In January this year Shearwater played a 3-hour epic concert with longtime friends and collaborators at Austin’s Central Presbyterian Church. The concert was a presentation of their Island Arc trilogy: Palo Santo, Rook, and The Golden Archipelago. They have now released a live album featuring excerpts which is available via bandcamp. You can listen in full to it below.
Frontman, Jonathan Meiburg, has also released an exqusite EP titled Why I Love My Home (songs for Charles Burchfield), also available through bandcamp:
I was invited to perform at the opening of the Whitney Museum’s exhibit “Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield” last year. I’d never heard of Burchfield before, but loved the whimsy, darkness, and grandeur of his giant watercolors, and wrote this pair of songs as an attempt to evoke some of his paintings in sound, since Burchfield often tried to depict sounds in his paintings. At the performance, I was joined by Andy Stack of Wye Oak, who set his drums aside and instead played keyboard, melodica, and a variety of sampled insect and frog songs from Burchfield’s beloved Ohio. These songs will be issued on vinyl as part of Graveface Records’ charity singles series in 2012.
In other Shearwater news the band have left their label Matador and signed to Seattle’s Sub Pop records. They begin work on a new album in the next couple of weeks which is expected to be released next year.
plus they report on their site that they have been busy outside Shearwater:
Thor’s been touring with Michael Gira’s reformed Swans, and is about to release a new instrumental album, Coy/Thor, and a thick book of terrifying/hilarious drawings, A Post-Apocalyptic Tale of Friendship, on Austin’s Monofonus Press. Kimberly’s new play, “Miss Tibet”, will be read at Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco on May 16th and 17th. And JM’s been guest-starring, playing piano and wurlitzer on Bill Callahan’s new Apocalypse and lending some vocals to Okkervil River’s I Am Very Far
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Video:
Shot in the house that Thor built, this short film features the eclectic bunch of characters the make up folk band, Shearwater.
Other Tracks:
MP3: Black Eyes
MP3: Castaways
More FRUK Shearwater Articles here