike, otherworldly atmospheres of his music a huge leap further.

The title refers to a phenomenon in which people create detailed imaginary worlds, and the idea of escaping is all over Paracosm’s music and lyrics. Paracosm finds Greene reaching beyond the computers and synths that filled Washed Out’s previous recordings, expanding his sonic palette to include over 50 different instruments, the most significant of which turned out to be old keyboards like the Mellotron, Chamberlin, Novatron, and Optigan.

“I’ve grown as a songwriter to the point where I want to have more involved arrangements, and that’s really hard to do with sampling,” says Greene. “These machines were kind of a happy medium: The sounds have a very worn, distressed quality about them, much like an old sample. But they also offer much more flexibility because they’re playable.”

Following two years on the road in support of the critically-acclaimed Within And Without, and the lauded Life Of Leisure EP (which can still be heard during “Portlandia’s” opening credits), he and his wife, Blair (who plays in the Washed Out live band), relocated from the big-city hubbub of Atlanta to a house outside Athens, where Greene could shut out the real world in favor of an alternate universe of his own making. Listeners will be immediately struck by Paracosm’s seamless melding of organic and synthetic sounds, and its lighter tone. Greene says: “I knew from the beginning I wanted this record to be optimistic, very much a daytime-sounding album. I think the last record felt more nocturnal in some ways. This one I just imagined being outside, surrounded by a beautiful, natural environment.”

With its gorgeous execution and uplifting attitude, Paracosm is primed to be this year’s summer record. And it promises to do what its name suggests: take listeners to a better world.

PRE-ORDER

If you pre-order Paracosm on CD or LP, you’ll receive the very limited-edition Washed Out 7" single, featuring “Pull You Down” b/w “Exit” (both exclusive tracks not featured on the album), at no charge. Speaking of limited edition vinyl, if you pre-order the record on the larger, fidelity-maximizing LP format (by which we mean, the LP is physically bigger and sounds richer than a CD, duh), you’ll receive the limited, colored-vinyl Loser Edition of Paracosm. But, as is the nature of limited things, the sooner you order, the better your chances are of receiving them.

CD (pre-order) - $12

LP (pre-order) - $16

Release Date: August 13, 2013

Track Spotlight: Silver Swans. Sea of Love. (New Single) + album teaser video.

 Stream Silver Swans' New Single, 

Sea of Love

Cross-posted from prefix: 

San Francisco's Silver Swans made a name for themselves with their dreamy layers of lush synths and airy vocals. But after a year since the release of their debut album Forever, the two have returned to the studio and started to tinker away. They chipped away at those dream-driven ideas and felt that the future was something venture into.

You hear this in their new single "Sea of Love." Full of analog synths and beats, Ann Yu's breathy vocals have become much more confident when singing about new love.

Yu spoke about their first new track in over a year:

"Sea of Love is one of the first songs we wrote for the new album and really set the tone for the rest of the songs.  I was starting a new relationship and the newness of it all overwhelmed me with questions of the unknown, the intensity of the feelings, and the hope that what you are experiencing is truly real.  The song is about rediscovering yourself through the eyes of your lover and about embracing their wonderment, by letting go of all fear and choosing to feel."

Watch the Silver Swans' new album teaser video:

See also "Always Something" Official Video:

Silver Swans on BANDCAMP

Bandcamp Track of the Day: Jetman Jet Team. The 15th (Wire cover).

Jetman Jet Team

The 15th (Wire cover)

BANDCAMP

The Stargazer Lilies Release Album Trailer for Upcoming LP We Are the Dreamers.

We are the Dreamers is the debut album from the incredible shoegaze/dreampop duo known as The Stargazer Lilies. It's out Sept 10th on Graveface Records in CD/LP/Digital formats, was curated by TOBACCO and the photos were captured by The Seven Fields of Aphelion. Here's bit about the band:
The Stargazer Lilies slow motion bathing through space music is like sun glistening on the water in sound, ambient rock for daydreamers to bob their heads to. The Northeastern Pennsylvania based trio of guitarist/bassist/drummer/producer, John Cep, singer/bassist, Kim Field, and live drummers EJ DeCoske and Johnny Lancia, bring back the raw rock primal gaze, no bullshit sunshine haze.

The gazey dance floor where Soundpool, John & Kim's previous band, dwelled lies behind them, while The Stargazer Lilies cosmic ambient arena lies ahead. Soundpool released three full-lengths in the last half decade, two on Aloft & Quince, and one on Killer Pimp. They shared the stage and in some cases toured with the likes of: Chapterhouse, Ulrich Schnauss, A Place to Bury Strangers, Asobi Seksu, School of Seven Bells, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Tobacco and Robin Guthrie to name a few.

