Optical Atlas

As some of you may have noticed, certain wings of the Optical Atlas Gallery are now open to visitors. We’re still framing prints and you can expect more areas to open in the days and weeks ahead, but in the meantime the wings devoted to Apples in Stereo, of Montreal, and Olivia Tremor Control are now open to the public.

The Gallery

I noticed a third of Montreal poster designed by Geminitactics Nina has popped up on her MySpace blog.  She also has some great tee-shirt designs.  The band is now on tour and you can buy some of this merchandise…and you ought to, because it’s pretty.

If you’re near Athens, this coming Tuesday get over to the Caledonia Lounge to catch Folklore, The Lucksmiths, and The Ladybug Transistor.  Talk about a great show – it all starts around 10.

Here’s another live video from BPrend and Chris Yetter.  Chris started a blog a while back called Things Chris Recorded, and right now there’s a wealth of E6-related videos and live recordings on his site, many from Athens PopFests past and present.  Definitely check it out if you’re hungry for more.

P.S. I apologize for the spam that keeps cropping up in the Comments on this blog. I have no idea why that’s happening. One of the security measures for entering a comment on OA is that you have to enter your email address, but know that your email will not be displayed when you place your comment. It’s just a precaution, not that it’s working much – but it was much worse when I turned it off…

Thanks to Chris again!
Video: BPrend
Audio: Mo

Amazon.com just launched its new digital music download store (there was a big story on NPR about it yesterday), and wouldn’t you know that The Apples in Stereo have leaped to #1 as the top downloaded artist.  The reason has everything to do with the fact that the Apples’ song “Energy” is being made an exclusive free MP3 with the Amazon MP3 downloading application, required to download songs from the site.  So take the stats with a grain of salt, but they are now listed as the #1 artist at the Amazon downloads page, and that’s pretty nifty.  You can view the Apples in Stereo store at Amazon here.

When Fire Records in the U.K. announced they were going to be re-releasing Neutral Milk Hotel’s first album, On Avery Island, with bonus tracks, there was considerable excitement (and, on my part, considerable blogging). A few months back it was revealed that the reissue’s bonus tracks were going to be limited to “Everything Is” and “Snow Song Pt. 1,” two tracks that are widely available elsewhere. (In fact, if you buy the Everything Is single Orange Twin released, it contains two additional tracks, “Aunt Eggma Blowtorch” and, from the Hype City cassette, “Tuesday Moon.”) After being pushed back for over a year, this reissue will be released on November 12. The Fire Records page for this release has the following quote from Jeff Mangum on the album’s creation:

The album was recorded in Denver with Robert Schneider from The Apples In Stereo. Robert’s a friend I met in second grade, we must have been about eight years old at the time. It was January in Denver, freezing cold and snowing all over. I moved into a friend’s house and was living in a closet and it was cold, not only because of the weather but because it was a haunted house. The closet I was living in was haunted. The person that lived in the house kept having dreams of people having cocktail parties in my closet, there would always be these really beautiful women in really tacky fur coats drinking champagne and telling my friend that we should get the fuck out of their party because we were really pissing them off… So I lived in my closet and listened to a lot of John Coltrane and waited about a month to start recording. Robert and I would get stuck on something when we were recording and walk around and grab our heads and get really frustrated, go outside and have a cigarette and go to the store, and then we’d suddenly hit on something and we’d jump up and down and hug each other. The whole album just blurs in a beautiful way to me, like a dream, because I guess my whole life the past three years has been geared towards the end which is the album itself. It’s sort of the culmination of the whole experience.

Pretty cool.

Pitchfork is reporting that there are two of Montreal releases scheduled for October. First up, on October 2nd, is a digital-only release of an acoustic performance from January featuring Kevin Barnes and B.P. Helium. They cover “Harvest Moon,” plus perform two Hissing Fauna tracks and a Love Is All cover, “Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up.” You’ll be able to download this from Sony Connect (eh? whassat?) next Tuesday, although you can stream that last track right now thanks to Pitchfork.

Then it’s a re-release of the band’s second rarities collection, If He is Protecting Our Nation Then Who Will Protect Big Oil, Our Children? Originally released in April 2002 as a tour-only CD, the track listing was changed around slightly–a few songs dropped, a few added–when it was issued a year later from Track & Field in the U.K. This is the version that Polyvinyl will be releasing. (Pitchfork, in 2003, gave the album a 5.3. It should be interesting to see their new rating.) You can pick this one up from Polyvinyl Records beginning October 23 for a very reasonable price of $10. I was hoping for a new rarities compilation, given the wealth of B-sides and MySpace exclusives that have popped up in the last couple of years – Kevin told Optical Atlas early last year that such a compilation was in the works – but I guess we’ll have to keep waiting.

Thanks to Adam and Harnk for mentioning the announcement.

Thanks to Chris Yetter for sending along this 42-minute-long live video.  It’s of Montreal’s performance at Emo’s (Austin, Texas) from May 13, 2004. 

courtesy of BPrend

…You can get your fix at the E6 Treehouse.