The Ladybug Transistor with Giant Day and Jeff Beam

Originally released in 1999 on Merge Records, The Albemarle Sound, the third full-length LP by Brooklyn, New York’s The Ladybug Transistor, exists just outside its fixed point in time and space. Perhaps the last great pop album of the 20th century, The Albemarle Sound is like few records from the turn of the millennium, its attention turned to the intricate arrangements of late 1960s pop and the strange and familiar environs of home.

The notion of home is important to The Albemarle Sound, not just lyrically and thematically, but in the fact that the album was recorded, mixed and produced in a Victorian house in Flatbush named Marlborough Farms. The Ladybug Transistor was formed in 1995 as the home recording project of singer and trumpeter Gary Olson, and by 1999 the group had swelled to include siblings Jeff Baron (guitar) and Jennifer Baron (bass), Sasha Bell (keyboards and flute), San Fadyl (drums), and Julia Rydholm (violin), who lived together at Marlborough Farms, a home filled with instruments, recording equipment and a piano room where the groupmade demos.

“The instruments and recording equipment around the studio seemed to havestories that were woven into the fabric of the house or its prior inhabitants,” recalls Jennifer, the sense of history and community evident in the warmth of The Albemarle Sound. Recorded entirely analog on a 16-track machine, the album invites the listener in by invoking place with an impressionist’s attention to detail and a surrealist’s curiosity. Moments at Sheepshead Bay and Prospect Park are transfigured in the light through the windshield of a car as tears are transubstantiated into summer rain and canals take the place of asphalt streets.

Musically, these scenes are given voice by Olson’s rich baritone and animated by arrangements that meld elements of the kind of baroque, orchestral pop practiced by Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach with the sweeping cinematic vistas of Luis Bacalov, imbuing their surroundings with California sunshine and an occasional bit of western swagger. Each of The Albemarle Sound’s 12 songs are soundscapes unto themselves, entire neighborhoods built by the careful employment of voiceand instruments, every part exquisitely placed to prick the ear and pull the heartstrings at just the right time.The lineup that shaped The Albemarle Sound weaved in and out of each other’s projects over the years that followed the album’s release, including Gary’s solo output, Jeff and Sasha’s band The Essex Green, Jennifer’s band The Garment District, and The Sasha Bell Band.

The Ladybug Transistor released one album following the 2007 passing of drummer San Fadyl, 2011’s Clutching Stems, and in the time since, The Albemarle Sound has grown in stature, hailed as an essential release in the deep catalogs of Merge Records and the universe of bands adjacent to the Elephant 6 Recording Company alike. The album’s 20th anniversary prompted shows in New York City and Norway featuring a reformed lineup of Gary, Jeff, Jennifer, Sasha, and, Julia. A tour followed in 2023, focusing on songs released during the band’s most productive period, 1999-2003, that welcomed Derek Almstead (Giant Day) on drums and included a special engagement at The Andy Warhol Museum.

For the 25th anniversary of The Albemarle Sound, the record has been lovingly reissued on silver vinyl by Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records. The CD includes 12 bonus tracks which break open the year-long recording process withthe inclusion of rare B-sides, four-track demos, instrumentals and alternate mixes, further highlighting the band’s mastery of songcraft while teasing out the intricate worlds those songs contain, making a case, as fans of The Ladybug Transistor have known for decades now, that The Albemarle Sound is as infinitely rewarding to return to as it is to visit for the first time.

This fall, The Ladybug Transistor will embark on a tour in celebration of the 25th anniversary of “The Albemarle Sound,” supported by Elephant Six artists Giant Day on the East Coast.

“With their amazing flair for arranging, The Ladybug Transistor adds a new dimension, density and depth to an age-old process of writing engaging pop songs." — Merge Records

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Giant Day is the latest musical project by multi-instrumentalist Derek Almstead and singer Emily Growden, bringing together their pop and psychedelic influences from years in the vibrant Athens, Georgia music scene. With a sound that is rich, poppy, danceable, and dark, Giant Day offers a fresh take on classic sensibilities.

Almstead (Circulatory System, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Glands, Elf Power, of Montreal), is known for his work with the storied The Elephant 6 Collective, and has established himself as a respected song-writer, producer and recording engineer. Growden (Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits, The New Sound of Numbers), with her background in vocal studies at the University of Georgia, has lent her voice to various recordings and live performances in the indie music scene.

Having recently relocated to rural Pennsylvania, the duo is focused on creating music, renovating their historic farm, and building a new recording studio. Giant Day’s debut album, Glass Narcissus, is set to be released by The Elephant 6 Recording Company on August 23rd, 2024.

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Jeff Beam has been strumming at the crossroads of Portland, Maine’s fertile indie-rock, folk and jazz scenes for years, and on this fittingly eponymous album, we get an eerie, era-spanning snapshot of every soul he’s encountered and a timely statement of activism that speaks to this particular moment in America’s history. The multi-instrumentalist is responsible for nearly every sound on the 9-track album—an inspiring and cathartic collection of songs that pleas for healing and change through civic engagement and artistic output.

From the opening shuffle of the haunting “Stephen King,” Beam’s homage to the fellow Mainer’s knack for creative alchemy, to the taut bedroom-funk of “Peripheral,” to the sun-dappled lo-fi disco of “Disarray,” Beam’s songs are eerily familiar, flashing before us his late friend and collaborator Tanner Olin Smith as well as the ghosts of influences like Grizzly Bear, Spoon, Olivia Tremor Control, and Radiohead before leaving their own distinct marks.

These songs resonate with a deeper urgency and focus than any material the polyphonic songwriter has ever given us. Of course, a little urgency is what being a sharp political observer will get you. Beam’s been a Bernie Sanders supporter from well before 2016, and many of these songs have shared the stage with the Vermont senator. Beam fesses that several of the tracks were born from the hope and anxiety coiled in today’s political moment—including “Think Twice, It’s Not All Right,” a final plea to Donald Trump supporters with a tense melody and skittering tape loops that sound as if lifted from the back half of The White Album.

On a sidewalk in Portsmouth, New Hampshire an eccentric gentleman offered to draw Beam for five dollars. Beam only being able to offer a dollar, the man generously agreed to do the sketch, and the portrait by that unknown artist graces the cover of Jeff Beam, embodying exactly what Beam sets out to confront with his music: connection. As much as Jeff Beam is an expression of the artist finding deeper connections with himself, it is also an expression of our connections with one another.

Whenever Jeff Beam makes an album, it feels like he’s arrived. But in the years since he first began crafting his distinct brand of dreamy, hypnotic psych-pop, Jeff Beam feels like the one we’ve been waiting for this whole time.