Optical Atlas

Pittsburgh’s WYEP will be hosting a Holiday Hootenanny at the Pittsburgh Opera on Thursday, December 17, at 7pm, to support the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.  Live music will be courtesy Silver & Gold, a local “holiday supergroup” which features The Essex Green’s Jeff Baron (thus the mention here) as well as members of Donora, Meeting of Important People, Lohio, Good Night, States, Boca Chica, Blindsider, and more.  The suggested ticket price is $5 plus a non-perishable food item for the food bank, and tickets are available here.  Thanks to Billy for the link.

Merge Records continues celebrating their 20th anniversary with The Merge Records Companion, a 350-page book collecting cover art and images from every one of their releases.  Includes essays by Merge founders Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, and celebrity hand models!  All proceeds go to charities selected by the SCORE! box set curators.  You can pre-order here, with copies shipping on November 3rd.

The Elephant 6 Townhall has assembled an album of covers of E6 songs, from of Montreal through Major Organ and the Adding Machine, Elf Power, Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, and more.  You can download Elephant 6 Fanfare through this thread.  Thanks to lenn9o9n for assembling the project, and everyone who contributed.

The Apples in Stereo will be playing a free concert at SUNY-Geneseo this Saturday, May 2nd, in front of the college union as part of Springfest.  Festivities begin at 1; the Apples should be on around 2-2:30. 

Folklore will also be playing SUNY-Geneseo’s Springfest, at the afterparty at Farteen (14 Avon Rd, round 7pm Saturday night).  Tonight (May 1) Folklore will be playing an “experimental set” at 230 Fellows Ave in Syracuse, NY.

The upcoming Merge XX Festival has announced more of its lineup, with potential surprise guests as yet unannounced.  We do know that E6 acts The Music Tapes, The Ladybug Transistor, and The Essex Green will be playing.  Individual tickets–in very limited quantities–will be made available on May 13.  More info here.

It seems like The Essex Green have dropped off the radar for a while, so it’s great to hear they’re back in New York to play a show tomorrow night–Wednesday, October 29th–for a Halloween-themed show at Brooklyn’s Bell House, with the High Places.  The show starts at 7:30, and it’s 18+ at $10/person.  Thanks to Ben Crum for the head’s-up.

A few weeks ago Merge Records announced a new, massive, anniversary-themed box set entitled Score! Merge Records: The First 20 Years.  The set will include 14 specially curated compilation albums, with exclusively commissioned artwork, and handpicked tracks by Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Phil Morrison (director of Junebug), Amy Poehler (Saturday Night Live), David Byrne, Miranda July (director of Me and You and Everyone We Know), author Jonathan Lethem, artist Marcel Dzama, Momofuku chef David Chang, Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo), comedian Zach Galifianakis, New Yorker critic Alex Ross, Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi, and artists Andrea Zittel and Kara Walker.  There will also be two bonus discs, including “an entire album of non-Merge artists such as The National, Death Cab For Cutie and Ryan Adams covering their favorite tracks from the Merge catalog, and a remix collection featuring reinterpretations of Merge classics by the likes of Battles, Jason Forrest, Four Tet and more.”

The Elephant 6 connection?  Neutral Milk Hotel, The Music Tapes, The Ladybug Transistor, and The Essex Green are all on the Merge label; it’s unknown at this time what the track listings of the albums will be, but I’m betting at least NMH will sneak in there.

Pre-orders placed between September 8th and November 8th will receive the entire collection for $179, after which the price will be $199 until sets sell out.  Proceeds go to charities picked by the curators.  You can pre-order here.

The Tup Keewah Recordings Blog (Mike Barrett of The Sixth Great Lake, formerly of The Essex Green) has posted a Sixth Great Lake performance taped in October of 2001 at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, for the Crossing Borders Festival. Among the songs played are a few by Essex Green and even Guppyboy (the pre-Essex Green, SGL band). Barrett writes, “Chris [Ziter] had a terrible cold and you can hear it in his voice. Chris, Brendan Skwire and Neil Cleary joined Zach [Ward] and I between shows from the middle of an Essex Green tour.” You can download the MP3s here. Thanks to lou2ser, as always.

The Essex Green have updated their website with a photo of their newest member: Sasha’s new kid, Bebban Labelle Lawson.  Plus a little update on how the new album is progressing:

With the last of the snows giving way to mud and the promise of t-shirt weather, we embark on our next project.  After a February stint in Pittsburgh, we have compiled the skeletal/muscular structure (and heartbeat) for our next record. Many new ideas inspired by some new faces (see below).

Continuing our pattern of recording in a variety of destinations, we look to western Michigan, Cincinnati (it’s NO Pittsburgh), and perhaps Barbados for this next effort.

P.S. I’m adding a few more images to the Essex Green gallery, and then I’ll be polishing off a Ladybug Transistor gallery to be added to this site.