The Stargazer Lilies streamline and minimize Soundpool down to just the bare essentials, ridding themselves of the superfluous & getting down to the essence of what The Stargazer Lilies are: ~butterfly wings, slowly beating guitars enveloping the listener, ethereal breathy female vocals floating on a melody, rocked out bossa nova beats and bad ass bass throwing down the rhythm.

This new direction, like minimalism, gains strength by taking away and paring the instrumentation down to create vast vistas of sound.

My Bloody Valentine Announce a Handful of U.S. Tour Dates for August 2013.

My Bloody Valentine have announced a set of North American dates in support of their excellent recent LP mbv. This is My Bloody Valentine's first stop stateside since 2009. 

08-16 Austin, TX - Austin Music Hall

08-17 Grand Prairie, TX - Verizon Theatre
08-19 Denver, CO - Ogden Theatre
08-21 Seattle, WA - WaMu Theater at CenturyLink Events Center
08-23 San Francisco, CA - Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
08-25 Los Angeles, CA - FYF Fest

Performing "Soon" live in London || 2013

Artist Interview: Jaike of The History of Colour TV.

When The Sun Hits 

Interviews Jaike of

The History of Colour TV

Interviewed by Amber Crain

Created as an experimental solo project and gradually developing into a band around a series of self-released singles and EPs, The History of Colour TV’s songs advance in cascading duels of pop-sense versus noise-texture. Propelled by a sonic charge of over-driven guitars, primitive drums and synth-induced soundscapes, the band interweave themes of sorrow and euphoria to form a glimmering evocation of a daydream, in which the past has yet to be and the future has been forgotten.

How and when was the band formed? The band was formed in Berlin, and that’s where we’re all living at the moment. I had been using the name The History of Colour TV since January 2010 for what I thought was to remain a solo project, but moving to Berlin changed that: I met with some like-minded people and the solo project gradually morphed into a full band, and became more focused in terms of its musical direction.

Can you tell us what the band has been working on and what you've got forthcoming in the near future (new releases, tour, etc.)?   Right now we’re taking a break from playing shows to focus on recording essentially what should become our second album. It’s likely that we’ll be releasing a single sometime after the summer, so we’ll be playing shows again then and most probably be presenting some of the new songs live.

Do you consider your music to be part of the current shoegaze/dream pop scene, or any scene? Defining one's sound by genre can be tiresome, but do you feel that the band identifies closely with any genre? How do you feel about genres in music, in a general sense?   It’s a delicate subject for us, because although people generally tend to talk about our music as being directly linked to the Shoegaze scene, current and past, we really consider that to be just one of several influences and aspects of our music. We are huge fans of My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, and it’s nice to have your music be favorably compared to those bands’ pioneering work. But when the description stops there, it feels like a short-cut been taken. As soon as music has some reverse guitars and reverb it tends to get labeled ‘shoegaze’ and occasionally perceived to be simply derivative of the music of that original scene, if there ever really was one. But if I make some mental space to compare our album to say a selection of key MBV tracks, I don’t really see a huge connection there, sound-wise and songwriting/structure-wise.
 At the end of the day it’s subjective, and it doesn’t really matter as long as you as an artist are being honest with yourself, and making music that’s an expression of who you are. One of the problems with categorizing music by genre, especially with something as nominally specific as Shoegaze - which I think some people are immediately curious about hearing while maybe others are immediately turned off by - is that any given Shoegaze band’s music would probably appeal to people beyond those stylistic boundaries. 
I was recently talking to a concert promoter in Germany, really nice guy, who told me that he loves Shoegaze but that he really dislikes My Bloody Valentine, which was pretty entertaining. 

What do you think of modern shoegaze/dream pop/psychedelia artists, any favorites?  Some favorites are Screen Vinyl Image, Lovesliescrushing, Pink Playground… Fabels have an interesting thing going, a nice mixture of styles of which one you might call Shoegaze… And though they don’t release anything under that name anymore, Slowhazel. Their track "Edge Of Yr Knife (Live)" is probably my favorite example of a modern take on the Shoegaze aesthetic. They’re really pushing the recording to the point of abstraction. It’s such an interesting process by which there’s a recognizable tune, but it’s on auto-destruct, eaten up by the sound that's being used to convey it.

