Out Now: Mozart’s Sister, Being
August 5th, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
Mozart’s Sister debut full-length, Being, is out now. It’s what you’ve been waiting for. File under “dirtpop.”
Line of the Best Fit reviewed Being and wrote, “Sure, she’s quirky and she plays synth – but Caila Thompson-Hannant is most definitely not some Manic Pixie Dream Girl kind of creature. She’s got a sampler and the voice of cabaret diva but, most of all, she’s got a hell of a lot of chuztpah.”
Last week, the Montreal Gazette interviewed Caila Thompson-Hannant of Mozart’s Sister:
Being comfortable as a solo artist, she continued, involves “managing a way to be happy with what you’ve done. To stick by it even if it’s not what other people want you to do. When you can feel confident with what you’ve done, that’s when people will come around and want to be a part of it. There’s a lot at stake — I can’t up and leave myself.”
Read the interview here.
Mozart’s Sister is touring Canada with PS I Love You in September. Tourdates here.
You can order the album here.
Annnouncing Fumes, a New LP From Lily & Madeleine
August 4th, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
Lily & Madeleine’s goal is to release an album-a-year for three years — a rare feat when the trend among singer-songwriters is to space albums by half-decades. So far, they’re on track: Fumes, the duo’s second LP, will be released October 28, 2014, 366 days after last year’s Lily & Madeleine.The sophomore album is a leap forward for the duo, a mature sentiment of two gifted young artists who have launched from their hometown onto the world stage with speed and grace.
When Indianapolis sisters Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz first started making music together, it didn’t cross their minds that they could make a living at it. Although they now find themselves in an acclaimed full-fledged career, what got them here has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the spirit.
“The music will always be first,” says Lily. Indeed, Lily & Madeleine’s artistic souls are obvious to anyone who has heard their recordings. From the beginning, the sisters’ calling card has been the breathtaking and intuitive union of their voices.
NPR’s All Songs Considered debuted “The Wolf is Free,” our first listen from the fall-bound album. It’s a wispy, ethereal, haunting song, a perfect summer track for that moment when the day turns to dark and the shadows start to loom among the trees. NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson, who’s heard the full record, praises, “This record has a little more of a kick to it…it’s fuller and more produced and more fleshed out…this whole record is zippier. I am excited about it.” Hear it on NPR here, or above.
New Video From Helado Negro
July 22nd, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
Noisey has premiered Helado Negro’s latest music video, directed by Ryan Dickie and set to the album’s first single “I Krill You.” The video features Roberto Lange (aka Helado Negro) set against a projection of electronic nature: trees, bright lights, streamers, and lasers.
Helado Negro will be touring with Son Lux and Sinkane in the fall. See his tourdates here.
The album is out September 2. Limited edition blue vinyl, as well as VIP hand-made edition, are available to preorder here.
New Video, EP Out Now From My Brightest Diamond
July 16th, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
It starts today: the latest phase in the musical evolution of My Brightest Diamond has officially begun with the release of None More than You, an EP of new material from composer/performer Shara Worden.
The five tracks collected here hint at a new direction for My Brightest Diamond, as Worden begins combining lullabies and laments of an almost tremulous intimacy with pop songs that take as much inspiration from classic poetry as they do from the latest dancefloor anthems.
Two of those tracks are a pair of vastly different takes on “Dreaming Awake”: the raw Son Lux Mix that opens the EP, and a mix by Mason Jar Music, who got caught trying to record the song at a secret session inside of an abandoned power station. Footage of that recording session—including the bust by the police, and the subsequent al fresco performance—has been uploaded to YouTube and premiered by Consequence of Sound, along with an embedded Soundcloud stream of the complete EP.
None More than You has been released exclusively on translucent purple vinyl or as a digital download here. In addition, iTunes has bundled together a Prismatic Edition of the forthcoming My Brightest Diamond LP, This Is My Hand, that includes a download of this EP, a pre-order of the LP (due in September), and a special advance download of “Pressure,” the lead track from This Is My Hand. It’s all available now.
New Video, Acoustic EP from Lily & Madeleine
July 8th, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
A lovely new digital EP is out today from Lily & Madeleine. The EP highlights seven acoustic versions of songs from their self-titled debut, and features a striking version of “Sea of Love” by Phil Phillips, later covered by Cat Power. You can purchase the EP on Bandcamp, iTunes, in our own store, or hear it on Rdio here.
Having just returned from a robust west coast tour with cellist Shannon Hayden, Lily & Madeleine also managed to record sessions at KCRW, Jefferson Public Radio, See also KCRW’s history of “Sea of Love” here. And if L&M weren’t busy enough, they managed to shoot a new music video set to the original, album version of “And Tonight.”
Watch “Year of the Tiger” from Sufjan’s Enjoy Your Rabbit
July 2nd, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
It’s been thirteen years since Asthmatic Kitty Records released Sufjan Stevens’ Enjoy Your Rabbit, but we’d never pressed it to vinyl — until this year. Now that it’s available in limited edition, colored vinyl, we thought we’d celebrate by asking director and animator Geoffrey Hoskinson to create a video. We let him choose the song and the concept for the video. What he created is mesmerizing and beautiful.
We asked Geoff a few questions over email about the video.
What appealed to you about the song “Year of the Tiger?”
