Renegade Communications presents: Tuxedomoon Half-Mute Tour 2016 + support
Renegade Communications presents: Tuxedomoon Half-Mute Tour 2016 + support
1980: San Francisco band Tuxedomoon release their debut album Half-Mute, which immediately establishes them as one of the leading avant-garde pop bands.
2016: thirty-six years, dozens of releases and hundreds of shows later, Tuxedomoon’s original members, Steven Brown, Peter Principle and Blaine Reininger, joined by Luc van Lieshout and Bruce Geduldig, get together to revisit Half-Mute and perform it on a series of exclusive shows around Europe.
Here is what Glenn O’Brien wrote about the album in 1980, in Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine :
TUXEDOMOON has released their first album, Half-Mute (Ralf Records) and that’s news.This San Francisco trio has been putting out little bits of great music for awhile— but now, the long awaited rst long-playing version. “Half-Mute” refers to the fact that this is half instrumental, half vocal material.There are songs and there are pieces.The rst mute piece is “Nazca”, after the Pre-Columbian, Central Ameri- can earthworks— spaceport of the Gods or earth art of the Gods? Here, it’s a drift through heavenly tones, pastel sonar clouds, celestial hums. Sax sings a love lament, giant lovebird calls and Andean indian love calls, maybe an alien love call. The rst sung song is “59 to 1”. It’s a time piece: super punctual walking bass and superhu- man drum rolls set up a very time-is-tight formula which serves to emphasise the inexorability of the clock.Time doesn’t take sides.The sax comes in and nds a duel with the clock, playing with time: speeding it up and slowing it down slyly, making time illusions that can’t really lie ‘cause the bass keeps it up.Telephone call is used as counter-lead instrument.The voice chants coot: the bad odds, and the sax wails out its time very charmingly and hot.