Maria Somerville's "Luster" & North American Tour: May 16 - 24 | Slowdive West Coast Tour: May 10 - 16 | "Shoegaze: The Genre that Could Not be Killed" | The Guardian

This past decade has unexpectedly become the locus of the nascent dreampop and shoegaze sound, with not only new albums, and tours, but improbable bands reforming and reactivating after decades of silence. Second only to the decade of the genre's origin, it's a great time for listeners avid for more of shoegaze inward-looking strain of melodicism and blissed-out fuzz. The Guardian's "Shoegaze: The Genre that Could Not be Killed", and New York Times' "Shoegaze, the Sound of Protest Shrouded in Guitar Fuzz, Returns", best encapsulate this contemporary resurgence. For those just now entering the neon torrent for the first time, you'd not go far wrong beginning with The Guardian's "Shoegaze: A Beginner's Guide", and the near-comprehensive book and compilation the Cherry Red label have assembled, "Still in a Dream: The Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995". The consensus is that shoegaze and the concurrent sounds of dreampop were born of two bands. These are considered to be Robin Guthrie and Elizabeth Fraser's Cocteau Twins in the early 1980s, and A.R. Kane, the British duo whom The Guardian credits as having "Invented Shoegaze without Really Trying". Representative of their influence, decades later both can be seen ranking highly on Pitchfork's "The 30 Best Dreampop Albums of All Time". Not limited to the post-punk and indie rock era of its genesis, both shoegaze, and its dreampop offshoot, are going through a renaissance this decade with new bands stepping into the forum. The telltale distortion-soaked melodies, and submerged vocals can be heard in the music of 21st century bands originating from destinations as far flung as Russia and New Zealand.

At the head of this renaissance, many of the genre's most influential and formative acts have returned from extended hiatus, not only touring, but with new and relevant material. Most improbable of them all, it was announced in 2014 that Slowdive would be performing a one-off at the Primavera Sound Festival. Finding an enthusiasm for playing and writing together again, the show suggested the very real possibility of a reformation. And following in rapid succession, "Slowdive Announce Reunion, and North American Tour". Two years later, all members of the band reassembled for the first new recordings in 22 years on the magisterial and surprising "Slowdive", for Bloomington Indiana label, Dead Oceans. This album singularly launching "The Unlikely Renaissance of Slowdive". From which they have ascended to heights of popularity never previously seen by the band, riding the wave of the "Jewel-like, Spacious Return" of their sound. The development of this new work was detailed for Stereogum by guitarist, Rachel Goswell, the self-described "The Only Goth in the Village". After five years, they return to this process for "Everything is Alive", which Neil Halstead speaks with NPR on the subject of this second new album of "Exquisite Songs from the Comeback Kids of Shoegaze", which arrives this month in a follow-up United States Tour.

Other unlikely returns have been seen in Robert Hampson touring with LOOP, the one-time-only North American visit from Lush's brand of 4AD dreampop, as well as some of the first new material heard in decades from The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Ride. On the other side of the globe from the sound's UK origins, a new generation of shoegaze is currently exploding across the south pacific, detailed in The Guardian's "'A Language We Use to Say Sentimental Things': How Shoegaze Took Over Asia". Another notable recent advancement of the sound has come from the Irish countryside of Galaway County. Maria Somerville's second album seems hewn from the rugged landscape of the village of Connemara where it was recorded amidst the expanses of flowering heath, and stone-littered mountains dotted with ruins of castles and nunneries, small fishing villages, and craggy ranges. The setting finds itself mirrored in her interview with New Noise, "Maria Somerville on ‘Luster’ and Nature", as the lumbering rhythms and windswept distortion that blows through the recording, expressed in stylistic references as varied as contemporary neo-folk and subtle nods to 1990s trip hop. Released by the hugely influential 4AD label, "Luster" has almost instantly become recognized as "A Vivid and Vital Entry in the Shoegaze Revival", and its reception has resulted in her first North American tour with a date at Seattle's Sunset Tavern.

Max Richter's "In A Landscape" & North American Tour with ACME: Apr 26 - May 10

Over the course of some 50 recordings, spanning soundtracks for dance, theater, installation and film, beginning with 2002's "Memoryhouse", Max Richter has marked out a body of work in a field shared with such 21st Century contemporaries as Jóhann Jóhannsson and Ólafur Arnalds. Backed by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, he returns to North America this spring with dates in prestigious venues as varied as Chicago Symphony, BAM, Kennedy Center, and Seattle Symphony, to present selections from "In A Landscape", and his wider body of work. Many of the entries in Richter's prolific discography are commissioned works, such is the case with "Infra", a score for the modern dance choreographer, Wayne McGregor. Not limited to dance work with Company Wayne McGregor, their collaborations have also embraced cutting edge transmedia installations like those of Random International. Their "Future Self" was one of the first in a series of successful collaborations with a score supplied by Richter. Following in rapid succession, the trio's "Rain Room" made its premier at The Barbican London the following year, to then becoming a sensation stateside at MoMA's PS1, and eventually concluding its run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

An unexpected turn by the composer who recently exclaimed "I'm a Low-key Raver! I Love all Kinds of Music", to the Baroque era produced another of Richter's major hits in his neoclassical reworking of Antonio Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" for the Deutsche Grammophon Recomposed series. The project presented abundant opportunities to express these shared juxtapositions of angular mathic patterns and gradual, flowing, tectonic undertows. After "Max Richter gave The Four Seasons a Modern Update", with the original volume "The Four Seasons: Recomposed" in 2012, he then returned to the work a decade later, and convinced Deutsche Grammophon of the necessity of a new performance and recording. This "The New Four Seasons: Recomposed", may seem an exercise in indulgence and paradox, as Richter utilizes both classic period instruments alongside analog synthesizers, yet the composer convincingly rationalizes this reworking for The Guardian, "Max Richter on Rewriting The Four Seasons - for the Second Time".

Among his major works, in 2015 the composer realized his long developing 8 hour piece for the facilitation of "Sleep". The full night-long composition is available as a recording for home consumption both digitally, as a ultra high fidelity Blu-Ray audio release, as well as a separate edition of excerpt highlights conceived to represent the more engaged listening aspects, titled "From Sleep". But it is in performance that "Sleep" most explicitly realizes its intent. Premiering in atypical venues across Europe, such as the Welcome Collection Reading Room, wherein the attendees nestled their campbeds between the reading room’s bookshelves for the performance of Richter's "Eight-hour Lullaby for a Frenetic World". This bold venture was met with anticipation for its experiment in duration and setting, in both Rolling Stone's "Composer Max Richter to Perform Overnight L.A. Concerts with 560 Beds", and the Los Angeles Times' "Composer Max Richter Wants Fans to Spend the Night in Grand Park". There has been no shortage of coverage in the pages of The Los Angeles Times, Time and NPR connecting the ritualized durational performance of "Sleep", and its benefits in relation to the media abundant and time-scarce times in which we live.