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Cryptacize
have just announced their DEBUT UK dates! The band are Chris Cohen
(formerly of Deerhoof/The Curtains), Nedelle Torrisi (Kill Rock Stars)
and Michael Carreira, a drummer they found playing the cowbell on
youtube.
Their debut album Dig That Treasure is out now on Asthmatic Kitty. Find out what Sufjan has to say about it below...
July Mon 7th BRIGHTON Engine Rooms (Free show! w/Half-Handed Cloud and Lake)
July Tue 8th NOTTINGHAM Bunker's Hill
July Wed 9th MANCHESTER Kro Bar
July Thu 10th LEEDS Fenton
July Fri 11th LONDON Luminaire (w/Half-Handed Cloud and Lake)
SUFJAN STEVENS ON CRYPTACIZE'S ALBUM "DIG THAT TREASURE". Jealously is not an attractive trait.
Yes, of course I revel in the busy ambition of songwriters who seek to
challenge themselves to endless boundaries, to jump fences, to scale
large mountains. But what is the effort all about? Cryptacize yield to
no such ambitions. They make music that is refreshingly coherent,
stewed with deliberate melodies, a refinement of instrumentation, no
excess, nothing wasted, nothing lost. Their new record gDig That
Treasureh offends many of my own musical impulses, the over-achieving
bigger-is-better-shock-and-awe approach. Obviously Ifm not offended,
but rather in complete admiration of the bandfs minimalist
gorgeousness. These songs are not trifles, but rather cryptic haiku
poems that expand toward a vast cosmic significance. But one doesnft
have to be a cartographer to appreciate these songs. Their surfaces
shimmer to the ear, like magic crystals hanging in the windowsill.
Chris Cohenfs guitar shakes off all the fashionable amplifiers and
effects pedals of his previous band Deerhoof. Nedelle Torrisifs voice
carries the uncomplicated clarity of a 1950s movie musical, shimmering
to a soft vibrato, triggering a beauty that is as bold as it is
matter-of-fact. No shock and awe needed here. Texturally, the songs
present comic tragedies of everyday life. The Cosmic Sing Along.
Playing the Evil Role in a Movie. False Pretenses. Dig That Treasure,
i.e. mine for your greatest pleasures, or keep looking, or donft give
up! One never quite knows if the setting is a living room or a space
station. And then therefs the loving 1960s pop sensuality, high school
infatuation, boy crazy, dreams of true love, or other operatic
propulsions escalading into open exclamations of goh no!h The
sweetness of each melody is never quite safe. It is like some chirpy
Broadway musical prophesying the end of civilization. Somehow these
sentiments entrench easily around other abstract, philosophical topics
about heaven on earth, pocket change, or human fear. Lyrics here can be
excerpted for an obtuse self-help calendar. gEvery note is an
unfinished song.h gNo one really knows me.h gNo amount of power
could ever replace the way he said my name.h To listen to Cryptacize
is to embark on the act of digging great treasures. Patience and
fortitude pays off in great golden swathes of fortune.
Sometimes I worry that the ever-increasing trend toward excessive
innovation has pushed the art and music world into a slapstick
exhibition of dog breeding, generating increasingly newer, more
contemporary fashions: gothic folk, for one. Or Afro-beat Ivy League
pop. Maybe this only reflects the inevitable merging of all cultures,
in which art slowly becomes a least common denominator for the
interchange of multiple civilizations coming together in one song. I
donft mind the intermarrying of ideas. This is the natural sequence of
events. We are all better for it; it is fundamentally American. But
sometimes the effort of innovation itself is just empty exertion,
unspirited and unreal, bearing bad fruit. Cryptacize, of course, shirks
all such ambition and seeks instead to gknow thyself.h The record
speaks of something much more present, in a careful tone, with the
considerate enumeration of an enlightened monk who, after spending
countless hours in isolation, in prayer, in thought, in meditation,
decides instead to leave the monastery to play jazz guitar at Bibbifs
Bar and Grill on Main Street. Yes, of course, I'd go to that show.
Watch Cryptacize's Cosmic Sing-A-Long!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykGsjQn560U
Listen to Cryptacize:
http://www.myspace.com/cryptacize
Cryptacize began across the street from the C&H Sugar Factory in
Crockett, CA, where Nedelle Torrisi and Chris Cohen lived in an
apartment slightly tilted. There, constant dizziness and the smell of
burning sugar became a permanent part of their psyches. One morning
while brushing their teeth, toothpaste running sideways out of their
mouths, Nedelle pronounced the word 'Cryptacize' and things were never
the same. Seemingly, the house now inclined in the opposite direction!
Soon after this, they discovered something even stranger ] a video of
a drummer named Michael Carreira playing his cowbell. Having only this
video, they sought him out and convinced him to join their band and
shortly there after began working on their first album.
Every song on Dig That Treasure is a miniature journey, a free
fantasia, a dreamy habitat built out of the minimum of material. Sudden
rhythmic gestures and frequent key changes will leave you feeling
pleasantly disorientated in a song. But trust your tour]guides! You
might feel as if you've come across a small tribe that speaks an
unstudied language, and miraculously, find that you can speak it too!
Performing live, Nedelle, Mike and Chris watch each other intently,
moving in an intuitive way to an unheard pulse, bringing their
delicately constructed songs to new life.
Dig That Treasure is humbly inspired by the larger]than] life
emotions of West Side Story, the joyfully percussive guitar gospel of
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Wizard of Oz's bittersweet escapism, the
other]world sentimentality of Sun Ra's Spaceship Lullaby, and Henry
Cowell's ethereal piano string strumming.
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