oh i am liking this one, Dan -  really like that acoustic guitar riff.  marries beautifully with your voice

@finnbhandari: Thank you! I think it's my favourite thing I've ever done. *subject to change of opinion*

@welovethatsound: Just seen - many thanks!

Train Song—Feist and Ben Gibbard

Kevin Morby
"My Name" 7"/DIG
Out Now: https://store.suicidesqueeze.net/
Release Date: August 5, 2014
Label: Suicide Squeeze Records
https://store.suicidesqueeze.net/
Label Instagram: @suicidesqueeze

ORDER

We Did It All Wrong by Kevin Morby

500 Miles (Cover)

Júníus Meyvant // Signals



Astronauts
End Codes album
Lo Recordings
6th May 2016

Dan Carney is a songwriter based in east London who releases music under the name Astronauts. He also enjoys spending time with his daughter and his partner, going for long walks, reading, writing, looking out of the nearest window, and making overly ambitious travel plans.

After the single ‘Skydive’ went viral in June 2014, the debut Astronauts album ‘Hollow Ponds’ was met with critical acclaim. This led to live performances far and wide, with Dan visiting Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, and Switzerland in 2015 alone, as well as – equally thrillingly - having a song used on the BBC’s darts coverage in his native country.

Radio support also came from all over, with Radio 2 (Huey Morgan) and 6 Music (Lauren Laverne, Cerys Matthews, Radcliffe & Maconie, Steve Lamacq, Tom Ravenscroft, Gideon Coe) in the UK, to US stations such as KCRU in Los Angeles, all queuing up to broadcast Dan’s efforts to the public.

In between all of this, Dan has found the time to write and record his second full-length, ‘End Codes’. It channels the melancholic intensity and rich arrangements first encountered on ‘Hollow Ponds’ into eleven beautiful new songs, while also managing to sound more coherent and focused than its predecessor.

Lyrically, it’s Dan’s trademark intriguing blend of resignation and defiance, all delivered with a world-weary estuary twang which combines the colloquial fragility of Robert Wyatt with the eerie double-tracked smoothness of Elliott Smith. Cuts such as opener ‘Recondition’, ‘Split Screen’, and ‘Breakout’ are propelled along by a familiar sprawling, motorik intensity, simultaneously fraught and uplifting, and just repetitive enough to lodge themselves firmly in your consciousness without becoming labored or tedious.

Elsewhere, however, there’s variation and versatility in abundance. The woozy, pastoral otherness of ‘When It’s Gone’ – inspired by the cautionary paean to faded youth which adorns the grave of the Black Prince at Canterbury Cathedral - cements Dan’s status as the nearest thing Essex has got to Jonathan Wilson, while ‘Dead Snare’ mines an ominous trench of paranoia and dreamlike malevolence, dark acoustic guitar lines intertwining with creaking cello and a nagging lyric which sets out a bleak, recriminatory inner monologue.

There’s also the steady, cyclical lead single ‘Civil Engineer’, possibly the finest folk-pop song yet written about the vagaries of a career in civic planning, and the triumphant Laurel Canyon-via-Romford CSNY-style harmonies of ‘You Can Turn It Off’. Closer ‘Skeleton’, with its defiant drone-gospel coda, triumphant and boisterous over a yawning chasm of electronic sadness, channels the likes of Fugazi, Tortoise, and The War On Drugs, proving that Dan’s horizons extend significantly further than many of his supposed “indie folk” contemporaries.

Dan hopes that ‘End Codes’ will appeal to his existing small-but-probably-dedicated fan-base, while also attracting new listeners, as it’s the best thing he’s ever done. We like ‘End Codes’ very much, and we hope you do too. Dan is, as ever, available for interviews, lovingly curated playlists, and questionable sports science product endorsements.

ARTIST LINKS
www.lorecordings.com/artist/astronauts/
www.facebook.com/pages/Astronauts…71?ref=bookmarks
twitter.com/AstronautHeart

LABEL LINKS
www.lorecordings.com
www.facebook.com/pages/Lo-Recordi…/448401545307474
twitter.com/lorecordings

CONTACT
Press – John Power – john@thebestinshow.net
Radio – Sean Newsham - sean@mutante-inc.demon.co.uk
Label/licensing - Gavin O’Shea - gavin@hub100.com


End Codes

Buy on Bandcamp

Recondition

From the album Modern Country, out June 3, 2016 on Merge Records.

