Tower Promotions presents... HUGO RACE(ex Bad Seeds) + TRUE SPIRIT plus support Friday 26th May 2006 Voodoo 39 Arran quay, Dublin 7. Doors: 8pm Admission: €16.50(incl. booking fee) Available from tickets.ie, Sound Cellar and City Discs. http://towerpromotions.gothic.ie Some press and comments about Hugo Race: In the last 3 years Hugo Race has released a stream of albums: the urban dreamscapes of the True Spirit’s "Goldstreet Sessions": the elegant trip-pop of Sepiatone's "Dark Summer": the ambient soundtrack-style noise psychedelia of Transfargo’s "Mil Transit": the Italian montage of "Merola Matrix": the raw cosmic blues of the Spirit’s "Ambuscado": and the live garage rock of the Spirit’s "Live in Monaco". Hugo explains in an interview during the Australian Ambuscado Tour, Brisbane, December 2005: “For me, those six albums have been a journey of exploration through my creative psyche where I've let tangents unfold and the music that’s in me emerge without judgement or self-consciousness. In a way, all this has been leading up to the new studio album from myself and the True Spirit, “TAOIST PRIESTS”. It’s pretty much a songwriting album with the emphasis on the lyrics and voices, but we’ve combined this classical approach with the kind of soundtrack-style abstraction we focussed on for the “Ambuscado” record. In a way, all the sounds and moods of the previous six albums have been fused into one total vision that is a kind of multi-layered self-portrait. I had to deconstruct everything to find out what I'm about and how far this band can go with it. Here I'm dealing with my own demons and also with the demons unleashed in our epoch. The album has a beautiful lush sound that aims to seduce, which is good because as a concept, “Taoist Priests” is all about what it means living and loving in a world poised on the edge of self-destruction, and this political background to it is even more present than on “Goldstreet Sessions”. Its difficult to write anything today without including the devastating changes this planet is going through because everything we know and do is conditioned by a global awareness. So Taoist Priests explores this concept without mincing words because we all have to stare down the enemy within. And its about rock music, feeling how good that stuff is when you really mean what you play on a gut level. Theres too many records today with no soul and just a lot of heavy marketing. What I wanted to do with Taoist Priests was write an album that’s totally about content, about having something to say then setting it in a context of music that not only entertains but challenges and disturbs, and does all that with a lot of love. Because none of us have infinite time left, and to me the music is tremendously important as communication and as a bond between us. We called this project the True Spirit because I believe in the spiritual power of music as a way to uplift and empower, not only as a form of light entertainment. We’ll be touring in Europe on and off from March until June with the core True Spirit line-up of Chris Hughes, Michelangelo Russo, Marta Collica and Giovani Ferrario. Looking forward to it.“ A prolific and visionary artist, originally from Melbourne, singer/guitarist, producer, performer and songwriter Hugo Race was introduced to the international stage as a teenage founding member and powerful transient element of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds (1983) - (he appears on six cds of the Seed’s catalogue ). He left that band to found the Wreckery (1985), who went on to become one of Australia’s seminal garage-blues cult bands of the ‘80s, releasing with the White, Rampant and Citadel labels. In 1988 Normal Records, Germany, released the final Wreckery album, Laying Down Law. In early 1989 Hugo moved base to Berlin and Normal released his debut solo album, Rue Morgue Blues. For the following ten years Hugo released a series of albums with his musical collective True Spirit, a period recounted in the Long Time Ago double-cd retrospective, released in 2001by Glitterhouse Records, Germany, with whom Race has been recording since 1995. Both alone with a guitar or with his True Spirit, Hugo has toured Europe repeatedly, performing on a vast trajectory from the UK to Greece and was literally one of the first western “underground” acts performing inside the ex- eastern bloc European territories after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has followed a personal musical vision in a series of mutating line-ups that have fused the boundaries between the "primal" (roots) blues and raw electronica - described by London Sounds as "night music of the soul", and by Melody Maker as "industrial-trance-blues". However, critics and fans of Hugo and his True Spirit have always been forced to go beyond these limited definitions to describe the nature of his music: rock, psychedelia, industrial, experimental or simply eclectic. In