Pitchfork: The Notwist Tour With Themselves

The Notwist Tour With Themselves
Chubby Checker, preacher from "Footloose" plan pay-per-view throwdown

[Posted Tuesday, January 6th, 2004 06:00:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

Your favorite German glitch popsters are teaming up with your favorite underground hip-hopsters for a North American tour this February. The Notwist and Themselves create a pairing of two highly creative forces in underground music today, and they'll likely need no introductions to each other.

Themselves are part of the Anticon collective, a politically leftist band of hip-hop/hip-pop artist/musicians that includes Why?, cLOUDDEAD and Alias, among many others. The Notwist intersects with said collective where Alias is concerned: Markus Archer teamed up with him on his latest LP, Muted, for the track "Unseen Sights."

Themselves was originally formed by vocalist Doseone and drum machine virtuoso Jel in 2000 as Them, but (perhaps not realizing the moniker was used by Van Morrison's '60s-era band) they've since lengthened their name. In as many years, they've released three full albums, with the most recent, No Music, arriving in September.

As for The Notwist, they've been keeping busy by starting a new label, Alien Transistor. It boasts a catalog of two titles thus far: the score they composed for the German film Lichter, and more recently, the debut album from Chronomad (aka Saam Schlamminger), Chronomad 1.

At this time, only a short tour has been announced, prompting speculation of more U.S. dates to come. We'll bring you those if they come about. For this set of dates, The Notwist and Themselves will hit a tiny corner of the Northeast U.S., drop by the most cosmopolitan cities of Canada, and finally make the predictable stops along the left coast. Dates:

02-03 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
02-04 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
02-05 Cambridge, MA - Middle East
02-06 Montreal, Quebec - Caberet Du Plateau
02-07 Toronto, Ontario - Lee's Palace
02-12 Vancouver, British Columbia - Richards On Richards
02-13 Seattle, WA - Chop Suey
02-14 Portland, OR - Dante's
02-16 San Francisco, CA - Slim's
02-17 Los Angeles, CA - El Rey