miguel_myriad
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- Nov 23, 2007
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Hotly tipped Washington DC act who have signed to Memphis Industries (home to The Go! Team, Tokyo Police Club). Le Loup creates music heavily laden with intricate patterns and swells, edging towards dramatic, sweeping movements. Support from other Memphis Ind. act School of Language.
POD Concerts presents
LE LOUP
Support: School of Language (solo show)
Thursday February 21st
Crawdaddy – Harcourt St – Dublin 2.
Doors – 8pm
Tickets €15 (inc. booking fee) available from Ticketmaster, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets. www.ticketmaster.ie
www.leloupmusic.net www.myspace.com/leloupmusic
LE LOUP
During certain periods in life, creativity goes beyond serving as an outlet for dealing with stress, beyond being a welcome distraction, and becomes a compulsion. It is at this moment, when creation starts to bridge the gap between superfluity and intrinsic necessity, that some of the best art is realized. For Sam Simkoff, the creative force behind Le Loup, a similar cathartic tumult resulted in The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium Assembly.
Created during a time of personal crisis, The Throne is a cataclysm, an escape, and a journey. Inspired largely by Dante's Inferno (also a journey conceived by a man in a time of crisis), here an emotional catacomb is traversed circle by circle. From Dante come apocalyptic scenes, rendered from personal feelings of hopelessness and impending disaster. Descent and escape are the central themes of "canto i" and "canto xxxvi", which take their titles from the first and last chapters of the Inferno, respectively.
Simkoff encountered the works of both Dante and another artist, James Hampton, during the initial writing of the record. The Throne takes its title from a piece of folk art that was meticulously built over the course of nearly fifteen years by Hampton, starting in the '50s. An engulfing homage to another heavenly realm, Hampton was a harried, outsider artist who kept his work a secret in a shed adjacent to his home. Consisting of 177 individual pieces that were painstakingly assembled from everyday objects, Hampton's throne became a delicate shrine to the transcendent.
More than a thematic influence, Hampton's work served as a model for pouring personal turbulence into work in a frenzied manner. Le Loup also takes the subtitle of album centerpiece "le loup (fear not)" from the crown jewel of Hampton's throne, a placard at the top of his work wrought of tin foil, urging the viewer to "Fear Not". This hopefulness, in the face of uncertainty and despair, shines through on the epic album closer "i had a dream i died."
The complex themes of The Throne are characterized by mounting tension and dramatic swells, coupled with an engaging emotional resonance that lifts just as much as it illuminates. Simple melodies plucked on a banjo are buoyed by keyboard lines, improvised percussion, and sometimes as many as a dozen overlapping and intertwining vocal tracks, creating a complex and lush soundscape which shrouds itself only long enough to surge into hugeness. Conceptually abstruse while remaining fundamentally personal, The Throne is a collection of rushing narratives that connect the individual struggle of each of us to the death of the universe in a manner that is both intimate and unshakably vital.
SCHOOL OF LANGUAGE
Album: Sea From Shore released 4th February 2008 on Memphis Industries
In April 2007, Sunderland trio Field Music (David Brewis, Peter Brewis and Andrew Moore) announced in a round-a-bout way that they were clearing their diary of all band activity in the hope that a change of situation and expectation might help them to become as productive as they'd always hoped they would be. They tried to make it known that they had no intention of splitting up in the acknowledged sense, but would instead use Field Music (as a group of people, a company, a way of working) as a tool to help the three core members, individually and collectively, to get creative and produce more and better music, expanding on the ideas hinted at in their two and half critically-acclaimed albums; 2007's Tones of Town, Write Your Own History, a collection of b-sides and early feet-finding released in 2006, and 2005's eponymous debut.
Since Field Music's final tour of the US in March 07, David Brewis has been busily piecing together this first School of Language record, which can perhaps be seen as the first test of the above proposition. Primarily recorded by David alone and consciously susceptible to the cut-and-paste, multi-tasking tangents induced by laptop recording, these constructions are resolutely un-band-like, veering between the intricate and unplayable and the solitary and unadorned, their cohesion stemming from an embrace of all that is most obtuse and personal.
Sea From Shore is bookended by the quartet of 'Rockist' tracks, a series of daydreams on words, their meanings and the decisions which follow from them, all underpinned by a collection of incessant looped voices. The album can, in some ways, be seen as a companion piece to Tones of Town but where that record was preoccupied with the choices resulting from questions of time and place, here time is tied to people - often because of their absence, but at other times because their closeness is what rejuvenates us.
Adding a collaborative presence, the album features one or two cameo appearances from David's hometown friends. Barry Hyde of the Futureheads plays guitar and sings on Disappointment '99, while the same band's David Craig, sings on Disappointment ’99 and Extended Holiday, along with former star of Kenickie and Rosita, Marie Nixon and their friend Sarah McKeown. School of Language's live appearances, however, have thus far been completely solo - a one man and his guitar performance about as far removed from the current crop of anodyne singer-songwriters as it's possible to be. These sporadic live shows have been witness to solo re-readings of the occasional Field Music song, and of long-lost songs from David's previous recording foray as the New Tellers.
A School of Language performance will feature as part of Field Music’s Christmas doubleheader at the Cluny in Newcastle on 17th and 18th December.
