LEWIS & CLARKE

Perform @ The Museum of Modern Art in NYC, 9:30pm Tomorrow Evening!

The songs of Lewis & Clarke are medicinal, meditative, and trance-inducing. They wind along lengthy lines of chamber folk, full of bows and bells, aphorisms and dreamy dreams. Both literally and figuratively, Blasts of Holy Birth is about being born and re-born.

Eve Miller and Russell Higbee join the folds of nylon-string guitar, harp, keyboard, horns, strings, and drums, with Lou Rogai, the voice and vision, with arms of friends draped in the name Lewis & Clarke.

Rogai is a pastoralist, a rat-race expatriate, an old-soul musician who chose to live more deliberately with his family under the eaves of mountain trees in Pennsylvania's Delaware Water Gap. It is a community distant to the big city's pace, but close enough for gigs and recording sessions with his city-folk colleagues. Among them are Russell Higbee (harp, keys) of Man Man and Eve Miller of Rachel's (cello) who, too, embrace the exploration of sinewy eastern melody and unaffected compassion called Lewis & Clarke.

"A profound work of earthy, orchestrated new-folk, Blasts Of Holy Birth raises the bar for both listeners and players in search of evolution in roots-oriented music. Meshing gorgeously hushed melodies and plucked guitars with baroque string arrangements and ethereal pulses and surges, Lewis & Clarke ( a.k.a. Del. Water Gap's Lou Rogai) has crafted a transcendent work of epic proportions. Themed around the birthing experience, the album moves in tidal breaths through meditative and hazy soundscapes, delicate minimalism, and goose bump inducing chamber sections. An expose of grace, beauty, peril, triumph, and the interconnectivity of all things - musically and lyrically, it's really that good." - Impose Magazine

In Delaware Water Gap, one can tune in to vibrations that only exist in certain areas. It is here that Rogai, with his family, took to nest in an antiquated dwelling within earshot of an historic jazz landmark: tuned in, turned on, and just far enough away from the rattle of the rest of the world.

Blasts of Holy Birth was written not with the usual pen-in-hand love-lost scribbles that song scribes commonly sing; here are celebrations, hand-in-hand, of life's travails and joys!

Lewis & Clarke songs are long and unhurried life lessons, believed and still unveiling truths, to himself and his son, who was months away from LIFE: Day One while this album was being composed. The only piece here not written by Rogai, "Comfort Inn", is by his friend, Aaron Ross, the CA mountain dweller and singer of Hella. Ross was awaiting the birth of his daughter during same time that Rogai expected his son, and so it only fit that they share in each other's song.

Over the last few years, Lewis & Clarke have toured and performed with Isobel Campbell (Belle & Sebastian), Blur, Robyn Hitchcock, Joan of Arc, Okkervil River, Mi & L'au, The Black Swans and other contemporaries.

And as is the case with good artists and smart adults, it is through big change and artistic redemption that we re-learn who we really are. And as the meat of life is inseparable from the weight of song, Lewis & Clarke's heavy-duty beauty, Blasts of Holy Birth, is born.

"Blasts of Holy Birth" Tracklist:
1. Secret Of The Golden Flower
2. Blasts Of Holy Birth
3. Comfort Inn
4. Before It Breaks You
5. Black Doves
6. Crimson Carpets
7. We Think We Have Eyes
8. Be The Air We Breathe

Also coming soon on La Société Expéditionnaire:
The Black Swans "Change!" CD/LP - November 6th, 2007
Strand of Oaks "Leave Ruin" CD/LP - February 2008
Moon and Moon - featuring William Lemon, Jay Hudak and Edward Klinger (An Albatross), Lou Rogai (Lewis & Clarke), members of Barkus Born, and guest musicians Natasha Khan (Bat For Lashes), Devendra Banhart, Gibby Haynes, and more. CD/ LP - March 2008

For more information, visit:
www.lewisandclarkemusic.com
www.la-soc.com
www.myspace.com/lewisclarke
www.myspace.com/lasoc