Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Unknown Mortal Orchestra first dropped into the world in late 2010 as a bandcamp account carrying a single called ‘Ffunny Ffrends’.

‘Ffunny Ffrends’ was everything you imagined it might be – alien beatnik pop music that echoed 60s psychedelia and krautrock minimalism with just a hint of gentle weirdness that suggested its roots might equally lie in the verdant indie of the equally distant New Zealand scene.

Ruban Nielson is a New Zealand native who had transplanted to Portland, Oregon with his band Mint Chicks. UMO was a project conceived as Ruban’s escape hatch to a new musical dimension where his vision of junkshop record collector pop could be realized in a sound that recalled Captain Beefheart, Sly Stone and RZA jamming on some kids TV theme too dark to ever be broadcast.

Out of the home studio, Ruban was joined by local Portland producer Jake Portrait on bass and teenage prodigy Julien Ehrlich on drums. They have been on the road all year, sleeping in ditches and running drunkenly from venues when needs be, curling ears and turning heads with their intoxicating sound all the way.

The eponymous UMO debut album is released June 21st on Fat Possum. Its probably something you should listen to.

Doldrums

A hypnotic mixture of beat-laden trance, sensuous pop, sample collage and noise experimentalism, Doldrums come to us by way of Toronto, with numerous cult favorite releases, including a split with Portishead on XL, three 7" records on We Are Busy Bodies, and a VHS split with Parrot Talk.

DIIV is the nom-de-plume of Z. Cole Smith, musical provocateur and front-man of an atmospheric and autumnally-charged new Brooklyn four-piece. Recently inked to the uber-reliable Captured Tracks imprint, DIIV created instant vibrations in the blog-world with their impressionistic debut Sometime; finding it's way onto the esteemed pages of Pitchfork and Altered Zones a mere matter of weeks after the group's formation.

Enlisting the aid of NYC indie-scene-luminary, Devin Ruben Perez, former Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt, and Mr. Smith's childhood friend Andrew Bailey, DIVE craft a sound that is at once familial and frost-bitten. Indebted to classic kraut, dreamy Creation-records psychedelia, and the primitive-crunch of late-80's Seattle, the band walk a divisive yet perfectly fused patch of classic-underground influence.

One part THC and two parts MDMA; the first offering from DIIV chemically fuses the reminiscent with the half-remembered building a musical world out of old-air and new breeze. These are songs that remind us of love in all it's earthly perfections and perversions.

A lot of DIIV's magnetism was birthed in the process Mr. Smith went through to discover these initial compositions. After returning from a US tour with Beach Fossils, Cole made a bold creative choice, settling into the window-facing corner of a painter's studio in Bushwick, sans running water, holing up to craft his music.

In this AC-less wooden room, throughout the thick of the summer, Cole surrounded himself with cassettes and LP's, the likes of Lucinda Williams, Arthur Russell, Faust, Nirvana, and Jandek; writings of N. Scott Momaday, James Welsh, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and James Baldwin; and dreams of aliens, affection, spirits, and the distant natural world (as he imagined it from his window facing the Morgan L train).

The resulting music is as cavernous as it is enveloping, asking you to get lost in it's tangles in an era that demands your attention be focused into 140 characters.

"Sometime" hit stores on October 11th with a second single to follow November 29, culminating in an early March EP release.

$12.00

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Johnny Brenda's

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Unknown Mortal Orchestra with Doldrums, DIIV

Monday, June 11 · Doors 8:00PM / Show 9:00PM at Johnny Brenda's