See CVLT Nation’s premiere of the video here.

Read an indepth interview about the video with director Steven Miller and myself from Redefine Magazine here.

THE CURRENT, featuring album art by Robert Beatty, will be released this spring on LP, CD and as a limited edition, tour-only cassette via Translinguistic Other. (Preorder here.) A string of US dates has been confirmed for March and April, including appearances at SXSW, 35 Denton in Denton, TX, and LA Psych Fest, and a European tour is currently being booked for Fall 2013 with Expo ’70.

Full tour dates below. See you soon!

Midday Veil Spring 2013 US Tour Dates

2/28 Chop Suey, Seattle, WA
3/09 35 Denton, Dan’s Silverleaf, Denton, TX
3/11 Invasion Festival, The Crown and Harp, Dallas, TX
3/13 Official SXSW Showcase, The Hideout, Austin, TX
3/14 Austin Psych Fest’s LEVITATION, Austin, TX
3/14 Holodeck Records Party, Austin, TX
3/15 Sahara Lounge, Austin, TX
3/16 Redefine Magazine’s FEEL YOU, House of Commons, Austin, TX
3/18 Guestroom Records, Oklahoma City, OK *
3/18 Stash, Norman, OK
3/19 FOKL Center, Kansas City, KS *
3/20 Situations, Chicago, IL
3/21 4329 Kirby Ave, Cincinnati, OH
3/22 Kung Fu Necktie, Philadelphia, PA #
3/23 PA’s Lounge, Cambridge, MA #
3/24 Silent Barn, Brooklyn, NY #
3/25 Cake Shop, New York, NY #
3/26 Ace of Cups, Columbus, OH
3/27 Radio Radio, Indianapolis, IN *
3/28 Eronel, Dubuque, IA *
3/29 Side Door Lounge, Omaha, NE *
3/30 Mouth House, Denver, CO *
4/05 Gem and Bolt, Oakland, CA †
4/06 Tin Can Ale House, San Diego, CA †
4/07 LA Psych Fest, Bootleg Theater, Los Angeles, CA †
4/08 The Knockout, San Francisco, CA †
4/09 The Works, Eureka, CA †
4/10 East End, Portland, OR †

* with Expo ’70
# with Ghost Box Orchestra
† with Brain Fruit

A Story of Rats began as the the solo musical project of visual and sound artist Garek J. Druss, who also plays in Seattle-based duo Dull Knife and Portland-based TECUMSEH and Atriarch, as well as multimedia ensemble Saint Genet.  Garek’s investigative work blurs the lines between sound and gesture, tangibility and time. The current lineup of ASOR also includes Andrew Crawshaw (Terminal Fuzz Terror, Broken Press) and D. Salo (Joy Wants Eternity, Saint Genet).

In 2011, our friends at Eiderdown Records released ASOR’s first LP, Thought Forms. Their second full-length, Vastness and the Inverse, will be entombed on 33RPM vinyl (limited to 300 copies) and offered up for consumption by Translinguistic Other with an official street date of March 4. Its haunting artwork was created by Druss and hand printed by Broken Press, and the record itself was recorded & mixed by Wolvserpent’s Blake Green in Seattle, WA, and mastered for vinyl by the inimitable James Plotkin. The LP comes with a download which features a bonus track, a reinterpretation of Side A’s side long dirge “Her Teeth are Nil,” remixed by Tristan Shone (Author & Punisher).

The record is available for presale now via TLO Records. An LP release show is scheduled for Thursday, February 28 at Chop Suey in Seattle with Midday Veil, Great Falls and Hekate.

A string of dates with Of The Wand and The Moon (Denmark) + King Dude have also been confirmed for late March/early April:

Tues 3/26 – Seattle, WA – The Comet
Wed 3/27 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios
Fri 3/29 – San Francisco, CA -The Chapel
Sat 3/30 – Santa Cruz, CA – Catalyst Atrium
Sun 3/31 – Los Angeles, CA – The Echo
Mon 4/1 – San Diego – The Casbah
Tues 4/2 – Sacramento, CA – TBA

More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/440179032708806/

The 4th of July is hidden
in a box of sundries
beneath a worthless curtain
which
on account of being clumsily battered for years by flaccid sunbeams
has been rendered devoid of reds,
its once healthy blues given way to an acrid, semisynthetic green
(whose existence is a travesty to the very concept of “color”
if you ask me).

