HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2013 HONORS FOR TTOTALS AND MICHAEL BEACH

Happy New Year! Man, what a year 2013 was. While it wasn’t our busiest in terms of the number of releases we put out, it was definitely one of our most exciting. I had the pleasure of watching Ttotals perform at this year’s Austin Psych Fest and meeting in the flesh excited fans who had just placed orders online for their critically acclaimed Spectrums of Light 7-inch that we released days before. Another highlight was meeting the man who had a hand in making this record sound so damn good hours before he blew us all away on stage…Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom. While Tate Eskew expertly handled recording and engineering duties, Sonic mastered this A/B slab of outer blues. Expect more doses of brooding psych sure to set your soul ablaze from these guys in 2014 in the form of a new LP. 

Ttotals at Cake Shop, NYC

August saw the release of Michael Beach’s sophomore LP, Golden Theft, a real genre-bending stunner. I got to tour the East Coast with Beach, backing him on drums, while his regular bandmates waited for him to return home to San Francisco for some West Coast dates. That week saw us share the stage with Matt Valentine (MV&EE) and John Moloney's (Chelsea Light Moving) new project, Home Comfort, as well as Chris Forsyth and other great bands, like the Estrogen Highs, Fatal Film, and Margaret Mead. We managed to wrangle a gig in an old church on the stunningly beautiful Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine. What a blast!

Beach at The Elevens, Northampton, MA

Both of the aforementioned additions to our catalog turned many heads this year and earned end-of-year honors. Ttotals appeared on The Styrofoam Drone’s Top 7” Records of 2013 list, while Beach broke the top 5 on both The Vinyl District and SF Weekly’s Top Albums of 2013 lists.

Twin Lakes has never been about the sheer volume of output…it has been and always will be about turning people on to the music we carefully curate because we love it. We’re looking forward to continuing to do so in 2014 with more from Ttotals, long-awaited releases from Closely Watched Trains and Myty Konkeror, and who knows what else? In the meantime, head on over to our Bandcamp page where you can download for free a Twin Lakes compilation.

Austin Psych Fest 2013 in Pictures

What an incredible weekend! I had the pleasure of spending the weekend of April 26 with Dwight Smith and the latest addition to our roster, Ttotals, at this year's Austin Psych Fest. Dwight provided stellar food, shelter, and companionship, while Ttotals was selected to play this year's festival and subsequently rocked the riverside Elevation Ampitheatre, turning many heads in the process. 

After their set was over, we took our time meeting lots of awesome people and taking in as much of this year's incredible lineup as we could. It was so great to be able to meet Lee all the way from the UK, who days before had ordered the new Ttotals 7" online. And seeing Spectrum, Black Mountain, Deerhunter, Woodsman, White Fence, Boris, Black Angels, and Goat, to name a few....pretty mind-blowing to say the least. Hope to be back there soon. Enjoy the pictures.

SONIC BOOM AUSTIN PSYCH FEST MIXTAPE FEATURING TTOTALS

Psych rock legend Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, has put together this mixtape featuring some of the bands playing this year's Austin Psych Fest, and one of the songs from Ttotals new 7-inch (available April 26th) made the cut. Tune in to 75 minutes of aural bliss below...

NASHVILLE'S OUTER BLUES DUO TTOTALS JOINS TWIN LAKES

We are beyond psyched to announce the latest addition to our catalog...a new 7-inch by Nashville’s outer blues duo Ttotals. These guys reached out to us about a year ago, and we were immediately sucked into their dark, brooding twisters of sound, featuring leagues-deep drums and haunting vocals, scorched-earth guitars, and flashes of sampled electronics...a careening vortex performing a muddy dance stomp along the Mississippi Delta as it flings the blues up to the heavens. So we invited them to play our showcase at the STPP Music Fest a few months later, and they were even better live! The band will be hitting the road in support of Spectrums of Light on April 19, which sees its official release on April 26, the day Brian (guitars/vocals) and Marty (drums/electronics) arrive in Austin, TX to make their first appearance at the always awesome Austin Psych Fest.

Tour dates:

April 19th - Kansas City, KS, Art Closet
April 20th - Denver, CO, Sidewinder
April 21st - Denver, CO, In-store at Wax Trax Records
April 24th - Albuquerque, NM, Gold House
April 25th - Lubbock, TX, TBA
April 26th,27th & 28th - Austin Psych Fest
April 29th - New Orleans, LA, TBA
April 30th - Memphis, TN, Murphy's  

 

Spectrums of Light was recorded and mixed by Tate Eskew at Zero Art Studios and mastered by Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) at Atlantis Sound in Rugby, England. It will be available in both vinyl (limited to 300) and digital formats from our website and most online stores on April 26, 2013. But you can listen to it and pre-order it right now over here. Then check out their previous releases over on the Ttotals Bandcamp page. Here they are perfoming a song off their 2012 self-released Silver on Black 10".