Debut Album "Hubble Drums" Out Now on Northern
Spy Records!
Stream / Download "Nude Ghost" (Midnight Magic Remix) here!
"Hubble makes music about small phrases and layered rhythms and tiny melodic variations: adding or bending some notes in a chain. (You can hear it on a strong new album, “Hubble Drums,” released last month by Northern Spy.) Mr. Greenberg sounds as though he’s starting from the usual 20th-century source material, Terry Riley in particular, and seeing where his own skill and nervous system can take it." - The NY Times
"...Greenberg meditates on the euphoric cosmos by cycling through patterns that orbit the ears. Earlier this year, I could see that intense meditation in his face as he heaved his body back and forth in the converted living room above a Washington, D.C. warehouse. It was as if Greenberg was summoning a galaxy right then and there in a zen state of shred." - NPR
"Greenberg's recent collaboration with Tiffany Borders from the Space Telescope Science Institute and video artist Sheena Callage, which sets "Hubble's Hubble" to imaging of actual Hubble telescope data, gives a good visual metaphor for our listening experience, both here and elsewhere on this beautifully troubling debut: an endless back-and-forth between details and expanses, wide angles and extreme close-ups, anxiety and awe." - Pitchfork
Following the recent appearance at Brooklyn's XPRMNTL FSTVL, and in celebration of the recently released debut full-length "Hubble Drums" out now on Northern Spy Records, New York-based solo guitar project Hubble (featuring Ben Greenberg of Zs and Pygmy Shrews), has premiered a remix of their new song "Nude Ghost" at the Northern Spy Records website.
Featuring the spellbinding touch of Morgan Wiley (Midnight Magic / Jessica 6 / ex-Hercules and Love Affair), this esoteric wall of sound is transformed into one of the year's wildest bangers. Complete with dance-floor ready beats, simulated hand claps and vocal blips and bleeps added to Greenberg's signature guitar noodling, the track recalls a time when New York's underground rave and electroclash scenes were at the forefront of Gotham City's ecstasy-infused nightlife.
Hubble is also announcing dates down to this year's SXSW marathon in Austin, Texas, where Greenberg will be performing as both the opening act to headliners The Men on select shows, and will also be performing as the band's newest member as he takes over bass-playing duties for the months ahead - full Hubble itinerary below.
Hubble Live!
3/9 - Savannah Stopover Festival (Telfair Museum) Savannah, GA %
3/14 - Club 1808 - SXSW Party Party Partners Showcase Austin, TX
3/16 - 517 S Lamar Blvd #B - SXSW Terroreyes TV Showcase Austin, TX *
3/17 - The Hideout Official SXSW Showcase Austin, TX
4/15 - Oberlin College Oberlin, OH ^
% = w/ The Men
* = w/ Dustin Wong, Dan Friel
^ = w/ Aaron Dilloway/Chris Corsano Duo
"Hubble Drums" Track List:
1. Nude Ghost
2. Glass Napkin
3. Hubble’s Hubble
Stream / Download "Nude Ghost" (Midnight Magic Remix) here!
"Hubble makes music about small phrases and layered rhythms and tiny melodic variations: adding or bending some notes in a chain. (You can hear it on a strong new album, “Hubble Drums,” released last month by Northern Spy.) Mr. Greenberg sounds as though he’s starting from the usual 20th-century source material, Terry Riley in particular, and seeing where his own skill and nervous system can take it." - The NY Times
"...Greenberg meditates on the euphoric cosmos by cycling through patterns that orbit the ears. Earlier this year, I could see that intense meditation in his face as he heaved his body back and forth in the converted living room above a Washington, D.C. warehouse. It was as if Greenberg was summoning a galaxy right then and there in a zen state of shred." - NPR
"Greenberg's recent collaboration with Tiffany Borders from the Space Telescope Science Institute and video artist Sheena Callage, which sets "Hubble's Hubble" to imaging of actual Hubble telescope data, gives a good visual metaphor for our listening experience, both here and elsewhere on this beautifully troubling debut: an endless back-and-forth between details and expanses, wide angles and extreme close-ups, anxiety and awe." - Pitchfork
Following the recent appearance at Brooklyn's XPRMNTL FSTVL, and in celebration of the recently released debut full-length "Hubble Drums" out now on Northern Spy Records, New York-based solo guitar project Hubble (featuring Ben Greenberg of Zs and Pygmy Shrews), has premiered a remix of their new song "Nude Ghost" at the Northern Spy Records website.
Featuring the spellbinding touch of Morgan Wiley (Midnight Magic / Jessica 6 / ex-Hercules and Love Affair), this esoteric wall of sound is transformed into one of the year's wildest bangers. Complete with dance-floor ready beats, simulated hand claps and vocal blips and bleeps added to Greenberg's signature guitar noodling, the track recalls a time when New York's underground rave and electroclash scenes were at the forefront of Gotham City's ecstasy-infused nightlife.
Hubble is also announcing dates down to this year's SXSW marathon in Austin, Texas, where Greenberg will be performing as both the opening act to headliners The Men on select shows, and will also be performing as the band's newest member as he takes over bass-playing duties for the months ahead - full Hubble itinerary below.
Hubble Live!
