Letters

When I first read Gertrude Stein’s Useful Knowledge, it changed how I looked at words. It might have been one of the first times I thought about performance and what words mean when you say them out loud and don’t just read them on a page. Though perhaps a challenge to read too much of at any given time, her work serves as a constant inspiration for me. A reminder to embrace the absurd, look at the words we use in a different way, and (most of all) to always do what you want and make the art you want to make.

With all that build up, here’s just a little something. A small passing moment.

is my very favorite Carter Family song. And, when America Salutes the Carter Family was first coming together, I showed it to Ariel Birks and we ended up doing a cover of it together. The album just came out and we’re proud to sit alongside such a fabulous line-up. I like Markly’s liner notes of this song: “There are so many fantastic musicians in my neighborhood that I could have easily done this entire project here. Take for instance Joshua James, AKA Letters, and his friend Ariel Birks, whom I ran into while walking to band practice one fine summer day. We walked over to my bandmate Sara’s place where they sat in the dining room, opposite the laundry room, and they cranked out this little number at the dinner table. What a song! And Ariel sings like a bird.”

All the Adventures to See Them I Will was reviewed in the new issue of Performer Magazine that came out today. Not on their website in full quite yet, but can be viewed on the PDF they have up (page 22 if you’re interested). Here’s some of it…

“What’s clear and fruitful from this album is the band’s ability to master a variety of arrangements and sounds. The lo-fi folk suits Letters well, but songs like “Holiday” and Musk of This Ink” share touches of electro-acoustic and gentle experimental noise, bringing out James’ and Wolf’s singing, brewing a storm you get caught in, but can’t help to sway and dance to. Letters are lyrically influenced by poetry: the track “Rachel” is a beautiful, sea shanty song of paralysis and worship. “Rare Beast” closes the record with an electronica beat and muffled lyrics that form a docile ocean of dream-pop ambiance. Like a telegram or that rare personal letter in the mailbox, this band is something to take in, digest and treasure.” –Performer Magazine

Our 2009 collaborative album with If It Ain’t Breakfast Don’t Fix It, Scattered Areas Where a Thousand Follow in Likeness, is now sold out in the physical realm, so we’ve decided to give it away for free on our Bandcamp. I listened back to the first few songs while opening at work this morning and was pleased to find that I still really like this album. So it makes me even happier to say, “yes, please take it. It’s enjoyable.”

Our dear fellow Letter, Danielle Rodeo Warhola, has always said it to be her favorite and got really upset when we sold out of the copies we’d brought on our last tour when we were just a couple shows in.

It got a few really nice reviews when it came out, Foxy Digitalis gave it a 10 out of 10 and said it was like being in a building that’s about to be demolished (which means ‘awesome’ when refering to music, but is actually a very terrifying situation), Fensepost called it brilliance (which was really flattering), and Slug Magazine said that we had the right idea. Those are the ones that I remember in the moment.

In other news, I saw the dear Ms. Kendl Winter today in Olympia, back from seven weeks of tour with The Blackberry Bushes and she said that Mr. If It Ain’t Breakfast Don’t Fix It himself will be back in the Northwest soon. Which absolutely warmed my heart.

“The DIY folk of Letters works almost too well with the wild noise of If It Ain’t Breakfast. The collective has created something outstanding that can only be dubbed lo-fi noise folk… I said it for the last album and I’ll say it again: pure brilliance.” -Fensepost

First off: been posting up some selected ambient works over on our new Soundcloud and on Bandcamp. With more to come. As is to be expected, it won’t all be ambient, but new recordings are coming and will be (almost invariably) free for a good spell.

The news sounds like this: Europe tour 2012 has been called off. Our dear Alexis Wolf is a little too swamped with life in Lyon and we are (of course) totally supportive of her doing what she needs to do. She has a new website for her writer’s life and if you haven’t checked out her latest issue of Ilse Content, get on it!

What we’re doing instead: the Letters + Poppet Feb, 2012 Tour will now be redirected towards the west coast of the United States and we’ll be saying some hellos to our California/Oregon/Washington friends and fans, hitting lots of places we’ve skipped over on the last couple tours. We’re very excited about this. We’re going to make it grand.

We’ll be playing a show at Al’s (1513 Brawne, Olympia) this Friday with Poppet and the Flourescent Radio dj crew. It might be as dance punk-ish/electroclash-ish as you’ve seen Letters. After that, we might slow it down for a bit and start making some more pretty atmospheric sounds for the cold season. So come get your dance on while you can.

So, as part of the Karl Blau 24-hour song relay (where a Karl Blau song is being covered/played every minute of the day, the world over), we recorded this. Originally a wonderfully psychedelic number off the excellent album “96″, we heard some ’80′s punk in the melody line and decided to work off of that. A really amazing thing- very excited we get to be a part of it.

photo by Alex Surber

Back from tour and readjusting to the world. Tomorrow, half of our most current line-up moves to Lyon, France for the next 9 months. Of course, we’re very sad about this, but it’s also spawning some exciting new plans. The most exciting of which being a tour of Europe! In February with the unstoppable Poppet! We’re going to be raising some funds through Kickstarter in the coming months, so keep your eyes out for that. In the meantime, you might find us experimenting with some new line-ups, interesting performances, minimalism, collaborating with some visual artists…time will tell.

On tour we had the immense pleasure of sharing the stage with some of the best musicians we could have possibly imagined. Two of our best friends joined us for parts of the tour, namely: Poppet and Twig Palace, getting the incredible pleasure to perform with both of them in various forms. Some of the others that come to mind off the top of my head are: Barren Nieces, Mariposa, Young Lungs, S.L.F.M., Abusive Consumer, Bears on Parade, Lionhead Bunny, Will Sprott, Neglect, Cat Stalks Bird, Chask’e Lindgren. Incredible performances and all so worth taking some time to check out.

In other news, our new album was reviewed over at Fensepost. And songs from it have been finding their way on to bunches of music blogs, getting some airplay on KEXP, KSPC, and KDVS, all of which has been really nice to see happening.

Our next project is a cassette tape album of all cover songs. I’m really excited about it, we’ve never recorded a cover (or at least never released one, once a long time ago we did record a Diane Cluck cover now that I think about it), but have talked about or started into doing so many. I’ve also never been one to figure out other people’s songs, so it has already been interesting to see that some of my favorite songs just have two chords- how did I not know? Keeping with our trend of pretentious indie rock titles, I have thought about calling it Recontextualization in the Age of Advanced Plagiarism (giving a nod to Karl Blau’s amazing KELP label), but Danielle Warhola will probably talk me out of it and we’ll call it something more sensible like Covers or Songs We Like. We’re also going to be coming up with some fun gifts to give away as part of our Kickstarter project, so I’m sure there’ll be some interesting things being created in the near future.

So, as you can see, much to come. We always love hearing from you. We have a PO Box that’s always open: Letters PO Box 2645 Olympia, Wa 98507. You can email us over at lettersmakesmusic(at)gmail(dot)com and you can say hello on the Facebook, as well.

Words,

Letters