Scene and Heard

Louisville, KY – On Sunday, July 10, Sublime with Rome will take the stage at the Iroquois Amphitheater.

Featuring founding members of Sublime, drummer Bud Gaugh and bass player Eric Wilson with new frontman, singer/guitarist Rome – Sublime with Rome is reintroducing themselves and Sublime’s music to fans across the country.

Rome, a 21-year-old northern California native, was introduced to Gaugh and Wilson in 2008. Last year, a handful of jam sessions led to an impromptu show at a small club in Nevada flooring a packed-house crowd. The trio later performed a one-off at the Smokeout Festival last fall and was a surprise special guest at the infamous KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas show, before officially dubbing themselves Sublime with Rome. The band returned to the stage for the first time in 14-years, fittingly on 4/20/10 for two highly anticipated, sold out nights at the Hollywood Palladium to rave reviews.

“Our shows are full of surprises,” said Gaugh. “Sublime has never used a set list. We are performing songs off every album and mix it up from show to show, never delivering the same set twice. We’ve also been working on some new material and have put together a couple of songs with Rome. We want to celebrate the music and share the experience with our fans.”

One of the most notable and successful ska-punk bands of all time, Sublime has sold over 17 million albums worldwide with the group’s music remaining in constant radio rotation across the country. Influential Los Angeles rock radio station KROQ has listed Sublime as the #3 act in their annual “biggest bands” list for the last six years in a row with the single “Date Rape” ranking as the all-time most requested song at the station. To this day, the group’s multi-platinum landmark debut album “40oz. to Freedom,” lo-fi follow up “Robbin’ the Hood,” and multi-platinum self-titled major label debut (a virtual greatest hits set in itself) are all widely regarded as music collection staples. Formed in Long Beach in 1988, Sublime’s final performance was in the spring of 1996.

Sublime with Rome will be performing live at the Iroquois Amphitheater on Sunday, July 10. Tickets, $35 in advance and $40 day of show,  will be go on sale this Friday, May 20 at 10:00 AM at all Ticketmaster locations including select Kroger stores, online at Ticketmaster.com.com or by phone at 1-800-745-3000.

For more information on this, www.NederlanderEntertainment.com or www.productionsimple.com

MOBY DEBUTS INNOVATIVE NEW MICROSITE FOR DESTROYED

PARTNERS WITH SOUNDCLOUD & INSTAGRAM

STREAM AND INTERACT WITH DESTROYED AROUND THE WORLD

DESTROYED ART AND MUSIC LAUNCH EVENTS THIS WEEK

May 11th – Clic Gallery Exhibition Opening and Book Launch – NYC

May 12th – Brooklyn Museum “In Conversation with Moby” + Exclusive Live Performance – Brooklyn

Moby unveils a unique microsite this morning presenting exclusive access to his forthcoming new album/ photography project Destroyed being released next week on May 17th.

In collaboration with leading audio platform SoundCloud and free iPhone app Instagram, Moby has always been focused on pushing the creative barriers online, and this new standalone website reflects that with a fully-interactive digital map that gives fans the opportunity to oversee Moby’s global vision forDestroyed, a bold, beautiful record written at 2am during recent touring commitments in empty cities around the world.

Plotting Moby’s route across the globe, the microsite uses SoundCloud’s creating and sharing capabilities to play-out the entire Destroyed album whilst tracking Moby’s rich and varied photography from every corner of the globe. Fans are also encouraged to connect directly, adding their own images taken at 2 a.m. to the map using the free iPhone app Instagram. Just tag uploads #destroyed and include location data! Visit http://destroyed.moby.comto go on an international journey with Moby.

Several Destroyed music and art events are happening this week.  National Geographic kicked off the first sold out event last night, May 9th in Washington D.C. called ‘Music on…Photography’, a multi-media series.  On Wednesday, May 11th Clic Gallery in New York City opens their exhibition “Destroyed: Photographs by Moby” featuring photos from Destroyed and a book signing.  The exhibition will run from May 12th through June 26th. The following night on Thursday, May 12th at Brooklyn Museum, Moby will sit down with John Schaefer host of WNYC’s Soundcheck and New Sounds as a part of the museum’s Thursday @ 7 Series.  The special evening will also include a sneak preview of songs from Destroyed performed live (the only scheduled performance in the US right now) and a screening of Moby’s self-directed/produced Be The One EP videos. For tickets visitwww.brownpapertickets.com

Additional exhibitions and events will be scheduled in the U.S., including Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles in September, the Irvine Contemporary gallery in DC, and throughout Europe this summer in conjunction with his concert tour.

