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Media inquiries: alyssa at teamclermont dot com
teamclermont.com
www.familytreerecs.com
"Where the Wild Things" premieres at Pitchfork:
pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/14654-where-the-wild-things/
Video premieres at Vice:
www.vice.com/read/vice-premiere-cy-dunes-where-the-wild-things-are-video
"Move the Room" premieres at Spin:
http://www.spin.com/articles/cy-dune-akron-family-song-move-the-room-no-recognize-ep
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Cy Dune is Seth Olinsky (also of Akron/Family.) Seth was joined along the way by drummer Chris Powell (Need New Body, Icy Demons, Man Man), NYC free jazz drummer Andrew Barker (William Parker, Marshall Allen, Goldsparkle) and bass player Shahzad Ismaily (Sam Amidon, Bonnie Prince Billy, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson) who lent their talents to certain tracks.
No Recognize will be available digitally and on vinyl March 5 on Family Tree Records. Pre-order is available now. Burger Records will release a limited run of 300 hand numbered cassettes, also on March 5. Please note the change in release date from earlier announcements. An LP is due later this year.
To celebrate Cy Dune’s upcoming No Recognize, cans of spray paint were shot over canvases with handguns in the Arizona desert south of Tucson by a group of local musicians, artists, poets, and pedal makers. Plumes of color exploded into the desert air, and onto the canvases.
The day resulted in about 22 paintings. These paintings are for sale on the Family Tree Records online storefront. As a creative alternative to a limited edition 7”, each painting will come with a download code for the EP’s lead single, “Where the Wild Things,” as well as a limited track not available anywhere else. The 12” canvases will be $30, and two sets of large diptychs will be $100 each.
The Cy Dune story starts with a songbook. This particular book had a 100 songs written in 20th century American visionary long hand over five years after leaving home and traveling the world in what some might call the contemporary music scene of the early 21st century, recording and performing with his band Akron/Family and collaborating with Rhys Chatham, Michael Gira, William Parker, Hamid Drake, Keiji Haino and Tatsuya Nakatani. The songs were demoed all that same time with new and old friends in big city and small town apartments, parents’ garages, horse barns, Maine basements, New Jersey Synagogues, old Pennsylvania factories, molding mid-century moderns, Brooklyn basement studios and across the bridge at the midtown Manhattan Sear studio with the old Abbey Road tape machine and the bass player from the Henry Rollins band.
In 2010 the 100 songs were finished, written and demoed. In 2011, he moved to the Sonoran desert to record a primitivist American blues story; an old/new weird American anthology of these songs with only an old acoustic guitar and the very same rebuilt 1/4” tube Ampex reel to reel that Alan Lomax used to record field hollers out of his trunk. Months were spent fine tuning the 100 songs, researching tube and tape saturation, Fahey’s discovery of Skip James and his mystical open D tuning, early Dylan cryptology, the notes between the notes of Leadbelly recordings, Michael Hurley’s Folkways First Songs and re-tuning all guitars to that self same slightly flat key.
But the 100 songs wouldn’t record.
2011 ended and the spark of change finally came as a Christmas gift given by his mother. Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Awed once again by the transformative powers of Rock ‘n’ Roll, frustrated, and fed up, he plugged in his guitar and the songs came alive and ripped themselves into being, bursting out as sheets of guitar shredding sound like explosions written on the wall. Patti Smith’s book begins the year Coltrane died. Cy Dune’s story begins again with the simple act of plugging in his guitar, mimicking the thrust of the 20th century.
The No Recognize EP is a soundtrack to this transformation. His electric guitar story-tellings tap in, steeped with all the mystery of pre-war weird America holler, African pentatonic shamanism, be-bop underground, and Kerouac’s road verse electrified and amplified. The songs blaze like roads north to Chicago and Detroit, like amps falling off cars, the rattling tubes all saturated, sound color and broken speaker blues, sounds of a whole century, like Wayne Coyne says, “touched by the religiousness of Rock ‘n’ Roll”. No Recognize was recorded loud on a few old microphones in Tucson, AZ and in Brooklyn with the help of drummer Andrew Barker (William Parker, Gold Sparkle) and bassist Shazad Ismaily (Sam Amidon, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), then doubled back and blasted through a friends broken PA high on a desert mountain. A Rock ‘n’ Roll Hymnal 100 songs behind and 1000 songs to go.