Willoughby’s debut album I Know What You’re Up To is the product of LA’s Gus Seyffert. All songs on the album were performed and produced by Seyffert, with a few friends stopping by to help along the way. The result is a delicate masterpiece that was a lifelong dream fulfilled for Seyffert, “I had wanted to
make my own record for a number of years but was always working on other projects. Recording the whole thing to tape was really important to me - I really wanted to capture the organic, analog sound of all the great records I love - by people like Harry Nilsson, Sparklehorse, The Zombies and Chet Baker.”

Willoughby will be hitting the road over the next few months with pals Priscilla Ahn and The Bird and The Bee. Priscilla Ahn and Willoughby have a mutual admiration, both having played on each other’s albums, and Seyffert is a member of both Ahn and The Bird and The Bee’s touring bands.

“LA’s Willoughby is winning high praise for their debut album, I Know What You’re Up To. Led by bassist Gus Seyffert, Willoughby offers up a blend of neo-folk, vagabond-pop with echoes of the Beatles and whispers of Wilco.” - Yahoo! Music

WILLOUGHBY

Sat Jul 19 Los Angeles, CA Hotel Cafe
Sun Jul 27 Ann Arbor, MI The Ark *
Wed Jul 30 Boston, MA Cafe 939 at Berklee *
Fri Aug 1 Hoboken, NJ Maxwell’s *
Sun Aug 3 Vienna, VA Jammin Java *
Tues Aug 5 Annapolis, MD Ram’s Head *
Sun Sept 28 Boston, MA Great Scott #
Mon Sept 29 Northampton, MA Iron Horse #
Tues Sept 30 New York, NY Spiegeltent #
Wed Oct 01 Philadelphia, PA World Cafe Live #
Fri Oct 03 Vienna, VA Jammin’ Java #
Sat Oct 04 Annapolis, MD Rams Head #

* = w/ Priscilla Ahn
# = w/ The Bird and The Bee

Willoughby - I Know What You’re Up To (Sargent)
Street Date: Sept. 9, 2008

01 Intentions
02 Story
03 Frankenstein
04 Wonder
05 Dust Bunnies
06 I’m Losing You
07 Wish I Was Yours
08 Long Time
09 Uzzell
10 I Know What You’re Up To
11 Sign
12 You Don’t Love
13 OK

WILLOUGHBY LINKS:

Myspace: www.myspace.com/willoughby

Artist Site: www.willoughbyrecordings.com

Press Materials: www.blaim.co.uk/willoughby_press

MP3: “Bobby Trendy Addendum”

Seven years later, the beast stirs. In the gap that followed Restiform Bodies’
genre-crushing self-titled LP (and companion piece, SunHopFlat), much did happen,
and several records of those times were made. Bomarr holed up in Oakland,
mastering his hypno-bounce sound (Freedom From Frightened Air, 2007).
Telephone Jim Jesus roamed Europe, collecting etherea previously unexcavated
(Anywhere Out Of The Everything, 2007). Passage went solo (The Forcefield Kids,
2004), and then to hell and back. In 2008, the three-headed post-mod monster called
Restiform Bodies is whole once again. And, at long last, the RBs drop their official
Anticon debut like a sack of analog televisions onto the fractured landscape of
modern urban forms.

TV Loves You Back is a dark and dense, art-twisted, New Wave-inflected hip-pop
marvel born of our overstimulated era. Musically, it stands alone, which is to say it
fits perfectly within the Anticon oeuvre. Strains of ghettotech, crunk, and hyphy
twirp and twirl with Eno-like atmospherics and buoyant bass swells, while
rapper/songbird Passage warps his vocals over blistering synth. Likewise, the lyrics
gallop at a ferocious clip. Like electron shots from a cathode ray tube, they combine
to form a deliciously sardonic image of modern living, and break down into
constituents that are metaphysically hopeful, socially relevant, poetic, and playful.

Fittingly, opener “Black Friday” begins with 30 seconds of ominous Top 40 rap
bluster (crowd cheers and wonky, reverbed “uhhs”), forcing the Restiform tongue
through its cheek before launching into a track that traverses burbling synth bounce,
doubletime drum ‘n’ bass, and free-floating atmosphere. Passage forges the vocals to
match-laidback rap, unlikely falsettos, rapid-fire couplets, a chorus of bent
melodies-while tempering his words into a poignant evocation of the mind of a
mall shooter hitting his prime.

