Optical Atlas

The Apples in Stereo’s latest album, Travellers Through Space and Time, will be released by Yep Roc/Simian/Elephant 6 on April 20th.  In April & May, the band will be hitting the road in support of the album, accompanied by friends The Generationals (from New Orleans) and Laminated Cat (from Athens, and the young psych masters who recently released Umbrella Weather on Garden Gate Records). Below are the dates, along with the complete press release for the album.

04.16.10 Lexington, KY @ Cosmic Charlie’s
04.17.10 Morgantown, WV @ 123 Pleasant Street
04.18.10 Washington, DC @ The Rock and Roll Hotel
04.20.10 Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
04.21.10 New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom
04.23.10 Cambridge, MA @ Middle East Underground
04.24.10 Ithaca, NY @ Castaways
04.25.10 Rochester, NY @ Bug Jar
04.27.10 Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop
04.28.10 Pontiac, MI @ The Pike Room
04.30.10 Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall
05.01.10 St. Paul, MN @ Turf Club
05.03.10 Milwaukee, WI @ Turner Hall
05.04.10 St. Louis, MO @ Billiken Club

Travellers in Space and Time,
by The Apples in Stereo

1. The Code
2. Dream About the Future
3. Hey Elevator
4. Strange Solar System
5. Dance Floor
6. C.P.U.
7. No One in the World
8. Dignified Dignitary
9. No Vacation
10. Told You Once
11. It’s All Right
12. Next Year at About the Same Time
13. Floating in Space
14. Nobody But You
15. Wings Away
16. Time Pilot

Studio-obsessed indie rockers The Apples in stereo are celebrating the start of a new decade with the release of their seventh studio album, Travellers in Space and Time, their most hi-fi and hook-laden production to date. Described by frontman Robert Schneider as “retro-futuristic super-pop,” the album is the official follow-up to 2007’s New Magnetic Wonder, and the band’s second studio release for Elijah Wood’s Simian Records. The album will be released on April 20 via Yep Roc/Simian/Elephant 6.

Travellers contains sixteen piano-driven tracks, bubbling over with vocoder harmonies and sci-fi sound effects, like 70’s AM radio filtered through a UFO; including the robotic first single “Dance Floor”, the four-on-the-floor dream-scape “Hey Elevator”, the Hall and Oates-tinged “Told You Once”, and the epic, yearning “Dream About The Future,” among many instant hits. The musical theme heard in these songs is strung throughout Travellers: intense pop hooks and electronic sounds, mixed with a pumping, get-up-and-moonwalk beat.

“I wanted to make a futuristic pop record, to reach out to the kids of the future,” Schneider relates. “It is what I imagine their more highly-evolved pop might sound like: shiny soul music with robots and humans singing together, yet informed by the music of our time. So we are sending a pop music message through time, hoping they will decode it and be into it.”

It is the first studio album from The Apples in stereo to feature new drummer John Dufilho, lead singer of Dallas indie rockers The Deathray Davies; and sees Bill Doss (Olivia Tremor Control, Elephant 6) and John Ferguson (Ulysses, Big Fresh), longtime Schneider collaborators, as full-time keyboardists in the band, alongside veteran members John Hill (guitar) and Eric Allen (bass). Original drummer Hilarie Sidney left the band in 2006.

Anyone familiar with The Apples in stereo’s career will know Schneider’s ever-evolving production process is as intricate as the recordings he generates. Engaging the same primary engineering team used to record New Magnetic Wonder, most notably Bryce Goggin (Trout Recording’s vintage recording wizard), as well as many studio-savvy friends and cohorts, the band spent well over a year in the studio recasting their signature pop sounds in chrome-plated futurism, all while adding a dance-driven vibe channeling ELO, Barry Gibb, Wild Honey-era Beach Boys and Off The Wall-era Michael Jackson.

With Travellers in Space and Time, Schneider continues experimenting with his recent invention, the Non-Pythagorean musical scale based on the logarithm, a mathematical function. Schneider is a passionate student of mathematics, and recently composed music based on prime numbers for a play written by world-class mathematician Andrew Granville, performed at the hallowed Institute for Advanced Study (home of Albert Einstein) in Princeton, New Jersey. Travellers includes “C.P.U.,” the first pop song ever to incorporate this novel scale.

In addition, the album features songwriting contributions from all of the other Apples, including “Wings Away” (Bill Doss/John Ferguson), “Next Year At About The Same Time” (Eric Allen), “No Vacation” (John Ferguson/Robert Schneider), “Floating Away” (John Dufilho), and “Dignified Dignitary” (Robert Schneider/Bill Doss/John Hill).

The 2007 hit album, New Magnetic Wonder, spawned late night performances on Conan and Colbert, commercial placements for The Apples‘ music (Pepsi, New Balance, Samsung, and numerous others), invitations to perform at many prestigious festivals and venues (All Tomorrows Parties, Pitchfork, Primavera Sound, R.E.M. Charity Tribute Concert at Carnegie Hall), and a world tour that took the band as far away as Taiwan – not to mention a polished performance of their hit song “Energy” by the contestants on American Idol.

