Hometapes

A Lone Sound Mixtape: a new All Tiny Creatures single and a scenic route just off the superhighway to the new album, Dark Clock

“new musical species are crafted through ATC’s ways of alchemistic discoveries that are both bright, dark, big, small, beautiful, fearsome, transitional and alive.” -Impose Magazine

STREAM/DOWNLOAD: All Tiny Creatures A Lone Sound Mixtape

Building on a tradition begun with Harbors and its adjacent mixtapes for “An Iris” and “Glass Bubbles,” today All Tiny Creatures unveiled their first longform audio exploration of their upcoming album Dark Clock (out June 25 on Hometapes). A Lone Sound Mixtape begins with the album track of the same name, a pulsing jam that’s unstuck in time. The rest of the mixtape answers the question: what if that feeling could keep going? “Hypertext” and “Wireframe” let you hover in it for a little longer — and it’s in those tracks you’ll hear the non-verbal commentary track for the album. Beau Sorenson’s bookending remix of “Glass Bubbles” (from previous album Harbors) reminds you that electricity is a very willing accomplice to dancing. Click and move:

All Tiny Creatures: A Lone Sound Mixtape

1. A Lone Sound
2. Hypertext (Extended Mix)
3. Wireframe
4. Glass Bubbles (Beaunoise Remix)

We’re still inventing fire: All Tiny Creatures announce Dark Clock, out May 28, and release first single.

MP3: All Tiny Creatures “Quickest Cut”
Check out the premiere on Paste.

“Dude, look what I just got.” It started with a text. All Tiny Creatures’ founder Thomas Wincek was at work on the new album. He’d just found a Rockman, the headphone amplifier designed by Boston founder Tom Scholz. Basically a guitar DI Box with multiple effects built in, this is what Def Leppard used all over Hysteria. I had no idea. For those vast radio jams of my youth, my brain had been the effects processor. You hear a sound and you make a decision about where it comes from. When I started listening to All Tiny Creatures, it was always a multiple choice question — and the answer was somewhere between a machine and a memory.

A couple months later, I was listening to Drexciya and watching King Crimson live videos. I was hearing Beach Boys songs I never knew existed. Wincek was curating my lunch breaks, and, simultaneously, scattering the breadcrumbs so I could find my way forward. Like leaving a note for yourself before you time travel, I was learning the secrets of Dark Clock. All Tiny Creatures’ second album is an ode to the intertwined bodies of music and technology. A familiar, primordial ease is wrapped up in pulsing electricity. In ten songs, the Wisconsin-based four-piece reminds us that our blood-filled frames are responsible for making the tangle of wires around us. We’re still inventing fire.

“This is like pop music from an alternate universe,” wrote Wincek. Cut to “Comets,” the album’s first song and its undeniable sense of transportation. Conceived quickly after their 2011 debut Harbors, “Comets” first appeared on a mixtape built around the song “An Iris,” a highlight of their first album featuring Justin Vernon on vocals. Over the next few months, “Comets” became a staple of All Tiny Creatures’ live set, evolving in real time. That first sound you hear on Dark Clock has traveled a long way. Like the ancient light from a star, it can give you that primitive tingle while flooding your brain with visions of the future.

All Tiny Creatures is Wincek, along with Andrew Fitzpatrick, Matt Skemp, and Ben Derickson. Between their triangle of homes in Madison, Milwaukee, and Fond du Lac, they are key players in both the lineage of and the current vibe zeitgeist in Wisconsin music. Wincek, Skemp, and Fitzpatrick are also part of Volcano Choir, the sonic collision between Justin Vernon and the venerable Collections of Colonies of Bees. Longtime friends, the process of creating Dark Clock was its own song for the band. First conceived by Wincek nearly seven years ago, First conceived by Wincek nearly seven years ago, All Tiny Creatures runs on the fuel of exploration and experimentation, as well as on high sonic standards. From sampling computer-speech pioneer Charles Dodge on “The Book” to inviting Julian Lynch to play clarinet on “Reunion” to pretending to be another band entirely on “A Lone Sound,” (“We tried to imagine what it must have been like writing music using primarily a Fairlight CMS, one of the earliest, most primitive samplers”), Dark Clock is as conceptually vast as it is viscerally immediate.