Our narrator too is in top form, next styling over the wamping, squirilly club beat
of “Foul,” then navigating the chopped white noise and guitar of “A Pimp-like God.”
And when “Panic Shopper” creeps in like a vintage horrorcore tune, painting a
QVC-inspired nightmare in stream-of-consciousness strokes (”Look at you
vibrating, bent-necked, bowed-head/PS3 building-jumping panic shopper/Launch off
the parking garage/In a Tony Robbins murder-suicide with infomercial knives…”),
it’s clear that Restiform Bodies have made something as enjoyable as it is topically
thick.

“Consumer Culture Wave” details a crux theme: the supplantation of sexual urge
with purchasing power. And on “Bobby Trendy Addendum,” Passage adopts a
Brooklyn sneer to bang out bitter satire atop a lo-bit mélange. He connects impulse buying to nightly news fear-mongering here, then traces our need to be placated by
prizes to a childhood pastime in “Pick It Up, Drop It.” “Interactive Halloween Bear”
is classic Restiform-surging synths, crystalline overtones, bassy blips, snapping
drums-overrun by a rich imagery that seems to portend societal collapse onto the
living-room couch.

But before all descends into chaos, TV Loves You Back hits back with the sixminute-
long climax, “Opulent Soul.” Passage burns through a Gary Numan-esque
laissez faire croon, cocksure rhymes, and a distorted Knife-like nastiness while the
music intensifies like a thunderstorm of seething digitalia. He crescendos with a 32-
bar rap rife with quips (”When Ty says ‘move that bus’/It just cleans my ducts”) and
affecting observation (”Round and round goes the collection plate/And ain’t defeat a
wicked virus, how it lives to repeat?”), and by song’s end, our hero reclaims his
humanity from the bottom of circuit pile.

TV Loves You Back comes to a quiet close with “Ameriscan,” a bittersweet
lullaby about cancer recognition technology. It’s an ending that only Restiform
Bodies could pull off, but it’s also perfectly apropos for an album so focused on the
comforts that bring chaos into our daily lives.

Restiform Bodies - TV Loves You Back (Anticon)
Street Date: Sept. 30, 2008

01 Black Friday
02 Foul
03 A Pimp-like God
04 Panic Shopper
05 Consumer Culture Wave
06 Bobby Trendy Addendum
07 Pick it up, Drop it
08 Interactive Halloween Bear
09 Opulent Soul
10 Ameriscan

RESTIFORM BODIES LINKS:

Myspace: www.myspace.com/restiform

Press Materials: www.anticon.com/pr/restiform.htm

MP3: Parenthetical Girls - “A Song For Ellie Greenwich”

When we last updated you on Parenthetical Girls, they had just signed to Tomlab, were about to tour with Au and Los Campesinos! and we shared a non-album track with you, an excellent OMD cover that has become a staple at their live shows.

“A Song for Ellie Greenwich” is the first track we’ve been able to share with you from their stunning and lushly orchestrated new full-length album, Entanglements. The album will be released on September 9, 2008 on CD, LP, and digital formats via Tomlab. Ahead of the album, the group will release a 7″ on Aagoo Records as a part of David Horvitz’s picture disc series.

Official Bio:

“His legs gave way like pages from a pop-up book…”

Long-time traffickers in the business of viscerally disarming disquiet, Portland, OR’s Parenthetical Girls trade in small-screen, corporal sincerity for a bold and blustering Technicolor - a lush, longing and lusty celluloid schmaltz they call Entanglements.

An orchestral song cycle of grand sonic ambition, Entanglements is an eleven-song, linear narrative of ascendancy, adolescent sexuality, quantum mechanics, consent, and other moral ambiguities - all set to an elaborately orchestrated olio of Modern Classical and timeworn, traditional American pop forms.

Borrowing from the string-swept sentimentality of unlikely pop-ulists like Van Dyke Parks, Scott Walker, Jack Nitzsche, and Burt Bacharach, Entanglements draws colorful lines across the expanse between these orchestral pop antiquities and the more formidable strains of Modern Classical composers - its hues distantly reminiscent of names like Krzysztof Penderecki, Philip Glass, and Gavin Bryars. The result - as blended with Parenthetical Girls’ already messily dripping palette - is an unsettlingly relentless emotional offensive; a gasping, restless confluence of cerebral and sentimental disparities, bound for their mutual allegiance to the uncannily timeless soundtrack that engulfs them both.

