Booking.
Email andrewembassy [at] gmail [dot] com
Video.
Recent Press.
Coke Machine Glow >link< "It is imperative for your sake that you get into Velella Velella.
. so now, after two-plus years comes the Flight Cub EP, which finds the [band] tightening the bolts on their creation, this funky Voltron, this blissful donut. The strobe light of influences here is again astounding -- in the first minute we hear Curtis Mayfield, the Junior Boys, and Timbaland -- but in the Girl Talk era what solidifies Velella Velella’s appeal isn’t just the reverence toward these influences and the devotion to live(-sounding) percussion but the imperceptible ebb of each sound into the next. So each track has sections that give way to another (like the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah-via-Neptunes intro of “Tickets” into its lilting De La Soul Is Dead [1991] finale) but transitions come organically. These tracks sound as if they laid dormant, waiting for discovery and transformation.
fluxblog.org - 10/29/07 >link< "Velella Velella are the musical spawn of Warp, Mo Wax, and Quannum; a live funk band who arrive at the genre via a generation of crate-digging DJs and electronic musicians sampling, interpolating, and mimicking the grooves of old records. Rather than freak out about authenticity, the band carries on with the new aesthetic, and rightfully so -- the reason any of us ever cared about the likes of DJ Shadow, Squarepusher, Luke Vibert et al in the first place was that there was a particular sound to those records that was fundamentally different from the artist's source material. Whereas it seems that most people view late 90s downbeat electronica as an aesthetic cul de sac or a form of musical necromancy, Velella Velella seem intent on using the previous generation's manipulation and recontextualization of classic funk recordings as a blueprint for a new sort of music that never had to be specific to artists dependent on laptops, samplers, and turntables.
Most of the elements in the arrangement of "Flight Cub" seem to be floating around, and though the bass line seems to be the track's center of gravity, even that part feels as though it is hovering just above the ground. Despite its calm, loose feeling, the song is rather tightly composed, with its duet vocals, smooth melodies, and relaxing textures flowing up and through the piece with the subtlety and grace of an expertly performed magic trick."
The Stranger Lineout Blog - 7/23/07 >link< "Velella Velella is my new favorite thing. I’ve been LOVING their debut album Bay of Biscay, playing it for out of town friends and bands and DJs getting universally positive responses. Opener “Do Not Fold/Do Not Bend” is one of my favorite tracks of the year so far, though the song name, like the band’s is inscrutable.
They played most of the album, but they played it up, out, around, bouncing through a ferociously upbeat performance. By the time they went on around midnight, the $2 Tallboy Effect had taken hold and the dancefloor was quickly transformed into a churning swirl of moving bodies. At this point I put down the pen and paper and just got swept up in the music, one of the surest signs of my unabashed affection for the music.
The quartet switched off on percussion throughout the set, handclaps and group vocals were in effect, an old-school Farfisa organ and vintage Rickenbacker bass kept the buffed a nice grit into the band’s shiny funk-pop. No drummer, all programmed beats—glitchy and funky and broken—but without relying too much on pre-recorded material. It’s exactly the kind of music I love the most, the kind that’s earnest but far from cheesy, that’s smart enough to be self-aware but playful enough to not be self-conscious. I’ve said it before: Funk is a tough route to navigate, because it can so easily veer into Poly Esters-style cornballing or fey whiteboy irony. Velella Velella barrels right down the middle, with a sound equal parts Midnight Vultures, Rjd2, and Curtis Mayfield. Yeah, they’re that good."
fluxblog.org - 11/27/06 >link<
"Velella Velella was pitched to me by my friend as an "indie Funkadelic," but that's not quite right --their slick grooves actually sound more like a live band hell bent on simulating the polyglot funk compositions of artists such as DJ Shadow, Luke Vibert, Daft Punk, and Prefuse 73. "Brass Ass" leans heavily on the after-midnight mood of DJ Shadow's Entroducing, but as with all of the tracks on Velella Vellela's MySpace page, it's not so much a direct homage as much as the product of musicians who very likely came to funk indirectly via sample-based music, which is the case for a vast majority of people under the age of 30. Rather than get hung up on untangling the knot of infinite quotation and recycling of their genre in the post-sampling age, the band embrace impurity to tap into something deep by proxy. The vocals can be a bit candy-assed, but thankfully they err on the side of the extremely white soul of Phoenix more often than they drift into the imperialistic tweeness of the Go Team."
Minneapolis City Pages - 10/28/06 >link<
Between the dive-bar disco of !!! and Wham!'s falsetto "Everything She Wants," you'll find plenty of wiggle room for Velella Velella's subtle (but no less exclamatory) funk-pop. The Seattle band—whose name is a species of jellyfish—come to town in support of Bay of Biscay, a self-released record full of compositions built on non-sequitur shout-outs ("You're your hands!" "Move your feet!") and a swathe of dreamy flute, vibraphone, and guitar. When synthesized, it all qualifies for a Dust Brothers remix. It's a sound that's as iridescent as a jellyfish, with just as much sting. —Kate Silver"
Cokemachineglow.com - 02/03/06 >link<
"So while Jamie Lidell electronically reinvents soul and Stax, VV respectfully tackles the legacies of George Clinton and the Bee-Gees, blowing up and gutting current indie-dance trends into something that's refreshingly direct and irony-free, but also something that won't sound embarrassing in the year 2020. They're doing that better than anyone else right now." CHAD BETZ