Since then, the band has been increasingly busy, gaining ownership of their spinART Records back catalog and readying the albums for re-release, compiling the best-of #1 Hits Explosion, and releasing Electronic Projects for Musicians, an album of rarities. Schneider also made his children’s music debut with 2009’s Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine (Little Monster Records), which made it to many Year-End Best Of lists; made numerous mathematics convention appearances; released Buddha Electrostorm (Garden Gate Records), an album of lo-fi garage-psych recorded with his brother-in-law Craig Morris (who played and engineered on Travellers) under the name Thee American Revolution; and topped it all off with his featured keynote talk and Australian debut performance at the Big Sound Music Conference, where he was featured alongside many musical luminaries, including noted Brian Wilson collaborator (and one of Schneider’s heroes), Van Dyke Parks… and all of this while hard at work on The Apples‘ most ambitious studio production yet.

Still Flyin’s “Good Thing It’s a Ghost Town Around Here,” from their album Never Gonna Touch the Ground, was recently featured on HBO’s Entourage.  Thanks to David Hugh for the tip.

Little Fyodor, one of the first artists to be released on the Elephant 6 Recording Company label, has a new album out, Peace is Boring.  You can order the CD here, or download it here.  He’s also featured, for the second time, in his own comic strip.

Umbrella Weather, the debut album from Laminated Cat, is out today from Garden Gate Records.  The cover art is by Will Cullen Hart (cat drawing) and Bill Doss (lettering), and the album was engineered by Craig Morris (Thee American Revolution).  Ordering info should be up shortly at the Garden Gate website.  My review is here.

Garden Gate Records is a relatively new record label founded by Craig Morris (Thee American Revolution) and Marci Schneider (wife of Robert Schneider), with a preference toward the psychedelic.  Their first release was Big Fresh’s album B.F.F., and their second will be Laminated Cat’s debut album, Umbrella Weather.  Which gives me, at long last, a reason to write about one of my favorite underground bands, whom I first saw at Athens PopFest back in 2007, delicately submerging a mid-afternoon performance at Little Kings into a dreamy but startling showcase, with impeccable songwriting gifts and a sound that could have emerged from San Francisco in 1968 or ‘69.  Not much later, I received their first version of Umbrella Weather in the mail, a collection of eight demos which confirmed, to my ears, that the band was the real thing.  How strange but fitting that in 2009 the album should resurface on Garden Gate, now filled out to fourteen songs, and further polished to a phosphorescent sheen, with some assistance by Craig Morris as well as Jason NeSmith (Casper & the Cookies), with cover art by Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss (The Olivia Tremor Control), and Robert Schneider calling them “the best young psychedelic band in years.”  Laminated Cat has two principal songwriters, Tanner Smith and AJ Griffin, both of whom provide vocals, guitars, and a wild assortment of other sounds; Tanner’s younger twin brothers Camden and Cooper Smith fill out the band on drums and bass, respectively.  On album opener “Sweet Sixteen” all those sounds collide into something compelling and oddly sinister, as Smith sings, “I turned sweet sixteen today/how my mother disappoints me.”  And after the lyrics have tangled themselves up in imagery which seems to come from the same queasy-surreal universe as the films of the Brothers Quay, or perhaps Neutral Milk Hotel, the words and melody are subsumed beneath a cacophany that ultimately resolves itself into the dreamy “Angel, I am Coming Home,” one of their most splendid songs (featured on last year’s compilation album Build Your Army with Potatoes).  To listen to this is like swimming with the mer-people in Jimi Hendrix’s “1983.”  But they quickly prove they can expand into the heavier (”FYBS,” “Kosmoknot,” and the expansive “Red Devils”), into sparkling pop (”The Driving Song,” “Aquamarine”), even dabbling in funk (”Take Me In and Lock the Door”)…albeit the druggiest funk I’ve ever heard.  If you’re a regular to this website, there’s a good chance this collection will hit your sweet spot. 

Note that upcoming releases from Garden Gate include the long-awaited album by Robert Schneider & Craig Morris’ Thee American Revolution, Buddha Electrostorm (Nov.10); as well as Herald,  a previously-unreleased folk-rock LP from 1972 by one of R. Stevie Moore’s first bands, The Goods; and a compilation album which is slated to include tracks from Circulatory System,  The Apples in Stereo, Bill Doss, Martyn Leaper (The Minders), The Deathray Davies, Elekibass, Supercluster, and more.  Umbrella Weather will be released September 29th.  MP3 below:

Umbrella Weather,

by Laminated Cat
1. Sweet Sixteen
2. Angel, I Am Coming Home
3. FYBS
4. Mother Please
5. Red Devils
6. The Driving Song
7. Kosmoknot
8. Say Goodbye to My Ghost
9. Take Me In and Lock the Door
10. Follow Me Around
11. Girl with No Soul Song
12. Aquamarine
13. Celery Eyes
14. Tea for Tigers