News & Events
CD / 2x10 inch LP / 2x10 inch LP picture disc
From Autumnal to Vernal Equinox, this is the Death In June Winter
tree. Stripped bare, but for thirteen of its branches. But they are
as strong as ever, and with thirteen glasses and one last toast, this
new album captures the true essence of Death In June, again setting
new standards in its self-created genre. Let the Blackbirds kiss you
and may The Rule Of Thirds dictate your life.
NER/NERUS, in association with Soleilmoon, is proud to announce the
first new Death In June studio album in more than three years. The CD
is presented in an embossed softpak with 16 page lyric book. The
double 10 inch vinyl edition comes in two versions: An edition of
1500 copies in black vinyl, and a very limited edition of 500 picture
discs. Both are packaged in an embossed gatefold sleeve with a large
fold-out poster with lyrics and photo.
Track Listing:
THE GLASS COFFIN / FOREVER LOVES DECAY / JESUS, JUNK AND THE
JURISDICTION / IDOLATRY / GOOD MOURNING SUN / THE PERFUME OF
TRAITORS / LAST EUROPA KISS / THE RULE OF THIRDS / TRULY BE / THEIR
DECEPTION / MY RHINE ATROCITY / TAKEYYA / LET GO.
"At one time or another, in everyone's life, each one of us wants an island…..a place to be away from the rest of the world, a place where no one can hurt or betray us. This record is about that island."
It is comprised of two tracks – "Sirens," coming in at 24 minutes, is instrumental, and is filled with the sound of guitars crying, rising and falling like waves crashing on the rocks. Sirens is ominous, and haunting. It is not music to sleep to, but instead could make you tense and anxious.
The second track is "Destroyed." It is 32 minutes long, and comprised of 3 suites. The first being layers of vocals, woven together to make a chorus of breathing and breathlessness, layers to make you feel as if you may be drowning in the sea…..whether that sea be the ocean, or the sea of life, the day to day world in which you must deal. The second suite becomes noisy, agitated, rumbling and distorted guitars, bass and feedback, and makes you sit on the edge of your seat wondering what is about to happen. The third suite takes you to the end of the album with it's subsonic frequencies and strange unrecognizible sounds.
This is not music for the faint of heart. Windy's dear friend Jody found herself having to pull over while trying to listen to this in the car because it made her too tense. And kranky turned it down for release, feeling it was more suited for listeners of Nurse With Wound or Current 93. Born out of frustration and anger, I Hate People is the story of how in one's life, your car, your dog, a dead bird on the ground, are not going to be as upsetting or devastating to you as another human will be – only people can make you feel so bad. Only people can hurt you, betray you, and make you feel like you want to die. I Hate People is the expression born of real life, and real pain, and is an expression of emotion that is universally shared. At one point or another, we all want an island. But most of us will never get there.
I Hate People will be issued on CD by Blueflea and on LP by Kenedik. The LP will be on limited (1000 copies) beautifully colored splatter vinyl (500 on clear with blue and green and purple splatter, and 500 on clear with blood red splatter), featuring a completely different mix and with a shorter length on each song so as to provide the best sound quality. Cover art features a wonderful selection of photos by Christy Romanick, Windy's dear friend and one of her favorite artists, and Windy's passport photo from 1987 – showing a very angry, young, punk rock beginning to this musician's career.
It is scheduled to be released on one of the most hated days of the year (tax day) April 15, 2008.
"Northern’s debut offering, another in Infraction’s sweet sleep-stream of supine-inclined ambience,
are bros of Canada, Davin and Kevin Chong, dealers in heating up cool digitalia with toasty warm
sample food. Drawn is a study in turning lost to found sound, capturing momentary guitar passes,
and releasing them, subtly altered, into enduring motifs, finding felicity in the fleeting and
making it stay awhile to become compelling. What happens is that this Northern music initially
seems to drift by asking nothing from you, but you gradually find yourself, oddly, wanting from
it. And it yields graciously. In being quiet, unwanting, you want to be quiet with it. It’s
the New Quiet.
The album opens with “Coasting” in zones that distantly recall those charted by Loscil
(Submers and First Narrows), the aqueous becoming a subtle leitmotif (cf. the later “Pacific”).
