Warp vs The London Sinfonietta Orchestra - album release & shows

August 22, 2006

In September 2006 the Warp Works and 20th Century Masters concert (featuring Mira Calix) visited Paris, for its first French performance in the stunning Cit de la musique concert hall. Now with the special double cd of live recordings released on Warp we're happy to see the show make its Russian debut in Moscow on April 5th.

Warp / London Sinfonietta website

Born at the Royal Festival Hall on 10 March 2003, the London Sinfonietta / Warp concerts grew out of a shared desire to explore the connection between the electronic experimenters on the Warp label and the avant-garde 20th Century pioneers.

The resulting collaboration will now visit Moscow on April 5th 07 for an evening of boundary-blurring musical juxtapositions. A live electronic performance by Mira Calix and tracks by Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Boards of Canada arranged for the ensemble share the bill with classics by Ligeti, Nancarrow and Reich, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

Live recordings of earlier performances at the London's Royal Festival Hall, Brighton Dome and the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall was released as a 19 track double CD collection, Warp Works and 20th Century Masters, on Warp on September 18th.

Further info on Warp Records

www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk

Permalink | August 22, 2006

Moha Euro tour Nov / Dec

August 19, 2006

The incredible guitarist from Noxagt and the incredible drummer from Ultralyd, this Norwegian improv band are blowing minds where ever they play.

We cant explain how good they are, you can get a bit of an idea from their myspace page,, umm imagine Lighting Bolt crossed with Anthony Braxton..
http://www.myspace.com/themoha

alot of shows confirmed, and a few to go.. email us now with interest, you wont be dissapointed! ned(@)littlebig.org.uk

November/December
22 Tilburg (NL) - Paradox
23 Amsterdam (NL) - Bimhuis
24 Antwerp (B) - Luchtbal
25 Köln (DE) - Stadgarten - Studio 672
26 Zürich (CH) - Overkill Party
29 Frankfurt (DE) - Forüm für Elektronische und Neue Musik
30 Bruxelles (B) - Ateliers Mommen - 5th floor bird
01 Brighton (UK) - Overkill Party - Volks Tavern
02 London (UK) - Overkill Party - Corsica Studios
03 Paris (F) - Kliton - La Miroiterie
05 Barcelona (ES) - Ozono Kids
07 Lisboa (P) - ZDB
08 Porto (P) - Lovers & Lollypops
09 Ovieda (ES) - La Caja Negra
10 Bordeaux (F) - El Inca
12 Marseille (F) - Lembobineuse
13 Lyon (F) - Zero Jardins - Sonic
14 Geneva (CH) - L'usine
15 Geneva (CH) - Recording Session
16 Strasbourg (F) TBC
17 end in Berlin

ps - check their myspace page to double check dates.

Permalink | August 19, 2006

The Locust - Welcome to Littlebig

August 01, 2006

What do we want? This!

What did you want, sonic inducer, sheep in wool coats dumpster diving for forever hidden treasure? What did you think, summer cesspool sleeper, English wasn't a language conceived for business? Allow me, please, to introduce New Erections, the third full-length from the Southern California decade-plus young endeavor, The Locust, as a post-futurist to primitive again strangled tongue-shearer just 'cause the business is lickin' pretty bad. Circumstances prohibiting, if the Locust could've soundtracked the previous two World War's they probably would've. Time ain't always on our side. Fortunate for ears and unfortunate for Earth, this procession leader of an album is a hell of a charm with New Erections clocking in at twenty-three minutes proving a potent and primal alarm that sludges along peach hairs before this breaking levy. Here is New Erections, eleven tracks deep and somehow totally anthemic, throbbing in the void of those past limps crumbled by planes and bleak brains, blanketed by soft skulls with electric socket glory holes for eyes that worship the steel wool pulled over them. New Erections, a celebratory prost! to the old photos of you, mid-twenties, with friends pissing on GG's shallow grave now under-exposed by the current you, over-miserable hollow white-collar power-slave. New Erections, later Saddam, hey Gomorrah...No more goose-stepping around the issue, huh? No more domes stuffed with down tissue, right? New Erections, find you pill synthetic sweat sympathetic, poker-face vague with Viagra, on your knees praying of drawing that magic card and hard up for hard-ons. New Erections, mighty kind of your snitching hairy palms to loosen the grips on strangling blood-filled phallic police tips. New Erections, with the world's voluptuous vomit crashing in all around, towers a true testament in the inevitable wake of tidal sewage. C'mon stiffs, we must demolish and level together... in the dead of everything...in the cold-sweat of the night, heat of the freon freedom fight, New Erections is exactly what we wanted.

www.thelocust.com
www.myspace.com/thelocust

SAFETY SECOND, BODY LAST

The Locust’s beauty has always come in finesse and intricacy. Thirty seconds of pitiless hurricane squall. Epic, labyrinthine guitar licks deconstructed, flipped ass-backwards, and compressed into two-second-long baby snake squiggles. Dainty ticka-ticka-tickas of hummingbird cymbal taps, followed by 80 hammer smacks squeezed into a heartbeat. But just as America has changed since The Locust hatched back in ‘95, so it goes with their sound. The band’s 2003 Anti- debut, Plague Soundscapes, took its half-minute killzaps and added a gurgling, hissing swamp of electronics. And their new one, Ipecac’s Safety Second, Body Last (produced by Alex Newport) goes even further.

It is a single 10 minute, 11 second track divided into four movements, like classical music (though classical as composed by serial murder-junkie Ed Gein in cahoots with The Residents.) It begins in a hellbroth of twitchy nerves par for the course of the band’s older stuff. But suddenly it stops and you’re dropped into a tossing, churning primordial sea of ominous splerrks, oscillating blits, and liquidic rrerks sputtered out of Joey Karam’s keyboard—before the vocals and Gabe Serbian’s drums come on again... only this time slow. Pained. Agonized. Like a woolly mammoth caught knee-deep in a tar pit.

From there, the track moves through a miniseries of stages: slow and sludgy to the fastest, herkiest jerkiest splatters you’ve ever heard; JP’s bass making spacebrain noises; keyboards sputtering like blood spurting and sloshing out of bullet-holes; guitars revving like chainsaws or e-bowing themselves into the gorgeous, ear-massaging sound of a mosquito’s lost cell-phone ringing at the bottom of lake WhatTheFucki.

The lyrics flay through a surrealistic landscape touching down on man’s need to compartmentalize his culture, gun-happy Americans, with a whole host of characters showing up—fools, barbarians, troglodytes, sonic cannibals. “Which one are you?” the record asks. “Whose side you on?”

But what does the music itself say? "The electromagnetic force has something to say, not 100% sure what it is yet,” says Bobby. “But until then, we (as a band) are going to allow for as many oscillators, potentiometers, jagged tempo and note changes as it takes to allow its message to be heard. In addition to that, on this EP we are allocating time for contrast in the form of thick, developed sub-range tones as well as primaly pleasing higher range frequencies as a homage to the full spectrum of human hearing as a sense."

So, a new EP. New excursions into sound. But some things haven’t changed. The band still refuses to play anything but all-ages shows. Also, Clear Channel is still dead set in their rifle sites. (They call for a boycott and follow up on their end, by not playing Clear Channel shows, no matter how incredible the line-up.)

As says Bobby, "Turning down shows with our friends the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Fantomas at the Fillmore isn’t the easiest thing to do, but instead of it being a thorn in our side, it’s more like an early coffin nail for Clear Channel."

And when The Locust is hammering said nails, rest assured they’re using the nastiest nailgun you ever saw.

Permalink | August 01, 2006