A Sunny Day in Glasgow

So we are all back home from tour, trying to stay warm and getting ready for the next massive round of touring in a few months… In the meantime, here are a couple of videos we recorded while on the road in the December.  The first one was recorded in NYC by Ray Concepcion for Pitchfork’s “Tunnelvision” series.  The second was recorded by the blog, the New Gay, before our show in DC.  (Acoustic ASDiG, yikes)  I would just like to say that, at the NYC show, my guitar was way louder than that.   These board mixes are tricky…  enjoy!

Mis Ojos Discos has sold its last copy of the special color vinyl for Ashes Grammar, which means it is all gone except for a few we set aside to have on tour with us later this Fall.  More on the tour later!

xoxo

Our new record, Ashes Grammar, is out today in North America!  You can pick up a copy from any of these fine places:

Limited 2 x LP on Color Vinyl direct from Mis Ojos Discos

CD from Mis Ojos Discos
CD from Insound
CD from Amazon
CD from Tone Vendor

mp3s from iTunes

and of course at your local record store

last night we finished mastering the last song and the new record is DONE.  there will be more details and information later, but it will be called Ashes Grammar and it should be out in May early June, um…September (I think, I’m not going to call it anymore, sorry!).  !!!

we’ve officially started recording a new album.  every weekend we get to use this big room in a dance studio in a tiny town in new jersey that is right on the delaware river and basically the nicest place within 2 hours of philadelphia.  it’s really fun.  there are lots of mirrors and kids gymastic padding  hopefully it will be done by thanksgiving and out early next year!  here are some pics.

We are playing this week and next at two fantastic shows!

June 6 - First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia with M83
June 13 - Soundcheck on WNYC, New York, live on the air at 230pm
June 13 - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  (Free show! starts early- 7pm)

In other news, the Slumberland and Graphic North 7″s have both been delayed due to manufacturing issues.  We hope to have the Slumberland 7″s by mid June and Geo North one by late June (maybe?).  As far as we know, the vinyl version of Scribble Mural Comic Journal is still on track for sometime in July…

…hopefully before we head to Europe for a bunch of shows over there!  The route is not yet finalized, but you can see the in progress version on the myspace page.   We’ll put it up here once it’s done.  This time we will be going over with the full band and we are really excited about that.  We’ll also have another 7″ just for the tour.  It will be a single of our song “Summerlong Silences” with a b-side re/mega-mix combination of “Best Summer Ever” and “Panic Attacks…” that doesn’t sound like either song but sounds awesome.   It was made by our drummer Josh who also makes music as The Fantastic Imagination.  We are releasing 4 records this year that are all on vinyl and we are reasonably certain we will have them all out by this July.

We’re also in the midst of recording lots n lots of demos we will hopefully record properly sometime this Fall once we find a big room/warehouse/church to record them in.  Right now we are calling the record Evil, With Evil, Against Evil, but that will probably change.  Some of the songs so far are called “Evil”, “Volume is Electricity”, “Nighttime Rainbows”, and “Dinosaurs”.   Those will probably change too, but it’s exciting to be recording lots of stuff again!  xoxo

We just got back from playing several shows out in California.  They were very fun, here is a quick story about them…  We got to San Francisco Thursday afternoon and went for a huge walk around everywhere.  We are all horribly out of shape as the walk to Coit Tower nearly finished us off.  We then met up with Mike from Slumberland Records for fancy pizza by Washington Sq.  I only just realized that Slumberland originally put out “Switch On” by Stereolab which is one of my favorite records of all time.  Mike had lots of other good stories too, like the one about Wali. 

Anyway, the show at the Edinburgh Castle was a bit chaotic at first as no one seemed to know what was going on, but it all went great.  Delipub and Thousand Names were nice enough to lend us their amps and drums.  After playing Delipub’s AC30 I think I decided I need to get rid of my super reverb and get one of those instead.  Extra bonus about playing in SF was that our old friend Michigan J now resides there and it was great to hang out with that guy.  By the time we played we had been awake for like 25 hours or something and none of us really knew what was going on but I think it went well.

The next morning we went to KUSF to talk with Irwin on his radio show.  I always love going to radio stations and this one was extra awesome because they had the “I Don’t Believe You” / “When I’m Not Looking You’re Not There” 7″ by the Magnetic Fields.  I have lost so many ebay auctions for this record and the version from the 7″ is a million times better than the one from “i”.  If anyone has a copy they want to sell, please write to us-asunnydayinglasgow (at) gmail (dot) com (or if you have mp3s you could email that would be awesome too).  But after KUSF we went to Amoeba records and bought a ton of records.  We then walked around Haight St. for a while before going back to Amoeba and buying a ton more records. 