The architecture becomes more digitally-enhanced, espousing sound 12k principles. Shuttle358,
Taylor Deupree, and Fourcolor would all seem to be Northern touchstones, sharing a similar
delight in deployment of small gesture processed loopstrata, fluting, floating, fibrillating –
at once a surface over which to skitter a glitch-scatter and a cushion for repose. No fear of
Northern exposure here at the warmer end of digital, gently meshing textures, lapping into
laptop. It’s a deceptively small sound that can get big on you, like on “Migrate”, which
dwells in semi-stasis just long enough to lull, then spills over with swells before slipping
out of sight. Drawn’s digital means of generation takes on an increasingly naturalistic
sounding aspect helped by its manipulated guitar-enriched intake. The guitar tradition
drawn on Drawn is the ostinato introspections and plucked intimacies of 1 mile North,
Labradford, and Dan Abrams. Ostensibly different from Infraction stable signature sound,
it somehow sits comfortably within it.
The first 150 copies come bountifully endowed with a bonus cd-r, Jessa (INFX 025), a collection
which signals the next phase in Northern development, though the seeds of Jessa’s future-indicative
are retievable from Drawn’s present-past. It evidences a deeper denser dronier zone-out music,
minimizing digital intervention and renouncing microsonic patter. The gestures here are towards a
half-light almost-orchestralism, moving from the likes of Marsen Jules and the secular sacral of
Eluvium, shoulder-to-shoulder with the submersible slowcore starriness of The Lid (whose time of
greatest influence and recognition has finally now come). Sidenote: Northern bid their myspace
visitors: “be quiet with us.” More resonances of SotL, and their “Be Little with Me”? Sshhh. It’s
Northern. It’s the New Quiet." (A. Lockett)
Comes housed in Stoughton style mini-lp gatefold sleeve. Down to 10 copies of the limited edition!
Info : www.infractionrecords.com/shop.html
www.myspace.com/northerncanada
Listen : www.infractionrecords.com/audio.html
On October 9, 2007 Robert Wyatt is to release his new album and first for Domino.
digi-pack CD re-issue with bonus CD
available 6/18/2007
Dream Glasses Off - listen to full song
“…delves into those bleak hours before the sun comes up, with raw emotion that's calculated to disturb. Stark, gorgeous songs weave a spell of deep-seated loneliness coupled with unceasing introspection; the album is a gut punch from the first hanging, ethereal note. “ – Salon.com
“Lullaby for Liquid Pig is deceptively potent; in just thirty minutes it divines your most closely held memories, guiding you farther farther back with endless, heartbreaking choruses…” Pitchforkmedia.com
“Lisa Germano pushes confessional intimacy to unsettling extremes …Unashamed candor often spells dreary self-indulgence. In Germano's insightful hands, it's fascinating and strangely exhilarating.” - Blender
Nobody makes records like Lisa Germano. This music seeps into your system with a warm glow like alcohol gently working its way into the bloodstream through the lining of an empty stomach. From the first moment you’re drifting weightless through Lisa’s gossamer world, where everything’s infused with a woozy, fairy tail melancholy, and maybe just a hint of the sour taste of last night’s wine. Liquid Pig is particularly beautifully and richly orchestrated, but also so intimate and saturated with a peculiar sadness (that can suddenly shift to joy or whimsy) you get the feeling you’re drifting through the dreams inside her head, led along by the soft breeze of her breathing. Lisa says that if you removed the breath from her voice there’d be nothing there. That particular quality is perhaps what draws you in. It really is the sound of a lover whispering a song or a secret in your ear. These songs are intimate, even “confessional,” but they’re certainly not limited to the personal. Seems to me, any human being with a sense of their own frailty ought to find a place for themselves in this beautiful and seductive music.
This album was first released in 2003 but the label that released it disappeared very soon thereafter, and it sadly went out of print. It’s my extreme pleasure to make it available now and I hope that this time it reaches the audience it deserves. - Michael Gira / Young God Records
LULLABY FOR LIQUID PIG: 1. Nobody’s Playing 2. Paper Doll 3. Liquid Pig 4. Pearls 5. Candy 6. Dream Glasses Off 7. From A Shell 8. It’s Party Time 9. All The Pretty Lies 10. Lullaby For Liquid Pig 11. Into The Night 12. …To Dream
BONUS CD – 20 songs (56 MINUTES): 1. It's A Rainbow (home recording) 2. (Live from Lisbon): Way Below The Radio / Guillotine / Moon Palace / Woodfloors / Pearls 3. My Imaginary Friend (home recording) 4. Flower Steps / From A Shell / Turning Into Betty (live from Largo Club) 5. Candy (home recording) 6. Liquid Pig (home recording) 7. In The Land Of The Fairies / In The Maybe World / Golden Cities (live from Lisbon) 8. Wire / Red Thread (live from Largo Club) 9. Dream Glasses Off (home recording) 10. It's Part Time (live from Lisbon) 11. Making Promises (home recording)
SOME REVIEWS / ARTICLES THAT APPEARED AT THE TIME OF LIQUID PIG’S FIRST RELEASE:
From Salon.com
Hard luck, red wine and loneliness
Lisa Germano made her hauntingly beautiful record alone, then turned down a tour so she could take care of her cat.
