RARE BOOK ROOM RECORDS LAUNCHES FIRST TWO FULL LENGTH ALBUMS | PALMS “IT’S MIDNIGHT IN HONOLULU” + LIA ICES “NECIMA” SET FOR RELEASE ON SETPEMBER 9th 2008
(Los Angeles, CA/ New York, NY) - Rare Book Room Records is set launch their first full-length album(s) with Palms “It’s Midnight in Honolulu” and Lia Ices “Necima” out on September 9th 2008. Hailing from New York (and sometimes Berlin), both sets of artists’ possess the organic qualities commonly found in the belly of the Rare Book Room beast, effortlessly painting mental pictures that warm the heart with an embracing strength. For the uninitiated, Nicolas Vernhes who runs Rare Book Room studio in Brooklyn, has made records with Black Dice, Animal Collective, Cat Power, Deerhunter, and the Fiery Furnaces to name a few. He created Rare Book Room Records in the Winter 2007/Spring 2008 with the release of his critically acclaimed “Living Bridge” compilation dedicated to the craft of the musicians he’s worked with as owner of the studio beginning in 1995.
Palms is Ryan Schaefer and Nadja Korinth. Though a band of only two, great distances and far-flung elements are constitutive of the Palms’ substance. To begin with, the members live on different continents. More than mere points on the map, however, we find each of these places out of the Palms biography present in the music as well, whether in the echoes of German kosmische musik, like Faust and Klaus Schulze, or the Midwestern plains (Shaefers home) evoked in the spare and expansive sounds of “Der Koenig” or “New Moon.” New York and Britain creep through as well in traces of the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain as much as in the enervated dance music of “Boundary Waters.”
Schaefer and Korinth are split between New York & Berlin - London served as the setting for the pair’s first meeting in 2003. Not surprisingly, this distance demanded a unique working relationship, one in which both spent months developing ideas that would later be stripped apart and elaborated on during short periods of intense collaboration back and forth over the Atlantic. Eventually, this became the duo’s major force of communication, allowing them to connect seamlessly with one another in the confines of a studio no matter the time or place. Guided by a sense of both precision and experimentation, the band transmutes these ideas into the sparse and haunted sound heard on “It’s Midnight in Honolulu”.
Lia Ices’ debut, on the other hand, was born on the piano. While at NYU’s Tisch School in the Experimental Theatre Wing, she was inspired to turn her stagecraft inward. She was encouraged to use her voice as a vehicle for emotion and as a source of expression, and to release a bit from all the classical training she had experienced throughout her youth and into her adulthood. Lia’s re-connection with her inner and outer voice—matched with her long love of prose, literature, and letter writing—launched her into songwriting.
Both Lia and Nicolas were eager to experiment with the arrangement and instrumentation of the songs and called in a number of talented friends including David Muller (Fiery Furnaces, Dopo Yume), Andy Macleod (White Magic, Bright Black) and Robbie Lee (I and Ear records, Love as Laughter). What came to follow was an eight song stream of tulip/double helix lyrics braided together by a rainbow of sounds; among them, gemshorn, a large Colombian hand drum, White album-era electric guitar, organs, bass clarinet, and at it’s backbone of course, Lia’s voice and piano.
