thee silver mt. zion memorial orchestra. thurs march 18

u:mack

thee silver mt. zion memorial orchestra play there first irish show in 5 years this march 18. more details real soon. check out this track from their forthcoming album, its called BURY 3 DYNAMOS:

http://www.tra-la-la-band.com/preview/

John

Excellent. They were amazing the last time, have been gutted every time they play Europe and pass by here. Any word on a venue yet or is that covered by "more details real soon"?

u:mack

John wrote: »

Excellent. They were amazing the last time, have been gutted every time they play Europe and pass by here. Any word on a venue yet or is that covered by "more details real soon"?

I should know tomorrow, just waiting for the band to decide

indiewindy

Lovely, will definitely be at this, wonder what venue as final fantasy is playing whelans that night, hoping for sugar club

mp3guy

Definitely looking forward to this. Though I hope they play more old than new stuff.

AnonoBoy

Tough choice between this and Owen Pallett that night.

Decisions decisions.

garthv

U:Mack.....

How do you do it? I mean seriously...you always book some of the greatest acts out there.

Thanks for this!!!

u:mack

u:mack
Present
thee silver mt zion memorial orchestra
Thursday March 18
Button Factory
Doors 7.30pm
Tickets €16 from City Discs, Road Records, Spindizzy, Sound Cellar, Sentinel & Online at www.tickets.ie/umack

We're delighted to announce the first Irish show in five years by thee silver mt zion memorial orchestra. Founded by Efrim Menuck (who previously co-founded Godspeed You! Black Emperor), they release a new album entitled 'Kollaps Tradixionales' in febuary. Check out this awesome new track, its called BURY 3 DYNAMOS: http://www.tra-la-la-band.com/preview/

ASMZ
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (SMZ) returns with its sixth full-length recording and first since the band’s line-up change of summer 2008. Having shed three members and recruited one (drummer David Payant) the group officially dropped the "Tra-La-La Band’ from its name, played a debut performance as a newly minted quintet at All Tomorrow’s Parties in upstate NY, and embarked on an extensive European tour through the fall of 2008. As Kollaps Tradixionales ably demonstrates, the band has lost none of its raw and frazzled anthemic power and continues to forge bold new ground in its search for a unique hybrid of punk, blues, psych, folk and modern orchestral idioms.

Anchored by the fried electric guitar and plangent voice of band leader Efrim Menuck (who previously co-founded Godspeed You! Black Emperor ) SMZ continues to slide comfortably and unforcedly towards an expansive, loose and blues-inflected balladry – not so much the inexorably riffing blues shuffle of the title track from its previous effort, 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons, but a more languid waltz-time marking an almost smouldering dynamic arc, as heard on the new album’s opening track “There Is A Light” and gorgeous closer “’Piphany Rambler”.

Needless to say, the slow burn with SMZ, whatever the blues influence these days, bears little reference to typical notions of musical seduction, relaxation, or hip-swinging satisfaction. What smoulders here is much more precarious and anxious, driven by some of this decade’s more devastating lyrical conjurings – of the universal outsider and the thematics of 21st century western psychic oppression. As the lyrics to “There Is A Light” attest, these are no simple paens to the human spirit, but songs of complex, desperate and thorny hope. The words to this song (and so many others too often poorly understood in the SMZ cannon) should at least give the lie to the oft-repeated charge that Menuck is some sort of miserablist or glib pessimist. This time around, they are also legibly printed for all to see and read in the accompanying insert.

With Efrim now the lone guitarist, his shattered oscillating tone and staggered snarling leads collide against one another on tape, framed by a swirling widescreen backdrop of dual violins, courtesy Sophie Trudeau and Jessica Moss. Their playing is in ways more classically orchestral than ever in many places on Kollaps Tradixionales, serving up arpeggiated runs and modernist strokes that counterbalance and destabilize the more conventional progressions at the core of any given song or movement. Thierry Amar’s upright bass work as always plays a similar role, fluidly moving from harmonic anchor to counterpoint to adventurous extrapolation, displaying this player’s fluency and alliance with free jazz, improv and out music. The way all these strings push and pull, with their own multiplicity of influences, against those punk rock ‘lektrik guitars has long been one of SMZ’s crucial and inimitable strengths. It is on fine display in many exciting new
guises on the new album, and the band’s freshest member, dummer David Payant, does a wonderful job playing into and off of this heady brew.