The album, to be released by Memphis Industries in the UK and Thrill Jockey in the USA, will be preceded by a Rockist Single on 28th January.
POD Concerts presents
LE LOUP
Support: School of Language (solo show)
Thursday February 21st
Crawdaddy – Harcourt St – Dublin 2.
Doors – 8pm
Tickets €15 (inc. booking fee) available from Ticketmaster, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets. www.ticketmaster.ie
www.leloupmusic.net www.myspace.com/leloupmusic
LE LOUP
During certain periods in life, creativity goes beyond serving as an outlet for dealing with stress, beyond being a welcome distraction, and becomes a compulsion. It is at this moment, when creation starts to bridge the gap between superfluity and intrinsic necessity, that some of the best art is realized. For Sam Simkoff, the creative force behind Le Loup, a similar cathartic tumult resulted in The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium Assembly.
Created during a time of personal crisis, The Throne is a cataclysm, an escape, and a journey. Inspired largely by Dante's Inferno (also a journey conceived by a man in a time of crisis), here an emotional catacomb is traversed circle by circle. From Dante come apocalyptic scenes, rendered from personal feelings of hopelessness and impending disaster. Descent and escape are the central themes of "canto i" and "canto xxxvi", which take their titles from the first and last chapters of the Inferno, respectively.
Simkoff encountered the works of both Dante and another artist, James Hampton, during the initial writing of the record. The Throne takes its title from a piece of folk art that was meticulously built over the course of nearly fifteen years by Hampton, starting in the '50s. An engulfing homage to another heavenly realm, Hampton was a harried, outsider artist who kept his work a secret in a shed adjacent to his home. Consisting of 177 individual pieces that were painstakingly assembled from everyday objects, Hampton's throne became a delicate shrine to the transcendent.
More than a thematic influence, Hampton's work served as a model for pouring personal turbulence into work in a frenzied manner. Le Loup also takes the subtitle of album centerpiece "le loup (fear not)" from the crown jewel of Hampton's throne, a placard at the top of his work wrought of tin foil, urging the viewer to "Fear Not". This hopefulness, in the face of uncertainty and despair, shines through on the epic album closer "i had a dream i died."
The complex themes of The Throne are characterized by mounting tension and dramatic swells, coupled with an engaging emotional resonance that lifts just as much as it illuminates. Simple melodies plucked on a banjo are buoyed by keyboard lines, improvised percussion, and sometimes as many as a dozen overlapping and intertwining vocal tracks, creating a complex and lush soundscape which shrouds itself only long enough to surge into hugeness. Conceptually abstruse while remaining fundamentally personal, The Throne is a collection of rushing narratives that connect the individual struggle of each of us to the death of the universe in a manner that is both intimate and unshakably vital.
SCHOOL OF LANGUAGE
Album: Sea From Shore released 4th February 2008 on Memphis Industries
In April 2007, Sunderland trio Field Music (David Brewis, Peter Brewis and Andrew Moore) announced in a round-a-bout way that they were clearing their diary of all band activity in the hope that a change of situation and expectation might help them to become as productive as they'd always hoped they would be. They tried to make it known that they had no intention of splitting up in the acknowledged sense, but would instead use Field Music (as a group of people, a company, a way of working) as a tool to help the three core members, individually and collectively, to get creative and produce more and better music, expanding on the ideas hinted at in their two and half critically-acclaimed albums; 2007's Tones of Town, Write Your Own History, a collection of b-sides and early feet-finding released in 2006, and 2005's eponymous debut.
Since Field Music's final tour of the US in March 07, David Brewis has been busily piecing together this first School of Language record, which can perhaps be seen as the first test of the above proposition. Primarily recorded by David alone and consciously susceptible to the cut-and-paste, multi-tasking tangents induced by laptop recording, these constructions are resolutely un-band-like, veering between the intricate and unplayable and the solitary and unadorned, their cohesion stemming from an embrace of all that is most obtuse and personal.
Sea From Shore is bookended by the quartet of 'Rockist' tracks, a series of daydreams on words, their meanings and the decisions which follow from them, all underpinned by a collection of incessant looped voices. The album can, in some ways, be seen as a companion piece to Tones of Town but where that record was preoccupied with the choices resulting from questions of time and place, here time is tied to people - often because of their absence, but at other times because their closeness is what rejuvenates us.
Adding a collaborative presence, the album features one or two cameo appearances from David's hometown friends. Barry Hyde of the Futureheads plays guitar and sings on Disappointment '99, while the same band's David Craig, sings on Disappointment ’99 and Extended Holiday, along with former star of Kenickie and Rosita, Marie Nixon and their friend Sarah McKeown. School of Language's live appearances, however, have thus far been completely solo - a one man and his guitar performance about as far removed from the current crop of anodyne singer-songwriters as it's possible to be. These sporadic live shows have been witness to solo re-readings of the occasional Field Music song, and of long-lost songs from David's previous recording foray as the New Tellers.
A School of Language performance will feature as part of Field Music’s Christmas doubleheader at the Cluny in Newcastle on 17th and 18th December.
The album, to be released by Memphis Industries in the UK and Thrill Jockey in the USA, will be preceded by a Rockist Single on 28th January.