And yet
all the delegates are present here
though the watchman decries his post
and I’m suspicious of the wounded man
—who turns elevens into sevens—
aching though he may be
beneath the weight of history.

I am lost to history.
For instance:
Where is my Fertile Crescent?
Did I really exchange it for a few sessions of awkward, menial sex and Coming Home Early from The Celestial Buffet of the Great Self?
If so,
can you remind me why?
Is it because you can never truly seduce a soul in exile?

Furthermore,
are pumpkins really that shape?
I am at a loss for shapes.
Even now as I write this hymn
on graph paper
where every possible point of contact
with the world of forms is equidistant from the last.

-E.P., 12/4/2012

Artwork by Leila Kair, age 4

WARM CLIMATE

Los Angeles-based power trio Warm Climate play angular garage rock with a prog twist. Led by veteran experimental vocalist/guitarist Seth Kasselman, WC delivers surprisingly hooky pop gems with warped indie bravado, while drummer Caitlin Mitchell shreds like a mathematically-inclined wild animal. Bassist M. Geddes Gengras is a solo artist in his own right (check out his excellent new LP on Holy Mountain) and also plays synths with Sun Araw.

Here’s some video I shot of these guys at Human Resources Gallery when they played with Midday Veil in LA last month:

HEKATE

Seattle-based “femme-fatale stoner doom” outfit Hekate is led by Micaela Tobin of Thousand Statues and Ambrosia Bartosek of Moths. This will be my first time to see them live; based on the haunted, fractured incantations I’ve heard on Soundcloud, I’m looking forward to it!

MARCUS PRICE

Here’s another act I haven’t seen live yet. In fact, Marcus is just starting to play shows, although his Soundcloud page is full of psychedelic, minimalistic compositions forged in the crucible of his studio in Everett, WA.

Please note that this is an early show for the Rendezvous.  Doors at 9 pm. See you tonight!

Jean-Herve Peron waxing apocalyptic at the Comet, Seattle

“HAVE YOU EVER PARTICIPATED IN A GENOCIDE?” a wide-eyed Jean Hervé-Péron asked a roomful of enraptured onlookers. “YES,” he answered himself, with a near-maniacal grin. “AND SO HAVE YOU.”  As the improvised cacophony swelled around him, abstracted, acid-damaged images of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama arose and melted away like candied phantoms emerging from a zig-zagged field of processed video feedback.

I’m admittedly biased, since I had something to do with coaxing the event into existence in the first place, but I’m fairly certain that I just witnessed history being made.  Faust—yes that Faust, the sublimely absurdist German “krautrock” band—just performed a concert that opened with an improvised soundtrack to a live feed of the US presidential debates, psychedelicized by Hair and Space Museum (the multimedia duo comprised of David Golightly and myself.)

The happening happened at the Comet Tavern, a Seattle dive bar that barely accommodates 150 patrons (a far cry from the music halls that Faust has commanded in Europe for decades). It came together at the last moment as the result of a half-joking fantasy about how to best spend the day off that Faust had to kill between scheduled Seattle and Vancouver shows.  (My band Midday Veil played both shows with Faust. I am infinitely humbled by the opportunity to spend time with these amazing artists.)

If it weren’t for Faust, many people in the room would have probably been at a regular bar watching the debates for real, myself included, but I think this actually may have been the more informative way to experience them. There was a moment during the set, when Jean-Hervé was singing into the cement mixer, the sound of gravel nearly drowning out his voice as a horrific, hot-pink Romney floated ominously overhead, when I thought to myself, “Huh. This may well be the single most inspiring artistic performance I’ll ever witness.”

