News
Copenhagen math-rock nerds Obstacles are touring Germany and East Europe at the moment. Debut full-length Dividual is coming out on PlayRec, September 20th. Listen on myspace and check if they’re coming to a town near you.
UPDATE! Band says:
We are sincerely happy to announce that our debut album DIVIDUAL is going to be released at Play/Rec on September 20th 2010.
Dividual is the product of over a year’s hard work with writing, touring and recording. And we can truly say that we are proud of this record!
We especially want to thank Jakob Reichert Nielsen for his effort and patience while recording and mixing this album. We are really happy with the result.
We also want to thank the guys at Play/Rec for releasing the record, Alan Douches for mastering and Patrick Ringsborg for providing the artwork.
Since the record in its final form didn’t make it to this tour, we’ve made a limited sneak peek CD-R edition, only available at the shows on this tour. So, if you want to listen to the record before it comes out on vinyl, you can purchase it cheaply at our shows around Europe.
In just 10 days, on August 15th, the new Alarma Man will be released on Sinnbus Records!! Love Forever was originally set to be released a long time ago. Back in January 2009 they told us that the mastering was taking a bit longer than expected. But they’re back and waiting to kick ass all over Northern Europe on their Live Forever tour (tour blog here).
So the album We Recruit from Swiss band Ventura is out, and a 7″ on which they recruited / scooped David Yow (that guy who’s in The Jesus Lizard) is also out. Ventura’s style is hard, slow and potent.. a good environment for Yow. At first site it does look like an odd project.. why is Yow hanging out with 3 young guys in Switzerland? Musically it makes a lot of sense. During his visit in Lausanne, this short was made:
After the demise of Mclusky one of the two bands risen from it’s ashes was Future of the Left. Singer/guitarist Andy ‘Falco’ Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone recruited Jarcrew’s Kelson Matthias for bass and there it was, a band that kicks even more arsch than Mclusky. But after 5 years and two albums, Kelson has decided to quit the band.
Is this the end of FOTL? Thankfully, no. Falkous on the FOTL website:
Future of the left is still a band, a thing, the centre of our unremarkable lives and continues, if anything, with more effort and furious pride than ever before.
For the time being Steven Hudson (Kong/Oceansize) will be taking over bass. But there is more. FOTL have recorded a few new songs with a fourth member. On the website Falkous writes he was making songs for a side project but “it all ended up sounding so perfectly like where Future of the Left should have been going that it seemed ridiculous to not combine the two.” He has yet to reveal who the fourth member is but his roles are “to play guitar and act like a fucking maniac.”
We’ll have to wait and see with these changes mean for the music of FOTL. But the last big change worked out pretty damn good.
More info at http://www.futureoftheleft.com
Manchasm by Future of the Left
Future of the Left -
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Sorry that I’m late with this… PTTRNS are from Cologne and have had a few songs out on a 7″, 2 splits and 2 casettes. Their sound is a musical alloy best described as DC post-hardcore, funkier and more fluent than for instance Q and Not U ever were, even on “Power”. And a bit out of time, akin Pit Er Pat. I heard the 3 tracks from People I Adore 7″… it was promising.. didn’t totally catch me, but nonetheless I found myself putting it on once in a while for a year or so.. and after putting PTTRNS into rotation again, I decided that they must’ve released something new by now. The band was doing small releases for 32 months before finally releasing Science Piñata this April. I’m still waiting to hear all of it, but whatever… I trust what I’ve heard.
Long time no speak. But not for no reason: we just finished mixing our LP with the awesome Guido Lucas at Blubox Studios. It‘s really good. It‘s called SCIENCE PIÑATA and it will be out on Altin Village & Mine Records on April 1st. Recording was difficult and tiresome - Benjamin and Daniel both fell ill in the process so we had to get Sting to lay down some bass and that guy from Arctic Monkeys to play the remaining drum parts. However, Guido is a wizard and edited it all. You probably won‘t be able to tell the difference. Get into it!
PTTRNS - Science Piñata
Altin Village & Ursa Major, April, 2010
…check out the EP from Tall Ships. The last 3 tracks are totally in the spirit of FMTM. I don’t know where this band is heading, but they have an interesting future. So does soundcloud, which i’ve just joined (this is me).
> It’s here… the EPs hiding right behind this link! Click it!! Seriously, do it!!<
The new Maps & Atlases Perch Patchwork might be considered a debut, but then again… no. I valued each of the two EP releases as any full-length, and the guys have displayed such a lot of activity that “debut” would sound awfully wrong. If you’re into merchandise, the band offers some lucrative deals btw… here’s what they said:
Hey, So we’ve been super busy, and we’re so excited for the perch patchwork release (June 29th in the US) and the accompanying headline tour. We’ve also got a bunch of cool pre-order deals going on. For Insound, if you pre-order the CD or LP then you get a copy of our extremely limited edition Solid Ground singles with two rare b-sides (Living Decorations demo and an Israeli Caves string and vocal mix). And with our merch company we’re doing all kinds of fun pre-order bundles. Check’em out HERE!
