Free jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements announce their new album, Who Sent You?, out March 20th on International Anthem/Don Giovanni, and today present its lead single/video, “No Más.” The group is comprised of Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. Who Sent You? is the punk-rocking of jazz and the mystification of the avant-garde. This record weaves kinetic soul fusion, dreamy yet harrowing poetry, and intricate rhythms into warmth-giving tapestries that comfort and conceal, confront and coerce all at once.
“No Más” was composed by the Panamanian-born Navarro in a harmonic echo of a Strata East free jazz classic over a movement-inducing Latin rhythm. Over its peak moments, poet/MC Ayewa professes: "No mas. No more... No longer will we allow them to divide and conquer, divide and oppress, define our humanity..." Its stunning accompanying video was shot in Johannesburg, South Africa by filmmaker and photographer Imani Nikyah Dennison. The video explores the concept of Africans escaping planet earth, on a path to liberation. A story of migration told through collage, stock footage, and movement, all being driven by the sounds of free jazz and poetry.
Originally performing as two different ensembles at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event in 2015 (in response to the NYPD slaying of Akai Gurley), the future members of Irreversible Entanglements recognized a shared ethos, and shortly after, assembled as a single unit for an impromptu studio date at Seizure’s Palace in Brooklyn. That session yielded their debut album, 2017’s Irreversible Entanglements. Critical and communal acclaim for the album (including “Best of 2017” nods from NPR Music, WIRE Magazine, Bandcamp, and others) fueled a high demand for the band in the live setting, and the group have since spent much of 2018 and 2019 on the road. They have collaborated in performance with many legends of creative music including Amina Claudine Myers, Pat Thomas, and Nicole Mitchell; and their highest profile shows have included Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, Le Guess Who Festival In Utrecht NL, Barbican in London, and the Smithsonian in Washington DC.
Where the band’s self-titled debut was all explosive noisy anthems and glorious cosmic bluster, Who Sent You? is a focused and patient ritual. Irreversible Entanglements take their time in between these grooves, stalking the war-torn streets of the Deep South and post-Columbian apocalypses—taking their time to dream up an amalgamation that sounds truly euphoric. More than the sum of its parts—war-like basslines, haunting saxophone, cyberpunk brass, the unwieldy storm of drums, and the oracular phyletic incantations of Ayewa—Who Sent You? is an entire holistic jam of “infinite possibilities coming back around,” a sprawling meditation, a reminder of the forms and traumas of the past, and the shape and vision of Afrotopian sounds to come.
1.The Code Noir / Amina 2. Who Sent You - Ritual 3. No Más 4. Blues Ideology 5. Bread Out Of Stone
IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS TOUR DATES
Tuesday, March 31 - Chicago, IL @ Co-Prosperity Sphere Wednesday, April 1 - Iowa City, IA @ Mission Creek Festival Saturday, May 23 - Atlanta, GA @ Atlanta Jazz Festival
Light Beams are a D.C. trio that uses samples and a live rhythm section to write songs about staying positive. No computers. No set lists. No dudes staring at screens onstage making music that reduces you to staring at your screen offstage. Instead -- Voila! -- music that makes you move, makes you feel good and never, ever overstays its welcome.
Founded in 2015 by drummer Sam Lavine, bassist Arthur Noll, and sampler/vocalist Justin Moyer, Light Beams has risen from the ashes of D.C. bands both legendary and obscure -- and definitely too numerous to mention. Self-Help, its first full length out 1/31 on Don Giovanni records, fuses its diverse influences -- abstract expressionist painting, Terminator X, 80s New York freestyle, Dischord bands, Sheila E. -- into a melange of cross-genre innovention the band calls "BLOCK ROCK." Recorded at Solar Power Station, Moyer's sun-kissed studio in downtown Washington, and mixed (in yet another twist) by metal legends Brian McTernan (Battery) and Mike Schleibaum (Darkest Hour), this record dares offer listeners overstuffed on streaming services' offerings something that cannot be contained by any playlist.
Active since 2013, PaisleyFields is a singer, songwriter, and bandleader splitting time between Brooklyn, New York and Nashville, Tennessee.
Fields' writes country music. His songs are tender and authentic, but also pretty good with a joke. They’re mindful of tradition, but deeply informed by his singular background -- as a teenage Midwestern church pianist, a Manhattan piano bar survivor, and a touring member of pioneering queer country outfit, Lavender Country. The stories are his, but the feeling they convey -- love, loneliness, lust, and so on -- are, hopefully, still universal.
We're pleased to announce that PaisleyFields will be releasing new music on Don Giovanni later this year. They'll also be on the road throughout the spring, including dates at SXSW.
PAISLEYFIELDS ON TOUR
1.15 - Milwaukee, WI @ - Cactus Club 1.18 - Durham, NC @ The Pinhook 1.19 - Nashville, TM @ Exit/In (Dolly Parton Tribute show) 1.22 - Ossining, NY @ house show - solo w/ Mercy Bell 1.23 - Brooklyn, NY @ Young Ethel's - solo w/ Mercy Bell 1.25 - Rochester, NY @ The Little Theater - solo w/ Mercy Bell 1.28 - Indianapolis, Duke's - Indianapolis - solo w/ Mercy Bell
After working with the world's favorite underground indie-rock songwriter Jeffrey Lewis for the last decade or so to reissue his classic albums on vinyl were proud to announce a brand new proper full length!
