Costume Contest !!

About Hermit Arts:
Hermit Arts is a Chicago-based creative company committed to new performance work. By integrating different forms of live performance and media, we explore fresh approaches to storytelling. Hermit has premiered new work throughout Chicago and in Minneapolis, MN; Columbus, OH;, and Albuquerque, NM, since 2001.

www.highplainssigh.com

Over the course of six acclaimed albums and hundreds of live shows, Amy Annelle and her cohorts in The Places have created a heavy, feral and beautiful sort of avant-folk music that "straddles the fence between the organic and the atmospheric" (Rolling Stone). The Places are touring the US as a trio to support the brand new album "Songs For Creeps", an experimental memoir or dark revelations. This misfit's tale is raw, potent and direct: the antidote to the eerie, calm-before-the-storm acrimony and improvisation explored on the Places' last studio album, "Call It Sleep". Vocalist/guitarist Amy Annelle will be joined by percussionist Adam Kriney (Castanets, Owl Xounds Exploding Galaxy) and multi-instrumentalist Tom Hand (Black 100s)

The Places' Amy Annelle is a tough one to pin down. She lives on the road as often as not, touring and recording with friends, staying everywhere from a high desert trailer park to a flophouse on the Bowery, and picking up work as chamber maid, laborer, forest ranger and carny. Her maverick folk music, too, shies away from convention. Over the course of five acclaimed albums and hundreds of live shows, she's created a heavy, feral and beautiful body of work that "straddles the fence between the organic and the atmospheric" (Rolling Stone). Her soon-to-be-released sixth album (and fourth as The Places), "Songs For Creeps", finds Annelle at the peak of her powers.

The Places have roots in Portland, Oregon's recent rich and eclectic music scene, but Annelle's new songs shrug off the rain clouds and PBR hangover of the Northwest and demand a home all their own. That home was built in Austin, Texas' Wonder Chamber, a tiny garage studio full of weird instruments, cantankerous vintage gear and thrift store desert paintings. During recording sessions there with Okkervil River (as guest vocalist on the band’s Black Sheep Boy) Annelle recognized a kindred spirit in producer Brian Beattie (Okkervil River, Daniel Johnston). The songs started flowing, and the pair went on to combine these prolific Wonder Chamber sessions with Annelle's home recordings to make "Songs For Creeps", an experimental memoir of dark revelations. This misfit’s tale is raw, potent and direct: the antidote to the eerie, calm-before-the-storm acrimony and improvisation explored on the Places’ last studio album, "Call It Sleep". A few tracks from a marathon recording session with Jay Pellicci (Deerhoof, Erase Errata) at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio in San Francisco complete the album’s eleven cuts.

Released on Annelle's own High Plains Sigh label, "Songs For Creeps" builds on her acclaimed songwriting, studio-as-science-lab aesthetic, and fondness for field recordings and sound collage. But the large ensemble approach of past Places albums is gone. Annelle is joined by just a few very special guests, and did most of the arranging and playing herself. Album art is by E*Rock (The Planet The, Beck), who created the lucid, bad-dream cover for The Places’ well-loved 2000 debut, "The Autopilot Knows You Best".
The Places will be touring far and wide in late 2006 with a full band lineup to support "Songs For Creeps". They have shared the stage with such freaks (folk or not) as the Mountain Goats, Castanets, Smog, Roy Harper, Jolie Holland, Ian Moore, Michael Hurley, Tara Jane O'Neil, Elf Power, Bobby Conn, Damien Jurado, Little Wings, Thalia Zedek, Arbouretum, M. Ward and US Maple.
(~~d. walker 2006)