By Julene Snyder
April 1, 2003 | It's not surprising to learn that as a child, Lisa Germano delighted in self-inflicted pain. In some ways, she's never stopped picking her open wounds.
What's unexpected is that she doesn't mean it literally. "I used to lock myself in a closet and torture myself," she recalls. "Not cut myself or anything, but I'd have these childhood fantasies where everything was awful. I'd make myself cry, and then it would end when I was crying so hard that the prince would have to come and save me."
Now in her mid-40s, she's long since stopped waiting to be rescued. "I don't believe there's a prince coming anymore," she laughs. "I'm just sick of the whole thing." On the phone from her Los Angeles home, Germano sounds incongruously upbeat for a self-described "fairly dark person," but she blames her perkiness on morning coffee. Her demons tend to come out at night.
Boy, do they. Germano's latest effort, "Lullaby for a Liquid Pig," delves into those bleak hours before the sun comes up with raw emotion that's calculated to disturb. Stark, gorgeous songs weave a spell of deep-seated loneliness coupled with unceasing introspection; the album is a gut punch from the first hanging, ethereal note. "These are your secrets, hidden inside," she murmurs on the opening track, then lays them out, one by one, like canapés at a suicide's farewell party.
The tone is hardly unexpected, as Lisa Germano has never made music for the faint-hearted. For the last decade, the multi-instrumentalist (violin, piano, recorder, guitar, voice, etc.) has specialized in delving into the deepest crevices of her psyche, exposing nerves, tendons and viscera until she reaches the white gleam of bone. While critical acclaim has been lavish for album after album -- six since her self-released 1991 debut -- audiences have not flocked to buy Germano's records. This is a crying shame, as her intimate, near-whispered delivery and spare arrangements tower above your average chart-toppers' best efforts.
Germano's chosen subject matter doubtless has something to do with the elusiveness of financial success, especially in the context of a recording industry that celebrates superficiality. The bleak "Happiness" (1994) explored the depths and valleys of depression and relationships with breathtaking directness. ("You wish you were pretty, but you're not … ha ha ha/ But your baby loves you, he tells you so all the time/ Oh, that must be why you're so happy together.") Yikes.
Her subsequent full-length release on 4AD, the harrowing "Geek the Girl," is an even more devastating dose of raw sensation. (Liner notes describe the record as the tale of a girl who is "constantly taken advantage of sexually" yet who still dreams of "loving a man in hopes that he can save her from her shit life What a geek!") That album's pièce de résistance, the nervous-breakdown-inducing "A Psychopath," culminates with a recording of an actual 911 call made by a terrified woman as an intruder breaks into her home. It's deeply chilling and more than a little creepy.
True to form, 1996's "Excerpts from a Love Circus" was a muffled scream, as Germano wielded her sweet, often-tentative voice with a surgeon's precision. The matter-of-fact self-loathing of "I Love a Snot" reveals flashes of humor and self-knowledge: "Tubby tubby butt, tubby tubby face, tubby tubby stomach when I am with you Icky icky breath, each and every kiss you're a snot, and I adore you."
But honesty doesn't pay the bills. 1998's "Slide" turned out to be her last with indie label 4AD. In spite of reviews lauding the work and a burgeoning sense of hope woven through the record, it ended up selling a disappointing 6,000 copies. "They're still my friends, but I understood," Germano says about 4AD's decision to drop her. "They've got to pay the bills." - - - - - - - - - -
Still, the muse doesn't stop coming just because payday's been canceled. Germano's been tinkering with "Lullaby for a Liquid Pig" for the past three years -- in spite of having no record label and no money.
"I don't even want to make a lot of money. Just enough," she says. "I don't know how people make it. I've stripped away my life so I just live in a room." (Her income comes mostly from her day job at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, where she's worked on and off for five years.)
So in true DIY fashion, Germano recorded "Lullaby's" 12 songs at home -- a practice she's become accustomed to over the years -- and ultimately put them on the audio-editing software ProTools so that she could send tracks to various musicians to get their input from a distance, since a lack of finances prohibited working together in person.
With contributions by former Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, and Wendy Melvoin (Wendy and Lisa/Prince), "Lullaby for a Liquid Pig" is an excellent -- albeit deeply disturbing -- addition to the Germano catalog. It's slotted to be released in April on ArtistDirect's new Ineffable label.
