MP3: Tune Yards – “Sunlight”
In and around 2007 Merrill Garbus creates tUnE-yArDs. She thought the exasperating capitalization will buy her some time.
Merrill came from parents who sewed their lives together with music, and at age seven she proceeded to hum her way through days. She hummed her way through the family record collection: Old Timey fiddling, Revolver, Django. She hummed her way through mid-’80’s pop radio and an obsession with Christmas music. She hummed her way through folk music camp, through Smith College and a theater degree, through anarchist puppet training, through brazen, all-women a cappella singing, through heat rash in Kenya, through deeply scrutinized puppet performances in Europe, through her lonely, swirling 20’s. The hum seems to have become a yell.
In 2008 she released BiRd-BrAiNs, which she had recorded over a span of 2.5 years on a hand-held voice recorder. Sampling snippets of her life as a nanny on Martha’s Vineyard and later as a young musician in noisy urban settings, she weaved sounds together to make substantial rhythms and then layered her ukulele and vocals over top. The album came out on recycled cassette tape to the chagrin of many, but was also offered by donation as an online digital download.
tUnE-yArDs toured with Thao with the Get Down Stay Down in the summer of ’08, and then with Disposable Thumbs on a self-booked cross-country tour for two long months in the fall of that year. One result was the upcoming proper release of BiRd-BrAiNs on vinyl through Marriage Records in Portland, Oregon.
TUNE-YARDS
03/18 – 03/21 Austin, TX SXSW
04/09 Olympia, WA TBA
04/10 Seattle, WA Healthy Times Fun Club
04/11 Portland, OR TBA
tUnE-yArDs
BiRd-BrAiNs
(Marriage)
Vinyl and digital only
Street date: March 10, 2009
1. for you
2. sunlight
3. lions
4. hatari
5. news
6. jamaican
7. jumping jack
8. little tiger
9. safety
10. fiya
digital-only bonus track:
11. synonynonym
TUNE-YARDS LINKS:
MySpace – www.myspace.com/tuneyards
Label Page – www.marriagerecs.com