Owen Pallett - Heartland

05-14 Denver, CO - Larimer Lounge

o my calendar has been marked~!

tempted to drive up to austin 4 that show

I'll be at the Denver show.

no britisher show? :(

Just finished our EU tour, we did London, Manchester, Birmingham and Cardiff two weeks ago. Sad we missed you. It was a good tour, we played a fun set at Inferno Festival in Oslo, between Atilla Csihar and Jarboe. (My booking agent likes to pretend we're a metal band and we like going along with it.)

BTW if there are any people from Milwaukee up in this bitch, come down to Turner Hall tonight, we are hilariously undersold.

oh man i never knew/had any money. anyway, cracking album dude.

my gf and i went in london! you were dope as usual

what're you doing for the summer owen? you in america? available to play?

Owen, great show in Chicago the other night! Loved the "Fantasy" cover.

04-20 Boston, MA - Institute of Contemporary Art

O_O

saw Deerhunter at this venue in 2007. amazing show. venue is right on the water. i should go to this.

boo, I'm supposed to be at a completely different event that night

owen why do you hate providence

wait Fantasy as in Mariah's Fantasy?

Yeah, he did that one in London too. At least at the (excellent) Koko show, don't know about the Union Chapel one which I sadly missed.

That sounds like something I need to hear. Is it on the internet or will it be a future bside?

Ha, I don't really know "Fantasy" at all and so I was like "All right, Tom Tom Club cover!" and then "oh, he wrote his own lyrics...?" and then "oh, I think someone in the '90s sampled Tom Tom Club! Could this be ... Mariah??"

btw owen i think you have 'made it'

http://i39.tinypic.com/2ptpdtl.jpg

lolz at drowny firefox skin

owen was an answer in this week's av club crossword, that's fucking making it.

Ha, who was the constructor?

francis heaney, but i wouldn't be surprised if tausig slipped that one in

owen what do you think of active child?

Time to stuff the ballot box (that is how it works, right?):

The Short List of 10 Canadian albums selected as nominees for the fifth annual Polaris Music Prize were announced today. The 10 records will vie for the annual $20,000 award, presented by Sirius Satellite Radio.

In alphabetical order, they are:

The Besnard Lakes – The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
(Montréal, QC)

Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
(Toronto, ON)

Caribou – Swim
(Dundas, ON)

Karkwa - Les Chemins De Verre
(Montréal, QC)

Dan Mangan – Nice, Nice, Very Nice
(Vancouver, BC)

Owen Pallett – Heartland
(Toronto, ON)

Radio Radio – Belmundo Regal
(Grosse Coque, NS, Moncton, NB, Pointe-à-l'église, NS)

The Sadies – Darker Circles
(Toronto, ON)

Shad – TSOL
(London, ON)

Tegan And Sara – Sainthood
(Vancouver, BC & Montréal, QC)

Owen and Dan Snaith need to sort out a rota so they release records in adjacent years.

Owen in a walk.

Great show on Canada Day! The album has not been leaving my car's CD player.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/12/magazine/14actors.html
also a reminder to myself to likely include this in my top ten albums

!

$

Wow... completely surprised by the magazine that just came in my editorial-mail and landed on my desk, from the North Netherlands Orchestra. They are going to perform Heartland with Owen Pallett in its entirety in November here! Didn't see this one coming, fantastic!

Cool!

I know, I'm psyched! And with 17 euros per ticket a really fair price too (normally the NNO orchestra tickets cost way more).

Seeing him do this with the Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican next week. Can't wait!

excellent! I'm so jealous of y'all — this was easily my favorite non-Lil B release of 2010, and I can only imagine how incredible it would sound in that setting & orchestration

If it wasn't for work commitments and an expanding black hole in my bank account I would be at the Barbican. What an album. That sounds a dream gig.

Team jealous!

Just saw this with Britten Sinfonia. Sounded absolutely lush.

Except for the songs he played on the Nord. They just sounded like The Knife. ;-)

Can't believe I only just discovered this album. Absolutely incredible.

it's an album I settle into like a great big book

This is really OTM.

oh K you were there as well! Did you stick out the full 6+ hours? (I ended up leaving during Richter because i've seen him before and don't find his stuff all that engaging. plus it was 12.15 and i needed to get up in the morning)

I hadn't heard the record before but that was really lovely, I am a definite convert.

did you have middle aged classical music fans who looked a bit annoyed during Owen's set? there was a couple near me who sat with their arms crossed all the way through.... like grumpy toddlers but older.

