The Underground of Happiness

One of the most spellbinding shows I’ve been to in the last few years was the Irish debut in January 2012 of A Winged Victory For The Sullen in support of the release of their self-titled first album. I wrote some words on the gig at the time, it really was pretty monumental. In fact, hearing that music live in the presence of another 100 people or so was bordering on emotional. http://www.theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.ie/2012/01/winged-victory-for-sullen-half-moon.html So the second album by Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie is quite an event for me. And it doesn’t disappoint. I’m afraid words like grandeur and majesty will have to do once again to describe this slowly shifting maelstrom of strings, piano and ambient hum. And as with the first album, despite (maybe because of?) the poise of the music, the restraint, there’s still something deeply romantic about it. What does that mean? Well, it seems to connote some vague sense of human yearning, something primal...

A pleasingly mixed bag this week, beginning with a beautiful kosmische cut from the new Eat Lights Become Lights album, Into forever , plus a forerunner in the shape of classic Harmonia from 1974. Mark Linkous' 4th anniversary is around now, good/poignant to hear a Sparklehorse memory from the 90s. And with a new AWVFTS album due soon, a track from their 2011 s/t debut, an album dedicated to Linkous, with whom Adam Wiltzie played as part of the Sparklehorse touring band. Some nice exotica around the middle of the show - new single from Benjamin Schoos with Laetitia Sadier (Euro flavour), Eden Ahbez from 1960 (west coast US hippie branch), Ellis Island Sound (motorik wing) and more great Italian soundtrack from Nino Oliveiro and the late Riz Ortolani . Then Vertical Scratchers channelling The Kinks. And Sabina (below), my new fave female singer - part Marlene Dietrich, part Nico, part Dada, all parts intoxicating. Mar 18 2014 w/ ELBL,Harmonia,AWVFTS, Sparklehorse,Kinks...

A Winged Victory for the Sullen played in Cork during the week - part of their still-proceeding European tour - a gig I'd been looking forward to with great anticipation for quite a while. If you've never heard the name before, there's some notes on the album on this link. http://www.theundergroundofhappiness.blogspot.com/2011/09/winged-victory-for-sullen-winged.html The gig turned out to be a memorable experience, one that will stay with me for some time, a bright, shining highlight of the last 12 months of music (which have been pretty memorable all round). Here's a review I wrote for Cork-based webzine Noise , which is reprinted in full from this link, with kind permission. http://wearenoise.com/index.php/2012/01/a-winged-victory-for-the-sullen-half-moon-theatre-cork-jan-18th-2012/ The Half Moon Theatre (the radical wing of Cork Opera House ) moonlights as an arthouse cinema these days, so no venue could be more appropriate, I thought, to house the first I...

We were talking last month about a new album due out on Erased Tapes , the self-titled debut from A Winged Victory for the Sullen , the collaboration between Stars of the Lid founder Adam Wiltzie and L.A. pianist Dustin O'Halloran . That's a band name which could go either way, ambitious or pompous, depending on the content of the music. You can test the question now by listening to it in full on this link. A Winged Victory For The Sullen (EXCLUSIVE FULL ALBUM STREAM) by erasedtapes You'll notice early on that it's completely instrumental and conducted at a moderate to slow pace. I think it's a monumental piece of work, personally. It feels like it has the power to divide the world between the time before you heard it, and the time since. There's a kind of floating, unearthly beauty about it. Starting immediately with the plangent piano chords of We played some open chords and rejoiced... . And the strings with ambient soundscape melancholia of Requi...

As a follow up to the recent news about the new album by A Winged Victory for the Sullen on Erased Tapes , here's a video teaser for the album just released. It features footage from a recording session at the DDR Studios in Berlin , no less. A Winged Victory For The Sullen – DDR Studios Trailer from Erased Tapes on Vimeo . And with a little bit of digging, it turns out that music is taken from the second track to be released from the upcoming album. It's called Requiem for the Static King Part One . Listen to it in full here. A Winged Victory For The Sullen - Requiem For The Static King Part One by erasedtapes Seriously, on the basis of just two tracks, this album is shaping up to be one of the highlights of the year.

We always look forward to e-mails from Erased Tapes here at UOH HQ, but a particularly nice one arrived today. Have a listen here while reading below - rather than make up a load of other stuff, I've just copied the very well written press release. It makes more sense anyway, because there's a bit of a backstory, which you'll notice includes the late Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) , as well as Peter Broderick , two of the people we love most in music. A Winged Victory For The Sullen – Steep Hills Of Vicodin Tears by erasedtapes CONTENT: ‘ A Winged Victory For The Sullen’ is the first installment of the new collaboration between Stars Of The Lid founder Adam Wiltzie and L.A. composer Dustin O’Halloran . The duo agreed to leave the comfort zone of their home studios and develop the recordings with the help of large acoustic spaces, hunting down a selection of 9ft grand pianos that had the ability to deliver extreme sonic low end. Other traditional instrumentation was...