We’re happy to welcome Frank Riley of High Road Booking to the team that’s bringing Lily & Madeleine to the world. Frank has booked for My Bloody Valentine, Wilco, Indigo Girls, Josh Rouse, OK Go, Music Go Music, Son Volt, and many others. Wilson Zheng at High Road will be helping out as well.

Frank and Wilson join publicist Asha Goodman, who works for Saks & Co in their Nashville office, and manager Paul Mahern and his White Arc Management company. Chris and Hannah Burque of Ghost Town are handling mechanical licensing.

Glad to have Frank, Wilson, Ghost Town, and Asha on board. Click here to watch Lily & Madeleine perform “Back to the River” live in Indianapolis.

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Written over the course of their summer vacation and recorded in three days, The Weight of the Globe is a musical snapshot by teenaged sisters Lily and Madeleine Jurkiewicz of a pivotal moment in their lives—turning their backs on the comforts of the past to step into an uncertain future.

The recording project that became the Weight EP started with producer Paul Mahern, who’d fallen in love with the duo’s YouTube videos, acoustic covers of a handful of favorite songs, and immediately got in touch to invite the sisters into the studio. Lily & Madeleine started writing their first original tunes over summer vacation, and Paul introduced them to their bassist and songwriting partner Kenny Childers.  The response to their first original song was immediate:  the YouTube video racked up a quarter of a million views, and the sisters sold out the first two shows they ever played.

Each song on The Weight of the Globe was written as a discrete, self-contained folk-pop statement, but thanks to the real-time circumstances of recording it, the EP holds together like a collection of interconnected short stories. Taken as a whole, the songs chart a journey from love to disillusionment to heartbreak.

We’ll be releasing The Weight of the Globe on CD, with bonus acoustic tracks, and on beautiful 10inch vinyl (with a download code to access the acoustic tracks) on June 11th. Preorder it here.

Watch a brand new video from the girls on Do317 here.

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[youtube width=”542″ height=”302″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C32YflNe3I8&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Fifteen years into his musical career, Denison Witmer has recorded a self-titled album, his most direct statement to date.

In a world obsessed with “branding” and constructed media personas, he chose to call his ninth album Denison Witmer because “I started thinking about the implications of what it’s like to work in an industry where I operate under my own name,” Denison explains.  “And my ultimate goal as a musician is to be honest with people, first and foremost.”

Inspiration for Denison Witmer came from an unlikely source.  Listening to the radio, Denison found himself moved by an interview with R.A. Dickey, the major league pitcher whose so-so start convinced him to switch to the difficult knuckleball.

“The knuckleball is a kind of pitch that has absolutely no spin on it whatsoever,” Denison explains, “and you aim at a target, but you really have no idea where it’s going to go.”  The learning curve first sent Dickey down to the minor leagues, then to the top of the majors, as he perfected his peculiar art.

Denison’s own peculiar art—like throwing the erratic knuckleball—also means going against the grain, and trusting in forces beyond his control.  A composer of subtle, deeply sincere albums in the era of instant mp3s, he wrote this album partly about learning to accept the person, and the artist, he finds himself becoming.

“This is the turning point for me,” he says.  “Even though it’s late in my career, I can feel something moving.”

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This Saturday, February 23, a handful of non-musicians will have the opportunity to collaborate with Fol Chen on a new conceptual project, “You Will Be My Music.”

Starting at 4pm, the band will give four guests of L.A.’s Machine Project art and education space one hour each to create a new recording in a mobile studio. Layer by layer, the band will guide each volunteer through a ProTools session, overdubbing new vocals and other sounds onto his or her favorite pop song. At the end of the hour, the tracks containing the original song will be deleted, leaving only these new elements.

“You Will Be My Music” plays on the meaning of the word “cover,” first covering up a song with extraneous musical elements, then turning those elements into an uncanny cover version of the original.

This is only the most recent of Fol Chen’s workshops at the Machine Project. At one previous appearance, the band introduced the Tetrafol, a tetrahedron-shaped electronic instrument they helped create with the Monome interface design company. At another, the opening act for their performance was a lecture on the mating habits of sea slugs.

Information on how to participate in this session will soon become available on the Machine Project website, machineproject.com.