Later, back at our house where we were all staying, I asked Jean-Hérvé about the “genocide” lyric…is that a Faust song? What album is it from? He tells me it was made up on the spot.  Perfect.  (He also just told me to adjust this photo of him chainsawing through polystyrene to make it black and white. I did, and he likes it better this way.)

The chainsaw-and-polystyrene is an important part of Faust’s live act.  The other day, David made some calls to Vancouver in an attempt to source a sheet for Wednesday night’s show.  ”No, we don’t have Styrofoam, and you shouldn’t buy it,” snapped a Canadian hardware shopkeep, who then hung up on him.

(He’s right, of course. But mere morality is not applicable here. Faust is as excessive, decadent, creative, destructive, and monstrously holy as Western Civilization itself.)

Anyway. Here’s some video from Tuesday night’s show at the Comet. I’ll upload more later, including some video of David jamming onstage with Faust in Vancouver.

Ian Buck also took some wonderfully surreal photos of Monday night’s show. (More here: ianbuck.tumblr.com.)

Faust at the Comet, Seattle, 10/15/2012. Photo by Ian Buck.

*** THANK YOU *** so much to everyone who helped Faust by loaning gear, sourcing random industrial supplies, and contributing art and music to these amazing shows, especially Michelle Smith, The Comet Tavern, Dull Knife, Jamie Potter, David Davila, Benjamin-Thomas Kennedy, Amy Denio, David “Skip” Milford, Valerie Calano (DJ Explorateur), Dave Segal, Steve Wilson, Mike Newman, Daniel Presnell and Joshua Stevenson of Von Bingen, The Waldorf Hotel, and my Midday Veil bandmates David Golightly, Timm Mason, Jayson Kochan, Sam Yoder and Garrett Moore. This week has been a truly humbling coming together of an amazing community.

Midday Veil. Photo by Frank Correa.

Midday Veil just released a new video for Choreia, the first single off our upcoming record The Current, produced by Randall Dunn.

MV are hitting the road next week for a west coast tour that includes Seattle and Vancouver, BC dates with krautrock legends Faust (!) and 7 shows with White Manna from Arcata, CA, touring behind their new LP on Holy Mountain.

MIDDAY VEIL FALL 2012 TOUR DATES:

10/15  The Comet Tavern, Seattle, WA w/ Faust, Dull Knife
10/17  The Waldorf Hotel, Vancouver, BC w/ Faust, Von Bingen
10/23  The Shanty, Eureka, CA w/ White Manna, Howlin Rain
10/24  The Hemlock, San Francisco, CA w/ White Manna, Ersatz
10/25  White Rock, Oakland, CA w/ White Manna, Clipd Beaks
10/26  Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA w/ White Manna, Warm Climate
10/27  Shanghai’d Room, Huntington Beach, CA w/ White Manna, Ahkiyyini
10/28  Soda Bar, San Diego, CA w/ White Manna, Los Loaded Saints
10/31  Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR w/ White Manna, Testface
11/1    East End, Portland, OR w/ Eternal Tapestry, Hot Victory, Grapefruit

Hair and Space Museum. Northwest Passage (installation view). Processed multi-channel video feedback, vinyl, sound, 2012.

The prospect of creating a site-specific work of art in the entry point to the exhibition presented some unique challenges. There was an expectation that our work serve as something of a passageway, both physically and conceptually.

In planning our Bumbershoot piece, I found myself thinking about certain works we had seen in an exhibition by Marianne Nicolson at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria back in 2007. Nicolson, who is Kwakwaka’wakw, created, among other things, a series of light boxes featuring surfaces etched with traditional tribal motifs. One of these boxes, mounted in the center of a room filled with paintings and objects, illuminated continually with a low-level light that cast very subtle shadows on everything in the room. I didn’t notice the shadows at first, and when I did, I had a small epiphany. The history of the Pacific Northwest contains multiple histories—in this case, the history of the indigenous people of the region—which are, of course, always casting their shadows on the present moment whether we notice them or not.

