Hugo Race

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Upcoming Releases

Dirtmusic album (Glitterhouse) Now

True Spirit DVD (Gusstaff) Feb 08
Sepiatone USA (Minty Fresh) Jan 08
True Spirit 53rd State album (Bang!) March 08
Wreckery - Past Imperfect cd (Reverberation/Memorandum) March 08

STRADA BLU July 2007

Modigliani, Italy.

Antonio Gramantieri invites Hugo Race and American multi-instrumentalist Bill Elm (Friends of Dean Martinez) to perform their material with Italian avant rockers Sea of Cortez in a kind of live workshop at the Strada Blu festival. Shows in the Romagna lead to a trip south to the Abruzzo mountains where the 8 piece line-up strips back to Hugo, Bill, Antonio and drummer Diego Sapignola. The final show at a festival in the high city of L'Aquila was smudged by drifting smoke from rampant local forest fires. Its not out of the question that recordings of these concerts surface in the near future.

Photos by Patti:

Sepiatone at Strade Blu

June 28, 2007

Sepiatone in transit to Italy.

We're playing an open-air show in Cesena, for the Strade Blu festival.

New songs are setlisted, and south the summer's in full swing

Szczecin

JUNE 22, 2007.

SEPIATONE

Koszalin, Poland. "Mwodzi i Film".

With Marta Collica - we flag a train out of Alexanderplatz across the flatlands headed east with a couple of guitars and a few effects. The landscape transforms after the border - as if we're going back in time. We're playing the afterparty at the Koszalin film festival.

Sepiatone shows are semi-acoustic duets, very minimal - we leave the loops and soundscapes behind when we play live.

We've been preparing the album Introduction to Sepiatone for U.S. label Minty Fresh Records. It's a compilation of our two albums, "In Sepiatone" and "Dark Summer", and Minty Fresh set the release for November 2007. Michelangelo Russo just completed a new video of Sepiatone for the U.S. debut...

Looking forward to the show tonight because amongst other things we'll be supported by the phenomenal Jacaszek. His "Lo-Fi Stories" album came out last year on Gusstaff Records, and we love its strange cosmos of hard editing and exotic melodies.

We changed trains at the border but there was no exchange - just a strange all-pervading sense of low-key chaos - so with no money and no food or water we kick back for the 5 hour journey to unfold...

4.6.07

Race, Brokaw and Eckman recording live at Sono.

The Dirt Music album is taped, but as yet unfinished.

The band plans to regroup in september.

Stay tuned...

Prague 1.6.2007

Dirt Music work their way around central Europe rain and shine.

Three guys driving one large van with Slovenian plates.

Plenty of room to stretch out and contemplate the landscapes passing.

Songs are taking shape in a nebulous way.

Find ourselves ultimately in Unhost Amerika...

Dirt Music

DIRT MUSIC is Chris Eckman, Hugo Race and Chris Brokaw

Digging back to their roots in search of the raw urban folkblues, Eckman, Race and Brokaw converge paths in the European spring for full immersion in the journey of a brand new collaborative project: DIRT MUSIC

Three multi-instrumental artists from diverse backgrounds - three voices discovering a mutual language in the legacy of the frontier. Six strings, some keys, "found" percussion, steel bottleneck, roots feels, acoustic storytelling illuminated by an electronic vein. Dreams and memories carved from hard bedrock reality: DIRT MUSIC - a road movie in evolution...

Following the May 07 tour in Central Europe, Dirt Music will begin recording an album in Prague...

HUGO RACE is leader of TRUE SPIRIT. Collaborations include SEPIATONE, THE BAD SEEDS, ROGALL'S ELECTRIC CIRCUS, TRANSFARGO, SONGS WITH OTHER STRANGERS, THE MEROLA MATRIX.

CHRIS ECKMAN leads the acclaimed American band, The WALKABOUTS. His collaborations include CHRIS and CARLA, the STRANGE, HOST, MIDNIGHT CHOIR, TOSCA, and WILLARD GRANT CONSPIRACY.

CHRIS BROKAW's bands include COME, CODEINE, THE NEW YEAR and more. Collaborations include EVAN DANDO, THE WILLARD GRANT CONSPIRACY, THALIA ZEDEK, STEVE WYNN and KARATE.

Sat 19.05.07 Murska Sobota (SLO) MIKK

Mon 21.05.07 Ljubljana (SLO) Sax

Tue 22.05.07 Vienna (A) Chelsea

Wed 23.05.07 Innsbruck (A) (location tba)

Thu 24.05.07 Stuttgart (D) Laboratorium

Fri 25.05.07 Erfurt (D) Museumskeller

Sat 26.05.07 Berlin (D) Maschinenhaus

Sun 27.05.07 Beverungen (D) Glitterhouse OBS Festival

Fri 01.06.07 Prague (CZ) Akropolis

Sat 02.06.07 Singwitz (D) Kesselhaus Lager

Hugo Race: Taoist Priests CD Launch

Wed 11th April Manchester Lane, Melbourne. Sun 29th April The Vanguard, Sydney.

HUGO RACE/HELIXED IN BRIEF

Hugo Race is a prolific and visionary performer, musician, writer and producer. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Hugo’s creative journey has given him ‘world citizen’ status, having lived and worked as an independent artist over the course of the last 20 years in Italy, France, Germany, the UK and the USA. If the eternal delta blues, jazz, and punk are his basic references, Hugo’s songwriting draws on pop culture from rock n roll to electronic soundscapes. Hugo defies any easy label and has staked out a creative territory totally his own between rock, experimental and psychedelia. He also writes screenplays and non-fiction.

