North America, the debut solo album by Will Graefe (Okkervil River, Landlady, Larkin Grimm, Petra Haden) hits the world via Pretty Purgatory on June 23rd. Pre-order it at bit.ly/willgraefe. 
--
North America is a collection of songs written on the road. Solitary and pastoral, it reconciles the brash melodicism of Aaron Copland and Sonny Sharrock with the ornate storytelling of Joni Mitchell and Cass McCombs. These are songs of deceit, folly, addiction, wanderlust, and persistent yearning, but there is a defiant optimism in their melodies.
 
Recorded between February and August of 2016 at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, North America features NYC luminaries such as Joan Wasser (Joan as Policewoman), Shahzad Ismaily (Sam Amidon, Bonnie Prince Billy, Tom Waits), Benjamin Lazar Davis (Cuddle Magic, Okkervil River), Alec Spiegelman (Woods, White Hinterland), and frequent collaborator Jeremy Gustin (Star Rover, Marc Ribot, Albert Hammond Jr.). Sam Evian (Celestial Shore) engineered and mixed, capturing the songs in dark, earthy tones.
 
Will Graefe has spent the last decade touring relentlessly as a guitarist for Okkervil River, Larkin Grimm, Petra Haden, Landlady, and many others. This is his first official solo album and the first record to feature his voice. North America is out June 23rd on Pretty Purgatory.

Will Graefe - Boys

Album release April 2018

Alone in the world, we find ourselves. Inside ourselves, we find something to share with the world. 
The Essential John Moods, a solo album in all senses of the word, is what Jonathan Jarzyna of Fenster found in himself during a summer spent hiking along the Iberian coast, and he now wants to share it with you. A mini-guitar on his back and a copy of GarageBand on his phone allowed Jarzyna to record songs each evening as he arrived in a new town after a long day traveling by foot. (He did, admittedly, add live drum tracks and some additional instrumentation back in Berlin.) The album preserves this peripatetic feeling, each song relating to the next as one city or village relates to its neighbor, its unique situation contrasting with the shared architectural vernacular. Blipping instrumental interludes (“Trainride,” “Pontevedra,” “Coastal Way”) even capture the disordered, delirious feeling of transit hubs and the sleep-bleared mystery of waking on an unfamiliar road.
“I just came alive completely” are the first words Jarzyna murmurs on “New Spring,” invoking the spirit of the album. He speaks not of the liveliness of manic activity, but the heightened, tender sensitivity of presence. It’s a fullness of living captured by the transition from the lush, jangling groove of “The Weight” to the spacious contemplation of “Pawns.” The dreamy echo of the 60s’ and 70s’ soft rock and folk troubadours suffuses the album, and the organ-soaked “Where In The World” even has a psychedelic tinge. But the overall effect is quite contemporary, from the back-of-the-nightbus lounge funk of “Take It Home” (featuring an amazing turn from arch-crooner Sean Nicholas Savage) to the mournful cupboard jazz of “Almost Gone.” “Dark Wall”  sounds like a honkytonk ramble alongside a robot tentatively learning to play lap steel. “Leap of Love,” an early album highlight, passes over the listener in shimmering waves, a love song which remains a mystery even to its creator. 
In the meditation tape coda “Relax Your Foot,” Jarzyna selects the perfect sample to encapsulate The Essential John Moods’ hopeful receptivity: the late Professor Carl Sagan reminding us that “despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.”

The Essential John Moods

Buy Tape on Bandcamp

John Moods - Leap Of Love

The Due Diligence - Life Is Hard

"Somebody’s Son is halfway between a plea and a declaration. It picks up where a story that everyone knows leaves off. The rosy romanticism of being young fades and disappointment wanders in. But what happens then? What is it like after you settle into the already-writtenness of continuing a life? You suspend yourself in a piece of something and then you let it float away. You’re somewhere, it’s no particular time and you’ve been here all along.”

Somebody's Son

Comfort is a gradual thing. you wake up unable to go on and then go on.  it smells different on the street where you’re usually walking. god doesn’t respond when you ask for help. all the mail on the counter makes it hard to clean with a sponge. the face of a person you don’t know is astonishing. there are flowers in the city but somebody put them there. you like to set three alarms.

Onlyness

Comfortable

From the album Moon 2 available September 7, 2018 on Western Vinyl.

Pre-Order Moon 2
Bandcamp: https://avaluna.bandcamp.com/album/moon-2
iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/moon-2/1394808147?ls=1&app=itunes
WV: http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv176

On Moon 2 Ava Luna’s de facto band leader Carlos Hernandez steps back, leaving space for the rest of the band members to step up and step into roles they hadn’t occupied on previous albums. Felicia Douglass (now a touring member of Dirty Projectors) worked with percussion and sampler, Julian Fader experimented with synths, nearly every band member ran the computer during recording sessions, and Becca Kauffman (aka performance artist Jennifer Vanilla) composed her first song for the group “On Its Side the Fallen Fire,” a deeply layered orchestral piece of Kate Bush grandeur meets Julia Holter reverie. 
 
Compared with previous Ava Luna albums, Moon 2 has fewer sharp turns into dissonance, fewer celebratory guitar parts, none of Hernandez’s signature screams. Nevertheless, the infectious buoyancy of “Deli Run” and “Walking With an Enemy,” are warm and bright, and songs like “Centerline” and “Set it Off” venture confidently into pop territory. The title track, painting the elation and tumult of a crush, is set against a swaggering reggae bassline and warbling Kraftwerk synths. “Every sci-fi movie has a nightclub. These are the songs in that nightclub," says Kauffman.

AVA LUNA
Band site http://www.avalunagroup.com
Instagram http://instagram.com/avalunagroup
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/avalunagroup/
Twitter https://twitter.com/avalunagroup

Sundown

Wilder Maker

Related tracks