At first listen, one would think that the album is unambiguously about the seductions of booze (specifically, red wine). And while it's true that many of the songs on "Lullaby for a Liquid Pig" have to do with alcohol, Germano says that in talking about the album, she's come to the conclusion that it's not really about drinking at all.
"I've had to figure out what it is about," she muses. "You strip away and strip away and strip away until you get to the real meaning. And even though some of the songs are about alcohol, it's mostly about loneliness, about being thirsty, being thirsty for more than you can get -- than you should get -- it's about being needy, about being a pig."
Germano believes that drinking every night masks a deeper void. "There's something about alcohol that's either 'I'm a big drunk alcoholic' or 'Let's go out and have some fun,'" she says. "But it's really about the behavior. A lot of us have this need, this behavior. We have our vices. Some people have sex with a million people, some do heroin, some drink, but it all comes from the same lonely place."
She laughs and tries to lighten the mood. "To mock your own behavior makes it less sad. Even the title [of the album] is mocking myself, that 'Everything is about me' thing, being so self-consumed. There's just too much me sometimes."
Of course, "too much me" is the very essence of Lisa Germano's work, and "Lullaby for a Liquid Pig" is no exception. The hazy, almost underwater vocals of the opening track, "Nobody's Playing," are accompanied by a hesitant melody picked out on piano keys. When she murmurs, "Circles and circles/ Places to drown/ All that you feel/ Is you're going down," there's a doomed inevitability, a noose that only grows tighter as the album progresses.
The discordant opening of "Liquid Pig" is a rumination on morning-after regret, Germano's accusatory whisper "Who did you call/ What did you say" a precursor to the certainty that whatever you said, whatever you did, you'll doubtless do it again -- and feel like shit the next day. The delicate prettiness of "Pearls" is laced with self-loathing ("Hurry world/ Whirl and whirl/ Stop when you fall down") and the siren call of home.
"That song is about alcohol," Germano says. "When you look inside, you see some really bad shit. But then, as you're getting drunk, you feel like you're home. But that's not right, getting drunk to do that. It strips it away and then puts it back in. When you hate yourself, all sorts of stuff grows, but in the end there's nothing to learn from alcohol."
There's a raw quality to Germano's voice on many of the songs here that she freely admits is owed to her vices: "I like some smoke and some wine when I sing," she says. "It makes me like the sound of my voice. It doesn't make it gravelly, doesn't make me turn into Marianne Faithfull. It just deepens it." She almost sounds giddy on the song "Party Time" when she drawls, "And I smell like wine, most of the time, a big red wine."
The album's title track flirts with the idea of going cold turkey before quickly backpedaling: "Well, if I do stop/ Or if I don't stop/ It doesn't matter/ I probably won't stop." A fluid segue into the next song, the almost dizzy introspection of "Into the Night," finds Germano making a laundry list of denial: "What not to see/ What not to hear/ What not to be/ When you begin seeing your sins."
A slender hint of hope snakes through the album's last track "To Dream," tempered with a heartbreaking fragility. Of course, after all that's come before, the listener clings to lines like "Don't give up your dream/ It's really all you have/ And I don't want to see you die," hoping that wishing might just be enough -- just this once -- to make it so. - - - - - - - - - -
Germano's labor of love is coming out on veteran record producer Tony Berg's newest venture, Ineffable Records (billed as a "creative collective" of artists). The release will almost certainly not change Germano's immediate financial situation; she had to plunk down nearly every penny she got as an advance to pay the vet bills for her ailing cat, 12-year-old Miamo-Tutti. "The cat got really sick really quickly," Germano says. "I had to feed him by hand and give him medicine a couple of times a day." The sick kitty meant that she had to postpone a planned tour with former Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, a decision she says Finn supported wholeheartedly.
"John Cougar probably would have had me arrested," she laughs, imagining telling the hard-rocking Mellencamp that she couldn't go on the road because she had to nurse an ailing kitty. Since nearly every article ever printed about Germano mentions her one-time affiliation with his band as a fiddle player, she kicks herself for bringing it up. "I've tried so hard not to have the press mention it!" she laughs.
Besides her dark past as a backup musician for heartland rocker Mellencamp, Germano has another incongruous skeleton in her closet. In high school, she was a cheerleader. "I didn't expect to make it and was shocked when I did," she recalls. "Even then I was not a positive person. I got yelled at every day for not smiling, so I quit." She laughs when she tells the story, but she sounds as if she's still unsure as to what went wrong. "I thought I was smiling," she says ruefully.