Available in CD, vinyl, digital formats, and included with the Destroyed book of photography, Destroyed the album was written by Moby mostly late at night, in hotel rooms around the world when cities had gone to bed and the insomnia that worldwide travel can induce fueled his need to create. The result is a 15-track collection that conflates the atmospheric and the disconcerting with the enveloping and beautiful – a record rich in the kind of melodies that are lodged in the brain by stealth rather than with a bludgeon. Destroyed was produced by Moby and mixed by Ken Thomas (Sigur Ros, M83) on old analog equipment and mixed on a 1972 Neve analog mixing desk from Abbey Road.

Also titled Destroyed and published by Damiani/D.A.P, Moby’s first book of photography features 55 photographs taking us behind the scenes on an international journey and introduces us to the strange and disconcerting life of touring that is often not exposed; the time spent isolated in anonymous, mundane spaces like hotel rooms, airports, and backstage waiting areas. These experiences are juxtaposed with moments and places of intense beauty in the world and the excitement and connection with audiences. From the absurdly empty to the absurdly full, Moby captures the universal situation that so many musicians and artists undergo living nomadic lives. The combination of the album and book of photography, created while touring, provides an intimate look at Moby’s world and his creative process.

moby.com | destroyed.moby.com | mute.com

Rick Springfield is an Australian singer-songwriter, musician, and actor. As a musician, he is known for the 1981 #1 single “Jessie’s Girl”, which became a blockbuster of 1980s pop rock music and helped establish the emerging music video age. As an actor, Springfield is known for playing Dr. Noah Drake on the daytime drama General Hospital. He originated the character from 1981–1983 and then returned to play him again from 2005–2008.

Don’t miss this chance to see Rick Springfield at Horseshoe Southern Indiana on September 23rd at 7:30 p.m. in the Showroom.  Tickets go on sale Friday May 20^th, 2011 and may be purchased through Ticketmaster or the Horseshoe Box office.

About Caesars Entertainment: 

Caesars Entertainment, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of branded casino entertainment through operating subsidiaries. Since its beginning in Reno, Nevada 70 years ago, Caesars has grown through development of new properties, expansions and acquisitions. Caesars Entertainment is focused on building loyalty and value with its customers through a unique combination of great service, excellent products, unsurpassed distribution, operational excellence and technology leadership.  More information about Caesars is available at its Website – www.caesars.com.

Rodney Carrington is a multitalented comedian, actor, and writer who has recorded eight major record label comedy albums selling over two million copies. Two of these albums have been certified gold by the RIAA. Rodney starred in his own TV sitcom Rodney, which ran for two seasons on ABC. He also co-wrote and co-starred with Toby Keith in the feature film Beer for My Horses.  According to Pollstar, Rodney was the 4th highest grossing touring comedian in 2009.

Don’t miss this chance to see Rodney Carrington at Horseshoe Southern Indiana on August 12th at 7:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. in the Showroom.  Tickets go on sale Friday May 20^th, 2011 and may be purchased through Ticketmaster or the Horseshoe Box office.

About Caesars Entertainment: 

Caesars Entertainment, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of branded casino entertainment through operating subsidiaries. Since its beginning in Reno, Nevada 70 years ago, Caesars has grown through development of new properties, expansions and acquisitions. Caesars Entertainment is focused on building loyalty and value with its customers through a unique combination of great service, excellent products, unsurpassed distribution, operational excellence and technology leadership.  More information about Caesars is available at its Website – www.caesars.com.

Melissa Etheridge has received fifteen Grammy Award nominations winning two, one Academy Award and has sold twenty-seven million albums worldwide and almost fourteen million in the United States alone.  Etheridge is known for her mixture of confessional lyrics, pop-based folk-rock, and raspy, smoky vocals.