I thought the whole night was great though (especially so for a 6hr+ bill)

argh why did i miss this

fuck!

haha amazing-- we were in the cheap seats (you know when that woman at the end was like 'the people in the balcony are clearly enjoying the view'? that was us, not being arsed to move down to the stalls) so sitting around us were pretty much just the kids, trying not to chair-dance too obviously. i have never seen so many t-shirts in a a Barbican audience.

it really was a great night, such a ridiculous amount of music! double sextet was just astonishing (i found clogs too twee tbh but, you know, life's rich tapestry and all that.)

No, sorry, I did not make it the full 8 hour Steve Reich they-shoot-minimalist-composers-don't-they marathon.

Left about 3 songs into Clogs due to train fear and gong fear. (3 gongs? Really? You need 3 gongs?) It was very odd because I seemed to be sat in a gaggle of parents of the children's choir who kept clucking about it "being far too late on a school night!" That was a bit of a downer for me, because it was a bit sullying of my enjoyment to be surrounded by uptight classical music stage dads. (I seriously did not know that there was so much politics surrounding the children's choir scene in London, but apparently it's a snake pit, with choir leaders getting in huffs and seceding from one another's groups. Shocking.) I did actually have to stick my fist in my mouth to stop from laughing aloud when the classic stage dads tutted about Owen's set "But we can't hear the *words*! What's the point of music if you can't hear the words?"

(I dunno about Barbican audiences because the last 2 shows I've seen there were Tomorrow In A Year and the Hallogallo thing so the architectural haircuts and band t-shirts seemed about right?)

It was an almost overwhelming amount of music though. And Steve Reich kept coming out and hugging everyone. (Actually he was sat near me, and he spent most of the night hugging anyone who came within 3 feet of him, but I guess it's his birthday, he's entitled.)

Heartland... Heartland was just ... quite too utterly utter. I'm still trying to digest the whole experience, like, having sound and colour turned up to 11 and I thought the record was beautifully arranged, but this was about 100 times moreso, and in any other hands, it might have been too rich, too caramel, too layers of meringue and cream and sprinkles on top but it was actually just heart-rendingly lovely, and there is really nothing like an entire violin section doing a sort of MBV wooze-swoop to set your heart fluttering.

(Also: Owen & Steve Reich in matching black caps was adorable, but I'd still rather have had more hair action. Grumble.)

That's a lovely write-up K, and makes me quite sad to have missed it.

Wonderful review Kate, can't wait till this lands in Holland!

It was beautiful, but it was also kind of a logistical nightmare. I mean, it was just *so* ambitious in its scale. They were 20 minutes late letting us into the theatre, but then you walk in and you see a band set up in front, then a full orchestra behind that, and then behind that, 4 grand pianos and 5 (?) vibraphones, and then behind *that* a choir on risers? (felt a bit sorry for the conductors tripping over said Nord on the way to the podium.) Just so much sound. Just a wonderful, overwhelming, totally enveloping and encompassing joyful noise of it all.

But I don't know that I've ever seen Reich performed live before, it's quite amazing watching the music flowing over the performers in waves. It has such a wavelike quality when you listen to it, it's very interesting to watch that duplicated as you can see a note, a pulse, originating, say, with the vibraphones, and the rippling through the string sections as bows start twitching, like you can actually *see* the pulse of the music that you hear.

Guess I should take that to a Steve Reich thread but don't really feel like searching.

i'm so jealous of all of youse! great write-up, k8.

wait the choir leaders seceding from each others' groups thing happened in like 1990, why the hell are they still talking about it

i was in that choir as a small person so was vicariously happy about it running over because it was always AWESOME when concerts went late on a school night, especially if they were at the barbican or the south bank centre, and you were like drunk with tiredness on the coach back and then you were groggy all the next day at school but as it was in the interests of culture no-one should really criticise you for it.

not v impressed with Clogs' excessive gongage given they barely fucking used them.