UPDATE: Touch and Go has clarified the information it gave to Pitchfork. We were originally told that the label will no longer be releasing new music. However, the label has since clarified that it hopes to once again release new music at some point in the future, once the dust has settled from the restructuring brought about by the shuttering of its distribution arm.

It's a very, very sad day for indie rock. One of America's foremost independent record labels, Touch and Go Records, has announced that they will no longer release new music.

They have also shuttered their distribution arm, which manufactured and brought to market releases for labels like Merge, Kill Rock Stars, Drag City, Suicide Squeeze, Flameshovel, Jade Tree, and Post Present Medium.

From Big Black and Shellac to Butthole Surfers and the Jesus Lizard, from Dirty Three and Pinback to Ted Leo and TV on the Radio, from Calexico to the Mekons to Slint, Touch and Go nurtured the careers of so many bands that served as backbones for indie rock. They even boasted a promising crop of new bands, with recent releases from Crystal Antlers, Mi Ami, All the Saints, and Sholi.

Crystal Antlers' Tentacles, slated for release on April 7, will still come out. They also plan to go through with a series of Jesus Lizard reissues in August, as well as a Jesus Lizard 7" box set release for Record Store Day.

A statement from the label concluded, "It is the end of a grand chapter in Touch and Go's history, but we also know that good things can come from new beginnings."

It's impossible to calculate the importance Touch and Go had to the rock'n'roll landscape of the past three decades. Back in 2006, when the label celebrated its 25th anniversary, Pitchfork published a few features about the label's history. Read those now for just a small taste of what this remarkable institution accomplished:

• Twenty-five essential Touch and Go albums
• Photos from the Touch and Go 25 Festival
• Video from the Touch and Go 25 Festival
  
• Interview with Touch and Go founder Corey Rusk
  

Posted by Amy Phillips on February 18, 2009 at 11:55 a.m.

Tags: Industry News, Touch and Go

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-- Pitchfork will probably not give the next British Sea Power album our coveted U.2 rating, if only because U2 has never, as far as we know, composed a score for the 1934 film Man of Aran. On May 5, Rough Trade will release the band's Man of Aran soundtrack as a double-disc package. One disc will feature the re-scored movie on DVD, and the other will include the soundtrack on CD, just in case you want your BSP fix without getting it all tangled up with images of hardscrabble Depression-era Irish life. On April 23, the band will perform the score live to accompany the movie at the British Film Institute in London. They will do the same on April 18 at the Duke of Yorks Cinema in Brighton, England as well.

-- The Kanye-approved Cleveland synth-rapper Kid Cudi will probaby not perform at any Reebok-sponsored events anytime soon. According to various reports, a sneaker-based dispute may have led to event security tasering Cudi at a Reebok party during NBA All-Star Weekend in Phoenix this past weekend. It was rumored that Cudi, who had been booked to perform at the event, wanted to wear Nikes onstage, and things got physical. Cudi himself disputes the cause of the fight in a blog post on his currently overloaded website, via HipHopDx: "It wasn't over me wearing Jordans. I arrived at the event in the most 'fugliest' Reeboks ever." Sponsors love talk like this!

-- Midnight Masses is a new side project from ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead multi-instrumentalist Jason Reece and Dragons of Zynth bassist Autry Fulbright. They'll open for Trail of Dead on tour this spring, and T.O.D.'s Conrad Keely will produce their debut album alongside TV on the Radio bassist Gerard Smith. Pretty soon, every single cool-band sideman in Brooklyn will have something to do with this thing.

-- Because nothing goes together like sludge-metal and comic books (and bong-rips, sold separately), the comic artist Brian Walsby has once again teamed up with Washington grunge titans the Melvins to release Manchild 4. The comic, Walby's fourth, is an illustrated diary that Walsby wrote when he was touring with the Melvins. Bifocal Media will release the book on April 7, and it'll come with a CD of live Melvins recordings. Half of the songs on the CD were recorded in Boston last year, but half of them were recorded at Berkeley's 's 924 Gilman Street Project in 1989, with Shirley Temple's daughter Lori Black on bass. Bifocal will only sell 3000 of these, so act fast.

-- "Family", an exhibition of Devendra Banhart BFF Lauren Dukoff's photos will open at San Francisco's Eleanor Harwood Gallery on Friday, February 20, as part of the Noise Pop Festival. The show consists of Dukoff's pics of Banhart, as well as those of other freak-folk scene staples like Joanna Newsom, Bat for Lashes, Vetiver, Little Joy and Entrance. Banhart also contributed artwork to the exhibition. In July, Chronicle Books will release Family, a collection of Dukoff's photography.

Posted by Tom Breihan on February 17, 2009 at 5:15 p.m.

Tags: Book, British Sea Power, Film, Kid Cudi, Lauren Dukoff, Legal, Midnight Masses, Noise Pop, The Melvins

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ABC News has launched a new series on its website called "New Music Monday", and they've invited Pitchfork to be a part of it. Pitchfork writers will appear regularly in the series, which can be viewed on ABC's World News Webcast, chatting about notable albums they have recently reviewed. So far, ABC has featured Amanda Petrusich talking about Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP, Marc Hogan reviewing M. Ward's Hold Time, and Joe Tangari on Andrew Bird's Noble Beast. And, to kick the whole series off, Ryan Schreiber profiled five albums he was looking forward to in 2009.