I don’t really dig the whole hype-generating, tension-building, merchandise-selling, US-exclusive record-releasing, so I’d like to mention that the album has leaked and sounds super. Like a holiday on Hawaii.
This is the link you should click
Richter Collective has been the label to follow in 2010 (The Redneck Manifesto, Jogging, Worrier). Now a fellow-Irish website is reporting that the new Enemies full-length is streaming in its entirety. After listening to it over and over again, I have no doubts that this is as elegant, balanced, admirable and scrumptious as I would’ve expected from the old EP Alpha Waves (2008)… and a big leap right into the elite of that unnamed genre that everyone would agree exists when they hear the sound. We’ve Been Talking is out on June 11th… I’m ordering mine now.
Noumenon has released a new EP that lives up to it’s title. No pretentiousness, just solid instrumental math played at party pace. The sound is crispy and live-like and is sort of a testimony/monument of many happy nights out at concerts.
Thanks for all the lovely music, amazing shows, and your unique passion! FMTM has been quite a chapter in music history — what they’ve created is something that will continue to inspire and give energy long from now, just as their first album (2002) hasn’t aged.
It’s with a wide array of emotions that I must announce the end of the band From Monument To Masses. FMTM is not organized or cohesive enough at this time to issue a unified or consensual statement, so I’m speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the other band members or affiliated labels. After almost a decade of making music and working hard to bring that music to you, we’re out of time. It has been educational to say the least. Our final tour will be Parabolicatune, a three-city tour of Japan at the end of April, 2010, and sergio robledo-maderazo will not be playing with FMTM on that tour. He ended his involvement with FMTM several months ago. After the Japan tour, it is possible that we will play a farewell show or two this Summer on our home fields of New York City and the Bay Area, California. That will be all.
There is too much to say here about our experience. We’ll be blogging about it later, I’m sure. Suffice it to say, that I’m incredibly grateful for my time spent with FMTM and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. From the responses we heard in talking to people about our music, I’m convinced that the music worked; it did it’s job. It reached people on a different level than most music… and that’s exactly why I committed myself to the band in the first place. I’m most sincerely grateful for every single person who enjoyed FMTM’s music and came to see us play. I loved every minute of it - even the minutes that I hated. FMTM was a very frustrating band, mired in frustrating business relationships, frustrating personal relationships, and frustrating contradictions between what we wanted to be and what we were; where we wanted to go and where we were headed. Given these obstacles, FMTM fell prey to a sort of “band entropy” wherein everything that we tried to control slipped even further out of our control. Eventually, the net losses outweighed the net gains and no one was happy. That’s when you know your band needs to break up, regardless of whether it breaks your heart or not.
It must be stated publicly that I regret any problems caused by our attempt at booking an EU tour in May, 2010. Our long-standing “partnership” with our booking agent went south as he pressured us to work exclusively with him and, once we had, he then proceeded to pawn us off to his incompetent sub-agents. The result was a lot of wasted energy and disappointment for no good reason whatsoever. It wasn’t the first time it had happened either — we had struggled through yanked dates for years, routinely unable to coordinate opportunities with the help and resources necessary to make them happen. The lesson learned here is perhaps to always work with independent booking agents and PR firms who have a genuine interest in seeing your band succeed - and not with corporate hacks whose interest in you only goes as far as the short-term commission your band can earn them, or who do the bare minimum that their retainer requires of them. Conversely, I must also say that Jerkov Booking in France worked very hard for us and confirmed a great set of dates, but since the rest of our EU dates never materialized, we had to cancel that as well…and we regret putting Jerkov in that terrible position. Divorce is hard on the whole family.
There are many people who believed in FMTM and who went above and beyond the call to help us succeed, and who never dangled any false carrots in front of us. Their talents and friendship do not go unappreciated. I will miss working with Kensuke Saito at Catune Records in Tokyo, Japan, Timo Siems at Golden Antenna Records in Braunschweig, DE, Lars Lewerenz at Audiolith Records in Hamburg, DE, Tom Dorsey at Nice Promo in Portland, OR, Jonathan Burkett who not only assisted us with graphic design but also drove us on a US tour, Eric Kuhn of Silian Rail who has filled in on several instruments for us, Matthias Werner at High-Low Agency, Florian Detlefsen at Trapdoor Tourz, all the engineers who helped capture our music; Tim Green, Matt Bayles, Ben Adrian, Tom DiMuzio, and Ed Brooks, among others, Eric Milhouse and everyone at the Glass House in Pasadena, Ramona Downey at Bottom of The Hill, and too many other artists, bands, and community organizers to name here. Members of FMTM will write in more detail about the characters in our history in our journals/blogs.
We don’t know at this point what will become of our albums, although it’s clear that they’ll remain available digitally for a long time to come. Whether Dim Mak will ever repress our out-of-print albums (the first two) is anyone’s guess. FMTM still administrates its own publishing and we will continue to make our music available for that purpose. I imagine the merch store, which is operated by the members of FMTM, will stay open yet for a while and I encourage listeners to use it. Thank you for listening. “Silence is argument carried out by other means.”
Sincerely,
Matthew W. Solberg, guitarist/co-founder of From Monument To Masses.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
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