Modern Country

William Tyler "Kingdom of Jones"

Andrew Bird - Tenuousness live In The Basement

First single taken from forthcoming album, "Other Worlds" out on Secretly Canadian on October 2, 2012.
Produced by Henning Furst.

Taken By Trees - "Dreams"

Jesca Hoop unveils her brand-new single “Red White and Black” taken from her forthcoming album STONECHILD. Order STONECHILD here : http://smarturl.it/stonechild

Having previously shared the Lucius featuring track “Shoulder Charge”, Red White and Black is perhaps the most overtly political track on the album, as Hoop explains: 
 
“Red White and Black is a poem, like a snapshot, set in post civil war USA when slavery was "abolished" and swiftly rebranded by the prison system.  It’s a personal acknowledgement and willingness to join the conversation for change.”

She continues “I write from personal perspective, about relationships mostly and I don’t find much music in politics, but as hate crimes increase, women’s rights are being rolled back, and the two nations I call home are building walls… well, the political has become deeply personal.”

Produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Aldous Harding, This Is The Kit), STONECHILD was recorded in Hoop’s long time home Manchester – a first, given previously she’s ventured back to her native California to record.  Parish’s minimal and purist approach helped clarify Hoop in her ideas subtly yet effectively realigning her sound. The simplified arrangements draw focus to the fundamental sophistication of the songs.

The album title was settled after a trip to a Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, where the Stonechild is a sad, compelling display of an unborn foetus carried by a woman for over 30 years. “They become a hard ball of bones, a rock. Phonetically, it's a beautiful sounding word - hard and soft – but also, I am taken by the idea of carrying something for a long time, perhaps in secret and then giving it up. I hope I have made an album of substance. There is meat on the bone” 

While Hoop’s trademark finger-plucked guitar and ethereal textures remain, the songs and their presentation are ever more direct. “He – Parrish - was a gentle collaborator until he killed one of my darlings” Hoop jests. “I’ve never been so brutally edited, and I wasn’t shy about expressing my discomfort at the sight of my work on the cutting room floor. He said, you will forgive me, and in some way I think I actually enjoyed that treatment…being stripped back to the bare basics…albeit painfully.  ‘Stonechild’ ventures further into fresh territory with other voices joining the narrative, with Kate Stables (aka This is the Kit) Rozi Plain and Lucius singing the choruses and expanding the sensual depth of the sonic bloom.

These rich and curious songs derived from themes of our troubled times speak Hoop’s heart and mind from her empathetic yet tough loving centre point. With writing so fluid, so natural the result is an album where everything is truly meant.  

Jesca is touring throughout 2019 as follows:

06 Jul - Swadlincote, Timber Festival 
14 Jul – San Francisco, Shinefest @ Bottom of the Hill 
17 Jul – Los Angeles, Bootleg Theatre
22 Jul – Brooklyn, Rough Trade 
15-18 Aug – Brecon Beacons, Green Man Festival
01 Oct – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
02 Oct – Bristol, Fiddlers
03 Oct – Manchester, HOME
04 Oct – London, Barbican
05 Oct – Cambridge, Storey's Field Centre
07 Oct – Gateshead, Sage
08 Oct – Liverpool, Leaf
09 Oct – Dublin, Soundhouse
11 Oct – Glasgow, Oran Mor
12 Oct – Edinburgh, Pleasance Theatre
13 Oct – Birmingham, Hare & Hounds
15 Oct – Paris, Petit Bain
16 Oct – Brussels, Botanique Rotonde
17 Oct – Luxembourg, Brandbau
19 Oct – Hamburg, Hakken
20 Oct – Copenhagen, Vega
22 Oct – Berlin, Privatclub
24 Oct – Prague, Café V Lese
25 Oct – Vienna, Haus Der Musik
26 Oct – Zurich, El Lokal
29 Oct – Utrecht, TivoliVredenburg, Cloud Nine
31 Oct – Oxford, The Bullingdon

Stonechild

Jesca Hoop - Red White And Black

Beyond The Valley Of The Three White Horses

Warp 7 Weft

Laura Veirs - Sun Song

END CODES (2016)... https://astronautss.bandcamp.com/album/end-codes-lo146

HOLLOW PONDS (2014)... https://astronautss.bandcamp.com/album/hollow-ponds-lo112

Join the Astronauts mailing list here... https://www.facebook.com/pages/Astronauts/141403006034771?sk=app_100265896690345

Recondition

Astronauts.

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