If you like ’90s indie rock, it’s a good afternoon for you. Elephant 6 band Olivia Tremor Control, which has more or less been defunct since 2000, has a new release. Yep, the same one singer/guitarist Will Cullen Hart teased at over a year ago. And in the same day, the former members of Sleater-Kinney have detailed their new project. You might want to take a second to adjust your iTunes playlist. Ready? Okay.
Carrie Brownstein, who most recently was doing some comedy with Fred Armisen, was pretty vague about that “in the next five years” Sleater-Kinney reunion, but we have had a pretty clear picture since March of what that was going to look like — for one, Corin Tucker is out, and Janet Weiss in.
Now we have a clearer picture, and tour dates to boot, according to Pitchfork. The other two members are also ladies from ’90s indie rock bands, making this some kind of supergroup. Brownstein and Weiss are joined by Helium’s Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole of The Minders. The band, named Wild Flag, is in the middle of recording its first album for Merge. Upcoming tour dates are all on the West Coast in small clubs; check out the itinerary below.
This won’t be the first time any of Wild Flag has met each other. Brownstein and Timony had a short-lived project called the Spells, and Weiss and Cole have a garage rock project called the Shadow Mortons. Furthermore, all of the members’ bands toured together back in the day. Basically, we have a match made in heaven.
As for that other band: As Pitchfork tells us, the neo-psychedelic Atlanta band Olivia Tremor Control has a new song out. “North Term Reality” will be on the compilation AUX Vol. 2, which Aux Festival will release October 19th. The website describes the compilation as “a collection of experimental sound,” and it’s put together by Heather McIntosh of The Instruments, who’s also in Hart’s project Circulatory System. AUX is giving this comp a very limited edition release — 250 copies packaged in “hand-printed silkscreen on archival paper.”
“North Term Reality”, which is streaming at Pitchfork, is probably a good indication of whether or not you’ll like this comp. It begins as a structured, futuristic tribal march and devolves into a fragmented noise experiment. According to Pitchfork, Olivia Tremor Control met at Circulatory System member Charlie Johnston’s house and developed this track out of an improvised jam. The band did some additional work at Hart’s house and Bill Doss’ A World As Myth studio.
Take a look at the tracklist for Aux Vol. 2 below. Tickets for the Wild Flag tour are being sold at the individual venues.
AUX Vol. 2 Tracklist:
01. Derek Almstead – Bamboo Beach Ball
02. Visitations – Haunted Theme
03. Hannah Jones – Voice Layers
04. Orthopedics – Dreamweavers 2
05. The Olivia Tremor Control – North Term Reality
06. Jessica Pavone and Mary Halvorson – Hartford
07. Killick – Spine, and You
08. Jay Nackashi – My Earthly Creature
09. feltbattery – thrasher
10. Dave McDonnell – Song of Overtones
11. Our New Silence – The Silence Saved Us (By Kai Riedl)
12. mohtzégorf – Two Hammers and a Tone
13. Spider Veins – China Girls Being Baptized in a Subterranean Centrifuge
14. Jeremiah Cymerman, Nate Wooley, Christopher Hoffman, Aaron Siegel – abidimulifukermanti
15. Melted Men – Seahorses
16. horaflora – The Hesitation, Visitated
17. Dark Meat – Changes Will Come, Ignore Them, What’s Important Is We Sing Like Vikings Pt. 3
Wild Flag 2010 Tour Dates:
11/10 – Olympia, WA @ The Northern
11/12 – Seattle, WA @ High Dive
11/13 – Portland, OR @ Doug Fir
11/17 – Sacramento, CA @ The Hub
11/18 – San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill
11/19 – Los Angeles, CA @ Spaceland
11/20 – San Diego, CA @ Casbah
11/21 – Pomona, CA @ Alladin’s