Looper

Reveal new video for Oh, Skinny Legs. 5 CD Box Set These Things & new album Offgrid:Offline out now.

Looper released their 5 CD box set, These Things, this week. The box set collates tracks from their entire catalogue including tracks from the brand new album, Offgrid:Offline.

Digital releases of all of their albums are also available: Up A Tree (1999), The Geometrid (2000), The Snare (2002) and the new album Offgrid:Offline.

The band have unveiled a video for Oh, Skinny Legs, taken from the new album – watch it here:

Created by Karn David, the video is a collaboration with Iain Gardner, the Scottish BAFTA nominated animator (Check his Vimeo channel HERE )

The new album also features Farfisa Song (Listen here: http://youtu.be/fgn3d88oNhg) and Outro (Tiptoe Home) (Listen here: https://youtu.be/HG6tHD-aPGw) which Stuart David recently explained to FADER, “…is based on a little melody that recurs throughout the Offgrid:Offline album. It documents a time spent trapped in Dundee, and my overwhelming desire to escape.”

In an inventive reinterpretation of ‘The Boxset’, Looper have curated the database of their entire body of work as five separate CDs, themed by type and entitled lexiphonics, kinokraft, voxtrot, transmitte and melos (full tracklisting below).

Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, who helped the band out of a jam in 1999, provides further sleeve notes. When the batteries in a sampler ran out during a show in LA a member of the audience came to their rescue, running out to fetch a pack of AAs. Looper later heard Tim had been their unlikely hero, but it seemed so preposterous they dismissed the idea. Tim professes his love of Looper here: “I wasn’t even exactly sure where the music came from: the past, the present, the future, another life or a parallel universe but it totally chimed with what I loved – a starkness attached to the glitches and bleeps but a real go get ’em soul to go alongside that.”

Looper emerged from Belle & Sebastian in 1997, when Stuart David (co-founder and bass player of B&S) and his wife Karn (an artist who directed the early B&S videos) collaborated for a show at Glasgow School of Art. A degree show fundraiser for Stuart’s sister Karla Black – who received a Turner Prize nomination in 2011- the performance was a multi-media affair incorporating TVs, super 8 film, 35mm slides and kinetic sculptures. Since nothing broke down and everyone clapped, they decided to keep doing it.

The These Things box set coincides with the release of Stuart David’s latest book, In The All-Night Cafe, a memoir of Belle and Sebastian’s formative year, (out on16 April via Little Brown, for further information please visit: http://bit.ly/1HRWijq) and to celebrate, Karn David has created a video for the previously unreleased Belle & Sebastian studio recording, Paper Boat, written by Stuart David in 1997. The video features footage shot in ’98 when Neil Robertson (the then B&S manager) took Stuart Murdoch, Isobel Campbell, Stuart and Karn David, to Banchory, Aberdeenshire for a wee trip… Watch the video for Belle & Sebastian’s Paper Boat here:

THESE THINGS – 5 CD BOX SET

Lexiphonics n. Spoken narratives accompanied by sample-based or electronic music, usually structured like a traditional pop song. [from Gk lexis: word, phonein: to make sounds, speak]

Kinokraft n. A form based around a looped riff. Vocals, when present, are usually sampled fragments- used as counter riffs. [from Gk kinemat: movement, Br craft: skill, art]

Voxtrot n. A hybrid form, combining elements of the ‘lo-fi’ pop song with the production and beats of hip hop and R&B. [from L vox: voice, Br trot: to move}

Transmitte n. A hybrid form, combining the ‘lo-fi’ pop song with arrangements and beats from all fields of electronica. [from Gl.* transmitter: send out signals, broadcast]

Melos n. A form in which the song is central. Elements from 1960s Easy Listening, Pop and Soul are combined using contemporary techniques and production. [from Gk. melos: song, tune]

*Glitch

Looper’s 5 CD box set, These Things, alongside digital releases of all of their albums – Up A Tree (1999), The Geometrid (2000), The Snare (2002) and Offgrid:Offline (2014) – are out now.

Stuart David embarks on a reading tour this week, catch him at the following venues:

16 April – Waterstones Edinburgh 6pm

17 April – Waterstones Glasgow 7pm

22 April – Mono Glasgow 7pm

23 April – Waterstones London (time tbc)

https://www.waterstones.com/events

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