“Year of the Tiger” is a really outstanding track on the record. I love how it is like a soft ballad juxtaposed with noisy glitchy interruptions and a big climax. It is these dynamics that really appeal to me.
Could you talk a bit about how you made this video? It’s so vibrant and alive. What tools did you use?
The video was created with Photoshop and After Effects. I designed all of the pieces in Photoshop and then animated them in After Effects.
There’s some really interesting visuals here; obviously the tiger is important, but you even have tiger sperm swimming through to a sun-egg. Your work tends to address some life/death issues. Could you speak to that?
What mainly drove the visuals for the video was the concept of birth. This was inspired by the notion of the birth cycles of the Chinese zodiac and the (then) impending birth of my son. The vocal parts in “Year of the Tiger” sounded to me like a wordless lullaby for a baby. So in the video, I saw the tigers as spiritual beings who were calling a new soul into existence with their song.
You can buy Enjoy Your Rabbit here, or at your local record store.
Double Youth, a New Record from Helado Negro
June 30th, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
Where does Helado Negro’s music come from? Awash in rich, ambient resonance, it seems to have emanated from someplace as remote as the future, or a distant memory.
But like all his music, Helado Negro’s new LP Double Youth was recorded in the place where he—Roberto Carlos Lange, a.k.a. Helado Negro—lives, in the home studio in his living room. And for all its sonic spaciousness, it’s also inescapably intimate.
Lange began work on Double Youth immediately after completing the last Helado Negro full-length, Invisible Life, during breaks from an enormous range of concurrent musical projects: along with Helado Negro material, he was creating experimental, conceptual works for performance by large ensembles.
And the funk/hip-hop tinged electronic grooves of Double Youth are experimental too, in a way: structurally, texturally, and rhythmically complex and unexpected. But the process of creating the album was about concision and directness, building songs out of of nothing but voice and electronics, and then paring away every inessential section from a piece of music to find the perfect pop song at its core.
The lyrics show him wrapping his head around subtle, often abstract concepts, and putting them in a language that’s easy to understand. Literally: Double Youth shows Helado Negro thinking bilingually, making the sound of his voice more present than ever, and singing lyrics—in Spanish and English—designed to transcend grammar and idiom to speak emotional truths directly to the listener.
Double Youth arrives on CD, LP, and digital on September 2. A VIP edition is available in limited quantities (just 100), hand-made and hand-numbered by Roberto Lange himself. A limited edition first-pressing in translucent blue is also available. Preorder those here.
To hear the first single, head over to FADER.
VIP Hand-made, Limited Edition.
Half-Handed Cloud Album Release Show; New Single and Video
May 23rd, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
The new Half-Handed Cloud full-length, Flying Scroll Flight Control, is dropping next month, and the fanfare heralding its arrival is already underway.
In especially good news for fans of cryptic symbolism as well as complex, outsider-esque sacred pop, the official celebration begins on June 1 at 1, when Half-Handed Cloud’s afternoon release show begins at Ohmega Salvage. Not just a venue, Ohmega is also a working antique salvage yard in Berkeley, CA where beautiful old things that have been rediscovered amongst the detritus of the modern world can reclaimed and restored. Those Lavender Whales of Columbia, SC will be opening for a three-person Half-Handed Cloud lineup on the Ohmega stage.
But first, PopMatters is offering a quick preview of the album this week, praising the “sun-kissed melodies” and “quirky instrumentation” of the new track “Festus, I Am Not Out of My Mind” and making it available to stream in full at PopMatters.com.
And Half-Handed Cloud mastermind John Ringhofer has posted his own, high-concept teaser for Flying Scroll Flight Control. A short video conceived and sound-designed by Ringhofer himself, and relying heavily on an important contribution from one Dr. Ralph Kuri, this preview, like the album, is made up of equal parts ingenuity, metaphysics, magic, absurdity, and wit, and features just a few seconds of music from the new album’s “Titus Three.”
Out June 10 on Asthmatic Kitty Records, Flying Scroll Flight Control is already available for preorder on CD, mp3, clear vinyl, and a special LP release with custom slipmat.
New Video From Rafter for “Convertible Jeep”
May 9th, 2014 , by Asthmatic Kitty
Debuting exclusively on Jamaicans Music, Rafter’s new video for “Convertible Jeep” will cause your brain to melt into a pool of reggae-ified gel. The good kind (of brain gel).
Directed by Lizeth Santos, the video features Rafter in an amazing Reggae Robot suit, an army of extras donned with gold future-microphones wearing multi-colored body suits, and pretty much every color possible.
Watch it on Jamaicans Music here, or below.
The album is available now. Allmusic reviewed it, saying “Everyone from Lee Perry to King Tubby, and even more modern producers like Steely & Clevie, would be impressed by the sounds [Rafter] conjures up on the record.” Buy it here.
https://vimeo.com/93404982
200 Words: New Video from Fol Chen
March 5th, 2013 , by Asthmatic Kitty
[youtube width=”542″ height=”305″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbXD8pnB0l4[/youtube]
SPIN has debuted a brand new video from Fol Chen. In the video for “200 Words” astronauts launch into space, only to fall back down again. Aaron Ohlmann directed the video, which features vocalist and keyboardist Sinosa Loa of Fol Chen.
View some photos from the shoot here.
“200 Words” is the first single from The False Alarms, which comes out March 19th and is available for preorder now.