When I heard “Quickest Cut,” I realized where Wincek had taken me. He took the blindfold off at the top of the ferris wheel, right when the guitar solo kicked in. The land that stretched out around us was lush and green, marked with glass skyscrapers and grazed by woolly mammoths. It was as endless endless as the improvised guitar loop the song was built on. I understood it now, the road we took in, lined with telephone poles and aluminum fences. I could see where it started, in those woods. I could see where it ended, in those woods. Dark Clock, like everything I’ve ever heard All Tiny Creatures create, is a neurotransmitter. From the click of a keyboard to the click of a breaking stick, it connects the dots between where we are and where we came from. You just dial in where you want to land, hold on, and let go.

-Sara Padgett Heathcott, Hometapes

All Tiny Creatures Dark Clock
Hometapes 059 - LP/CD/DIG
Release Date: May 28, 2013

01. Comets
02. A Lone Sound
03. Hypertext
04. All Die Out
05. Impossible Season
06. Quickest Cut
07. The Book
08. Chase Lights
09. Wave Particles
10. Reunion

You guys. It’s Friend Island time again. We’re headed to Austin, with all our portable dreams, to host the finest Friend Island SXSW has ever seen. Seven years in, this is Hometapes all aglow. Check out all the details below, including a special Soundcloud playlist highlighting all the bands, and be sure to RSVP and bring your friends.

{{{ FRIEND ISLAND }}}
The SXSW oasis presented by Hometapes and friends.

Saturday March 16
12pm til 12am |  FREE (no SXSW cred needed)
@ The Museum of Human Achievement  |  Austin, TX

RSVP for address and more info: bit.ly/friendisland2013
A sonic invitation: bit.ly/friendisland2013music
Stare into the middle: bit.ly/friendisland2013flyer

12:00 - DJs Bear In Heaven and Sunless
01:00 - Jason Ajemian
02:00 - Akron/Family
03:00 - Helado Negro
04:00 - All Tiny Creatures
05:00 - Matthew E. White 
06:00 - Snow Panda and Scott Clark
07:00 - JD Emmanuel
08:00 - Sinkane
09:00 - Leverage Models
10:00 - killer BOB
11:00 - Zorch

Plus treats in Friend Island tradition: free beer, Pop Tarts, nachos, endless endless Topo Chico, and The Hometapes Portable Record Store

Presented by Hometapes
In sweat with…
Spacebomb and The Museum of Human Achievement 

Leverage Models are making moves again. Some great press love this week from The Deli NYC and Dingus. Here’s a choice selection from The Deli:

“Leverage Models are mixing business with pleasure. Pulling from the colorful bullsh*t of popular industry, they’ve given new meaning to the bland business of deliverables and accounting in ready-made dance classics like the undeniable ‘Sweep’ (streaming below) off latest EP ‘Cooperative Extensions.’ This is world beats turned into booty-shaking dirtiness, topped off with Shannon Fields’ roof-shaking falsetto. It’s the kind of band worth doing business with.”

Leverage Models have two NYC-area shows coming up; the live show should not be missed: 

Jan 31st at Cameo, Brooklyn, NY
Tickets: http://www.cameony.net/event/209207-rumors-brooklyn/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/517564121608528/?fref=ts 

Feb 11th at Glasslands, Brooklyn, NY
Tickets: http://ticketf.ly/UNGQbW
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/560851000608964/

Make sure to follow Leverage Models on Soundcloud…cool things on the way very soon!

I can’t tell if I’m unraveling or multiplying into a technicolor blanket to cover us all. 
This year.
I didn’t hear you the first time.
Star Over.

DOWNLOAD: Star Over, a Hometapes holiday album
FREE with the option to DONATE any amount to Smallwater and their efforts to rebuild the Rockaway, NY community in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. 

Thirty-five tracks that travel through time, space, and the past few years of Hometapes holiday albums, Star Over is the music we’re listening to as we close our eyes, grab your hand, and step off the cliff edge of 2012. Juxtaposed in new ways — and including brand new additions by Chris Rosenau (also of Collections of Colonies of Bees & Volcano Choir), The Caribbean (a collaboration with Insect Factory), Keith Sunset (also of CYNE), and Sunless (Hometapes’ own Adam Heathcott) — these songs are the recipe for the sunrise and sunset of the hardest and best year of our lives.

