Anteloper is a duo of psychedelic sonic compatriots starring a pair of raggedy celestial sound warriors: trumpeter Jaimie Branch and drummer Jason Nazary. These longtime friends and collaborators met as young explorers and consider this electrified duo a continuous experiment into the unknown sonic abyss. Improvised organisms, abstract bangers, and mind-bending head boppers are guided by a unique desire to hear what hasn’t been heard before. This is music made of and for the moment, tipping towards the future, moving feet to the new-new beat.
Of Anteloper, in the liner notes for their 4/20/2018 debut Kudu, audiovisual avant-garde sage Rob Mazurek says:
Perspectives shift in weight and wander, sometimes distilled into perfect shots of mystic rum and sometimes left alone in an overgrown petrified aluminum forest, dripping and seething into utopian oblivion… Multiple dimensions collide and caress like a wooly tiger, kissing suns and embracing the nothingness, cracking this nothingness into sheets of corrugated dreams…
Although only released on cassette, Kudu was dubbed one of the “Best Albums of 2018” by Bandcamp, Pop Matters, and Rolling Stone, who said “the duo convincingly bridges woozy psychedelic abstraction and furiously propulsive free funk… fractured beats and pealing, effects-heavy brass suggests a punk-minded update of Miles Davis’ most thrillingly weird Seventies explorations… This is music for serious immersion.”
In May 2018, Branch took up a month-long residency in the shipping container-turned-recording studio at Pioneer Works, an arts center down the street from her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She called up Nazary, and he rolled by the studio loaded with acoustic drums, electronic triggers, modular FX unit, synths, sequencers, and a myriad of processors. Branch engineered the sessions, and brought her rig to the table: trumpet, synths, delay/looper pedal, auxiliary percussion, and a Roland TR08 drum machine. They did what they always do — rolled tape and started from nothing.
In the Fall of 2019, they set out for the “Ante-Myths Sonic Projections Tour” that took them across the US alongside DC duo Blacks’ Myths. For the journey, they self-produced a super limited-edition tour tape, Tour Beats Vol. 1, which features recordings from those Pioneer Works sessions.
For Summer 2020, International Anthem is proud to re-present Anteloper’s Tour Beats Vol. 1 on 45RPM 12” vinyl in a package featuring artwork by Branch, photos by Richard Ross, and liner notes as poem, again, by Rob Mazurek…
…blustery nights frozen distinct; systems… cones… reversed… allowed… plush… reminiscent wastelands gothic potential; screaming planets forlorn… wax and wane… born again and again and again; citing against the pricks, within sullen elastics, ecstatic pulse weft; new informal districts of time and energy…