First introduced to the international stage as a teenage founding member of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds (he appears on the debut, “From Her to Eternity”, and features on several other Bad Seed’s cds and various compilations), Hugo then founded the seminal Australian art-punk cult band The Wreckery (1985), released through the White/Hot, Rampant, Citadel and Normal labels. A Wreckery compilation,”Past Imperfect”, was released in 2008 through Memorandum/Fuse Records, (Sydney ) and a national reunion tour followed.

In early 1989 Hugo moved base to Berlin, and Normal Records (Germany) released his debut solo album “Rue Morgue Blues” as the Wall fell, a fact reflected in Hugo’s frequently politically-inspired lyrics. So began two decades based in Europe and the production of 13 Hugo Race & True Spirit albums, the latest of which “53rd State” was released in Australia (Spooky Records) and Europe (Glitterhouse Records) in 2008 to rave reviews.

Hugo is perceived as a cult figure, charismatic and inspired – and he continues to enthrall an ever-expanding international audience. If Hugo’s work maintains a bent towards the moody and experimental side of contemporary music, that doesn’t exclude writing beautiful love songs or meditational mood pieces, and he is sought after by other artists as a producer or to record collaborative projects all over the world.

Currently, Hugo is immersed in preproduction for his feature film project "We Create Tomorrow"......

Some of Hugo’s other music projects include:

the folk Americana of Dirtmusic together with Chris Eckman (The Walkabouts) and Chris Brokaw (Come, Codeine), with whom Hugo performed recently at the Festival au Desert in Mali, Africa;
the Italian experimental pop of Sepiatone with Marta Collica (John Parish band), now licensed to Minty Fresh Records, Chicago (www.sepiatone.net);
the sophisticated pop electronica of Rogall’s Electric Circus Sideshow, together with DJ Rogall from Berlin’s Sonar Kollectiv (Perfect Toy Records);
the psychedelic country of Denver-based band Lilium, together with Pascal Humbert (Woven Hand, 16 Horsepower) (Glitterhouse Records);
the ambient electronica of Transfargo, together with Swiss DJ Dimitri de Perrot (RecRec Records);
the conceptual Italian multimedia montage of “Merola Matrix” (Desvelos Records)

Other productions and collaborations include:
Hellhound Brown, Pantaleimon, Klimek, Mick Harvey (Bad Seeds), Robert Forster (Go-Betweens), Rowland S. Howard (Birthday Party), Nikki Sudden (Swell Maps), John Parish (PJ Harvey), Max Sharam, Afterhours, Cesare Basile, Giovanni Ferrario (PJ Harvey), Soteria Bell, Feldmann, Lo.Mo, Alexander Hacke (Einstuerzende Neubauten), Delavega and many, many others. (In fact, there are too many collaborations to mention here and we suggest you refer instead to the discography)

In addition, Hugo has acted, scored and written for several feature films (Ghosts of the Civil Dead, Forbidden Lies, Queen of the Damned, Dogs in Space, In Too Deep, etc.), sung avant-guard contemporary experimental music at the Sydney Opera House (The Hanging of Jean Lee), had his writings published in magazines such as Australia's Overland literary journal and composed and acted for the theatre.

“Urban dreamscapes… elegant trip-hop… ambient noise psychedelia… raw cosmic blues… live garage rock… cinematic melancholia, new wave nostalgia, essential songwriting, post-rock minimalism…” – all these descriptions have been applied to Hugo’s work, best summarised as:

“Hugo Race is a psychedelic prophet, a 360 degree artist who makes compromises with nobody.” (Debaser, Italy, 2005)

Other press excerpts…

“Both alone with a guitar or with his True Spirit, Hugo has toured Europe repeatedly, performing on a vast trajectory from the UK to Greece and was literally one of the first western “underground” acts performing inside the ex- eastern bloc European territories after the fall of the Wall. He has followed a personal musical vision in a series of mutating line-ups that have fused the boundaries between the "primal" (roots) blues and raw electronica - described by London Sounds as "night music of the soul", and by Melody Maker as "industrial-trance-blues". “ (Ludger Kordt, KGB, Germany)

“The stripped to the bone sound of the True Spirit exercises a fascination not exactly reassuring, yet magnetic in its evocation of obscure dangers. Music from the wild side of the street – or better, like walking blind in a war-zone…” (- Gianluca Testani, Mucchio Selvaggio)

“Hugo Race remains one of the great unsung talents of Australian music, and with ‘The Gold Street Sessions’, the leathery old wolf of the nightmare psycho blues returns… The Gold Street Sessions requires a darkened room and an open bottle. Doubt not – this is a dangerous little record from a songwriter who is only ever the real deal” (- Jonathon Alley, MAG Australia)

“With “Dark Summer”, the sublime Sepiatone render another of the innumerable blues mutations already lovingly explored by Race in the arc of his hyperactive discography, deepened by fragile evocations emanting from a couple in extreme symbiosis, traversing a long dark night full of phantoms and desires… that only the charismatic mind of Hugo Race could have invented.”
- Andrea Salvi, Mescalina, Italy 2005

Hugo Race - Helixed Productions