Don’t miss this chance to see Melissa Etheridge at Horseshoe Southern Indiana on July 22nd at 7:30 p.m. in the Showroom.  Tickets go on sale Friday May 20^th,  2011 and may be purchased through Ticketmaster or the Horseshoe Box office.

About Caesars Entertainment: 

Caesars Entertainment, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of branded casino entertainment through operating subsidiaries. Since its beginning in Reno, Nevada 70 years ago, Caesars has grown through development of new properties, expansions and acquisitions. Caesars Entertainment is focused on building loyalty and value with its customers through a unique combination of great service, excellent products, unsurpassed distribution, operational excellence and technology leadership.  More information about Caesars is available at its Website – www.caesars.com.

Combining a Philadelphia soul sound with a strong appreciation of Marvin Gaye, Maze featuring Frankie Beverly was among the top R&B acts of the late ’70s and ’80s. The distinctive Maze and its charismatic lead singer, founder, producer, and songwriter Beverly didn’t have many pop hits, but they remain extremely popular among soul and urban contemporary audiences and enjoyed at least six or seven gold albums.  Don’t miss this once in a lifetime chance to see Maze at Horseshoe Southern Indiana on June 10th at 7:30 p.m. in the Showroom.  Tickets are on sale now and may be purchased through Ticketmaster or the Horseshoe Box office.

About Caesars Entertainment: 

Caesars Entertainment, Inc. is the world’s largest provider of branded casino entertainment through operating subsidiaries. Since its beginning in Reno, Nevada 70 years ago, Caesars has grown through development of new properties, expansions and acquisitions. Caesars Entertainment is focused on building loyalty and value with its customers through a unique combination of great service, excellent products, unsurpassed distribution, operational excellence and technology leadership.  More information about Caesars is available at its Website – www.caesars.com.

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The Forecastle Festival and AC Entertainment are proud to announce the 4th annual “Halfway to Forecastle” event, July 15 in Louisville at Waterfront Park and The Ice House. It will be the first event partnership between The Forecastle Festival and AC Entertainment ~ producers of Bonnaroo, Moogfest, Big Ears, and over 750 concerts annually.

The event will be co-headlined by Pretty Lights and Big Boi (Outkast), and will also feature performances from RJD2, BoomBox, and the first hometown concert in three years by Louisville’s VHS or Beta. A late night after-party will include Mimosa, Ana Sia, and Gramatik at The Ice House :: the first event hosted at the newly renovated, former Artic Ice facility in downtown Louisville.

Early-bird tickets go on sale this Friday, May 13 at 10am through eTix.com, ear-X-tacy Records, or charge-by-phone at: 1.800.514.3849. Tickets for Halfway are $29.50. Once the early-bird allotment is sold out, advance tickets will increase to $35 until the event is sold out, with any remaining tickets available for $45 at the gate. A very limited number of VIP Tickets will be available for $80 and will offer preferred viewing, hospitality, and amenities.

Tickets to the after-party will be sold separately, costing $20 in advance, $25 day of show. There is a limited capacity for both of these events.

The main stage schedule can be found on the festival website: www.ForecastleFest.com. An additional performance area featuring Sonicbids and Red Bull music academy artists will be announced at the end of May.

“Halfway to Forecastle 2011″

July 15

The Wharf at Waterfront Park

Pretty Lights
Big Boi
RJD2
VHS or Beta
BoomBox

After Party at The Ice House

Mimosa
Ana Sia
Gramatik

Halfway to Forecastle is an annual event designed to celebrate the “Halfway” point to the annual Forecastle Festival, which will host its 10th Anniversary in 2012 at Waterfront Park. The event is the first partnership between AC Entertainment and The Forecastle Festival, and will expand greatly upon the footprint of previous event. Halfway to Forecastle has grown significantly since its inception in 2008, selling out for three consecutive years, attracting fans from throughout the region, while continually upgrading to larger venues.

Moby is yet another major artist to add to the role-call of illustrious insomniacs, even if, for him, sleep deprivation is as much about the modern international music star’s peripatetic lifestyle as it is an unquenchable creative dynamo. “The last thing I should be is a travelling musician,” he admits. “Some friends of mine, if they go from Los Angeles to London they’re immediately on British time; or they go from Singapore to San Francisco and they’re immediately on San Francisco time. I, unfortunately, go from New York to London and sit in my hotel room not sleeping for hour after hour.”

