Mikel Rouse To Release Double CD: Boost|False Doors

Composer, filmmaker, director and solo performer Mikel Rouse announces the May 1, 2012 release of his first double album, Boost|False Doors (Exit Music 1015-1016), through iTunes and all major retailers. Boost|False Doors will be available via iTunes, Amazon, Bandcamp, CD Baby, CD Connection and CD Universe and on disc through All Major Retail Stores and through Exit Music Recordings on May 1. Both CDs will be available for Pre-Order from iTunes on April 15 (to commemorate the Hedge Fund theme of Boost). “False Doors has been described as my Buddhist record, probably because of an impression of acceptance that pervades the recording,” explains Rouse. “And Boost was about the anticipation of a loss of love through the metaphor of hedge funds and banking. The recordings are a year apart, but somehow, they seemed to become bookends, so I thought I’d release them together.” Rouse’s musical and theatrical repertoire has its roots in the high art-meets-popular culture, mix-and-match aesthetic of the early ‘80s downtown Manhattan music and art scene from which he emerged. As the Toronto Globe and Mail puts it, Rouse’s music has brought “comparisons to Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and occasionally Talking Heads, though Rouse's love of complex rhythmic patterns far exceeds them all.” And Rouse has been credited with anticipating the orchestrated pop music of Postclassical 30 years before the term was coined. As the New York Times noted in 2010: “If Mr. Rouse had built his career in a different era, he might be playing these songs to indie-rock fans alongside bands like Dirty Projectors or an earlier Sufjan Stevens.” But music is just a part of what he does: His pieces also build a hypnotic effect through their non-narrative approach and the use of surreal film images. The Los Angeles Times notes, “Indeed, what makes Rouse's music so fascinating is that it completely merges speech and song into a rich overlay of textures. The songs have a lush pop music texture (some have noticed a seeming Rouse influence on Beck). The melodies are immediate but complexly structured like poetry; his beautiful lyrics are highly musical in tone and rhythm.” And after the premiere of Rouse’s multimedia opera, The End of Cinematics, The New York Times reported, “Sometimes built on heavy, repetitive beats, and sometimes couched in Beatle-esque psychedelia, the songs are vivid, pleasingly visceral and often engagingly harmonized, with amusingly off-kilter lyrics.” Rouse is perhaps best known for his modern media trilogy: Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland and The End Of Cinematics, presented for the first time in repertory in 2008 at the Luminato Festival in Toronto. Praising part one, the Washington Post wrote “There is no standard vocabulary adequate to describe Failing Kansas…for full appreciation, it should be seen more than once.” Of part two, Dennis Cleveland, Daily Variety wrote “highly sophisticated, using imaginative harmonies, contrapuntal techniques (even fugue!), complex overlays of rhythm and Minimalist phasing, rap and hip-hop. It is a musical language substantial enough to make statements, direct enough to make theater.” Dennis Cleveland began its life with a sold-out run at tiny New York City avant-garde venue the Kitchen, where theatre-goers had to turn to scalpers to nab hard-to-come-by tickets, and returned to Manhattan years later in a more full-blown form, for a critically-acclaimed engagement at Lincoln Center. Village Voice critic Kyle Gann called it “the most exciting and innovative opera since Einstein on the Beach.” And the Toronto Star said of The End Of Cinematics: “If the job of an artist is to upset expectations, stimulate the viewers’ imaginations, critique the corporate driven culture and expand the possibilities of any given genre, then Mikel Rouse is at the top of his league.” The End of Cinematics was inspired by two essays –“The Decay of Cinema” and “A Century of Cinema” – written by Susan Sontag. It explores the domination of film by corporations and commercial interests, and was premiered at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana and subsequently performed in Chapel Hill, New York, Miami, and Liverpool. In 2006, Rouse’s International Cloud Atlas was commissioned by The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the John Cage Trust and Betty Freeman, and premiered at The Joyce Theater in New York. The piece was scored for multiple iPods set to “shuffle” so that each audience member had a different realization of the score. International Cloud Atlas was released exclusively on iTunes and was available for download prior to the premiere. In 2010, the New York Pubic Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center announced the acquisition of Rouse’s archive including analog recordings, films, manuscripts and correspondence. Also in 2010, Rouse presented the New York premiere of Gravity Radio at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. For full bio and more info on Mikel Rouse, please visit www.mikelrouse.com. Email: email@mikelrouse.com

