Matt Bauer returns with "No Shape Can Hold Us Now" - Out October 23rd, 2012 on Crossbill Records!

No Shape Can Hold Me Now was recorded over more than a year in which Bauer has had no permanent residence,  and at the at the heart of the EP are thoughts on travel, return, and trying to find a home in the world.

The centerpiece is "Andaman Sea", a duet with Jolie Holland that imagines a red eye flight over the international date line - the speaker lost in thought and memory and the inwardness of travel as a day vanishes from her calendar. "These are just lines on a map / I erase them," she thinks. "No shape / No Time / No, nothing can hold me now."

From there, the songs take us to places familiar and strange, real and imagined.

"Enlisted," commissioned by the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, takes as it's source a drawing of Italy's "Miracle Mountains" by Enzo Cucchi and imagines a young man's thoughts as the people of his small town crowd around to enlist for war.

"Tonight We Get to Sing Our Songs" is about wandering a new city with friends before playing a show, finding the melody to a new song in the shadow of a giant black church made of lava rock.

Last, "Homeward Bound" is about returning home, or to some dream of it, in central Kentucky.

The wanderers of this EP find home not only as a place on a map, but as a shared past, a moment with friends, or in the thrill of having no idea where you are or what's next.

Following 2008's The Island Moved in the Storm, Bauer has, more often than not, been on tour in the US and Europe and after the release of 2011's The Jessamine County Book of the Living has split his down time between Brooklyn, Austin, Arkansas, and Kentucky.

No Shape Can Hold Me Now was recorded to a vintage Avenbeinder 5 track in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Lexington, Ky, and Gilbert, Arkansas.



No Shape Can Hold Me Now - trailer 1 from matt bauer on Vimeo.

"Matt Bauer's orchestral folk music can chill the bone." Under The Radar

"Brilliant." New York Magazine

"If you’ve never heard Matt Bauer’s staggeringly beautiful The Island Moved in the Storm (2008), I suggest you stop reading now and remedy that situation posthaste. I say that simply because thoroughly digesting that record is about the only thing that can prepare you for Bauer’s upcoming release, The Jessamine County Book Of The Living." My Old Kentucky Blog

"The Jessamine County Book of the Living moves with the grace of a gentle breeze floating through the flowers and high grass of a wide open meadow." Mixtape Muse

"Matt Bauer‘s latest album, The Jessamine County Book of the Living, is equally earthen and inspiring, a wonderful mix that features 20 musical guests including Jolie Holland among others." Stereo Subversion

"What drew me in was Bauer’s voice, a thing so low and precise that it recalls Richard Buckner’s best work. (You might notice that “Blacklight Horses” features Jolie Holland, and she turns out to be Bauer’s perfect foil, a high contrast to his weight.) Then there are his songs, which are so odd – they are dark and beautiful, menacing and sweet; they are everything at once, and it’s an intoxicating mixture. And don’t get me started on those beautiful strings."Music For Robots

"The album is a ten-song venture into experimental sound that mixes the bluegrass twang of a banjo with the ethereal sounds of an orchestra that seems as though it slipped into Kentucky’s own Mammoth Caves, spiraled into hell and is now playing its way out. In fact, the inspiration for the album comes from the natural landscape and world that is so prevalent in most of Kentucky." Awaiting the Flood