ALUK TODOLO + INSECT ARK USA 2017
Feb 3,4,5 New York – Stardust VI – St Vitus
Feb 7 Seattle – Highline
Feb 8 Portland – High Water Mark
Feb 9 San Francisco – Elbo Room w/ Common Eider King Eider, Alaric
Feb 10 Sacramento – The Colony
Feb 11 Los Angeles – the Complex
ALUK TODOLO (Grenoble, France) is an instrumental power trio performing Occult Rock since 2004. Their music is a methodical exploration of the powers of musical trance. Part occult black metal fiend and part snide kraut menace, the band conjures rabid obsessive rhythms and abyssal disharmonic guitars, subliminal spiritualist vibrations and bizarre, magick summonings. ALUK TODOLO reduces psychedelic improvisation to a bare, telluric instrumentation, in which dry, spare percussion grievously mines the scrapes, shrieks and shimmer of mutated guitar and bass. The band’s sound is monolithic and stabbing, hypnotic but unpredictable, minimalist yet teeming: a dangerous, noxious coil of all things black.
INSECT ARK is an instrumental doom-psych duo based in NYC / Portland (Dana Schechter – bass, lap steel, synths / Ashley Spungin – drums, synths). Schechter plays/has played with M. Gira’s Angels of Light (Swans), Wrekmeister Harmonies; Ashley Spungin also plays in Taurus. Since the band’s inception in late 2011, Insect Ark have toured internationally, had their music used in feature films, and released 5 records/singles. Pitchfork called their 2015 album “Portal/Well” “vivid and immersive, maintaining a queasy, menacing dream logic”; and the WIRE, “lumbering, thudding bass riffs rise from the pools of droning, keening synths beneath”. A new full-length LP is currently in production for a 2017 release.