tuxedomoon, eclectic international post punk new wave music group, music CDs, live performance

New album "Vapour Trails" finds the members, vocalist, clarinetist, saxophonist and keyboarder Steven Brown, bassist and producer Peter Principle, vocalist, violinist, guitarist and laptop botherer Blaine L. Reininger and trumpetist Luc van Lieshout in top form, exploiting their mature vision and instrumental skills to the full. They load their eclectic pallet with a wide and surprising variety of styles and influences, and sing in the languages of the many places they have lived or visited, singing this time not only in English, but in Greek, Spanish, and languages of their own devising. Vapour Trails was produced and mixed by the winning team of Athens' Coti K. and New York's Peter Principle, also responsible for Tuxedomoon's previous two albums.

After living together in Brussels, Belgium for the greater part of the '80s and '90s, Tuxedomoon fled to distant corners of the planet. Steven Brown now lives in Mexico, Blaine L. Reininger in Greece and Peter Principle in New York. Only Luc van Leishout remains in Belguim. Being so far apart from one another has dictated that they live and work in what they call "the post national style", dependant upon modern means of communication while remaining true to the call of a timeless esthetic that only they define.

Tuxedomoon's new album "Vapour Trails" happens to come out in the year of the band's 30th anniversary. To mark this occasion, Tuxedomoon & Crammed will also be releasing a limited-edition boxed set entitled "77o7 tm", which will include the new album along with a CD of previously unreleased archives, a DVD containing 160 minutes of rare or previously unreleased videos, and a live CD recorded in early 2007. The DVD will consist of no less than 7 different sections, including the long-deleted "Ghost Sonata" film, a series of music videos entitled "A Thousand Lives By Picture", an on-the-road-documentary called "Mythical Puzzle", and the late '70s-early '80s studio and live video experiments "Jet Wave" and "Colorado Suite".

It was over 30 years ago that Tuxedomoon came barreling out of the electronic music lab of San Francisco City College and began making flirtatious, whimsical, provocative, idiosyncratic music. Music which shapeshifted with beguiling ease yet brimmed with an almost underworld magick and mystical hypnotism.

Controversial but never egregious, their brand of punky, gothic postpunk experimentalism came with impossibly wide parameters - no-wave, classical, jazz, punk, funk were all simultaneously consumed and expurgated and gained them a cult following immediately.

Their ability to invent and surprise (the band once managed, incredibly, to transform Marvin Gaye's soul classic 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' into their very own song) famously led to an interview in Warhol's 'Interview' magazine and a label deal on Ralph - imprint of Bay Area avant-garde icons
The Resident's.

They have always made music that shrugs off musical influences as nonchalantly as a snake sheds its own skin.

Crammed is proud to present "Vapour Trails", the latest studio album from cult legends Tuxedomoon. Pursuing the creative trails first blazed on 2004's "Cabin in the Sky" and 2006's "Bardo Hotel", "Vapour Trails" was composed while being recorded in a series of sessions between the Acropolis and the pilgrim road to the Eleusian Fields in Athens, Greece in 2006..

With spirits still entrenched firmly in a counterculture that predated our current over-the-counter culture, Tuxedomoon step forth and confidently deliver messages of defiance and diversity when they are perhaps most needed.