It’s alright, the rumble in your ears:
All Tiny Creatures cover A.C. Marias and King Crimson.

STREAM/DOWNLOAD: All Tiny Creatures “Just Talk | Sleepless”

When you slide a record back into its jacket, when you clutch and push the spine and place it back on the shelf, it all goes quiet. It all goes back into that resting state of potential energy. You can run your hand over it and remember. You can forget it for months and it doesn’t whimper. It waits.

All Tiny Creatures’ album Harbors is the boss of the record shelf. That spine, those thick letters — it set up house there in 2011, maybe with a little bit of that new-kid-in-town debut album swagger. Listen to “An Iris” to remember your first time. And remember, as side D of that double LP twists down to that last breath groove, All Tiny Creatures is just waking up, somewhere in Wisconsin.

Thomas Wincek, Andrew Fitzpatrick, Matt Skemp, and Ben Derickson have been building on the undulating earth that Harbors dug down into.
They’ve been making a new record.
On tour earlier this year with Bon Iver, they were already evolving in real time. Flashing lights shook the crowd into just the right place: somewhere between the past and the present. It just sounded like the future.

Today, that expansion has been bottled. A study of two old songs displays the archaeology of everything to come. Described in detail by Wincek (in words you can read as you hit play), All Tiny Creatures pulls back the curtain to reveal another curtain — woven from their influences, their process, and their hope to connect the dots.

So walk up to that backlit map, find where it says “you are here” and decide which way you want to go next. These twelve minutes of new-old material from the band I’ve described as “the music my brain would make” might just guide you in the absence of a clear answer. 

Landmarks to visit along the way:
All Tiny Creatures Official Website
All Tiny Creatures Tumblr
All Tiny Creatures on Soundcloud
All Tiny Creatures on Twitter
All Tiny Creatures on Facebook 

»» Jon Mueller : Death Blues ««

Step One: The Manifesto. 
Death Blues: The Celebration and Opportunity of Each Moment by Jon Mueller. Read and download exclusively from Change This. 

Step Two: The Album
Stream & Download Jon Mueller Death Blues now from Hometapes.
Vinyl LP out in January on Hometapes and Taiga Records.
Find Yourself. Impatience. Death Blues. Acceptance. Impermanence. Iron String

Step Three: You
I’ll go first. 

I’m wrangling the notion that everything I touch is Death Blues.
There’s a calendar to Death Blues, to you and me, to the light wrapping around everything.
As we recognize it, it disintegrates, it defines itself anew, it proves itself wrong.
We prove ourselves right, we prove ourselves here, and the person sitting across from us, the churning crowd in a room.

Death Blues is the soundtrack to the sweet and sure knowledge that you are alone.

You are the door-opener, the door-slammer. You uncurl your wires and let them touch or not touch.
Death Blues is that electricity that wakes you up, that keeps you up, that whispers you to sleep; it’s just recharging.
I’d like to show that electricity.
Step one is losing that pressure, or pushing back, letting the transaction itself manufacture the spark  to fire up what we need.

Death Blues came in flashes:
A coffee shop in Minneapolis. An apartment hallway.
Examining yourself in the bathroom mirror.
Speaking at dinner with command and an eye on the sunset.
On the road, land sliding by and winking because it knows you might not pass through again anytime soon. 

It’s every time I come home.
It’s all the phone calls until they stopped.
It’s the stopping until it started moving again.
It’s grass up to my ankles in Texas.
It’s the red vinyl of a dark club, sinking into it and my phone glows in my hand.
It’s headlights on grass and siding and a quiet Moon Tower.
Too big for me to have never noticed.

How often we don’t look up.
How often we forget to breathe, but don’t.
Just shallow, just to get us by.
Have my days been like shallow breaths?
There’s no way, look at what I’ve made.
Look at who might testify. Look at these piles and hear the sounds.
I’ve gathered every bit of energy around us in the desert, and I’ve filtered it through myself.
Whatever it caught along the way is the me in all this.
And it’s become my language and definition.

Is it a march to an end, is that end Death, or is Death just an every day thing,
Every day dies as it passes.
Death of the possibilities of a minute.
These days just flex in and out of each other
And your chance is infinite
You’re always dying and living,
and the Blues are wrapped up in both.

