Simian Mobile Disco Release EP, Tour a Ton

If you've peeked over in Forkcast very recently, you've noticed an MP3 for a Simian Mobile Disco song titled "3 Pin Din". It's one of three previously unreleased tracks on the duo's forthcoming self-titled EP, which was released digitally this week and will appear in stores on July 24 via Interscope.

The EP's other unreleased tracks are "Simple" and "State of Things", and they are joined by Attack Decay Sustain Release track "Tits & Acid". ADSR, as previously reported, makes its way to U.S. shores on September 18.

Jameses Ford and Shaw have months and months of tour dates to accompany these releases. Their next show is in Philadelphia on July 6, and they. just. do. not. stop. until December 8 back in England. For the last leg of their tour in the UK, they will support Klaxons. [MORE...]

Prince Announces First First Avenue Show in 20 Years!

Sorry Live Earth, but Prince can't make it. Instead, this Saturday (07/07/07), he'll play three shows in his hometown of Minneapolis.

Now we already reported the first two shows, taking place at Macy's (you know, they sell perfumes, one of which Prince releases that day) and the Target Center, so what's so special about the third show that it warrants its own story?

It's the venue. According to his website, "The official aftershow 4 Prince's Target Center event this Saturday will take place at First Avenue," the club where Prince's Purple Rain performances were shot. And he hasn't played there since March of 1987. Even if he's so tired from his other two shows that day that he just gets up to recite a little poetry, it's still a big deal. In fact, any Prince poetry reading could be an even bigger deal than a concert (not that we're getting our hopes up).

Tickets will go on sale Saturday for the semi-predictable and totally reasonable sum of $31.21 each, and the doors to the club will open immediately following the Target Center show. Flight tickets to Minneapolis can be sent to us at the Pitchfork address listed on the contact page.

As previously reported, Prince will appease the rest of planet Earth with Planet Earth on July 24. He has a show in East Hampton, New York on July 14 and a London residency starting August 1. [MORE...]

Bill Callahan Tours North America, UK, Ireland

Bill Callahan will take to the road with his given name and his new album in tow this summer and fall, as he preaches the gospel of Woke on a Whaleheart to audiences from the UK to Ireland to North America over the course of two months.

The Drag City songwriter begins his trek August 10 in Dublin and ends it October 10 in Seattle. Ex-Sun City Girl Sir Richard Bishop joins the artist formerly known as Smog for most North American dates. [MORE...]

Phosphorescent Signs to Dead Oceans Label, Tours

Though he's still yet to deliver the finished product of his third LP to their lovin' arms, Phosphorescent's one of the first to plunge into the Dead Oceans label fold.

The label company he'll be keeping-- Dirty Projectors, Evangelicals, Bishop Allen, the Explorers Club-- is reason enough for you to give a gander to Matthew Houck and his Phosphorescent on a handful of live dates throughout July. According to his MySpace, Houck is also playing a house show July 25 on the Florida panhandle, but, as my mother always told me, it'd probably help to know a guy before you go knocking on doors. [MORE...]

NYC Spiegeltent Gets Lady Sov, Jose Gonzalez, Johnston
Plus Mobb Deep’s Prodigy, Shout Out Louds, DeVotchKa, O’Death, An Albatross

Lower Manhattan's Spiegeltent-- located at the lovely-I'm-sure Fulton Fish Markets on the East River's Pier 17-- is a beer garden, an art deco dreamworld, and quite the summertime spot for live performances of all stripes. This summer's Spiegeltent schedule has firmed up quite a bit of late, with big-top showcases planned from Lady Sovereign, Daniel Johnston, José González, Mobb Deep's Prodigy, Shout Out Louds, DeVotchKa, O'Death, An Albatross, and Badly Drawn Boy.

The Spiegeltent schedule-- the whole darn thing, as it stands right now-- is available after the jump. [MORE...]

Ladybug Transistor Tour With Starlight Mints, Papercuts

Despite suffering the loss of their beloved drummer San Fadyl earlier this year, the Ladybug Transistor aren't going out like TLC in '02; instead, they're keeping on like TLC in '07, with a full-fledged summer tour in support of their recently-issued Merge album Can't Wait Another Day.

Currently going down in eastern Europe, the tour won't get back to the States before the Transistor get a crack at playing a pair of Russian shows this weekend. They'll also rock that self-congratulatory Team Clermont thing July 25 in Athens, GA along with Starlight Mints, with whom they're sharing a whole bunch of dates. The Mints have a few Ladybug-free gigs coming up as well. [MORE...]

