First Review is In!

It's official. The first review is in for "Throw Down Your Hammer and Sing". My man, Massimo Ricci has thrown some especially lovely verbiage at this release in his blog, Touching Extremes. If you haven't become addicted to this site, you will. I have dreams of making t-shirts with his descriptions of me over the years, my favorite being "exquisitely hostile", although "grey eminence of incompatible trumpeting" will definitely need to be silkscreened on something.



Monday, 16 February 2009

NATE WOOLEY / FRED LONBERG-HOLM / JASON ROEBKE - Throw Down Your Hammer And Sing
Porter

Currently (and luckily) in a period of hyperactivity, Nate Wooley - the grey eminence of incompatible trumpeting - holds to his painstaking search for marketable lost causes in this, a disobedient trio with the gruesomely attractive cello-cum-electronics of Fred Lonberg-Holm and the humdrum-killing infection of bassist Jason Roebke. The comrades need no preamble to start stinging the ears in “Tacones Altos”, where the comparative oppositeness of registers becomes a pretext for cantankerous macerations of common sense, achieved by oscillating between the extremes of timbres with intolerant know-how. “Sans Aluminumius” (sic) is inaugurated by a fantastic series of raggedly dirty glissandos, then proceeds to mock the phobia of dissonance typical of formulaic improvisation by blowing the remnants of tone all around the place in a quest for sheer disreputableness, malevolent oxidation corroding the strings in an unprompted exhibition of low-budget anarchism.“Southern Ends Of The Earth” is a meeting of Webern aficionados whose incorruptibility is tested by an undesired guest trying to sneak smoothly blown intimidations in the existing conversation; yet, at one point, the music sounds like psyched-out frogs commenting the insane practices of a Alfred Hitchcock-loving jazzbo. “Saint Mary” begins with micro-crickets and misbegotten parsimony, the squeaking qualities of the wood and the cunning behavior of the three exploiters at the basis of a surreptitious degeneration of instrumental configuration ending in friction-and-howl proficiency. The album is completed, in dilapidated glory, with “Anywhere, Anyplace At All”: drops of wretched electronics underlining an ungovernable sonic gossip, kind of a soundtrack for the attempted larceny in a depressing hole already visited a hundred times by other thieves. Nothing left to steal, those previous missives didn’t tell the truth, the song is over.


Also, there will be an interview in LA's All About Jazz about the recording in the March issue, so check that out....and of course the release in March, so go to www.porterrecords.com and reserve your copy now!

New Trio CD on Porter Records March 17!

"Throw Down Your Hammer and Sing" on Porter Records comes out on March 17th. This is the debut disc of a new group featuring Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello and electronics and Jason Roebke on bass. I first played with Fred and Jason as a unit at the Umbrella Festival in Chicago in 2006. It was during my days of willy-nilly promotion (not that those are completely over) and I made a proposal to Elastic Arts to do something with local musicians for the festival. If you don't know why I picked Fred and Jason, then you probably haven't heard them, or you only like music that you can have hot sex to. They are two of the most creative, quickest thinking and organic musicians I have ever worked with.

We went into BelAir Studios with Todd Carter of TV Pow in February of 2007. The group has a raw economy that was initially uncomfortable for me. I think it is very intimate and human improvisation. Even Fred's electronics have a certain detached warmth to them. I am incredibly proud of this recording and am excited about Porter Records' decision to release the results of, what I hope will be a long association and Sarah Spears contributing a beautiful photo for the front cover.

The group will be on a short East Coast tour in the fall and please feel free to contact me at nate@natewooley.com or go to http://www.porterrecords.com/ for copies of the disc after they are released on 3/17.

More news soon:

There will be an upcoming interview in Dan Warburton's Paris Transatlantic on February 25th

The Seven Storey Mountain featuring Paul Lytton and David Grubbs will be released on Important Records June 23rd.

Also, look out for Crackleknob (Mary Halvorson and Reuben Radding and I) on HatHut Records at the end of April!