A week later, we’ll be playing the ever-burgeoning Austin City Limits festival here in our hometown. They keep moving this later and later in the year in hopes of beating the heat; October 10th seems like a relatively safe bet for cooler weather and clear skies.

After that, plans are in the works for a return to the east coast in November – we’ll keep you posted.

The show at the Whitney museum in NYC with Andy Stack and Jonathan Rosen went well – we played two long, new songs, “The Sphinx and the Milky Way” and “Hymn to the Valences”, and filled that weird, concrete hall with choruses of frogs, cicadas, and swirls of guitar feedback. Also, if you missed the End of an Ear JM/Thor instore last week here in town, you missed this moment (pictured, photo by Ben Kim), as well as a mesmerizing amplified kalimba/vibraphone duel between Thor and Ralph White (JM).

First off, we’re starting a new European tour in mid-July; we’ll be revisiting some of our favorite places and adding new ones, including a long-overdue return to Scandinavia and our first-ever trips to Poland and Finland. We’ll also be playing at the Barbican in London as part of an exhibit of Andy Warhol’s “screen tests”.

JM will be performing at the Whitney Museum in NYC on the 25th June, among Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)’s hallucinatory watercolors of natural scenes. He’ll be joined by Andy Stack from Wye Oak and by author Jonathan Rosen, who will read excerpts from Burchfield’s mystical, reflective journals.

JM and Jamie Stewart (from Xiu Xiu)’s collaboration album, Blue Water White Death, will see release from Graveface records later in the year. We’ll have more details about that soon, but in the meantime there’s an article in the most recent issue of Tape Op magazine (required reading for every recording studio in the world, it seems) in which JM and JS geek out on recording and songwriting techniques.

In the meantime, work continues on a SW instrumental record, and a special show in the Austin City Limits studio in July, about which we’ll have more details soon. We also plan to return to touring stateside in the fall. Onward!

DOWNLOAD: We’d also like to share this live version of “Meridian” (mp3), recorded at Lincoln Hall in Chicago on April 4, 2010.

NEW DOWNLOAD: “God Made Me” (mp3), also recorded at Lincoln Hall in Chicago.

Photo courtesy Chad Wadsworth

We’re also in the middle of planning out the rest of the year, which will include a return trip to Europe (if the ash cloud ever clears) and, we hope, parts of the US we’ve missed this time around. I’ll leave you with this mysterious clip, from a reading of Thor’s book in Lawrence Kansas…a memorable moment, to be sure (JM).

We released a pair of videos for “Hidden Lakes” yesterday; you can find them here. But we also wanted to post an exclusive version of the video shot at JM’s house, in which he talks about the TGA and some of the travels that inspired it. If you look closely you can catch some footage of places featured in the album artwork. Shot by JP Garrigues.

I should explain a little bit about the dossier. Most of it comes from the bulging files I’ve gathered after expeditions to places like Isla de los Estados, Argentina, the Jason Islands of the Falklands, the Aboriginal settlement of Kowanyama, Queensland, the Chatham Islands of New Zealand, and the Galapagos, and after I’d typed up the credits and lyrics on my grandfather’s old Coronet Super 12, I went through the files and tried to pick out documents and images that seemed to relate to the world of TGA. The Mitchell River Mission ‘rules’, for instance, come from the 1950s, and an ill-fated attempt by missionaries to impose their idea of civilization on a group of people who had been living quite successfully in northern Australia for thousands of years. (“Boys” and “Girls”, in these documents, actually mean “Men” and “Women”). The saga of the German aviator Gunther Pluschow, and his boat, the Feuerland, forms another section of the dossier…his story is too long (and too unbelievable) to recount here, but his dogged and whimsical fascination with Tierra del Fuego charmed me, and the Feuerland survived as a working farm boat in the Falklands into the 2000s; I lived on it during a bird survey in 1997. It’s since been bought and taken back to Germany; I think it’s in Hamburg somewhere, being restored. Poor Gunther died in Patagonia in 1931, falling out of his airplane after its engine died; its compass, with a great crack in it, is in the “End of the World Museum” in Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost town in the world. The last image, of the man with the violin, is from the Falklands. His name was Andrew Peck, and he built the violin himself, out of matchsticks. I love the pride and humor in his eyes, and the care he’d taken to put on what were probably his best clothes, and of course the violin itself – it’s easy to imagine the hours of work that must have gone into it. To me, the image illustrates both the fragility and the resilience of human cultures, and the way that, even given the most minimal resources, we always strive – sometimes wonderfully, sometimes horribly – to make with our hands the worlds that we see in our minds. (JM)

Also, the Golden Dossier project, a visual companion to The Golden Archipelago which we organized through Kickstarter.com, has only a few days remaining.  You can find out more and order your own copy of this massive and special document here.

Last but not least, dates for our 2010 European and US tours are on the right side of this page.   We’ll keep this list updated, as we’re likely to add a few more shows as these dates approach.

In other news, we’ve updated our European dates, adding a Manchester show on the 24th Feb, and are happy to announce that all our shows on this EU/UK tour will include a performance by the unclassifiable and spectacular David Thomas Broughton.

Shearwater – The Golden Archipelago from KMS on Vimeo.

The Golden Archipelago, our third album for Matador, has a release
date: February 23rd in the US, and a week earlier (the 15th) in the
rest of the world. We’ll have more information about the record (and
its companion piece, the ‘Golden Dossier’) up here soon, but in the
meantime, here’s a ‘trailer’ for the record made by Kevin and our
friend JP Garrigues.