Rather than twiddling his thumbs during such protracted periods of wired somnambulance, however, Moby has come to embrace enforced wakefulness and turn it to his advantage – a process he calls “repurposing insomnia.” Aside from learning to relish “some amazing sunrises you wouldn’t normally see … stuff that’s hidden from the sleeping world”, during his last world tour he carried with him a laptop Pro Tools setup, a microphone and keyboard and for the first time began to write and record music on the road. The bleary, after-hours statelessness of the touring regimen, and the awed solitude inherent in gazing out upon silent urban nightscapes, pervade his new compositions.

It’s a fuzzier, woozier strain of the ‘elegant melancholy’ which has characterised much of Moby’s best-loved music; a rare quality in a musician still affiliated, however nominally, with the extrovert escapism of dance music. “You’re in Cologne, in a hotel, room, you have insomnia, you’re exhausted but you can’t sleep; you look out of your window and everything as far as you can see is quiet and asleep, except for the occasional changing street light”, Moby says, outlining Destroyed’s quintessential mise-en-scène. “You’re hardly going to make jump up and down, feel-good music… I certainly tend to make music [in that environment] that’s quieter, more atmospheric, a little disconcerting but hopefully a little warm, enveloping and beautiful at the same time.”

With a hard drive full of these evocative, wee small hours recordings, Moby returned to his studio in downtown Manhattan (New York being ‘the city that never sleeps’ after all – which is perhaps why Moby has recently relocated to Los Angeles, although he maintains his NYC facility) where he set about fleshing out the sketches into full-blown songs. The result is Destroyed, Moby’s ninth studio album, a 15-track collection that, sure enough, conflates the atmospheric and the disconcerting with the enveloping and beautiful. Rich in the kind of melodies that are lodged in the brain by stealth rather than with a bludgeon, it is nonetheless a record whose hook-line quotient is arguably unrivalled in the Moby canon since his 1999 international breakthrough album, Play.

Like its predecessor, 2009’s post-punk-indebted Wait For Me, the new album eschews deluxe studio gloss in favour of warts-and-all charm, inspired particularly by proto-electronic pioneers such as Suicide, DAF and early Heaven 17 – artists whose flawed but fearless attempts to capture electronic instruments resulted in music of immense character, filled with the kind of raw, sonic grain which a rueful Moby doesn’t hear in too much contemporary music. “I don’t really like too many big, well-produced records. I tend to like old records, whether it’s a Billie Holiday or John Lee Hooker recording … even a record like Cream’s Disraeli Gears: you listen to the [technical quality of the] recording, and it’s disastrous – but it sounds and feels amazing. What I love about John Lee Hooker’s first single, ‘Boogie Chillen’’, is that it’s just a guitar, a vocal and a guy hitting a box, and it leaves room for me, the listener, to enter the recording; whereas I listen to a new pop record and its so big, so bombastic and over the top and so perfectly produced, I feel like I’m at an incredibly loud, dynamic party that I’m not invited to.”

Destroyed also features a cabal of seductively-toned female guest singers (Moby, who admits to not favouring his own singing voice, restricts himself to a handful of vocals, typically processing them through a half-broken Korg vocoder).  “The trajectory of a lot of the songs is sort of like the trajectory of hotel insomnia”, Moby elucidates. “It starts out disconcerting and then you sort of make peace with it. The more time goes, the more you realise that it’s not disconcerting, it’s actually quite interesting. [Likewise] the songs begin minimal and fractured and then build and fill in a little bit.”

Ranging discreetly across styles, from the Kraftwerkian vocoders and pointillist electronica of ‘The Broken Places’ and the soaring, hymnal ‘Be The One’, to the soulful funk of ‘The Right Thing’ via the Bowie/Eno-indebted ‘The Day’, the unadulterated synth-pop of ‘Blue Moon’ and the symphonic melancholy of ‘Lie Down In Darkness’, Destroyed offers a listening experience designed to be consumed, Moby insists, as an album. “This might sound bad, but when I was growing up, albums were some of my best friends. Heaven Up Here by Echo and the Bunnymen and Closer by Joy Division: I was closer to these records than I was to my family and friends. I love the [idea of the] album as a cohesive body of work; it’s still really precious to me.”

