Dear TUXEDOMOON Fans,
Your dreams will finally come true: a 10- LP box from your favorite band!
A perfect Christmas present for yourself, released on November 13th.
TUXEDOMOON - THE VINYL BOX
To celebrate the band's 38th anniversary, here's is an elaborate, luxurious, bountiful, 10-vinyl artefact.
It contains the band's main 9 studio albums (three of which have never appeared on vinyl before),
and an album entirely consisting of previously-unreleased tracks, entitled "Appendix".
Plus a 28-page 12"-sized book with original notes by the band members -who reminisce about the recording
of these albums- as well all the lyrics & credits, a full colour poster and a single code for downloading
the content of the ten albums: "Half-Mute", "Desire", "Holy Wars", "Ship of Fools", "You", "The Ghost Sonata",
Cabin In The Sky", "Bardo Hotel Soundtrack", "Vapour Trails" and "Appendix"
Only the first 300 copies are numbered
(and available on pre-order from Crammed's online store)
DON'T MISS IT !
AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF TUXEDOMOON
Born in 1977, in the electronic music lab of San Francisco City College, Tuxedomoon have kept rising phoenix-like from their own ashes on more than one occasion, continuing to reinvent themselves and defy classification, and avoiding many of the pitfalls usually associated with success and longevity.
In the late 70s/early 80s, Tuxedomoon played a central part in San Francisco's post-punk golden age and New York's No Wave scene, as documented for example by the "Downtown 81" film, in which they appear alongside Jean Michel Basquiat, Blondie, James Chance, DNA and more. "No Tears", their 2nd single, has remained an electropunk club classic to this day.
The band went on to sign to The Residents' Ralph Records in 1979, and released two seminal albums ("Half Mute" and "Desire") which soon got them overseas exposure, and established them as one of the leading avant-garde pop bands.
Fleeing Reagan's America, Tuxedomoon moved to Europe in the early '80s, and stayed there throughout the decade. Although their ability to crystallize a certain dark and romantic zeitgeist quickly turned them into one of the most influential bands around, their music transcended all genres and included impossibly wide parameters –rock, electronics, minimal music, classical, jazz, Gypsy music and pop were all simultaneously consumed and transmutated into a quasi-prescient blend.
After releasing a string of albums on CramBoy (the imprint they set up with Brussels-based label Crammed Discs), the band stopped recording together in 1988, and the various members pursued solo careers, becoming as disparate geographically as sonically, with Steven Brown living in Mexico, Peter Principle in New York, Blaine Reininger in Greece, and Dutch trumpet player Luc Van Lieshout (who had joined the band in '85) in Brussels.
Tuxedomoon got back together since 2003 to write and record the awesome "Cabin In The Sky", "Bardo Hotel Soundtrack" and "Vapour Trails" albums, which found them in absolute top form. These albums were warmly welcomed, and a wildly eclectic array of references sprang from the pens of reviewers trying to describe Tuxedomoon's music (Charles Ives, Radiohead, Philip Glass, Miles Davis, German electronica, Tom Waits, John Cage, Kurt Weill, Tortoise, Can…). Which confims the fact that Tuxedomoon were never connected to a particular period: they had become '80s cult figures simply because that's the period in which they happened to develop and rise to fame… but the band have always been evolving in their own space, and their music is as relevant and fresh today as it was then.
Alongside The Vinyl Box, this autumn sees the release of "Blue Velvet Revisited", the original soundtrack music written by Tuxedomoon with UK band Cult With No Name for Peter Braatz's documentary about the shooting of David Lynch's classic film.
In the spring of 2016, Tuxedomoon will revisit their debut album "Half-Mute" and perform it on a series of exclusive shows around Europe
© Lucia Baldini