This June 20th, Monkey Records and Banished from the Universe are proud to present Spring Summer Awesome Winter, the second album from Bond Street Bridge and the follow-up to his critically acclaimed 2008 debut The Mapmaker’s Art. Pre-order your copy here and be the first kid on the block to have it.

Bond Street Bridge is the solo project of Auckland-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Sam Prebble.  Since the release of The Mapamaker’s Art, Prebble has been busy, touring extensively in  New Zealand, Australia and Europe and playing shows everywhere from dive bars to art galleries and festival stages.  As well as his solo work as Bond Street Bridge, Prebble plays violin, mandolin and guitar for Reb Fountain and the Bandits and the Hannah Curwood Band, and is a long-standing member of Auckland folk-pop group The Broken Heartbreakers.  In 2010, he hit the road in Europe, touring first with Tim Guy and then as stand-in violinist for Berlin-based NZ psychedelic post-rock ensemble An Emerald City.  Along the way he has played shows alongside North American psychedelic heavyweights Black Mountain and the Black Angels, New York art-pop duo The Books, and Californian alt-folksters The Mountain Goats.

Despite his involvement in this range of other projects, Prebble kept Spring Summer Awesome Winter a resolutely solo affair. He worked on the album in spare moments over a period of two years in between stints of touring and recording projects with other bands, capturing the whole thing with one microphone on an old laptop in the lounge or bedroom of a succession of tumbledown central Auckland villas.  Crafting the record from the ground up, Prebble wrote the songs, played all the instruments, and engineered the  recordings, involving other people only at the mixing and mastering stages.  At that point Jamie Newman (Cinema 90) came on board as mixing engineer, and together they took the tracks to a studio in a barn north of Auckland, where Newman worked magic and made them sparkle.

The solo approach gave Prebble the freedom to experiment with sounds and arrangements, producing a collection of songs that is at once intimate and unique.  Using a sonic palette consisting of fingerpicked acoustic guitars, lush strings, chiming mandolins and glockenspiels, warm vocal harmonies and analogue synthesisers, antique organs and pianos, and found-sound beats from staple-guns and key-rings washed out with rich reverbs and tape delays, he created intricate soundscapes to surround his trademark wry observational lyrics.  These songs tell stories from the fantastical to the mundane: love and distance, storms at sea and the crying of the gulls, history, memory, loss and wasted youth, getting to bed on time so you won’t be tired in the morning, and the feeling that any minute now somebody’s going to realise you’re bluffing. As the title suggests, most of the songs on the album deal with the passing of time and the changing of seasons in various ways. The album is brought to life by superb hand-painted cover art by Emily Cater.

Now We Are 28 is the new single and video from Bond Street Bridge.

This song is about getting older – older than Percy Shelley, older than Kurt Cobain, older than the illustrious roll-call of bright and doomed artists who made it to 27 and checked out.  It’s about hoping that maybe there’s more to life than looking at things and trying new drinks, but suspecting that there maybe there’s not. It’s about remembering fast cars and the feeling of being ready for whatever, and it’s about the feeling you get when it slips away, and you have to start going to bed before midnight or getting up in the morning will be even more of a pain in the ass.  For all that, though, it’s got a spring in its step and a sparkle to it.

Now We Are 28 is accompanied by a web-only video shot (and edited) by Monkey Records’ boss Nigel Braddock on a rather basic camera while touring with Bond Street Bridge and Tim Guy through Germany, France, Switzerland and the UK between July and September 2010. Says Nigel, “It’s more or less just a montage of images and impressions from the tour in no particular order but I guess you could say it’s also a journey of the main character from the cities to the countryside with recurring images of wind turbines, fire, rampaging farmyard animals and driving – lots of driving…”

Now We Are 28 was the first single to be released from Bond Street Bridge’s sophomore album Spring Summer Awesome Winter.

‘Silver’ is the second single from Bond Street Bridge’s critically acclaimed debut album ‘The Mapmaker’s Art.’

The song and the video tell an epic story of folly, adventure, and eventual insanity.  A well-dressed but confused-looking young man pushes a mannequin in a post-apocalyptic shopping trolley through a desert populated by dessicated skulls, poisonous snakes, and cantankerous alchemists. With only a deck of cards for guidance, he’s searching for a mysterious potion – presumably he’ll know it when he sees it.  As in most ill-conceived endeavours, things go wrong quite quickly.

The video was shot in lush black and white by Briar March, and directed by Nigel Braddock.  Sam Prebble, the one-man multi-instrumentaliser behind the Bond Street Bridge project, wrote the script and provided art direction.  He explains ‘the logistics of the shoot were a bit of a nightmare, but since it was my idea, I couldn’t really complain about having to push a severely distressed shopping trolley up a sixty-foot sand dune.  At least, that’s what Briar and Nigel reckoned – I decided to complain anyway.’

The bulk of the shooting was completed in one very long day at Bethell’s Beach, on Auckland’s west coast.  Racing to fit so much action into one day of shooting gave the finished product exactly the epic qualtiy the team was aiming for.  ‘I wasn’t acting by the end of the day,’ says Sam. ‘All that rolling around and falling over towards the end of the video was a pretty good reflection of my state of mind by that stage.’

The video was edited by Campbell Farquar and features Sam Prebble and Derek March.

The debut album from Bond Street Bridge, ‘The Mapmaker’s Art,’ was recorded with one microphone and an old laptop in a falling-down villa next to Auckland’s northwestern motorway.  The circumstances of the recording had a strong influence on the content of the record; and this is particularly audible on the track ‘motorways,’ the new single and video from Bond Street Bridge.  Most of the songs on ‘The Mapmaker’s Art’ are about ways of traveling, and this song is inspired by the motorway at night, wet from the rain.

