DIVE CHANGES NAME TO DIIV
LISTEN TO NEW SONG “DOUSED” AT PITCHFORK
OSHIN DUE JUNE 26 FROM CAPTURED TRACKS
DIIV (formerly DIVE) is the new nom-de-plume of Z. Cole Smith, musical provocateur and front-man of an atmospheric and autumnally-charged new Brooklyn four-piece. Regarding the name, Cole had this to say:
“DIVE becomes DIIV. Out of respect for Dirk Ivins and the original Dive, this former DIVE has renamed itself. We’ve not been contacted by Dirk Ivins or his lawyers, but the short of it is that I don’t really give a fuck what the band is called. I originated this project in a bedroom with no internet and didn’t know if it would ever leave the bedroom. “DIVE”, the word, was an element of what inspired the project in its genesis, but we’ve outgrown the name and its associations. The band is the same, the music is the same, the future will always be the same. A name is nothing.”
To celebrate the name change, the band has shared new song “Doused” – available below.
STREAM – “Doused”
Recently inked to the uber-reliable Captured Tracks imprint, DIIV created instant vibrations in the blog-world with their impressionistic debut “Sometime”; finding it’s way onto the esteemed pages of Pitchfork and Altered Zones a mere matter of weeks after the group’s formation.
Enlisting the aid of NYC indie-scene-luminary, Devin Ruben Perez, former Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt, and Mr. Smith’s childhood friend Andrew Bailey, DIIV craft a sound that is at once familial and frost-bitten. Indebted to classic kraut, dreamy Creation-records psychedelia, and the primitive-crunch of late-80’s Seattle, the band walk a divisive yet perfectly fused patch of classic-underground influence.
One part THC and two parts MDMA; the first offering from DIIV chemically fuses the reminiscent with the half-remembered building a musical world out of old-air and new breeze. These are songs that remind us of love in all it’s earthly perfections and perversions.
A lot of DIIV’s magnetism was birthed in the process Mr. Smith went through to discover these initial compositions. After returning from a US tour with Beach Fossils, Cole made a bold creative choice, settling into the window-facing corner of a painter’s studio in Bushwick, sans running water, holing up to craft his music.
In this AC-less wooden room, throughout the thick of the summer, Cole surrounded himself with cassettes and LP’s, the likes of Lucinda Williams, Arthur Russell, Faust, Nirvana, and Jandek; writings of N. Scott Momaday, James Welsh, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and James Baldwin; and dreams of aliens, affection, spirits, and the distant natural world (as he imagined it from his window facing the Morgan L train).
The resulting music is as cavernous as it is enveloping, asking you to get lost in it’s tangles in an era that demands your attention be focused into 140 characters.
Since that fateful summer, the band have waged a full throttle attack on the nation’s venues, where the mellow, sometimes melancholic vibes of those early transmissions morph into a manic, crashing thing, providing an apt preview of DIIV’s debut LP Oshin due on Captured Tracks on June 26th. Catch DIIV on tour now.
DIIV
Oshin
(Captured Tracks)
June 26, 2012
01 (Druun)
02 Past Lives
03 Human
04 Air Conditioning
05 How Long Have You Known?
06 Wait
07 Earthboy
08 (Druun pt. ii)
09 Follow
10 Sometime
11 Oshin (Subsume)
12 Doused
13 Home
Tour Dates
5/01/12 @ Magic Stick – Detroit, MI *
5/02/12 @ The Shop Under Parts and Labor – Toronto, ON *
5/03/12 @ Valentine’s – Albany, NY *
5/05/12 @ Mercury Lounge – New York, NY * !
6/23/12 @ Glasslands – Brooklyn, NY (Record release show!)
8/09/12 @ RiverRocks at Pier 84 – New York, NY ^
* = w/ Frankie Rose
! = w/ Spectrals
^ = w/ Grimes + Wild Nothing