Lewis has a new band name, too, if not necessarily a new band. Bassist Mem Pahl and drummer Brent Cole -- who have been touring the world with him for the past four years as Los Bolts -- are still on board. For Jeffrey, though, it is tradition to apply a new band name to each release. This time around, the group has been re-christened as The Voltage.
Although mostly recognized for his lyrical skills, the secret weapon in Lewis's arsenal has been his slow evolution from DIY folkie in the late '90s to barn-burning indie-rock live sensation- he started out as Daniel Johnston and spent twenty years turning into Yo La Tengo. Bad Wiring -- which was recorded by Roger Moutenot in Nashville, TN -- continues along this trajectory.
"The first thing we did when we got to Roger's studio in Nashville was to set up the gear and play the entire album through, live, like a live set, no stopping," Lewis explains. "Roger got good quality recordings of all of that and we pretty much could have called the album finished right then and there, in one day. But we spent the rest of the week using those live performances as a reference point for how to capture the best possible version of each song, the best performances and the best sounds. So we first showed Roger what we were capable of and then Roger showed us what he was capable of! It was an amazing working method! I worship a number of the records Roger had produced in the past, so I specifically sought him out, I didn't even know if he was still producing records, or where he was living."
As usual, Lewis's song topics are a tightrope walk between comedy and tragedy. The album opener "Exactly What Nobody Wanted" is a passionate tour de force on the subject of great artists that the world missed the boat on. Never entirely specific as to who or what the art or music in question is, the subject is left to the listener's imagination. Elsewhere the relentless and dense lyrical darkness of a song like "Depression! Despair!" is lightened by the camaraderie of the call-and-response chorus: "Depression! Despair! / I'll see you there."
With the endlessly creative musical variety on display from Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage, and Lewis's writing as sharp as ever, we are completely comfortable telling you that Bad Wiring is the greatest album of Jeffrey's 18-year career.
11.1.19 - Kent, OH @ Stone Tavern 11.2.19 - Detroit, MI @ PJ's Lager 11.3.19 - Chicago, IL @ Subterranean 11.4.19 - Omaha, NE @ Brothers 11.5.19 - Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive 11.6.19 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Diabolical Records 11.7.19 - Boise, ID @ The Owyhee 11.8.19 - Portland, OR @ The Fixin' 11.9.19 - Seattle, WA @ Victory Lounge
11.11.19 - Olympia, WA @ Le Voyeur
11.12.19 - Eugene, OR @ Wandering Goat
11.13.19 - Arcata, CA @ Outer Space
11.14.19 - Oakland, CA @ Starline Social Club
11.15.19 - Los Angeles, CA @ El Cid
11.17.19 - Phoenix, AZ @ Trunk Space 11.17.19 - Tucson, AZ @ Club Congress 11.19.19 - Austin, TX @ Cheer Up Charlie's 11.20.19 - Tulsa, OK @ The Vanguard 11.22.19 - Knoxville, TN @ The Pilot Light 11.23.19 - Richmond, VA @ Sound of Music 11.24.19 - Newark, NJ - Index Art Center
Out October 18th, Singles Too collects Screaming Females’ complete non-album recordings, gathering together early 7” singles, digital-only b-sides, and one pretty great remix. The download and CD will also feature six cover songs, including the New Jersey trio’s takes on music by Neil Young, Taylor Swift, Sheryl Crow, and Patti Smith. The vinyl version of the album will be a one-time pressing limited to 1500 copies.
The tracklist also provides a roadmap of the band’s progress through 15+ years of music-making -- tracking Screaming Females from their early days playing New Brunswick basement shows into life as a full-time band with a tour schedule rigorous enough that their van earned its own New York Times profile. “On the first single we ever put out, there were mistakes that I made playing guitar that make me want to crawl into a hole and die,” says guitarist Marissa Paternoster, recalling the sessions for “Arm Over Arm” and “Zoo of Death.” “At the time I didn’t know I was allowed to say, ‘Can I do that again and correct it? I was 19, giving it my all.”
On Singles Too, you can hear Screaming Females lay it down at Milltown, NJ’s post-apocalyptic recording-on-a-budget one-stop, The Hunt -- tin roof, flammable mixing board, DIY growlab housed in back of Marshall cab -- AND at posh Los Angeles hit-factory, East West Studios, where they convened with members of Garbage to cover “Because the Night.” The b-sides included here also capture the breadth of the trio’s creativity, with compelling detours and tangents otherwise unrepresented in their catalog, from Sammus and Moor Mother’s re-work of “End of My Bloodline” to the stripped down demo of Rose Mountain’s “Hopeless.” Singles Too is a rarities comp, but it’s a compelling one -- a deep dive into SF ephemera, an introduction, and a history lesson all at once.
Formed in 2005, Screaming Females are Marissa Paternoster (guitar), Mike Abbate (bass), and Jarrett Dougherty (drums). They have released seven full-length albums and toured across the world.