The most joyous and true music is wrapped up in the ceremony of death.

Maybe it rests in beauty,
in the gold edging, in the curve of a letter, in the way your hand feels gliding across the paper.
It may be in a mingling of the minimal and the crowded,
I’m trying to get at what I like to rest in. Is it an empty table or an overflowing one. Does it matter you don’t have anywhere to sit your plate or your book or your computer
If the table is full of everything you need already.

Death Blues is the path to any decision, from getting up from your chair to picking up the phone, to opening a new text file and thinking into it.
Music is so perfectly simple. It says everything.
I don’t want to get in the way of what people will naturally understand.
But to get them there in the first place,
To take it beyond the inner circle to the area of strangers, to the area of effect.
Is that very effort a stalling force?
If we just try, is that enough?
If we don’t try, will we do it by accident?
Can you outline Death Blues?
Can you put a date on it?
Can you attribute assets to it?
Can you sell it?
Can you play Death Blues on the radio?
I think we do every day.
I’m wrangling the notion that everything I touch is Death Blues.

I’ve started this post maybe six times.
I’m trying to talk about the noise.

The noise in the life of a musician, the load-in and the load-out of creation.
What it takes to get to that pure, ecstatic moment that only music can spark.
Only music.
It’s the laid-out-bare condition that keeps us, some of us, walking into venues, holding records, clicking links.
There’s a reason we’re here.
There’s a reason we carry this metaphorical 4x12 guitar cabinet up a flight of stairs that we can’t see the end of.
There’s a reason we breathe in everything, the noise, for 23 hours a day, simply for that hour-long exhale from 10pm to 11pm on a Tuesday night.
It’s music.
We can write about it and talk about it.
And I do, it’s all I want to do sometimes.
But I can’t quite ever share that elastic swirl, that otherworldly drip of pure shimmering stuff that music is synonymous with. 
That moment is each of ours alone, amplified by everyone feeling their version of the same thing, all around us.
From the record to the club, goddamn it’s easy to share.
If you can find a parking place
or the money to pay your bills.

Sometimes the noise drowns out the song.
Sometimes the noise is the song.

Ape School, today, this is all your fault. Today, you say it all.
“Be An Encore” on repeat. 

DOWNLOAD:
Ape School: the Insound/Fred Perry Artist Lounge Sessions 
Featuring “Be An Encore” and “Bone Dry”

Click here to learn more about the sessions, recorded during CMJ last month by Grammy winning engineer Geoff Sanoff (Nada Surf, Secret Machines, School of Seven Bells), as well as all the other bands and friendly sponsors involved.

And we’re pleased to announce that Ape School and Hometapes family The Caribbean will be playing a show in Philly next month at Kung Fu Necktie. Grab tickets for the December 15 event right here.

And while we’re in the family way, check this out:
Ape School “Be An Encore (CYNE Remix)”

Photo: Ape School at Glasslands, Brooklyn, NY, 8/21/12. By Hometapes.

Web music OGs, Epitonic recorded a saki Session for Leverage Models during their most recent tour around the US. The ‘Models played six tracks covering ground from all three EPs. While you’ve really gotta see ‘em live to get the full effect of the megaphone and roto-tom set up, this great-sounding performance will be a fine substitute until they hit road again. Check it out here. Also: dance. 

Leverage Models took the stage at saki with an array of pre-recorded backing instruments laying a foundation of reverbed-out synths and drums, garnished with the occasional meandering saxophone line. The backing band took hold of each track with wild flourishes of roto-toms, guitars drenched with chorus, and driving bass. Meanwhile, Fields was a dynamo, stalking and dancing around our intimate setting with an arsenal of percussion and delivering a vocal performance, often through a megaphone, mirroring each song performed from his EPs. All of which made for a fun afternoon, and a set of recordings to inspire teasing your hair up with a can of hair spray, donning that skinny keyboard tie, and dancing the night away.

«Side note: It’s always nice to see folks from our distant past still fighting the good fight. Justin Sinkovich of Epitonic was a member of Thumbnail way back when we were in junior high. I can remember sitting on Sara’s floor and listening to their self-titled album over and over. The beautiful album artwork and packaging most certainly planted one of the earliest seeds into our proto-Hometapes brains. Cross-country high-five. Thanks, Justin/Epitonic.»