Drafted in fits and starts over the course of the last three years, the seeds for Entanglements were initially conceived by Parenthetical Girls founder Zac Pennington as a conceptual/orchestral follow-up to (((GRRRLS))), the band’s self-released (and largely ignored) debut. When the task eventually proved too daunting for Pennington - a relative non-musician - alone, the project was abandoned in favor of a more sonically direct approach; a tact that would eventually birth the band’s critically acclaimed sophomore record, 2006’s Safe As Houses.

Following years of fluctuating ranks (past line-ups included members of The Dead Science and Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, among many others), Pennington at last drafted what was to become a permanent Parenthetical Girls line-up-core multi-instrumentalists Matt Carlson, Eddy Crichton, and Rachael Jensen, along with constant studio collaborator Jherek Bischoff (The Dead Science, Ribbons) - who would prove to be the final components necessary to realize the long-abandoned Entanglements project. Aided immeasurably by Carlson’s classically trained hand, the group set about eschewing Indie Rock’s propensity for orchestral dabbling by forgoing the “Rock” almost completely. (Incidentally: there is exactly one note of guitar in all of the record’s blisteringly brief thirty-two minutes). As a result, Entanglements is foremost a modern Orchestral Pop record - its motifs dissected and appropriated from a century’s worth of sources, and reconfigured anew into something altogether different.

Recorded between Seattle, WA and Portland, OR over the course of two strenuous months, the Entanglements sessions gathered upwards of twenty-five classically trained/experimental musicians to realize the songs’ dense and dramatic arrangements, as laid to paper by both Carlson and long-time (((GRRRLS))) producer/engineer Bischoff (with additional assistance from Dead Science frontman Sam Mickens). The lavish orchestral sprawl is matched only in the album’s ornately disconcerting narrative, all crooned and cooed in Pennington’s liltingly familiar falsetto. The result is uncannily ageless, sensually unsettling, and above all else, extraordinarily ambitious.

This is the spooky action at a distance. And these are Entanglements.

PARENTHETICAL GIRLS LINKS:

MySpace: myspace.com/parentheticalgirlsband

Press Materials: tomlabel.com/parentheticalgirls

Band site: www.slendermeanssociety.com/parenthetical

Label Page: tomlab.com

MP3: “Veins To The Sky”

On Sept. 16th ATP Recordings will release the third album from Alexander Tucker, Portal. The album is available on CD and LP, featuring artwork from Tucker. He will also perform on Sept. 20 at All Tomorrow’s Parties in Monticello, NY as part of the ATP / My Bloody Valentine curated event. He will play a few other select dates in the US, more info. on that coming soon.

Bio:

Texts of this nature usually require the author to make fashionable or wilfully oblique references to artists past and present. Portal, the third Alexander Tucker long player for ATP Recordings is a work of such bewitching splendour that any such comparisons would read like hyperbole, thus doing it a great disservice. Even Tucker’s Previous albums (Old Fog and Furrowed Brow) seem like stepping stones in the wake of Portal. But if we must draw comparisons then lets say Chicago musician/composer Jim O’ Rourke — both are unparalleled in their pairing of the 20th Century avant-garde techniques of composers like Stockhausen and Steve Reich with the archaic sounding free-folk of John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Loren Connors.

The late Karlheinz Stockhausen envisaged music where “instead of very precisely formed single notes there are little complexes little crystalline blooms that pass through a register form”. During Portal, Tucker’s finger-picked guitar lines become indistinguishable from the more traditional string arrangements and voice. These melodic clusters interweave like the paths incurved by a figure skater. This is still to say nothing of Tucker’s voice, which sounds as if it is emanating from a ghost channel on an ancient mixing desk rather than appear sung on top of the epochal arrangements. It’s a voice comparable perhaps to Meddle era David Gilmour or John Martyn on Solid Air. These are big claims of course but then Portal is a work of such extraordinary majesty that even trying to surmise it in words seems like a heresy. If you disagree after listening, then I’m sorry to inform you that you are spiritually dead.

- Tony F Wilson.

ALEXANDER TUCKER

Sept. 20 - Monticello, NY All Tomorrow’s Parties

Alexander Tucker - Portal (ATP)
Street Date: Sept. 16, 2008
1. Poltergeists Grazing
2. Veins To The Sky
3. Omnibaron
4. Husks
5. Bell Jars
6. Energy For Dead Plants
7. Another World
8. Here

ALEXANDER TUCKER LINKS:

Myspace: www.myspace.com/alexandertucker

Press Materials: www.atpfestival.com/atp-recordings/alexander-tucker