Goodbye Matt Wright PR, Hello IODA!

October 14th, 2007

Matt Wright PR is CLOSED!

It’s true, as of right now Matt Wright PR is officially CLOSED! In closely related news, I recently moved from Portland to San Francisco, where I am very excited to be working as one of two Campaign Coordinators at IODA Marketing Services. I will still be doing online PR as part of our broader marketing efforts at IODA, and look forward to working with many of you in that capacity. Thanks to everyone I worked with at Matt Wright PR, and please don’t hesitate to drop me a line at the new gig!

Pseudosix To Release Self-Titled Sophomore Album on Sonic Boom Recordings

July 19th, 2007

Portland, Oregon’s hidden treasure, Pseudosix, is set to release their long-awaited sophomore disc on August 28th via Sonic Boom Recordings (Death Cab For Cutie, IQU, United State of Electronica, Nada Surf). The self-titled effort finds lead songwriter Tim Perry collaborating with members of such local lights as The Joggers, Grails, and Dolorean. And when we say Joggers, we really mean Joggers: a full half of that wonderful band (drummer Jake Morris and guitarist Dan Wilson) is currently playing with Pseudosix, as is Jay Clarke of The Standard. The band has upcoming local dates alongside Blitzen Trapper, Viva Voce, 31 Knots, and The Shaky Hands, and will be announcing tour details shortly.

Click here for more on Pseudosix.

Telephone Jim Jesus Returns with Anywhere Out of the Everything for Anticon

July 2nd, 2007

Anticon is proud to announce the impending arrival of Telephone Jim Jesus’ second solo outing, Anywhere Out of the Everything, due September 25th. Featuring guest appearances by label all-stars Doseone, Odd Nosdam, Alias, Pedestrian, Subtle’s Alex Kort, and TJJ’s Restiform Bodies bandmate Bomarr, Anywhere is a gorgeous, sweeping mess of lush electronica, junkyard hip hop and swirling out-rock that’s sure to be one of the year’s strongest and most idiosyncratic releases.

Somewhere beyond atmosphere but within gravity’s pull—nearly freeform yet defined by its unerring direction—you’ll find Anywhere Out of the Everything, the latest (mostly) instrumental full-length from Telephone Jim Jesus. Arriving three years after George Chadwick’s auspicious solo debut, 2004’s A Point Too Far to Astronaut, Anywhere offers further exposition of the themes and methods of its predecessor, but while that last album was celebrated for a lush etherea punctuated by bright bursts of rhythm and light, this one works its duality to the fullest throughout. The end result is a multihued textile of living song that can be admired both for its constituent parts—mini opuses with aural narratives unto themselves—and as a subtly evolving whole.

Anywhere Out of the Everything, is, as much as anything, a testament to the loneliness, abandon, growth, and madness of a life lived on the road. A European tour with Sole and pedestrian in the summer of 2005 coincided with the break-up of an eight-year relationship, one that stretched from the middle teens to the middle twenties. Without a home to return to in the U.S., on a post-traumatic whim TJJ decided to stay in Europe, and for about four months careened mostly between Sole’s apartment overlooking Gaudi Park in Barcelona and a Lithuanian squat in South London, doing an occasional show to scratch up money for the train. The moment he landed back in North America, he took off through the South and up the East Coast, with stints doing reconstruction work in a Vietnamese community on the Gulf Coast immediately post-Katrina, improvising anti-war demonstrations on Capitol Hill, and for an odd couple of weeks labored and partied in a shuttered hotel on Cape Cod.

Wandering through the overgrown graveyards, thrift store treasuries, and unreconstructed gothic quarters of Western Europe, he found both staggering artistry and usable material in the corridors of the old world. His return voyage through the physical devastation of the Gulf Coast and the moral wreckage of Washington D.C. stirred the impulse to create once more. Anywhere Out of the Everything (the title is a riff on Baudlaire’s “Anywhere Out of the World”) documents this period in great, if fractured, detail, from the cover art collaged out of London’s trash to the variety of voices and sounds captured on Dictaphone and symphonically embedded in the music. So a violin sings in a London tubeway, a muezzin calls the faithful to prayer on a shitty speaker overhead, a crowd croaks out horrific noises, and the voices of he and his fellow travelers recite the desperate poetry inscribed in London tombstones and strain to describe what elsewhere emerges before them.

Click here for more on Telephone Jim Jesus.

Talkdemonic Announce US Tour Dates, Plot UK Takeover

May 23rd, 2007

Portland’s beloved electroacoustic duo Talkdemonic have announced a string of US tour dates that will see them supporting recent breakout stars The National, as well as headlining their own shows for the latter part of the tour. Talkdemonic is currently hard at work on the follow-up to acclaimed 2006 release Beat Romantic (both for the Arena Rock Recording Company), and will be performing some of their new material throughout these dates. The band has also formally announced their recent signing to One Little Indian subsidiary Tangled Up Recordings, who will be releasing Beat Romantic for the first time in the UK on August 13th. The UK version of Beat Romantic has been expanded to include the new video for “Mountain Cats” (see link below) and a cover of Brian Eno’s “Sombre Reptiles.” Talkdemonic has recently toured in support of The Walkmen, Quasi, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Click here for tour dates, and here for more on Talkdemonic.

The Shaky Hands Announce US Tour Dates, Battle Text Messaging Hipsters

April 24th, 2007

Portland’s jangly pop heroes The Shaky Hands have announced a string of US tour dates in support of their self-titled debut, released April 10th on Holocene Music. The announcement comes on the heals of the much-blogged music video for album track “Why & How Come,” directed by Whitey McConnaughy (The Thermals, Shins, Band of Horses). The clip (streamable here) pits a lone Shaky Hands fan against a room full of jaded hipsters and their cell phones, a situation the band hopes to reverse on the upcoming tour.

The critical response to The Shaky Hands’ debut has been immediate and overwhelmingly positive. SPIN, Magnet, Pitchfork, and a host of influential blogs all seem to agree: The Shaky Hands brand of soulful, rhythmic indie rock has resulted in one of the funnest, bounciest albums to come out this year.

Click here for tour dates, and here for more on The Shaky Hands.