New Pornographers, Roots, Dears Play Rogers Picnic
Also: Bad Brains, Tegan and Sara, Apostle of Hustle

On July 29, the city of Toronto will host the Rogers Picnic festival at Historic Fort York, once the site of a War of 1812 battle.

This marks the first year Rogers Picnic takes place. To kick things off in appropriately rousing fashion, festival organizers have rounded up the New Pornographers, the Roots, Bad Brains, the Dears, Tegan and Sara, Little Brother, Apostle of Hustle, Bedouin Soundclash, and Team Canada DJs. Go Canada!

Calexico Kick Off European Jaunt, Ready Tour-Only CD

Like a dollop of "Southwestern sauce" on the proverbial chalupa of indie rock, Calexico are always giving you a little more than you expect. The atmospheric Arizonian horn-blowers will match their European tour that kicks off tonight with a brand new CD, available only at shows and through the band's website.

Tool Box, the CD in question, features 14 instrumentals and this really cool cover figure wearing what appears to be a welding mask and some manner of aluminum foil suit. The artwork, typically stencil-y, may well be worth the price of admission alone; and, hey, you might also get to see a really cool show out of the whole affair. Sound good? Good. [MORE...]

Flosstradamus Launch Tour, Play Gigs With Kid Sister

Second City partystarters and occasional masher-uppers Flosstradamus are about to turn roughly two-dozen muthas out on a summer tour that'll see them in the U.S., Canada, and Norway. Quite a few of the bills are shared with kitsch duo Chromeo, but you're not obliged to stick around for that. You will, however, want to check out ace fam Kid Sister, who'll link up with Floss for a few dates in the dirty come August. After all, just about wherever they go, she goes.

In other Flosstradamus news, they recently heard an indie song and a hip-hop a cappella they thought would go well together. More details when we get 'em. [MORE...]

Roskilde Diary: Wednesday [Brandon Stosuy]

Photos by Jane Lea

Dirty Boots

Pitchfork is spending the week in Denmark at Roskilde, Northern Europe's largest music festival. The lineup is packed-- from Against Me!, Arcade Fire, and Arctic Monkeys to Beirut, Björk, and Boris through the Who, Wilco, X-Alfonso, and Zyklon with Machine Head, Mastodon, Matmos, and My Chemical Romance nestled somewhere near the middle of the alphabet-- but the first thing you notice are the muddy boots and the people attached to them: there are dirty boots discarded next to trashcans, crusty punks wearing crustier army boots, duck-printed baby boots, teenage girls in increasingly stylish boots increasingly covered in mud. I don't think I've used the word "galoshes" since I was a kid, but I've started keeping a notebook of the amount of times I've mentioned it here in Roskilde (so far, 73).

Noah's Ark

It's been raining off and on for a week. Yesterday a notice was posted at the official Roskilde website asking folks to please leave their cars home-- "the parking areas are flooded." Mix that sort of saturation with tens of thousands of campers stamping through the grounds and it's no wonder folks are tearing off their clothes and partaking in good-spirited mud fights. After the soil washes off, you see the beer... again, lots of it. I was told on-site beer prices have gone down this year, but it remains a tradition (Roskilde started in 1971) for concertgoers to purchase cheaper libations at grocery stores prior to entering and to lug them along into the concert grounds with their sleeping bags and backpacks-- I spotted one girl carrying six or so cases of canned beer; others walk by with hand trucks; some load dozens onto the graffiti-covered train that takes you a stop closer to the grounds. At this point, I've carried no more than two beers at a time.

"Warm-Ups"

The main festival officially begins today but the "warm-ups" started on Sunday at Pavilion Junior-- basically up-and-coming Scandinavian bands like the techy, tongue-in-cheek Norwegian trio Ungdomskulen or off-kilter, CocoRosie-colored chanteuse-pop vocalist As In Rebekkamaria (aka Rebekkamaria, who also performs in Danish/Swedish Glitterhouse crew, Lampshade). By the end of Monday, approximately 45,000 folks had already arrived. No idea where the headcount's at now.



A "Self-Sufficient" Neighborhood

We landed a couple days early to get situated. A depressing aspect of festivals is cutting it too close and never getting to see anything but the festival grounds. As a corrective, we headed twice to Copenhagen, where it was somehow always sunny. Denmark's capital city is a short walk and half-hour train ride from the hotel. Before heading down into the festival mud, we met up with some friends and their kids at Tivoli, a huge, overlapping amusement park, where we rode one of those free-fall things, sucked down ice cream, and drank Big Gulp-sized beers while our friends' kids drove a mini-rollercoaster. Afterward we went to a couple restaurants, wandered the brick streets, noticed that everyone in Copenhagen has a bike that nobody seems to lock when not using, and forgot to check out Christiania, the communal "self-governing" neighborhood in the city (i.e. pot brownie central).

