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Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs

American Royalty, DJ Aaron Axelsen, Bells & Whistles

Wed, August 8, 2012

Doors: 8:30 pm / Show: 9:00 pm

$15 ADV - $18 DOOR

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This event is 21 and over

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs

The gentleman you see wearing the bizarre attire is one Orlando; producer and performer behind the distinctively named Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.

Originally hailing from the Greco-Roman stable, Orlando has been gradually ascending his way to the top since his debut EP release first grabbed people’s attention back in 2009. Then he was an exciting raw talent, tiptoeing between bass-heavy neon dance floor rhythms and instantly engaging pop sensibilities. The mixture and the balance proved quite unique, but then this is the son of an Oxford University music professor who fell in love with Jungle in his teens; his take on music was always going to be an interesting one.

“It goes from 124 bpm to 140 bpm. It crosses lots of genres and sub-genres of dance music, and I don’t really know or care about all these genres, I think they’re a bit useless and unnecessary. It’s just dance music at the end of the day.” (2009)

That was then, but this is 2012 and Orlando and his music have come a very long way. Still combining his original sensibilities with the wide range of tempos and sounds, but everything’s now risen to a whole new level.

It was ‘Garden’ from the ‘All In Two Sixty Dancehalls’ EP on Greco-Roman that first propelled TEED into the spotlight. A gorgeous house miniature featuring boy girl vocals (Orlando himself plus Luisa from Lulu and the Lampshades) that was revisited last October via Polydor with huge support from Radio 1, both day and night, and a massive global sync for the Nokia Lumia ad campaign. It’s one of the most instantly recognizable electronic-pop records of recent years, having clocked up over 2.5million views on YouTube and counting.

Combine that with other hugely popular tracks like the sonically ambitious ‘Household Goods’ and his debut for Polydor, the wonderfully melancholic ‘Trouble’ – Orlando’s first full-vocal song and a standout live favourite. There’s been great remixes for the likes of Lady Gaga, Professor Green and Friendly Fires – who he also collaborated with on-stage at Bestival in 2011. His biggest adventure to date took him to the Congo in Africa, working with local musicians as one of the personally invited producers to collaborate on Damon Albarn and Oxfam’s DRC LP project alongside XL’s Richard Russell and Gorillaz producer Dan The Automator amongst others.

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs swings between overt musicality and scarily on-point dance floor intuition, ripping up gigs around the globe with his live show of bizarre instruments, glitter cannons and of course… dancing dinosaurs. There’s a sense of playfulness, sleight of touch and FUN that seems missing from many of his contemporaries. Having completed successful tours across America, Europe and a recent sold-out run of headline dates across the UK, as well as featuring at every notable summer festival for the past two years, TEED is perfectly placed to unleash his debut album this June.

With new single ‘Tapes & Money’ (released in April) set to get anticipation raised even further with great radio support already stacking up – welcome to 2000 and TEED, it’s going to be an exciting year.
American Royalty
American Royalty

The lovechild of a studio experiment that was never meant to make it out into the wild, Los Angeles' American Royalty constructs an unlikely yet glowingly functional blend of dark garage rock and poignant electronica. This creative soundscape is topped off by the two vocal leads of Marc Gilfry and Billy Scher, whose pipes both seem to fall somewhere in the realm of where eerie and soul meet back on the other side; altogether resulting in one of the most innovative sounds to haunt independent music today.

The psychedelic blues-rock three piece has already begun making their mark on the road over the past year, turning heads in the touring circuit with their unorthodox stage set up, a penchant for sprinkling in reworked bits of both the classic and obscure, and an explosively energetic and entrancingly unique live performance.

The group has won over supporters in both the rock and electronic genres; playing on both coasts with friends and advocates Drop the Lime, Superhumanoids and Hanni El Khatib… warming up the crowd for everyone from Metronomy and Digitalism to Kisses, and sharing festival bills with the likes of The Flaming Lips, Snoop Dogg and Thievery Corporation Matchstick, the group's newest offering, was written in the summer of 2011 in Venice Beach where Scher and Gilfry were couch surfing, waiting for their tour to start.

"We came to the studio with these demos that were inherently very electronic, because we wrote them in our friends' living rooms," said Scher, "We were lucky enough to record at Infrasonic Sound with lots of great vintage equipment that helped us sonically flesh out the demos by adding a complementary analogue instrumentation."

The EP showcases the trio experimenting with the balance between both genres. "We had this idea for the EP to try to highlight the interplay between analogue and synthetic," said Gilfry, "At times in the final recordings it's hard to tell what is man and what is machine – there are electronic drums using samples of our live drum kit, synths running through grungy amps sounding like guitar. We're excited because we feel like this is a step in a new direction for us, which is obviously exciting for any artist."
DJ Aaron Axelsen
Bells & Whistles
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