The Library is on Fire to release "Magic Windows, Magic Nights" on March 2nd, 2010
MAGIC WINDOWS MAGIC NIGHTS lp/cd to be released March 2, 2010 on __________ Records (fillintheblank). Official Press Release:
www.fillintheblankrecords.com
Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York – Amid a detritus of exposed flat white-painted brick, magazine cutouts, cigarette butts, broken pens, rusty guitar strings, video cameras, and guitar cables, The Library is on Fire Headquarters lay quiet. Band members Steve Five (singer/guitar player) and Pete Sustarsic (drums) are asleep, the muffled tones of an art opening downstairs drone on, mixing with sirens in the street, where bass player Mark Shue lives a few blocks away. The Library is on Fire was sound asleep, but they were not resting on their laurels.
2009 had been a consuming and prolific year for the band, writing over forty songs, playing countless New York shows and touring the U.S. with Brighton, England, noise punk trio My Device. The band performed as NIVARNA at Glasslands on Halloween, fans literally crying, screaming “Fuck You, Kurdt. You killed yourself!”post-performance. Five, graduating from The New School in May with an MFA in Poetry and Ekphrasis, had just completed a novel entitled “The Book of Black Sunshine”. The band shot and edited footage for two music videos in Library Headquarters. Five engineered albums by punk duo Red Dawn II for Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! Label, the final Usaisamonster album, and Oneida’s triple disc set “Rated O”for Jagjaguwar, while also premiering collage work (and subsequent album art) in a group art show in Williamsburg. The Library is on Fire had been in pre-production at their Brooklyn loft for weeks prior, arranging instrumentation and making demos. They had booked a dozen or so loft parties at TLIOF Headquarters, showcasing bands like The Miami Ice Machine, Knyfe Hyts, and Doug Gillard. And they had just returned from recording sessions with Guided by Voices producer Todd Tobias.
In a recent interview with New York Press, Kid Millions of the rock band Oneida had declared The Library is on Fire as “the best unheard band in NYC.” It was obvious the band wasn’t obscure for being lazy – they simply didn’t have time to “market an image”or posture for promoting themselves.
The January recording sessions with Todd Tobias, lasting less than two weeks in the freezing Northeast Ohio cold, showed the band’s ability to work at a breakneck pace with pinpoint accuracy and culminated in the fifteen-song monolith LP/CD entitled Magic Windows, Magic Nights (________ Records). Blending lo-fi cassette performances, urban NYC field recordings and tape samples with baroque orchestration and Tobias’high-fi analog indie production, Magic Windows, Magic Nights clamors with the noise of a band firing on all pistons – Five’s melodic songwriting often veers from languid to raging, and eclipses the band’s 2008 Cassette debut, with tightened Mascis-style guitar melodies and Brian Wilson-style pop concision, while the gunfire drumming of Sustarsic and polytoned sub-frequencies of Shue coalesce into a heavy slamming machine. Magic Windows, Magic Nights showcases a band who know the meaning of impermanence and transition, and know how to bridge the gap between oblivion and survival.
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