Sadly, Miamo-Tutti (who Germano describes as a "very Italian cat), ultimately didn't make it. ("I'm sure [he's] having a big party with all the other cats up there," she says in an update on her Web site.) Perhaps he'll make an appearance in a future Germano song; a likely scenario, given her penchant for turning episodes from her own life into art.
When asked what it's like to perform such personal material live, Germano is matter-of-fact. "These songs really work best when I have a sense of humor," she explains. "It lets the audience think, 'This is hard, but at least she's all right.'" While she doesn't get stage fright, she does say that wine can help her to focus better. "It's important that I really start breathing before I go on. My voice is all breath. Without the breathing, there's nothing there."
Release date: June 26th, 2007
"'In Pink' is the 3rd ( r ) album. I’ve worked on it for almost 2 years, both 'cause I’ve been very busy with Larsen and XXL as well as touring and working in the studio with other bands, and ‘cause it came through troubled and sometimes painful, but anyway intense times.
Whereas the previous 'Under The Cables, Into The Wind' was a very warm and relaxed album, and also my favourite so far, 'In Pink' is a pretty extreme one, swinging between joy and fear, introspective moody songs and explosions of - desperately optimistic - energy.
Still it is more a diary than an exorcism, filled with songs about death and transfiguration, including my version of an Irish traditional theme (which also Johnny Cash interpreted on one of his American albums) and Joy Division’s classic Atmposphere (which I list among the best songs ever written). It is also my most arranged and colourful album where my recent experiences as producer for other bands have converged, and the most "band" oriented among my solos.
While I was composing and recording it I was also playing lots of shows and often other musicians joined me on stage. I really wanted to have them on the album in order to get that sound in the studio too and also for personal and sentimental reasons, them being among my closest friends.
Paul Beauchamp (who is also my partner in the Blind Cave Salamander project as well as one of the members of the Steve McKay - of Stooges- band), Ango (of Mariae Nascenti), il Bue (of Larsen) and the amazing Baby Dee have contributed to the final result of this album along with Marco Milanesio that even this time has not only recorded and mixed the album, but also co-produced it with me.
The CD also sports some amazing pictures by photographer Giulia Caira that portray to perfection the moods of the music.
Pink was also the colour of Vivienne Westwood’s Sex Pistols t-shirts, so In Pink is a punk album and, despite everything - luckily!- it ends up with very positive notes, out of darkness and into the landscapes and the waters of the Blue Lagoon."
--Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo
It has been more than three years since the release of múm's last album "Summer Make Good", and a lot of water has passed under the bridge. And now, finally, a string of European festival appearances heralds their long-awaited new album, strangely entitled "Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, Let Your Crooked Hands Be Holy", due out September 25.
Merge Records is thrilled to announce the release of Andorra the new album from Caribou on August 21st, 2007. The album will be released in Europe on August 20th (City Slang).
Andorra is the 4th full length from Dan Snaith recording under his Caribou moniker (formerly Manitoba - but that's a whole 'nother story). Andorra has more of a full band feel than some of Caribou's earlier studio efforts. It's still just Dan in the studio creating his singular magic, but the extensive touring that Caribou did for their last album, The Milk of Human Kindness, definitely left its mark on the arrangements. The sound is more expansive and more blissfully psychedelic than ever.
Dan seems pleased with the results: "I'm super-happy with the way the album has turned out. I've put seemingly endless hours into it over the last year or so getting everything exactly as I wanted it and have never been this madly excited about my music. I can't wait for you all to hear it and hope you'll like it too."
We have no doubt that you will.
"The sound Snaith debuted with on Up in Flames and developed with The Milk of Human Kindness is easy to describe in terms of other bands, blending Mercury Rev, Neu!, Brian Wilson, and a few others in specific proportions. It's most certainly a formula, but then, so is E=MC2" --Pitchfork Media [9.0 rating]
"Sounds like the work of someone given one month to live" -- Urb
Andorra Tracklist:
1. Melody Day
2. Sandy
3. After Hours
4. She's the One *
5. Desiree
6. Eli
7. Sundialing
8. Irene
9. Niobe
"She's The One" features and was co-written by the Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan
Merge will be releasing a CDEP of "Melody Day", the first single from Andorra, on July 10th. More details to follow shortly.
Look for Caribou on tour in North America in October and November 2007. Complete tour dates and routing coming soon!
Stay tuned for more updates and details.
www.mergerecords.com
www.caribou.fm
www.myspace.com/cariboumanitoba