3/9 - Savannah Stopover Festival (Telfair Museum) Savannah, GA %
3/14 - Club 1808 - SXSW Party Party Partners Showcase Austin, TX
3/16 - 517 S Lamar Blvd #B - SXSW Terroreyes TV Showcase Austin, TX *
3/17 - The Hideout Official SXSW Showcase Austin, TX
4/15 - Oberlin College Oberlin, OH ^
% = w/ The Men
* = w/ Dustin Wong, Dan Friel
^ = w/ Aaron Dilloway/Chris Corsano Duo
"Hubble Drums" Track List:
1. Nude Ghost
2. Glass Napkin
3. Hubble’s Hubble
About "Hubble Drums"
Planned since Hubble's first live performance in September of 2010, Hubble Drums is an inspired record of new guitar music. Equal parts shred-fi, cyber-dread and fried psychedelia, Hubble Drums marks Ben Greenberg's first full-length recording and debut for Northern Spy. Recorded at Python Patrol and lovingly mastered at Bonati Mastering, the CD and 150g LP features original artwork by Michael Yaniro and Ben Greenberg.
“Hubble's Hubble” serves as the soundtrack for a video of NASA sanctioned cosmic imagery captured by the actual Hubble Telescope. Possibly the most minimal track, Ben produces sheets of sound that circle through 3 channels, panning left to center to right, creating an aural environment that reflects the space and movement of deep space. “Nude Ghost” is based off the first tapping riff that Ben wrote when creating music for solo guitar. The glacially emerging beat mixed into the track came from two days of hazed studio jamming with Joe Williams (White Williams), Jon Leland (Janka Nabay, Skeletons) and Matt Papich (Ecstatic Sunshine). "Glass Napkin" highlights Ben's mastery of both guitar tone and hypnotic rhythmic patters, as well as his energetic patience in the face of a void of his own devising.
Since the inception of his new solo guitar project, Ben Greenberg (also of Zs and Pygmy Shrews) has sought to exploit the guitar for its ulterior qualities, simultaneously displaying a true love for the instrument while redefining how guitar music is understood. Whether distortion-drenched or achingly clean, Ben describes painstaking result as “cyber-dread”, an apocalyptic, beat-less quasi-electronic music, conjuring Terry Riley’s pulsing minimalist structures and Gregg Ginn’s aggressive, avant-garde rock.
About the Hubble live performance, Ben expounds, "Every Hubble set, on a stage or in a friend's basement or in my bedroom, is a concerted effort on my part to change the air in the room, to push it towards a state of greater resonance.” Using mesmerizing guitar mastery to create extended rhythmic patters of note groupings of varied tempo, dissonance, and harmony, Ben hypnotizes the audience with slowly developing, subtle variation, until the listener is lulled into a highly vivid dream state. The set varies between a versatile and simple set-up and the more ambitious Hubble Superposition, a quadraphonic experience that splits the guitar signal into four different signals which are routed through four separate amplifiers.
Ben’s first release "Hubble Linger" (NNA Tapes) brilliantly utilized the cassette format by distilling a live performance into two side-long pieces of stereo-panning guitar. The tape was well received inciting electronic musician Keith Fullerton Whitman to claim “...I’m fairly floored by this extended solo-trance-out from Zs guitarist Ben Greenberg, who seems to have invented a device that halts time (musical, actual, and meta-physical) ; its use is put to great effect across this 60-minute blast of cycling “stereo” chord progressions and assorted haze(s) that approaches the fervour of MBV / Belong’s filtered-out high-gain wash while retaining the minimalist patina of Charlemagne Palestine piece ... awesome.”
"At once heady and visceral, psychedelic and intensely lucid, Hubble's mesmeric guitar webs are laser-etched incantations to the sublime. At the luminous crossroads of John Lee Hooker and Philip Glass, this is virtuosic and visionary sound-sculpture that kicks the concept of what is music just a little further down the road. There is something new under the sun. Just listen." - Michael Azerrad
“Hubble's euphoric wheedlechurn is where the measured precision of downtown minimalism meets the unhinged aggression of Brooklyn loft noise--truly hypnotic and truly New York.” - Christopher R. Weingarten
"Working under the pseudonym Hubble, Brooklyn-based composer Ben Greenberg writes hypnotic instrumentals that are part avant-garde classical music, part heavy metal." - The Washington Post
"He’s made a rock-solid practice of crafting amorphous music out of spidery figures maneuvered by hummingbird-like fingers. But Hubble is his most focused, lean work, and it’s the first that fully belongs in its own orbit." - The Boston Globe
"Greenberg's technique blurred into life, the tapping phrases taking on their own definitions, the exact musical inverse of what happens when one repeats a word ad infinitum into meaninglessness." - The Village Voice
“I’m fairly floored by this extended solo-trance-out from Zs guitarist Ben Greenberg, who seems to have invented a device that halts time (musical, actual, and meta-physical) ; its use is put to great effect across this 60-minute blast of cycling “stereo” chord progressions and assorted haze(s) that approaches the fervour of MBV / Belong’s filtered-out high-gain wash while retaining the minimalist patina of Charlemagne Palestine piece ... awesome.” - Keith Fullerton Whitman
“[Ben] has been channeling his formidable guitar chops into distortion-drenched, loop-based compositions that lovers of distressed ambience will be more than happy to zone out to.”
- Emile Friedlander, Altered Zones
"His new instrumental solo project, Hubble, finds Greenberg maniacally noodling through celestial, finger-tapped riffs with little more than a guitar and a basic loop station. It’s a touch more accessible than his past work, and allows his well-honed virtuosity to shine through." - The New Yorker
"When you watch [Hubble] perform...one of the most striking things is realizing how excited you are to watch someone play guitar that can really fucking play. And makes rad, new music!!!" -Terroreyes.tv
For more information, visit:
Hubble on Facebook
Hubble on Twitter
Mission Hubble Blog
www.northern-spy.com
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