Wednesday, August 17, 2011

2 Petes, 1 Canada... Spectre Folk hits the Golden Road with MV and EE

Spectre Folk will pay a visit to our neighbors to the north this weekend as a lean, mean, way zoned duo. They'll be hitting the streets of gold with good buddies and multiple label mates MV and EE. In spite of how they appear in the press photo below, Spectre Folk are just a couple of real friendly New York dudes who'd love to make some new friends in Canada. They won't hurt you. Come check em out in Montreal on Saturday and Toronto on Sunday.




SPECTRE FOLK & MV/EE IN MTL

For all our Montreal friends, a musical announcement...

>>Popcorn Youth presents…

SPECTRE FOLK [Brooklyn, NY]

with

MV+EE [Brattleboro, VT]

and

Les Momies de Palerme [Montreal]

at

La Brique / 6545 Durocher #402

9pm doors / 9:30pm start

Sliding scale $8-10

Saturday, August 20 / a night of gorgeous psychedelic folk, heavy drone jams + sudden pop exploration

We are so so excited and honored to welcome Spectre Folk to our city. Spectre Folk is led by Pete Nolan (of GHQ, Magik Markers, and Arbitrary Signs fame) and Peter Meehan (oh and their drummer is Steve Shelley – yes that Steve Shelley – of Sonic Youth!). Earlier this spring they celebrated their latest release, the EP “The Blackest Medicine, Vol. 2,” on Woodsist Records. This is going to be a really special night. PLEASE RSVP to me, natasha.pickowicz AT gmail DOT com to get your name on the guestlist as it is a private event. Thanks + hope to see you there!

Monday, August 8, 2011

United Waters in Pitchfork's Overlooked recs of 2011

Here's what Pitchfork's Marc Masters had to say about the Untited Waters record in Pitchfork's "best Overlooked recs of 2011":




United Waters: Your First Ever River [Arbitrary Signs]

The debut from Brian Sullivan's solo project United Waters can be as murky and dense as his primary concern, Mouthus. But Your First Ever River is also subdued and intimate. It sounds like Sullivan crafted these tunes in some kind of ocean-floor bedroom, building rolling melodies out of small fragments-- an acoustic strum, a two-note riff, a looping beat-- and creating his warmest, most inviting record to date. (Watch the video for United Waters' "Platetectonics" here.)


Thursday, August 4, 2011

Isolated Markers Cassette review on Tiny Mix Tapes

Markers cassette got a rad review here:

Magik Markers
Isolated from Exterior Time 2010 a.k.a. Bonfire [CS]

[Arbitrary Signs; 2011]
http://arbitrarysigns.blogspot.com
By Squeo

As the title suggests, the Markers retreat from the Drag City limelight back into the womb, documenting the mitosis of their mind into a handful of rickety songs à la the 2007 flood of CD-Rs that paved the road to Boss. One track is indistinguishable from a Velvets bootleg; another sounds like the final beach blanket bingo party after the seas dry up; Bob Seger's "Ramblin', Gamblin' Man" isn't covered so much as prepped for alternative dental surgery; near the end of side A, the band works out a straight 90s driving anthem, yearning over the horizon on the chorus and birthing one of their best songs yet in the back room of a Stephen Chbosky-penned coming-of-age rager. All these tunes still have a ways to go, but in this age of straining neck muscles to reallyhear music like we're manning the boards at the INA-GRM, it's refreshing to hear something so rambling and janky, and it demonstrates what still seems so valuable about this band and its MO: an ever-evolving attempt to be honest and strong in the present environment, to inhabit the performance space as the same sloppy humans they were before pressing 'record' and, through the divining rod of inspiration, living their way into startling works of art.



ASCS008 Magik Markers "Isolated from Exterior Time" Cassette... get some basement clues to the Markers new direction... 60 minums long






prices





Also... don't forget to come see:




Wednesday, August 3, 2011

United Waters

Has everyone heard this record yet? It's really... really good... Check out this review from Dusted:



United Waters - "Platetectonics" (Your First Ever River)


As part of Mouthus, Brian Sullivan makes music that is too noisy and dense to be rock, too nimble and pulse-oriented to be noise, too primitive to get dubbed electro-acoustic or experimental. Similarly, it’s impossible to grip the seven pieces on Sullivan’s first solo LP under his United Waters moniker as anything concrete: Are they songs that spiralled out into jams, or jams that coalesced into songs?

It’s a tension he seems to relish, and it’s there from the first drop of the needle. Side A is dominated by the 11-minute suite, “My Geology I–IV,” and the title and length alone should clue you in to the polarities Sullivan is moving between. It’s intimate but maps out larger, unseen forces, a play of the personal and the primordial.

Likewise, his arrangements throughout the album set opposing forces against each other. The opening section of “My Geology” has a clean acoustic guitar backing a trembling, distorted voice, like a slightly more wasted version of Donovan’s “Hurdy-Gurdy Man.” “Platetectonics” continues this acoustic/electric binary, with an acoustic guitar keeping the pulse for Sullivan’s massed vocals while a drum loop and back-masked cymbal strike clatter in the background, seemingly out of time, as if they were meant for some other song but leaked into the mix.

This tape-saturated, murky fidelity is on every track here, but Sullivan uses its masking properties with purpose. By subtly disguising his instrumental sources and rearranging them in the stereo field, he gives them new life and frees up our associations for the bigger effect. Both versions of “Spires” feature a muted drum track that sounds like it was recorded in a separate room. On “Statuary.” a slide guitar emerges midway through, bringing light to the minor gloom of the track’s first half.