Published simultaneously with the album is a deluxe art tome of Moby photographs, also titled Destroyed. The book offers a by turns stark, poignant, amusing and beautiful cavalcade of surreally deserted cityscapes and urban ‘non-places’, airport buildings with endless corridors that seem to lead nowhere, and semi-abstract compositions of cloud forms and landscapes shot from airplane windows. There are also several contrasting images of luminous but lonely hotel room vistas (“…where the streetlights are all on but are only illuminating emptiness”) set alongside vast, swaying, ‘single organism’ audience shots, as snapped from the stage; their juxtaposition seemingly saying everything about the bizarre psychological dislocation, the dramatic yin and yang, that is the international  musician’s life. As Moby puts it, “Touring is all contrasts and strangeness, and that’s what I’m trying to convey in these pictures.”

The title and front cover of Destroyed, both album and book, are products of Moby’s keen photographer’s eye. The eye-catching image depicts the final part of an LED security warning: Unattended luggage will be destroyed, which Moby snapped as it flashed up, one word at time, in a deserted hallway at New York’s La Guardia airport. The word ‘destroyed’ had an immediate resonance. What might be an elliptical nod to Pablo Picasso’s infamous aphorism, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction”, for Moby is principally an expression of the psychological state bought about by life in almost perpetual motion. “Anyone who’s travelled a lot, or even a little, will have experienced being in an airport, in a hotel, when everything around you is vaguely familiar but disconcerting in its familiarity. You’re in an airport in Singapore and all looks normal, except your circadian rhythms are all screwed up; you haven’t eaten well; you haven’t slept; it’s unnecessarily bright, you’re covered in that weird, synthetic travel grime … and there’s that feeling of just being ‘destroyed’. Sometimes you get past the level of exhaustion and it starts to feel good … the narcotic quality of feeling ‘destroyed’”

Moby had to be cajoled into publishing his photographic work by trusted friends from the New York and LA artistic communities, so reluctant was he not to be tarred with the brush of pop star dilettantism. In fact, he is far from being a flash-in-the-pan, digital camera-wielding dabbler, having studied film and photography at SUNY Purchase (State University of New York) in his youth. Indeed, Moby has actually been a keen SLR lensman ever since, as a ten year old, he was presented with A Nikon F camera as a Christmas present by his uncle Joseph, a photographer for The New York Times. “It was the single best present. I couldn’t believe I was being given this piece of adult technology. I treated it so reverentially. And then he gave me his old darkroom equipment that he wasn’t using, so I learned how to process my own film and print.” At SUNY Purchase, Moby became a habitué of the college darkroom. “I was obsessive. The darkroom opened at two in the afternoon. I would shoot in the morning, until 1.59pm, and then spend ten hours in the darkroom. I was constantly sick, because developing chemicals are disgusting. That’s one of the great things about digital photography; it’s nice not to be around those toxic chemicals any more.”

Photographer, international music star, DJ and soundtrack composer (his credit appears on over 300 Hollywood and art-house movies; including Paul Haggis’s The Next Three Days, which boasts Destroyed track ‘Be The One’ on its soundtrack. Alongside other Moby material), Moby is also a lover of great American literature – his great, great grand-uncle was Moby Dick author Herman Melville, after all. Indeed, evocative titles drawn from Moby’s favourite literary works are another hallmark of Destroyed, the album. The song ‘Lie Down In Darkness’ is named after a William Styron novel, for example, while the ‘The Violent Bear It Away’ and ‘Victoria Lucas’ salute Flannery O’Connor’s so-named Southern Gothic morality tale and Sylvia Plath’s first pen-name, respectively’.

The scion of a versatile artistic family, he admits to having arrived at music almost by default. “My uncle was a sculptor, so I couldn’t be a sculptor; my mom’s a painter, so I couldn’t be a painter; my other uncle’s a photographer… They’d cornered those markets, so I had to choose music…”

With the dual-discipline Destroyed, Moby has proved that such restrictive notions have been jettisoned. Safe in that knowledge perhaps he’ll finally get a decent night’s sleep now. He surely deserves it.