Dm Stith to tour

DM Stith embarks on his lengthiest North American tour to date this summer, which begins June 12 in New York City. Coming on the heels of Stith’s collection of covers and remixes culled from his acclaimed debut album and subsequent digital-only EPs, Heavy Ghost Appendices, the tour finds Stith joining up with visionary musical colleagues Inlets and Silje Nes. Stith will be releasing a limited edition tour 12” featuring exclusive material by each artist, including a Sparklehorse cover by Stith. Please see below for a list of confirmed dates.

Heavy Ghost cast an almost supernatural effect on reviewers and fans when it was released in March of 2009. Both groups acclaimed it as a stunning debut unlike anything else they had heard. NPR called the LP “complex… [containing] inventive songs,” while Entertainment Weekly proclaimed it “one of the strongest debut albums I’ve heard.” Stith’s peers received it well too: Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear twittered about it calling it a “lovely album,” and Bat for Lashes picked Heavy Ghost for her New York Times Playlist, saying “It traverses all these magical landscapes… almost like Alice through the looking glass. Like you’re being sucked into a secret world.”

Heavy Ghost Appendices, which comes out May 25 on Asthmatic Kitty, revisits this secret world and adds to its cartography a series of hidden coves, unexplored forests, and new landscapes.

Heavy Ghost was also mystifying and intertwined to David when he wrote it; the Appendices are a means to sort the thing out in his mind. They physically collect the digital trilogy of EPs released over the course of the summer and fall of 2009 into a beautifully packaged limited edition double-disc set. The EPs were an exercise in exploring the boundaries of the music contained on Heavy Ghost, revisiting songs, reinterpreting, and displaying some inspiration and influences through covers of other artists. The remixes helped provide new context and deconstruction of his songs in a way that unearthed the songs’ roles and relationships to one another.

The two discs are divided between the covers/reworkings and the remixes. The first disc includes an astonishing rendition of Randy Newman’s “Suzanne” and a David Lynch-esque version of the The Ronettes “Be My Baby.” There is a serene tenderness in Stith’s cover of David Byrne’s “A Soft Seduction” while he turns Diane Cluck’s “Easy To Be Around” into a menacing overture. Included are also new renditions of his own songs including “Around the Lion Legs,” the marching band gut punch of a re-envisioned “Pigs,” as well as a collaboration with label-mates I Heart Lung turning “Wig” into an ambient free jazz swirling haze.

The remix disc offers up myriad interpretations from some of electronic music’s most distinct voices, along with a smokey jazz version of “Thanksgiving Moon” by Dayna Kurtz. Michna provides a tropical dance remix, Rafter turns “Thanksgiving Moon” into a doombeat terror, Roberto Carlos Lange (Savath & Savalas, Helado Negro, Prefuse 73) infuses “BMB” with latin experimentation, while Son Lux interprets the same song with a unique sort of polka glitch.

Bibio’s remix of “Abraham's Song” takes Stith’s voice into the realm of saturated electro-acoustics while FatCat glitch artist and Bjork collaborator, Ensemble, and Warp recording artist Clark offer their own unique approach to Stith’s music both reworking “Braid of Voices.” The Appendices also includes the expansive 11-minute shoegaze electronics of Actuel. For such a strange young voice, 2009 was a wild and beautiful year and this new collection provides a reflective compendium to Stith’s debut album.

DM Stith Summer Tour
June 12 New York, NY 92Y Tribeca
June 13 Brooklyn, NY Littlefield
June 15 Portland, ME Space Gallery
June 17 Montreal, QC Casa Del Popolo
June 18 Toronto, ON Whippersnapper Gallery—NXNE Festival
June 19 London, ON Gigs
June 20 Detroit, MI Magic Stick
June 23 Madison, WI Gates of Heaven
June 24 Minneapolis, MN Cedar Saloon
June 26 Fargo, ND The Aquarium
June 30 Boise, ID Neurolux
July 1 Missoula, MT The Badlander
July 2 Calgary, AL Sled Island Festival
July 4 Vancouver, BC The Railway
July 5 Portland, OR Doug Fir Lounge
July 6 Seattle, WA High Dive
July 7 Olympia, WA Northern
July 9 Davis, CA Sophia’s
July 10 San Francisco, CA Hemlock Tavern
July 11 Los Angeles, CA Spaceland
July 12 Tucson, AZ Solar Culture
July 14 Denver, CO Larimer Lounge
July 15 Lawrence, KS Jackpot Saloon
July 16 Columbia, MO Mojo’s
July 17 Lexington, KY Al’s
July 18 Asheville, NC The Rocket Club
July 19 Washington, D.C. The Black Cat
July 21 New York, NY Joe’s Pub