Stay tuned to the ABC News website for more. And who knows, maybe you'll bump into Charles Gibson in the pit at the Wavves show one of these days.

Posted by Pitchfork Staff on February 17, 2009 at 3:50 p.m.

Tags: ABC News, Pitchfork

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UPDATE: According to Stars' publicist and a MySpace blog post from the man himself, Torquil Campbell had nothing to do with the MySpace bulletin dissing Ben Folds. He writes:

hello everyone-
we don't know who put up their rant against ben folds here.......could have been anyone i guess.........but we don't know what the fuck all this is about... We do love charlie spearin............don't really know ben folds work...........anyway, i find it exciting that i dont even have to know whats going on to be contreversial..... i am now going to change the password on our myspace......i have to say, whoever you are, you've really got my style down!
wow, torq

As far as we know, Campbell still stands by his diss of our own Ryan "Numballs" Dombal, however.

Wow. Somebody really needs to buy Stars frontman Torquil Campbell a punching bag or a Bop It or something. Because otherwise the glammed-out Canadian indie pop singer will keep venting his rage via MySpace posts, and nobody needs that. First he let loose a classic now-deleted MySpace rant against my esteemed Pitchfork News colleague Ryan Dombal ("Ryan Numballs," if you're Campbell) after Dombal had the audacity to drop a 7.4 on Stars' In Our Bedroom After the War. And now Campbell's wrath has found itself another target: 90s alt-pop dorm-room staple Ben Folds.

The beef started when Folds, appearing on the Canadian radio network CBC, referred to The Happiness Project, the horrendous weirdo-soundscape solo album from Do Make Say Think/Broken Social Scene manCharles Spearin, as "bad spa music." But Spearin is Campbell's boy, and you do not fuck with Torquil

"hi guys...well i know i'm gonna regret this, but i can't help myself. I just heard Ben Folds, who many of you prolly have never heard of because you don't waste your time listening to shitty mid nineties m.o.r. lite grunge, calling my friend Charles Spearins' BEAUTIFUL new record "bad spa music" on the CBC. BEN FOLDS! insulting CHARLES SPEARIN! is he fuckin' nuts? you come to our country and insult a national treasure on the radio? CHARLIE SPEARIN????? the most beautiful talented soulful brother in the whole world? a guy who has written some of the most influential, sublime music this side of heaven? WHo has just completed the Happiness Project, one of the most original and uplifting pieces of music i have EVER HEARD? Ben Folds, ladies and gentleman, is an ASSHOLE for dismissing this extraordinary tribute to life and love as 'bad spa music'. It makes me wanna......well you know.....kick his scrawny, washed up hipster doofus ass....but instead, i encourage you all to write to his myspace (he could use the visits) and imbed charles' music in your message so that every time some refugee from the nineties wants to hear their favourite ben folds ditty, they get charlie instead. i've said it before, and it feels right, so i'll say it again; BEN FOLDS IS AN ASSHOLE. Campbell's boy when you're on Canadian radio. Here's Campbell's reaction, sent out via MySpace bulletin titled "BEN FOLDS IS AN ASSHOLE":

xo love and hate torq@stars"

If you will, take a moment to savor the delicious absurdity in someone with Broken Social Scene connects derisively referring to a guy who wrote songs for the movie Over the Hedge as a "hipster." But that isn't even the best part: Where Campbell refers to Folds as someone "who many of you prolly have never heard of because you don't waste your time listening to shitty mid nineties m.o.r. lite grunge." Oh snap!

Who would've thought that one of our finest purveyors of uber-dramatic heart-on-sleeve synth-rock would also turn out to be one of our greatest MySpace name-callers? God bless you, the internet.

Posted by Tom Breihan on February 17, 2009 at 3:35 p.m.

Tags: Beef, Ben Folds, Stars, Torquil Campbell

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When you name your file-sharing website the Pirate Bay (as opposed to, say, the Recreational Legal Downloader Bay), you're practically begging the authorities to shut you down. But things aren't that easy for Swedish prosecutors. Yesterday, the trial against the four founders of the Pirate Bay, the torrent site that millions use to swap files, began in Stockholm. But today, the prosecution dropped the charge of "assisting copyright infringement," as the BBC reports. Now all that's left is the syntactically jumbled charge of "assisting making available copyright material."

This is quite a victory for a group that's already been working to turn this trial into a circus, showing up to the courthouse in a gigantic painted bus yesterday morning.

Pirate Bay founders Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, and Carl Lundstrom all faced fines and up to two years in prison before those charges were dropped, according to the BBC. "This is a sensation," defense lawyer Per E. Samuelson told TorrentFreak. "It is very rare to win half the target in just one and a half days and it is clear that the prosecutor took strong note of what we said yesterday."

The record labels haven't given up yet. According to a statement from music industry lawyer Peter Danowsky, the charges are now just simpler and easier to prove: "It's a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact it simplifies the prosecutor’s case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works."

None of this has stopped Kolmisoppi from declaring victory via Twitter, which is where everyone makes their victory declarations nowadays: "EPIC WINNING LOL." Oh, the internet, don't ever change.

Posted by Tom Breihan on February 17, 2009 at 3:20 p.m.

Tags: Industry News, Legal, The Pirate Bay

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