reality, each new chapter in the story has only added to the confusion regarding how to catalogue Hugo and True Spirit, the result being that Hugo is perceived as a cult figure, unpredictable, brilliant and inspired – with a music that is real, honest and perfectly realised. Helixed…. In the late 90’s, Hugo Race, after the best part of a decade spent on the road with the music of the True Spirit, moved his base to Sicily and began a long rapport with Italy and the emerging Italian underground scene. In 2000, with the formation of the Helixed Productions project, Hugo expanded his vision in a creative explosion through a wide range of projects and collaborations, experimenting with different genres, line-ups and locations, and occasionally producing for other artists such as Cesare Basile, Nove Rose and Lo.Mo. Hugo initiated the Sepiatone project with singer/songwriter Marta Collica, making their debut in 2001 with the haunting and etheric “In Sepiatone” album on the cult Milano2000 label. “Perhaps the most beautiful Italian release of this period is from the Italo-Australian duo Sepiatone… a mix of cinematographic melancholia, new wave nostalgia, essential songwriting and post-rock minimalism.. (Fernando Fanutti – Rockerilla) The second Sepiatone album “Dark Summer”, a dreamlike odyssey through intimate songwriting and expanded psychedelic soundscapes, was released in May 2005 by Desvelos Records/Helixed to an overwhelming critical response and has since been licensed in Australia by Mushroom Music for a release in 2006. –www.sepiatone.net In 2004 Hugo’s surreal and sample-heavy exploration of southern Italian melodrama, “Merola Matrix”, was released by Desvelos, and the avantguarde multimedia/electronic live shows of the Matrix have been staged in some of Italy’s most prestigious galleries and art centres such as the Palazzo degli Arti di Napoli and in the Italo-Australian Film Festival at Genova. On another creative tangent, the haunting instrumental Transfargo “Mil Transit” was released in 2003 on the avant-guard Swiss label RecRec Records, inspired by Hugo’s work composing for film and television and by his encounter with experimental dj Dimitri de Perrot. In September 2003 Glitterhouse (and Spooky Records in Australia) released Hugo’s totemic Goldstreet Sessions album, a milestone in the groups highly regarded career: “Goldstreet Sessions” is Race’s latest blues-mutation, defining a sound between triphop, ambient and rock - the toughest and most intense record of his career.” (- Frankfurter Rundschau) “Hugo Race remains one of the great unsung talents of Australian music, and with ‘The Gold Street Sessions’, the leathery old wolf of the nightmare psycho blues returns…” (- Jonathon Alley, MAG Australia) In 2004 the Italian cult magazine Mucchio Selvaggio released Hugo Race + True Spirit Live in Monaco, an electric and adrenalised live session from the Goldstreet tour, (recently reissued by Glitterhouse). Meanwhile, Spanish label Bang! Records released the 7” vinyl of “Ready to Go”, while Glitterhouse reprinted the Spirit’s classic experimental album “Wet Dream” (1996). In June 2005, the Spirit’s experimental electronic blues “Ambuscado” album (Glitterhouse) hit the streets, featuring the Spirit’s most uncompromising and hallucinogenic work to date: Race’s haunted arrangements (on Ambuscado ) make him sound as if he’s literally looking lost in the song, stumbling around blindly looking for a way out, or at least safe passage through. Elsewhere it’s adventurously loose and full of rich, slow-burning incidents, united by Race’s commitment to spontaneity and experiment, and deserving of the closest attention and the highest praise. - Keith Moline, The Wire, London, September 2005 Ambuscado is a beautiful and courageous record, a slap in the face of musical conformism, with tracks always at the limit between mystic evocation and psychedelia…. Momi, Speak my Language, Italy “Ambuscado is a mysterious record. Experimentation, minimalistic blues, electro-spirituals, gospel – inside it there is everything that Hugo Race and his colleagues have undersigned in the space of a decade. Altogether, it’s a big project. Arid guitar, warm voice, dark spaces, an intimate voyage to the spiritual frontier. Vishnu, the trinity, the new age, fundamentalism, a touch of irony. What we have in front of us is a new dimension. - Rumore, Italia Hugo Race is a psychedelic prophet, a 360 degree artist who makes compromises with nobody. (- Debaser, Italia) “The stripped to the bone sound of the (True Spirit) exercises a fascination not exactly reassuring, yet magnetic in its evocation of obscure dangers. Music from the wild side of the street – or better, like walking blind in a war-zone…” (- Gianluca Testani, Mucchio Selvaggio) More information on Hugo Race + True Spirit and on the Helixed projects, as well as downloads, tourdates and links to relevant sites can be found at: www.helixed.net