What is the most important piece of gear for your sound? Any particular guitars/pedals/amps that you prefer?   On a purely technical level, the AKAI MPC1000 is pretty central to our setup. Markus uses his kit to trigger a lot of the synth and drum sounds from the album, which are all loaded into the sampler. Graeme has a few secrets lined up on his pedal board which result in a pretty crushing bass sound; he rates the Z.CAT fx pedals pretty highly. We used the Digitech XP300 a lot on the album, and live also. That has a very identifiable sound. And I couldn’t be without a Cobra overdrive, which was built by a small french company called MOJO, and which as far as I’m concerned is irreplaceable…

What is your process for recording your music? What gear and/or software do you use? What would you recommend for others?   We recorded the first album ‘digitally’, but with the next recordings we’re trying to shift back to doing as much in the analog realm as possible. This implies a few more limitations, but really, it just means making key decisions earlier on in the process as opposed to later in post-production. In fact we have a pretty specific way we’re trying to proceed with this album, and if we can pull it off, it will essentially mean that there will be little or no post-production, no actual ‘mixing’ sessions. Kind of touching wood on that one…


We used some simple but effective gear on the first album. Old German broadcast pre-amps and mixer, standard but decent microphones, nothing too fancy, and recorded into Logic 9. I feel that recording, digital or analog, is all about making the right decisions in the context of what you have at your disposal. But in the digital realm specifically, trying to minimize the amount of processing you subject your audio to is essential. Again, it’s all a bit subjective…

How do you feel about the state of the music industry today? There is no doubt a massive change underway; how do you see it and do you feel it’s positive at all?   It seems like the change we’re witnessing will be on-going for a while to come. It might be short-sightedness, but I can’t really see how one particular model will prevail in a major way over any other, in the sense that the technology involved, the media and platforms are also constantly evolving. For good or for bad, depending on who’s side your on. Here in Germany, the local royalty-collecting agency GEMA has been annoyingly successful in their dispute/deal with YouTube for example, to block certain copyrighted materials from streaming on that site. It’s a pretty strong reminder of how the internet can be controlled differently depending on where you are in the world, and as an extension, that the battle to avoid it becoming some kind of proprietary system is likely to intensify. 


In terms of the industry… I would have to think about what the expression ‘music industry’ means right now, what’s included under its definition. It’s a little blurry. Surely Bandcamp has to be counted as being part of the music industry, but is a band recording DIY, etc, and releasing their music on Bandcamp considered to be a part of it too? If you look at it in a romantic way, maybe it’s comparable to the situation where big companies were selling lots of blank cassettes throughout the 80s and 90s, but bands putting together their own sleeves and albums and selling their tapes on a smallish scale were circumventing the ‘music industry’. The obvious difference today is the amount of people you can potentially reach, the quantity and rapidity of connections that can be made from one listener to others, the way 'mainstream' and 'underground' are visible on the same page and platforms, next to one another. That’s amazing of course, and it’s easy to get lost in the amount of stuff out there. But it also reinforces my fascination for how things worked in a previous age, with photocopy machines, mailers and stamps, how the early hardcore and independent scenes and labels developed in the 80s, and how much passion went into all that, both in terms of the creators and the listeners. Not to say things were systematically better in the past, but now it just seems hard to imagine it was ever possible. 


To finish on the theme of the current evolution of the industry, these subjects are almost always talked about in relation to revenue, how a piece of recorded sound can generate some kind of income and how we can maintain that as a reality in the digital age. The money-factor hasn’t changed that much, and if you take it away a lot of the debates become redundant. 

When it comes to label releases versus DIY/bandcamp and the like, what is your stance, if any?   No particular stance, I suppose it’s all about working with the right people, collaborating in creative and constructive ways, whether it’s with a label or within a DIY collective etc. There is however something to be said about putting your own releases together: recording, designing the covers, cutting and folding them, turning them into finished objects. It’s a very satisfying experience. And one that’s not incompatible with working with a label of course…

Do you prefer vinyl, CD, cassette tape or mp3 format when listening to music? Do you have any strong feelings toward any of them?   Vinyl is my favorite format. It’s fun and bold and fragile and generally sounds good. CDs are cool because they can also be used as mirrors.

Can you tell us a little about what you are currently into (books, films, art, bands, etc.)?   I’m currently obsessed with french novelist/essayist/philosopher Maurice Blanchot. Being able to read his works is probably the best reason to learn french. He remains a bit of a mysterious character, kind of a hermit, not very well known even in France. He also wrote a lot, and it’s pretty dense and time consuming, so it will be an obsession for a while yet. And he's a pretty big influence somehow.