The Two Sides Of Jefferson Thomas

By Shelley Rosen After spending most of 2008 and 2009 slogging it out in his van supporting his "Western Front" release, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jefferson Thomas was burned out, and found himself taking a self-described “working vacation” by lending his talents to other artists. “I guess my name got around a little. Dave Diedrich, Matthew Foster-Moore, and a few others heard the work I’d done on my own releases and hired me, and suddenly I was a ‘producer’. I wasn’t exactly comfortable with that title at first, but after spending a year and a half playing anywhere and everywhere, toting your own rock day after day, you get sick of the sound of your own name. This was a great diversion, and totally rejuvenating. It got me excited about making music again, and it’s actually more challenging not being the boss.” Throughout 2010 and into 2011, while hard at work helping others shape their visions, Thomas kept writing. With the pressure on someone else to unleash their own masterpieces, he could relax on his own material, creating for creation’s sake, without a deadline. One day, he was surprised to find that he’d gradually cranked out over twenty new tunes that were keepers. It was Diedrich who, upon hearing that, first suggested a double-release. No one was more dubious of such a heady idea than Thomas himself. “I said ‘I can’t do that!’ You figure only huge household names can get away with something as presumptuous and arrogant as a double-record. Then I thought, well, that’s because those folks are usually the only ones who can afford to do it, but I have more than enough music, and I can afford to do it. And hell, I am presumptuous and arrogant! (laughs). So then it became a question of how to go about it, and how to position it. What approach makes the most sense? What’s the angle?” The “angle” turned out to be a pragmatic solution to the one nagging problem; all the songs didn’t fit together, but they did seem to fall easily into two distinct camps. “I had some rootsy and twangy stuff which was a lot of fun, and then I had a bunch of darker stuff that rocked harder. They weren’t radically different, like Gregorian chant vs. Goth-polka or whatever, but there were definitely two clearly-defined houses, and each song’s impact was ultimately better served by having it live in the right one.” As a joke, and in deference to his favorite habit of browsing through his father’s classic vinyl collection, he began using “Side One” and “Side Two” as working titles for the two groups of material. “I fully intended to come up with actual titles for each one, but as the work progressed, two distinct lyrical moods also emerged . It was like side one and side two of me. I decided we should make them look exactly the same, like a collector’s set, but in different colors; red and black, like a roulette table. Someone at one point suggested I call them ‘The Red Album’ and ‘The Black Album,’ which sounded incredibly pompous to me. Yeah, right. When you outsell the Beatles and Metallica someday, you can do that.” "Side One" is loose, boozy roots-rock and alt.country. Its songs feature characters straight out of a Bukowski barroom. "Side Two" is the more ambitious of the two, musically and production-wise, with moody string arrangements here and there and a few cinematic cross-fades. The characters in these songs are caught in the very real recent American landscape of crippling economic woes and the bleak aftermath, and they don’t really ever make it out. Some kill, some die, some run drugs and guns, and the ones left standing avoid the mirror in the morning. Thomas laughs when he sums it up. “I guess the first one is about my demons. The second one is about your demons.” The two records will be released as separate entities about three months apart; Side One debuted in early January, and Side Two hits the street in April. A combined twin-disc version bundled with exclusive content (videos, bonus tracks, etc) will be available late in the year. Thomas will tour extensively off them, with dates in the U.S. through the late spring and summer and overseas legs in the fall and winter. “Well, it’s a double-dose of new music to push, so it’s not like we’ll be taking the winter off to go hibernate in the studio and come out with something new, like we usually do. Damn, what have I done?!” Information is available at the artist’s website: www.jeffersonthomas.com