news from alex
January 27, 2021:
“All our wolf hours” is out now! You can buy it at our Bandcamp page.
January 20, 2021:
One more week until our new album “All our wolf hours” is released. Check it out in advance by listening to last week’s livestream over at our Youtube channel.
Below, enjoy the Wolf Boy woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493 CE). This image was central to the album artwork for “All our wolf hours”.
January 6, 2021:
In three weeks, “All our wolf hours” will be released. In the meantime, we’ve got some things happening to let you check out the album in advance.
First, you can listen to “The Treatment” on Youtube or Soundcloud.
Second, next week we’re having a low-key
listening party over at our Youtube channel. The entire album will be
streamed starting at 9 PM EST.
This is Melissa's last album with hellothisisalex.
Since becoming hellothisisalex roughly twenty years ago, we’ve
made music whenever we wanted, played Mutek and other great shows
alongside musicians we admire, and been given some amazing
opportunities to just do our own thing in our own way. We’re
parents now, and that certainly limits our free time for making
music. With this new album ready to be released, Melissa feels the
time has come for her to step back from writing and recording
music. She wants to use the limited free time she has to pursue
other interests (to be honest, it’s probably bird-related). She’s
given Mark the go-ahead to continue on as hellothisisalex without
her.
Don’t misunderstand us—hellothisisalex is still alive, it’s just
going to sound a little different without Melissa. At the risk of
making this seem more dramatic than it is, we’re not breaking up;
we’re both still together, we’re just not writing music together
anymore.
We’re both happy you’ve all tuned in to see what’s going on in our
tiny little world, and Mark’s happy to have you all come along for
whatever the future holds.
We’re really proud of “All our wolf hours,” and we hope you all love it, too. Releasing it on January 27, 2021 means that it will come out approximately twenty years after we first brought hellothisisalex online. A nice coincidence and a fitting time to change it up.
‘Lovesick Tanagers’ is now available to listen to online.
Because Melissa. And because birds.
So change is coming, but now have a listen to the first track
we’re publicly sharing off of ‘all our wolf hours’: ‘Lovesick
Tanagers’. You can listen to it at Youtube or Soundcloud. Enjoy!
December 10, 2020: all our wolf hours will be released
on Bandcamp on January 27, 2021! We’ll
now commence marking off days on our calendar...
August 25, 2020: Guess what? The new album is finished! We’re just getting everything ready for it’s release. Want to know what it’s going to be called? We’ll tell you: all our wolf hours. You also might have noticed that the website looks very different. Good eye! We’ve re-skinned it with the new album artwork. Check out a preview of the album cover below. Whew. Next time you hear from us, it will be about the album’s release date...
June 6, 2020: A big update for you: we've added all our music to Bandcamp, complete with bonus tracks and artwork extras. This isn't just any ordinary move to a new retailer, though. We've also released the previously unheard full version of a murder of crows. Now, it is available in it's original full album version, not the EP version that was released way back. Enjoy!
May 25, 2020: Five years can pass very fast. We haven't stopped working on the new album, but things are a bit glacial. Finishing a mix here, adding a part there. We've had big life changes: a big move (hopefully our last), and a little one to take care of and keep alive. We offer our humblest apologies; we're trying to get it done. Soon (we hope)! First things first, we're cleaning up the website. Thanks for checking in!
Jun. 11, 2015: You've got to be comfortable while you're listening to a rough mix. Plastic dinosaurs and Victorian furniture definitely help.
Jun. 4, 2015: It takes a long time to get new songs to sound right. Translating the psychological experience of a song played live to a recording hits snags, breaks branches, and gets logjammed. We’re still working away, diligently trying to make the new recordings live up to our expectations. It’s slow, but it will be worthwhile. We’ve managed to get two of the new songs completely recorded and mixed, and we’ve started on a third. There are ten songs in total, so it will still be a while, but we promise we’ll keep you in the loop. In the meantime, experience the Electribe V...
Mar. 27, 2014: Things progress.
Feb. 26, 2014: For what it's worth, we've started recording our next album.
July 21, 2013: With our year of remixes and revisitations now behind us, we are now ready to present you with the album that gathers them all together, including one more new track previously unheard and unreleased. ‘Anniversary’ is now available to consume from CDbaby, iTunes, Amazon, and more. We’re glad you could tag along on this trip with us. We’ve had a blast. Celebrate with us! Have some cake!
What’s coming next? You’ll just have to wait and see. There must be some new music; after all, there were those previously unheard songs played at Lupercalia...
June 27, 2013: Here's a peek at the album art for 'anniversary':
April 7, 2013: We're currently working on gathering up all the remixes and revisitations for our upcoming album 'Anniversary.' In the meantime, we've spent a day on the farm mucking about and doing our usual thing.
Come visit the farm.
February 21, 2013: Remix No. 12 is ‘Snow on the Tongue,’ an unfinished track from ‘across the river twin.’ Originally intended as the album’s close, we never could seem to take the music where we wanted. Frustrated, we set the song aside. Once we had finished ‘the beauty queen waves goodbye,’ the album felt complete. In the end, ‘Snow on the Tongue’ was shelved with only three parts intact. The passing time gave us the answer we needed for finishing it, and now it sees the light of day.
Listen for the first time:
With Remix No. 12 we complete the year-long 10+1 year anniversary celebration. We’re now at our twelfth year, and we’re getting right curmudgeonly (but just a little). We need our slippers, the daily newspaper (what’s that?), and naps in wingback chairs.
But lest you wonder where you’ll get your fill of hellothisisalex remixes, fear not! We will be releasing all of these blasts from the past on ‘Anniversary,’ the new hellothisisalex album later this year. We’ll give you the release date in an announcement as soon as possible. Until then, happy napping!
January 20, 2013: To start off 2013, we give you a track that was never officially finished, and never officially released. ‘Group Geography’ was started around 2007, with the track being built on top of shortwave radio broadcasts recorded by a good friend living in northern China. Eventually it reached a passable state and faded into obscurity in our archive. For this month’s remix, we redid some parts and added some new ones. Here it is, heard by the outside world for the first time, a cold new track to match the wind chill.
Listen to the remix:
December 20, 2012: As the calendar year’s end suddenly approaches, we return to ‘The New North,’ a song written for Minus 40. Minus 40 was a project pairing artists and musicians with National Film Board of Canada films. For it, we re-scored 1946’s ‘The New North,’ a piece of wartime propaganda about the building of the Alaska-Canadian Highway. The original song featured samples of the film’s narration, but for this month’s remix, we decided to revisit the original instrumental version of the song. We didn’t add anything new, but we re-did the mix from the ground up. We hope this mix tides you over until we return in 2013. Cheers to the return of the sun!
Listen to the instrumental mix:
November 21, 2012: Sometimes you have to let a song sleep for a
long time to get it right. Once upon a time, ‘a murder of crows’ was a full-length album.
Then time passed and we started to feel like too much of the album
felt wrong. Eventually, we compromised, cutting the album down to
an EP and removing everything we were unsatisfied with. One of the
removals was the extended section that introduced ‘The soft form
of old corpses.’ This section, ‘He casts a shadow, his phantom
looms,’ has finally been completely remade, gifting the properly
sombre introduction back to the wistful (and perplexingly upbeat)
‘The soft form of old corpses,’ which has also been remixed. Check
out ‘He casts a shadow, his phantom looms’ for the first time, and
compare ‘The soft form of old corpses’ with the original...
Listen for the difference...
Listen to the remix: