Detroit-based acoustic guitarist Nick Schillace is in an Afrobeat big band and a post-rock duo. He composes, improvises and backs up singers in string and traditional ensembles. But he’s not a band guy. Sure, he did what you probably did in high school, answering friends’ calls for help with their projects and building his reputation as an electric guitar player. Nick kept it up through five years of journalism study, or long enough to realize that he really didn’t want his fate as a musician to rest on somebody else’s whim. He quit his bands, enrolled in music school, and began pouring every idea into six strings wound to wood.

Nick was well prepared, as his parents—early members of the Detroit Blues Society and musicians themselves—had toted him to folk music workshops throughout the South during his childhood. There, he met and studied with still-living purveyors of traditional music. In college, he looked back at that past through the first generation of steel-string composers. Nick dug into their releases, transcribing and studying the disparate styles but eventually arriving at an ultimate axiom: Musicians of the highest order explored their own tastes and idiosyncrasies as players, listeners and people to create highly individual music. That lesson was reinforced by a comprehensive graduate thesis focusing on 20th-century American musical identity and a process for analyzing musicians in a neutral and comprehensive way. Nick got to work, applying his findings to his own music and releasing Box Canyon, his debut for acoustic guitar, in 2005.

But Landscape and People—his second album and first for Burly Time Records—is the real arrival: Like the journalist he almost became, Nick’s memories narrate these tunes as his fingers spin the projector. “1976”—the year of his wife’s birth—moves with what he calls her bright, optimistic outlook, and “Your Memories of Oklahoma”—Nick’s first 12-string number—relates nostalgia for a piece of land in Oklahoma owned by a friend’s family. Through it all, Nick never sounds like he’s reciting or showcasing. Rather, he sounds fresh and untouched, carefully composing stories that read themselves to you with smiles, winks and nods.

This is Landscape and People. With all due respect to our favorite pickers, we think it will become your next reference point.

Download MP3:

1976

Your Memories of Oklahoma

Press Photo:
http://slowpitchpr.com/wp/wp-content/images/NSpressHIGH.jpg (2mb)

LANDSCAPE AND PEOPLE One Sheet:
http://slowpitchpr.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/schillace_onesheet.pdf (200kb)

Thanks to everyone who is listening to and talking about “Birds” from Collections of Colonies of Bees. Here are some selected quotes from those talking about the album:

“a flight of airy resonances and Reichian flutters … a gorgeous … unfurling, that rolls up and down into a few anti-climaxes until its final triumphant climb

-Brandon Stosuy, Stereogum (01.14.08)

“They don’t need vocals or traditional song structures to make interesting, engaging and energetic music.

-Muzzle of Bees (01.12.08)

“The music, as grandiose and expansive as any take on indie’s vast pallate, is … another solid album in a long line of bands making pop feel epic once more.

-Electronic Voice Phenomenon (01.15.08)

“the first perfect sound of 2008.

-Collective Common (01.18.08)

“Evidence if it were needed of the power of music.

-Mp3 Hugger (01.16.08)

“majestic passages appear as if they were lifted from clouds, with guitars that swarm and proclamate, build, and explode monstrous holes in the dark with their light.

-Parasites & Sycophants (01.18.08)

Hello, and thanks for visiting the Slowpitch PR website. We are an independent firm, currently managing the press and public relations exclusively for Table of the Elements and Table of the Elements / Radium artists. We look forward to introducing you to the forward thinking, exciting artists and bands that you need to know about, and keeping you informed of their activities.

If you can’t find the materials you are looking for on the site, or if you’d like to set up an interview or request titles, please feel free to email us at:
slowpitchpr@gmail.com

Thank you, Talk to you soon.

Saturday, January 19th
Mad Planet, Milwaukee WI

w/ Bon Iver

The Bees’ latest show is with their good friend Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), and should not be missed. The Bees look forward to seeing Justin, as the last time they played together it was during a tour with Deyarmond Edison, the band Vernon fronted along with Megafaun members Joe Westerlund, Brad and Phil Cook.