The new Zru Vogue album "Zero: Exile II" is now available from on iTunes, making it super easy to grab your Zru and take it to go. We're iPad friendly, we're iPhone friendly, we're iPod friendly, by gosh we're just so darn friendly!
Find out why Wineau says that Zero: Exile II "recalls the freshness of 'Nakweda Dream' from 1981, but with the maturity of a band that has continued to evolve, reinvent, and develop new sounds."
We're an intangible asset like an executive gift. We're all caught up in the continental drift. We're supposed to be learning, and we're expected to improve. And it's all in transition because we're always on the move. We take a picture at breakfast. We're losing money round the clock. We're an uncertain collective. Artists and poets run amok.
Back in 1997, founding Zru Vogue members Andrew Lawrence Jackson and Max Tyrell (aka Tom Sanders) traded tapes back and forth in a long-distance collaboration that resulted in an album of quirky songs and instrumentals that was quietly released and then mostly forgotten.
In the early 80’s Rick and Andy shared a house for a time on the South side of Palo Alto, and most of these recordings come from that time and the time after that when Andy moved out but still returned to record songs with Rick in the make-shift living room studio.
The underground college radio hit of 1981 was "Nakweda Dream" by Zru Vogue, at the time a mysterious unknown San Francisco area band whose haunting, ethereal song with the strange guitar riff Sub-Pop Magazine named the best independent single of 1981.
In this post, Rick gives us a brief breakdown of the tracks that make up Galerie Zru — CD2 of Zru Vogue's 2010 double album.
Listening to Galerie Zru is like wandering through an art gallery where each room is an art installation, and each of those installations has been re-imagined as a slice of contemporary pop music. From "En-trance" to "Exit-stential," themes we've by now come to appreciate from Zru Vogue of dada, trance, time-shifts, somnambulism, existentialism, and such, are all here in the galerie.
Rick and I got together Saturday night for a recording session and essentially improvised music for the last two songs on Exile 2: "No Occupancy" and "Zero One Two Three." "No Occupancy" was one of the original lyrics I wrote back in February (originally titled "Occupancy", which may make more logical sense but then what's logic got to do with it?). "Zero One Two Three" was a new song lyric I'd written just a few days ago.
2009 was a good year for Zru Vogue. The band recorded and released possibly their most innovative and unique CD to date, Eleven Eyes, and they played their first East Coast gig in Arlington, Virginia (for a longtime friend and fan’s 50th birthday party).
In early 2010, Andy and Rick recorded an improvised extended funk track that emerged as a proper song once Andy dropped some lyrics — and “Consenting Adults” took form as a Funkadelic-inspired nine-and-a-half-minute art-funk mini masterpiece, the first track from what would become Club Zru.
Club Zru/Galerie Zru is a special price 2-CD set. Two albums for the price of one!