And of course there is plenty going on here that ain’t no blues at all, particularly the two middle sides of this four-sided album. “Metal Bird”, as it has been known to fans from set lists over the past couple of years, takes up Side Two (or tracks 2 +3 on the CD) and the two sections now bear titles that together spell out the entire first enigmatic line of the song. This has been a massive crowd favourite in concert in recent years, careening through a throbbing 7/4 template of intertwined ascending and descending lines, coalescing into unison melodies and pumping breakdowns. The sonic references are abundant, ranging from afrobeat to bouzouki music to hard bop to punk rock – culminating in the memorable refrain “dance you mother****ers”. The three phases of the album’s ‘title track’ on Side Three (with their variant spellings and parenthetical modifiers) are indeed ‘traditionals’ of a sort, playing on tropes of American and
Anglo-Saxon folk, marching song, sea shanty and hymnal. Together they make for perhaps the most overtly enchanting (“Kollapz”), tender (“Collapse”) and terrifyingly rapturous (“Kollaps”) music on the record.

Kollaps Tradixionales is available on CD in a custom gatefold paperboard jacket with lyric sheet insert, and on double 180g 10" vinyl in a deluxe package that includes a CD copy of the album, a special 16-page 7″×9″ perfect bound art book of found image collages by Efrim Menuck and filmmaker/photographer Jem Cohen with a foil-embossed cover, and a limited edition silkscreen poster. All papers and boards used in the packaging for both formats are 100% recycled. The album is also available digitally.

Thanks for listening.


a silver mt. zion was born in 1999. thierry (contrebasse), sophie (violin), efrim (piano), mark (electric bass). we played our first show at the constellation loft. efrim wrote the music in pencil in the pages of a dollar store notation book=a failed experiment in self-taught music theory that did not stick. later on, we recorded those songs onto 1/2-inch 8-track at thee mighty hotel2tango. mark moves to england and aidan plays some drums. wanda was dying, and we made the record for her. efrim sings on a song that he wrote on a schoolbus in the middle of a clearcut north of thunder bay when godspeed was still broke. while designing the LP’s insert card, we change our name to “thee silver mt. zion memorial orchestra & tra-la-la band”.

a couple of years later and we book our first tour. european winter.
we add three new members= beckie (cello), ian (guitar), jessica (violin). spend three weeks rehearsing, a pair of local shows, and then we get on an aeroplane. 5 weeks of playing quietly to drunks, and a bad digital piano. live-sound by german paul. we wrote “the triumph of our tired eyes” on the road. came back home and recorded our second LP straight away. mixed it slowly, before and after the riots in quebec city, and named it “born into trouble as the sparks fly upwards”. hardly any piano this time, but a whole lot of bowed strings and very many noisy guitars.

a year and a bit later. we write a bunch of songs in our jamspace and record our third LP. “this is our punk-rock, thee rusted satellites gather and sing”. the neighbourhood’s changing, and nobody’s laughing at america’s president yet. aidan plays some drums again, and we hustle up an amateur choir. we decide to tour again, but loud this time. scott from black ox orkestar joins us on drums and guitar. we set up in a semi-circle and tear each other’s heads off. also, we start group-singing together. first show with this lineup is at clinton’s in toronto. a handful of shows during canadian winter and then back over the ocean again. nick does our live-sound but then disappears, so radwan takes the reins.

we tour steadily for the next few years, and record “horses in the sky”. the world, as always, seems totally ****ed. we record one of the tunes around a campfire in the laurentians. emma the dog spends the night staring balefully into the darkness as the embers fade. we tour north america proper for the first time. colorado is a lowpoint, as is saskatoon.

somewhere in the middle of all that noise, scott leaves to be an american again. eric from hanged up takes his place. more tours, more highways. we record “13 blues for thirteen moons”, the first time we make a record of songs that we’ve played live forever. pitchfork implies that we’re terrorists and we license a song to the abc television network. more touring and then beckie, eric and ian leave the band. a summer of regret, and we drop the “tra-la-la band” from our name. dave becomes the new drummer, and efrim is the lonely guitar. we tour europe again and play many places that we’ve never been to before. the global economy collapses while we play latvia. tristan is the new sound-dude. poland is heavy.

we record “kollaps tradixionales” in the summer of 2009. jessica and efrim have a baby. the new record’s got songs that we wrote as the tra-la-la band, and a couple of new ones too. touring again, and we’re ten years old. in our own country we’re pretty much invisible.

we believe in what we do, and move forward slowly. we’re lucky and we know it. we earn an honest living, though it gets harder all the time.

see you on the road…

silver_surfer

Finally got my ticket for this, can't wait. The new album is a cracker!

blubloblu

I'm looking forward to this.