Namelessnumberheadman Hit New York, Chicago

It's amazing what creating good music can do for your mental health. Consider Kansas City-based organo-mechanical trio Namelessnumberheadman, whose excellent summer release Your Voice Repeating has managed to sustain the band despite a dearth of cash and record label representation. Speaking to Pitchfork via e-mail, NNHM's keyboard/device manipulator Jason Lewis told us, "We play quite a bit around the Kansas City area, and are working on more shows in the Midwest for January and February. Strangely, we somehow managed to play in Brooklyn [last April] before we ever played in Omaha, but we've made a pinkie swear to not neglect our home region anymore during the coming year."

More immediately and certainly not in defiance of said pinkie swear, the band will head back to the New York area for a couple of shows before stopping in Chicago on their way back home. At the Chicago show, NNHM will serve as an opening act for a tour-closing DJ set by VHS or Beta (behind the deejayin' guise of Kit Chaps), so it should be a good chance to bask in ethereal sounds and textures before dancing the Illinois night away. A fun time for all, in these metropolitan climes:

12-09 Brooklyn, NY - Southpaw (w/ The Black Spoons)
12-10 Rochester, NY - Visual Studies Workshop (w/ The Black Spoons)
12-12 Chicago, IL - Empty Bottle (w/ Kit Chaps, The New Roman Times)

As for the future, Lewis explains, "We've been working on new material, one song of which we have just begun adding to the live sets. We've been writing and recording quite a bit in the last month and have plans to hibernate a bit in the coming winter months to do more." When asked if all this slowly coalescing activity has generated the outlines of an album yet, Lewis replied: "We don't have definite plans for another release in the near future, mainly because we are up in the air in our label situation. We seem to work in a fairly gradual way, in that we get multiple song ideas going in a somewhat rough form and then start layering and honing them. So, we aren't typically debuting a new song every month, but things are rolling in that direction."

In the meantime, the band members will keep themselves fresh with different side projects (drummer Andrew Sallee has played for fellow K.C. rockers Ghosty, while guitarist/keyboardist Chuck Whittington is involved in co-producing local band Trusty Defiant) as well banding together to remix some material from The Belles.