(GA) Mekons announced the September 27th release of their 26th album, Ancient & Modern, which will be released on the band's own, newly reformed Sin Record Label. The band are taking their new (and old) songs on the road, and have divided up their shows, billing the performances as "A quiet night in with the acoustic Mekons" or "A wild night out with the electrified Mekons".
On Ancient & Modern, Mekons bring you an "album" just like albums used to be; cardboard things filled with cheeky, chunky 78rpm shellac. Just take a look at the cover of Ancient & Modern and you'll know what we're talking about! Let the band take you for a walk down memory lane, to the world as it was just before the First World War ... to the Edwardian Era, to the Naughty Naughties a hundred years ago, a cozy nostalgic world: cricket on the village green, punting down the river in a striped blazer and boater, off with the hounds, picnic hampers, community singing, mistresses and wives, mysticism, secret societies, dangerous poetry, radical modern art, Freud, national strikes, revolution, anarchists, bombers, British concentration camps ... oops, is that really a hundred years ago?!? Mekons travel back/forward to a world unaware that it's waiting for the pistol to CRACK CRACK CRACK in Sarajevo, plotting their singular course through the digital tsunami of contemporary sounds that blare tinnily from your mobile phone or spin at 78rpm in His Master's Voice from the horn of your exquisite Gramophone.
09/30: San Francisco, CA @ Swedish American Hall *
10/04: Evanston, IL @ Space #
10/05: Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall %
10/07: Brooklyn, NY @ The Bell House %
10/08: New York, NY @ City Winery *
* = "A quiet night in with the acoustic MEKONS"
# = MEKONS "MEEKAKUCHA" An evening of Pechakucha and Mekons acoustic music hosted by Peter Exley
% = "A wild night out with the electrified MEKONS"