I bring up Christiania because a) we really did forget to stop by, and b) the Roskilde festival has that same "self-governing" feel: It's this separate, enclosed space that's more self-sufficient than any festival I've attended. Basically, it's a very loud carnival: cinema (hey, the Tenacious D movie...), art installations, skate ramps, traveling choral groups, the campground and cooking area, an orange bar that only serves orange-colored drinks, volleyball, swimming, and, of course "a rap battle zone."

As one organizer joked, we went from the family-centered Tivoli park to a hyped-up bunch of muddy teenagers and twentysomethings running naked sprints, guzzling cans of Tuborg and Carlsberg, "staying warm" inside and outside of tents, and drinking orange-colored drinks in that orange bar. Well, time to strap on those galoshes and dive in...

Snoop Dogg Seeks Australian Citizenship
Pimpin' hos and clockin' a grip like his name was Vegemite

As it turns out, Australia-- which, if my sixth grade history still serves, was a British prison colony for some time-- is awfully stringent about who they let in. Back in April, the island nation denied Calvin Cordozar "Snoop Dogg" Broadus, Jr. passage into its borders due to a failure of the nation's requisite "character test." But who, I ask you, is a bigger character than Snoop Dogg?

Not content to merely roll up a fat one, head to Outback Steakhouse, and simply pretend, Snoop's got designs on setting up shop in Australia as a citizen. And, through a new series of clips put on by MTV Australia, his journey from Dogg to Dingo will be documented for all to see.

As for why he's chosen Australia for this confusing flaunting of international law: Snoop claims he's tired of the fast-paced L.A. lifestyle, and believes a move to Australia will allow him to "slow it down [and] enjoy the women." To the untrained eye, Snoop's L.A. lifestyle seems to consist of getting high and making Carson Daly uncomfortable on his own television program, but I guess that's enough to take it out of a Dogg.

No word on whether this is real-- and, if so, what exactly that means-- but we'll let you know if we're still paying attention when something crazy happens.

Slim with the tilted grin's got a mess of tour dates coming at Europe this summer, which makes us question his dedication to the whole Australian thing. Hey, if Snoop wants to hang around on the beach with some ladies and make "meat pie" jokes, we're not gonna stand in his way. Et tu, Australian immigration minister Kevin Andrews? [MORE...]

Silver Jews Work on New LP, Berman Seeks Intern

Photo by Michelle Harris

The last time we heard from Silver Jews was in February, with the premiere of Michael Tully's Jews tour documentary, Silver Jew. Since then, things have been all quiet on the David Berman front, but a recent post on the band's message board by the Jews' songwriter/frontman (as confirmed by Drag City) reveals some of the details surrounding their sixth album, the follow-up to 2005's Tanglewood Numbers:

1) "The band on the record will be the band from the Wilderness Campaign [aka Berman's touring band, we presume. --Ed.]."

2) It will consist of "ten or eleven songs, two word title, name in upper left corner." [What a novel idea.]

3) "I have to record, mix and master it by August 15th, so it can come out in January. I don't know where yet. Somewhere new in Nashville."

Berman also includes a list of the new songs he has, in alphabetical order. Check them below.

Finally, he also includes an item of interest to Nashville-residing die-hards with an administrative bent: "I've been wondering for a long time if I was qualified to have a summer intern. It must depend on interest in the intern community. I have the ability to write a recommendation letter. (Alert: I have no 'connections.' I don't know ANYONE who runs a record label besides the two Dans at Drag City.) So I throw it out there: I am looking for someone who lives in Nashville who can help me with a few different SJ projects, once or twice a week. Being able to type or run a webpage would be very [helpful]. I can't believe I'm typing this but: 'writers and musicians need not apply.' I'm looking for someone on the other side. I've got enough me. I need someone else." [MORE...]

Do you have a news tip for us? Anything crazy happen at a show you attended recently? Do you have inside info on the bands we cover? Is one of your favorite artists (that's not somebody you know personally) releasing a new record you'd like to see covered? You will remain completely anonymous, unless we are given your express permission to reveal your identity. (Please note that publicists, managers, booking agents, and other artist representatives are generally exempt from this rule, but will also be granted anonymity if requested.)