If you had to choose one track that was the ultimate definition of your sound, which would it be and why?    Probably Colour TV, the first song of our first EP. The fact that it’s called ‘Colour TV’ is more to do with its thematic contents than with the band’s name. It was one of the first songs written for the band, and because the whole project was brand new, I could somehow also picture that it was coming to an end, that it had already come full circle and we were writing the full-stop. So it had to be epic and loud, but also melancholic and nostalgic. And somehow a lot of our music is like that. The video was cool too…

Can you tell us a little about the band’s song writing process?
There’s no regular way of proceeding. Although it’s usually a riff or a sonic glitch or a pattern/beat,  anything can turn into a song. Occasionally it’s a series of words, or a title, not so much in terms of subjects or themes, but more the images and tension it might evoke.

What is your philosophy (on life), if any, that you live by?
There’s a famous quote from Scanners in which one of the shadier scanner characters sits inside one of his sculptures and declares “my art keeps me sane”. It’s more of a statement than a philosophy, but it’s one that comes to my mind pretty frequently. It’s cool, both ‘art’ and ‘sane’ are somewhat relative, so you can go a long way with that one.

 

Bandcamp 

Saint Marie Records

Order the 12 inch LP version of Emerald Cures Chic Ills by The History of Colour TV from SMR.

Order the gorgeous 12 inch LP version of Emerald Cures Chic Ills by The History of Colour TV while it is still in stock at the Saint Marie Records store! Hands down my favorite 12 inch cover art of the year (and the music is brilliant, too!)

ORDER HERE

Velochrome Announces September Release of Debut LP, A New Design for Love, Pre-Order now available via Bandcamp.

A New Design For Love  ||  Velochrome

Cologne, Germany based band Velochrome has officially announced the upcoming release of their debut LP, A New Design for Love, via Bandcamp. See below for pertinent pre-order information!

Digital Album

Pre-order of A New Design for Love in your choice of high-quality MP3, FLAC, or other formats. A link to the album download will be emailed to you the moment it’s released.

Pre-order Now  €7 EUR  ||  Releases 01 September 2013

Limited Edition 12" Vinyl LP

Vinyl edition of the debut album, strictly limited to 500 copies worldwide, directly from the band. Pre-order includes digital album in your choice of high-quality MP3, FLAC, or other formats. A link to the download will be emailed to you the moment it’s released.

Pre-order Now  €12 EUR 

Digital album releases 01 September 2013 || LP ships out on or around 02 September 2013 and limited to Edition of 500 

Limited Edition Compact Disc

Gatefold card case CD edition of the debut album, strictly limited to 500 copies worldwide, directly from the band. Pre-order includes digital album in your choice of high-quality MP3, FLAC, or other formats. A link to the download will be emailed to you the moment it’s released.

Pre-order Now  €10 EUR ||  Ships out on or around 01 September 2013

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TONIGHT! WTSH on Strangeways Radio. Stream Live 10pm EST /9pm CST.

TONIGHT! WTSH on Strangeways Radio - Expect to hear a brand new exclusive from Drowner's new LP, new ones from Weekend, Lilies On Mars, Marnie & SLOWNESS, along with some classic gazer anthems thrown in the mix, as well. 

Stream it live TONIGHT 

10pm EST/9pm CST 

www.strangewaysradio.com

News: Captured Tracks Turns 5, Announces 2 Day Outdoor Festival feat. DIIV, Wild Nothing, Beach Fossils, Soft Moon, Blouse and more...

Captured Tracks turns 5 this year and to celebrate they are throwing a two-day festival at the end of the summer. The two-day outdoor festival will be held August 31st and September 1st at The Wick with performances by DIIV, Mac Demarco, Wild Nothing, Beach Fossils, Soft Moon, MINKS, Soft Metals, Blouse, Widowspeak, Chris Cohen, Heavenly Beat and Alex Calder. 

If you are remotely close and can make it to this festival, DON'T MISS IT. This may be the line up of the year!

Dates:

August 31st, 2013

September 1st, 2013

Address:

The Wick

272 Meserole St

(between Bushwick Pl & Waterbury St) 

Brooklyn, NY 11206

Tickets:

Day 1 : $30.00 

Day 2: $30.00 

Both Days : $55.00 

- a two day pass gets one time 10% off used goods ($50 or more) at the Captured Tracks shop in Greenpoint – which is due to open this August

ULTRA Two Day : $100.00 

- includes: special gift bag of exclusive merch and a one time 20% off used goods ($50 or more) voucher at C/T Shop 

Line Up || Day 1 – 8/31

DIIV

Mac Demarco

Soft Moon

MINKS

Chris Cohen

Heavenly Beat

Line Up || Day 2 – 9/1

Wild Nothing

Beach Fossils

Widowspeak

Blouse

Soft Metals

Alex Calder  

SEE MORE...