‘Motorways’ is a lush track. The glitchy beats, driving strings, and rolling bass surround a sinister tale of misadventure on the open road, delivered in a hushed an impressionistic vocal.  There are bones, there’s poison and knives, and the wet road follows powerlines through the mountains to an unspecified destination.

In the video, shot in grainy black and white by Sam Duckor-Jones and Tim Sissons, a car travels aimlessly through dark streets, with streetlights and road markings melting into abstract patterns reminiscent of Len Lye’s experimental film work.  The sequence is dream-like, with moments of lucididy cutting in and out through a haze of lens flare.

Sam Duckor-Jones is a visual artist based in Wellington.  His work includes painting, sculpture, puppetry and animation, as well as video work.  He exhibits at Bowen Galleries. Tim Sissons has collaborated with Sam on a number of video and photography projects; this is their first music video.

Monkey Records is pleased to announce the release of a summery little gem from Auckland artist Bond Street Bridge.  The new song ‘Birds’ is the first single from Bond Street Bridge’s forthcoming sophomore album, due for release in early 2010 following on from the critically acclaimed The Mapmaker’s Art released last year.

In this catchy wee number, Bond Street Bridge, aka Sam Prebble, reflects on the mating habits of New Zealand’s paradise shelduck, Tadorna variegata.  These striking brown-and-white ducks  generally mate for life, and pairs are a common sight in open country in New Zealand.

Prebble says ‘I spend a lot of time driving around the country for shows and whatnot, and anthropomorphising the wildlife is a good way to pass the time.  I have to concede that the birds in this song are probably not really in love, but based on the way they tend to sort of sit next to each other and not really say much, they sure look like they are.’

Bond Street Bridge is the creation of Auckland-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Sam Prebble.  Sam has been playing music for as long as he can remember, and ‘probably before that as well,’ as he puts it. Bond Street Bridge is currently a solo project, but Sam has always played in bands, orchestras and choirs.  For the past few years he has been playing in the Broken Heartbreakers and Reb Fountain’s Bandits, and has recently guested on releases by White Swan Black Swan, Dylan Storey and Andy Gibson, playing fiddle and writing string arrangements.  Sam’s experience in bands and orchestras has developed the strong sense for arrangement and orchestration he brings to his debut album, ‘The Mapmaker’s Art.’  Listening to the lush soundscapes and cunningly interleaved parts on this record, it is hard to believe that it was recorded on a laptop with one microphone, in a falling-down villa next to a motorway.

Working by himself, Sam had the luxuries of time and creative free rein, which he used to craft a unique and original record. The result is an often surprising collection of songs dealing with what Sam describes as ‘the details of daily life – extinct giant birds, storms at sea, pointless wanderings in the desert, demonic temptation and the like.’ This is imaginative and refined songwriting which achieves both honesty and enigma; slightly detached but never cynical, concise but never terse.

The record uses a sonic palette consisting of guitars, violin, mandolin, piano, organs, percussion and vocals, all played by Sam, with double bass on two tracks provided by Wellington-based artist Kate Whelen.  These organic and acoustic elements are complemented and supported by glitchy beats, warm reverbs and washed-out tape echoes, producing an overall sound which is at once nostalgic and innovative.  Jangly mandolins ride comfortably on top of rolling basslines, and fiddle lines trace paths through a forest of computerised beats.

This album, while fresh and original, pays homage to the artists whose work has influenced Sam over the years.  The influence of New Zealand artists such as Demarnia Lloyd and Cloudboy, Bachelorette and SJD, as well as international artists such as Bjork, Beck, New Buffalo, Neko Case, Thom Yorke, Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen is audible on this record.  In creating this work, Sam also drew inspiration from writers, painters and filmmakers, among them Ursula Le Guin, Hone Tuwhare, Bill Hammond, Kurt Vonnegut, Christine Jeffs and Carol Ann Duffy.

The title of the record, ‘The Mapmaker’s Art,’ is a reflection of the fact that most of the songs are about movement, getting from on place to another.  Sam says ‘we draw a map to describe a place we’ve been, a place that existed before us and continues to exist without us.  The art of the mapmaker is to describe a place to someone else so they can get there and back with a minimum of fuss.  Needless to say, most of the places I describe on this album are not really real, but I invite you to come and visit them just the same.’

The Mapmaker’s Art was recently included in the list of Top Albums of 2008 on Elsewhere.

Reviews

“The debut album from Aucklander Sam Prebble is one of the finest collections of new homegrown music to cross this desk in a while.The Mapmaker’s Art is an album of wistful, pensive stories spread coyly over a bed of introspective indie folk, string arrangements, subtle electronic flourishes and dreamy mandolins.  Fans of SJD and the story-telling style of Don McGLashan will find favourite elements of those two esteemed artists entwined on the Mapmaker’s Art as Prebble weaves his engaging and curious narrative.  The salient track is the bnet single ‘black market soul transplant,’ a sparse yetyet delicately textured track driven by brooding steel guitar – a great song that laments the “stitches down my side where my soul used to be.” The swampy and melodic bluegrass of ‘the nature of the blues’ is another highlight from Prebble, who might be known to music fans through his work with White Swan Black Swan and Reb Fountain’s band the Bandits.  The Mapmaker’s Art is an album that commands attention and will reward the listener with a joyously cinematic listening experience.”
**** (four stars).  Phil Reed, Real Groove

Elsewhere
Otago Daily Times
Cheese on Toast
Bullet Magazine

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