Nicolson’s work stuck with me because of how it collapsed multiple moments of time in a given space, and the theme of Skyward! seemed to call for a similar investigation of the multifaceted nature of the narratives it implies.  Seattle’s pioneer spirit is amusing, even endearing in its innocent exuberance, but it is also heavy, because of the often unanticipated (yet ever present) consequences of exploration and expansion.

Hair and Space Museum. Northwest Passage (installation view). Processed multi-channel video feedback, vinyl, sound, 2012.

Hair and Space Museum’s piece for Bumbershoot is titled Northwest Passage, after the fabled thoroughfare explorers once hoped to find in our region’s labyrinthine waterways. It consists of an ambient, cosmic soundtrack and a set of two projectors and cameras mounted into the ceiling, creating a pair of mirror-image feedback loops that are continually projected onto a screen on the floor which dominates a threshold that people must walk through to enter the exhibition.  The feedback loops are modulated by an analog video synthesizer, whose patches will be changed to generate different effects and interactive possibilities during the course of the festival.  Once a person walks across the floor, their presence transforms the projected image, blazing a virtual trail in their wake. In the absence of visitors, the feedback system eventually returns to something of a self-sustaining stasis.

Skyward! opens today (Friday, August 31) with a preview reception at Fisher Pavilion, and will be open throughout the course of the festival. The exhibition also includes interactive works by I Want You , Vaughn Bell & Iole Alessandrini, Heather and Ivan Morison and Hollow Earth Radio’s Garrett Kelly and Amber Kai Morgan, among others.

Not only is tonight’s lineup full of incredible local bands, it’s an album release party for Midday Veil and Swahili, who both have new releases on Translinguistic Other Records!

Swahili. Photo by Kerosene Rose.

A few years ago, metaphysically-minded quintet Swahili relocated to Portland, Oregon from Reno, NV. Since then, they have quickly emerged as one of the most exciting experimental rock bands currently working in the Pacific Northwest, performing at last year’s Portable Shrines Escalator Festival  and Redefine Magazine’s Intuitive Navigation, as well as this year’s BODY||MIND house party at SXSW with Lumerians, Night Beats, AU, Royal Baths, Midday Veil and many others.

“there is nothing about this music that is by the book. [...] The percussion beats you over the head while the synths sound like the end of the world. It’s a sonic fucking monument.” – Experimedia

We are excited to be releasing Swahili’s debut album as a limited edition LP with MP3 download on Translinguistic Other Records!

Also celebrating a new release tonight is Midday Veil, with a super-limited cassette of improvisations made last summer in the Integratron, an acoustic tabernacle built with extraterrestrial guidance by George Van Tassel (1910-1978) in the magical Mojave desert.

 ”Midday Veil consistently produces some of the best experimental psychedelic music I’ve ever heard, always bending genres and minds at the same time. This new cassette, Integratron, promises to do that yet again, as it is a series of improvisations recorded in an acoustically perfect wooden dome situated on a geomagnetic vortex in the middle of the California desert. I honestly don’t know what could sound more perfect right now.” – Hammer Smashed Sound

Geist & the Sacred Ensemble at the Black Lodge. Photo by Eleanor Petry.

Joining Swahili and Midday Veil are TLO labelmates Geist & the Sacred Ensemble, whose 2011 cassette In Search of Fabled Lands is officially sold out through Translinguistic Other’s website, however a handful will be available at tonight’s show.

“As a largely acoustic musical meditation on death and rebirth (various deaths and various rebirths, real and imagined, physical and psychological, to these ears), In Search of Fabled Lands resists easy categorization, at once skyward-gazing and planted firmly six feet underground. It’s an album that rewards the patient listener…” – Revolt of the Apes

Glass Tunnels. Photo by Margot Bird.

Rounding out the bill will be relative newcomers Glass Tunnels, who mesmerized audiences at the  recent multimedia art extravaganza NOISE, curated by Margot Bird and Nils Petersen.

I couldn’t be more excited about this show, which represents an incredible cross section of talent currently bubbling up from Seattle’s psychedelic underground. We have also been fortunate enough to receive some wonderful label press over the past few weeks, including a feature on the TLO label in this week’s edition of The Stranger.