"...beautiful folk-pop ballads..." Pitchfork
"...vast and varied..." Magnet
San Francisco-based Michael Zapruder will return with his new album, Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope, on its new release date of November 18th, 2008. The record will see release on Zapruder's new label home, Sidecho Records (home to Via Audio). Recorded with Scott Solter in two weeks of marathon day-and-night sessions, it's another beautiful record of sinuous melodies that straddles the line between classic songwriting and experimentalism.
Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope, the new record by Michael Zapruder, is a record of contrasts and oddities that moves with easy dreamlike logic from the everyday to the everynight, presenting opposites without attempting to resolve them. In the process, it offers a glimpse of wildness at the core of humanism.
Zapruder and Scott Solter (Mountain Goats, Two Gallants, Pattern is Movement, John Vanderslice) recorded and mixed the record in a two-week session at San Francisco's Tiny Telephone Studio. Somewhere in that undertaking, like fishermen dangling a net deep into the darkest waters of the Pacific, they ensnared something loose, weird, old, formless, and potent.
Zapruder brought a two-part mission statement with him. First was the idea of negative capability, the ability to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". The second was a line from a poem by contemporary poet Joshua Beckman: "This party is fucked without the karate chop of love."
With these in mind, Zapruder set about making something that would reside squarely where discontinuity and faith meet. Twenty-five songs went in and eleven came out, the survivors supported by the contributions of Zapruder's Rain of Frogs, a loose cadre of musicians and friends that now number in the thirties, and which sometimes includes members of the Decemberists and Tom Waits' bands (see www.michaelzapruder.com/rof.htm).
Minimal and tricky, Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope presents a world of large spaces and tiny details. It dwells in contrast and juxtaposition. Whatever intuition made Zapruder set the two-week limit on this record, it was a good one, because the recording lacks oversight and planning and thereby exposes common threads in songs that might have initially seemed too dissimilar to belong together. What results is a larger world that feels strangely effortless and surprisingly unified. And thanks to Scott Solter, on Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope for the first time, the quality of the recorded document equals the quality of Zapruder's songs. This is the best record that Zapruder has yet made.
Tour Dates
(Michael Zapruder will be available for interviews. Contact us for more information.)
10.24.08 - New York, NY - CMJ, Ace of Clubs
10.25.08 - Washington DC - Dahlak
10.26.08 - Pittsburgh, PA - The Coyote
10.28.08 - Peoria, IL - Gorman's Pub
10.29.08 - St. Louis, MO - Cicero's
10.30.08 - Omaha, NE - Waiting Room ^
10.31.08 - Greeley, CO - Atlas Theater ^
11.01.08 - Colorado Springs, CO - Rocket Room ^
11.02.08 - Santa Fe, NM - Meow Wolf ^
11.03.08 - Phoenix, AZ - Modified Arts ^
11.04.08 - Upland, CA - The Wire ^
11.05.08 - San Francisco, CA - CD RELEASE SHOW, Bottom Of The Hill ^
11.07.08 - Portland, OR - Roturre
11.09.08 - Seattle, WA - Sunset Tavern ^
* with Via Audio and 1090 Club
^ with 1090 Club
Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope
Track Listing
1. Happy New Year
2. Lucy's Handmade Paper
3. Ads For Feelings
4. Can't We Bring You Home
5. Black Wine
6. Harbor Saints
7. South Kenosha
8. Bang On A Drum
9. White Raven Sails
10. Second Sunday In Ordinary Time
11. Experimental Film
Previous press:
"...one of the inheritors of Leonard Cohen's crown of thorns, Zapruder explores themes of isolation and eros without the customary whine." - Los Angeles Times
"It's probably not too much of an overstatement to hang the "genius" tag on multi-instrumentalist Michael Zapruder." - Amplifier
"This record belongs on the shelf between Lennon's Double Fantasy and Westerberg's 14 Songs. Go get it." - Performing Songwriter
"...gorgeous, uplifting, well-wrought, and magical." - Delusions of Adequacy
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