Telegenic is a small collective working with orchestral instruments, feedback loops, found sounds, guitars and electronica, combining the immediacy of played instruments with digital, analog and lyrical/textual elements. A first album was finished in late Feb, Meet In California, When We're Dead. The album re-visits the lost concept album, focusing on California, and particularly L.A, as a 'Janus' city, a doorway to the next world. This is not anti-LA or anti-California. We have lived there and loved it as the most excessive metropolis in the world, an extreme endpoint of western desire - beautiful as a city of collective hope and ridiculous as both an incubator and graveyard for preposterous egos.
While we focus on strings, orchestral sounds and feedback textures with these selections, we are influenced by a range of sounds from early experimenters Can, Faust to more recent electronica and played music like Mice Parade, Colleen, the Silver Mount Zion Orchestra, and M83.
The name Telegenic is a reference to both the darker side of celebrity fascination as well as an eponymous tracing back to early punk spirit: the ethos of taking pride in "being too ugly for television" - & therefore excluded from major label consideration. We remember John Lydon, in a very early interview, saying words to this effect about the SP, with very fetching levels of spirited defiance.
We chose the title because it fitted our interest in L.A/California, and as a kind of calculated movement away from the seamless merger of fashion, marketing and alternative culture that seems all pervasive these days. Not that we expect to change this!!!
September 7 We have some new songs up! Some demos from the album we are about to record and/or finish mastering. Things move slowly sometimes with the everpresent chance real life will intrude upon our creative space. Hope to get this out by late in the year, or early 2009. We just got back from Beijing too, what a city!
July 5 OK, we've been busy bunnies recording and writing, with very little time for myspacing. Sorry if we haven't responded to all messages. All our CDs are sold out too and we have no plans for another pressing in the near future (you suddenly enter a higher/more intense realm of music business crap). But you can still buy online at Itunes/lots of places
March 14: After all our band working-bee copies went in under a day (thanks everyone!), we've had a limited number of extra copies produced.
28 Feb: We've finally mastered 15 tracks and are now streaming extra songs (see below). Unfortunately our hand-crafted, cottage-industried, indvidualised copies with band-member artwork have all been snapped up. For those who missed out, we are trying to figure out a way to get more available . soonish .
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Lucifer's Toy Piano
Enter the Lexicon
Meet in California, When We're Dead