Like a Pollock painting, your first impression of all this murk and the discordant elements is of a sloppy mess, but closer inspection reveals a tangled, intuitive intelligence at work. Order emerges not by breaking it down into its constituent parts, but when you step back and appreciate it with a wide-screen gaze. Your First Ever River is an album you could tuck into the tradition of cloistered, lysergic bedroom missives running from Skip Spence and Syd Barrett through to Twenty Six and Six Organs of Admittance, but it could just as easily get cast as something outside of that lineage. Not truly Outsider, but at least sui generis, made without a thought of really belonging anywhere or to anything.

By Matthew Wuethrich

Monday, August 1, 2011

Spectre Folk NYC




Come check out the Spectre Folk band Tuesday night at Cameo Gallery... and see the solo jam this Saturday at the Stone courtesy of Carlos Giffone.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Spectre Folk ..3 gigs Wednesday 7/27, Friday 7/29 and Tuesday August 2nd

Hey Hey... thanks to everybody for coming out to see the Markers at the un air conditioned Shea Stadium venue... also... what's wrong with you? Do you hate yourselves? It was 300000 degrees in there? Even the singer of the band almost passed out...

Spectre Folks got a small torrent of gigs this week starting tomorrow.. Me and Peter Meehan will play duo opening for Chicago band Disappears... Friday it's solo-Nolo at a gig in philly with MVEE and Aswara... then next Tuesday it's a full band gig at Cameo gallery back home (cough) in Williamsburg at the Cameo Gallery with Sands. Please try to contain your excitement... here's some previews from various web locations



SPECTRE FOLK WITH DISAPPEARS 7/27

Spectre Folk duo (Pete Nolan + Peter Meehan) will open for Disappears at The Cake Shop in New York, NY on July 27.

Spectre Folk have a new 12″ EP - The Blackest Medicine, Vol.IIavailable now on the Woodsist label and at the sonicyouth webstore. Altered Zones recently interviewed Pete Nolan and Peter Meehan.


Fire Museum Presents:

MV & EE

Spectre Folk

Zillions

Aswara


Friday, July 29th 7:30PM
Highwire Gallery
2040 Frankford Ave
Philadelphia, PA
$6

MV & EE (Brattleboro, VT):

“Beaming down from the cosmos to a transmitter in some desolate place west of the Appalachian Mountains comes Liberty Rose, the new LP from Brattleboro, Vermont’s prolific duo/collective MV & EE. Noted for their ability to assemble both musicians and noises into dense, reverb-laden compositions, Matt Valentine and Erika Elder’s music describes the companionship between human-modified sound and nature’s own silence and echoes. Aptly split into two suites of equal running length, Liberty Rose, like most of the duo’s discography, hearkens back to the days of Scott Walker and Pink Floyd’s explorations into music’s atmospheric qualities... With the air of dissonance that’s common throughout their discography, MV & EE capture well the state of being lost. Rather than forging through the anxiety and helplessness that this state offers, however, the band lavishes in its adventurousness and liberation." - Jeff Roesgen/Tiny Mix Tapes

Spectre Folk (Brooklyn):

“Spectre Folk is the long-percolating solo guise of Magik Markers drummer Pete Nolan, a black sea of noise guitar, psych-jams, no-fi experiments, and other interplanetary gunk released on a never-ending waterfall of tapes, CD-Rs, vinyl, and the occasional CD. Nolan's latest, Compass, Blanket, Lantern, Mojo (released via his label, Arbitrary Signs), is the most mellow, soothing, and ethereal of his sounds that these ears have heard, channeling the dusty desert vibe of Ennio Morricone, exploring a little Six Organs churn, and finding lusher new secrets in his home-recorded murk. In short, it's dreamy, dreary, and a warm place to curl up.”- Christopher Weingarten/Village Voice

Zillions (Philadelphia):

New project by Rosali Middleman of Blood Like Mine ("Down home experimental swamp-a-delic americana to tickle your eardrum." says Fire Museum.) . - Quoting Brickbat quoting us

Aswara (Asheville, NC):

“This is the most recent release on rafi bookstaber’s azriel label, upping the stakes of his aswara duo w/ paul “p.” grimes via this blast of minimal, diffused free-electronic lacings, ranging from a righteous cymbal/gong-bath to kosugi-esque auto-filter voice & flute stratagem to some fine free-percussion & synthesizer blottage dotting the remainder ... a vision artifact of ancient future harmonies and inner cosmosis. supreme inner cranial reverberational reflections of where you are. unspoken language and incorporeal communion.” - Mimaroglu Music






Thursday, July 7, 2011

Magik Markers invade Brooklyn 7-21, 7-22 Arbitrary Signs Showcase at Shea!!


photo

The Magik Markers will be playing 2 gigs in Brooklyn soon. The first will be on July 21 at the Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg with Ex-Cops and Haunted House.

93 North 6th Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211
(718) 302-1180


The second will be an Arbitrary Signs Showcase gig at Shea Stadium (the bushwick venue.. not the Met's joint), featuring the first ever appearance of Arbitrary Signs recording artists United Waters! Man I'm stoked to check this out. Also playing will be the always astounding Burning Star Core... Altho Spencer's not technically an Arbitrary Signs recording artist.. he's a long time buddy.. and we're really stoked he's playing.Anyway... July 22nd at:

Shea Stadium

20 Meadow Street Brooklyn, NY 11206 | Bushwick |