We somehow wound up at the Exploratorium which is totally amazing.  We didn’t actually go inside, but the facade is so bizarrely grand it was great.  SF is just too nice, it’s weird.  There were hundreds of people wind surfing in the bay with the golden gate bridge in the background.  I bet this would look kind of nice in Philly on Deleware River with the Ben Franklin bridge in the background, but people would probably throw bottles at you or something.

The Davis show was that night and it was also great.  I really love Davis.  We all stayed up way too late hanging out with Simi and Navi and everyone and then next day there was this big parade in Davis which was really kind of sweet in a main-street-old-timey-america kind of way.  I feel like I need this kind of stuff in my life right now.  But Destroy Tokyo were really great and you should check them out when they go on tour this summer!

After the parade was the long drive to LA where we played at Pehrspace again.  I really like it there and for some reason we all got realy drunk before this show.  This was the most out of it I have ever been for an ASDiG show.  Apparently it was very loud, but I think it went well.  It was nice to meet Ale from Dublab and Marion from Squaregirls and all the other people whose names I can’t remember now.  Also, No Little Kindness were pretty amazing and I highly recommend checking them out.

The next day we flew a couple scary planes home and made it back with all the gear intact.  I think we got maybe 5 hours of sleep the whole trip and we are all slowly getting back to normal.  Look out next month for our cover of “Something I Think About You” by the Pastels out on Slumberland Recs and then, a week later on June 3 Geographic North Records will release a 7″ of a couple new songs which are:

A: (cult of) The Cemetery Flowers (mandolins version)
B: Walking Pneumonia

THEN, hopefully in early July our record Scribble Mural Comic Journal will be released on double 180g vinyl by Ruined Potential Records out of Austin.  This version of SMCJ will feature a remix of “Ghost in the Graveyard” by Ulrich Schnauss and a remix of “Summerlong Silences” by Asobi Seksu.  There might be one more remix as well.

THEN THEN, we are going to Europe for some shows!  We will be playing at the MIDI Festival in the south of France and then some shows elsewhere in France, Germany, and the UK.  Incidentally, if you set up shows in Paris, Cologne, or Berlin, and would like to put us on, please get in touch. 

THEN THEN THEN is too far away to speculate.

craziest shit ever!  ever ever!  so we played at Johnny Brenda’s tonight and it was a great show from what I recall.  I was hanging out backstage with Colin from Remote Islands when we heard this loud explosion sounds.  We looked out onto Frankford Ave. to see this TRACTOR-TRAILER SEMI MONSTER TRUCK thing careening down Frankford.  Sadly, the band van was parked on this street and this truck rammed the car parked behind us and then dragged both of the cars about 100 feet before it broke free and continued down the street, hitting more cars.  It’s crazy too, because it was going slow enough for me to run out of JB’s and catch up to it as it was dragging our van.  I started jumping up and down, screaming at the guy “STOP THE TRUCK YOU CRAZY FUCK!!!” over and over, and he definitely made eye contact with me as he was dragging these cars.  But yeah, eventually he stopped and ran for it.  Totally insane.  I’ve really never seen anything like that.  It was kind of funny when the police got there and asked me if I had seen him.  Then they pulled out the guy’s driver’s license and asked if he looked like that.  We all laughed.  Sigh…

But yeah, we drove the van home, no word if it’s totalled or not- dragging a parked car 100 feet or so can’t be good.  Also, we can’t open the back to load equipment anymore.  But we’ll get to the Union Hall next Saturday one way or another.

be safe everyone.  and when your truck driving friends want to drive home after the bar, punch them in face or something.

grab ya face,
asdig

The contest to win the Japanese version of our record from Notenuf Recs has ended.  good luck to everyone who entered!

 xoxo

Our record, Scribble Mural Comic Journal, is being released in Japan with completely new artwork this Saturday, February 9th.  There is no way that we know of that you can get this record with this artwork outside of Japan EXCEPT to win it from our record label, Notenuf Records.

The contest is very simple, perhaps too simple.  All you do is, you email an email to:

contest (at) notenuf.net

A winner will be chosen at random…  happy contesting!