Archive

  • ADULT. debut on Mute Records with new LP

    ADULT. (Detroit’s Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller) have announced details of a new collaborative album, Detroit House Guests – their first for Mute – out on double vinyl and CD on 17 March 2017.

    Listen to They’re Just Words, the first track to be taken from the album, featuring Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas J McCarthy here and watch the album trailer here.

    Detroit House Guests is a collaborative project, conceived by ADULT. in the early 2000s. The concept became a reality in 2014 after receiving a John S. and James L.Knight Foundation grant.

    Based on the visual artist residency model, each musician came to ADULT.’s studio for a three week period with the parameter that they all live, work and collaborate together. The result – a total anthropological sound experiment and a full length album.

    The album features collaborations with a whole host of musicians and artists – Douglas J McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb, Michael Gira from Swans, Shannon Funchess from Light Asylum, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe aka Lichens, Austrian thereminist Dorit Chrysler and multidisciplinary artist Lun*na Menoh.

    ADULT. are the Detroit duo Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller. They played their first live show together in Germany in 1997 under the name Artificial Material. In early ’98 they released their first 12″ under the moniker Plasma Co. Later that year, they released their first 12″ under the name ADULT. Currently, they have released six albums and 19 EPs or singles on Ghostly International, Thrill Jockey and Clone Records, as well as on their own label Ersatz Audio, (which currently has over 40 releases since it was founded in ’95). They have remixed over 20 acts as well, including Tuxedomoon, John Foxx, Death in Vegas and Pet Shop Boys (for Moog Music).

    Kuperus and Miller also make sculpture, paintings, films, photographs, performances, videos and installations. They strive to intersect the lines between art and audio and have exhibited their work at institutions worldwide.

  • ADULT. embark on EU tour in November

    ADULT. Fall 2013 Tour

     

    In just over two weeks the pioneering Detroit duo will return to the EU & UK for a select run of dates, beginning in Madrid and ending in Belgium. Check the video below of a taste of their stunning live show from earlier this year.

  • ADULT. present mix for FACT ahead of EU tour

    Ghostly’s ADULT. served up an exclusive mix for FACT earlier this month, where they tackled powerhouse electronica, bleep techno, skewed pop and more – it’s a treat. Dig in via this link.

    Tracklist:
    Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind “Rocky Mountains”
    Streetwalker “Future Fusion”
    LFO “We Are Back”
    Vicious Pink Phenomena “815 To Nowhere”
    Severed Heads “Halo (Edited)”
    Grimes “Oblivion”
    Slava Tsukerman, Brenda I. Hutchinson, Clive Smith “Noon”
    Ladytron “Runaway (ADULT. Remix)”
    Douglas J. McCarthy “The Last Time”
    Light Asylum “Hour Fortress”
    Kap Bambino “Under Tender”
    Frank Alpine “Heart is Grey”
    Final Exposure “Vortex”
    Tom Ellard “Blame
    Plasma Co. “Fluorescent Lights (Listening to the…)”
    Black Marble “Uk”
    Eurythmics “You Take Some Lentils & You Take Some Rice”
    Standish/Carlyon “New People”

    Now booking the final dates for their return to the EU in November, email chris@littlebig.org.uk for availability.

  • Stream ADULT.’s new album ‘The Way Things Fall’

    You can now stream ADULT.’s new album in full before it’s release on May 14th.

    THEFADER.com says “After touring in support of their 2007 album, Why Bother?, The Detroit-based duo of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus took an extended break from the album cycle. Consequently, ADULT.‘s beat-driven, synth-based sound—melodic at its core but ever-so-slightly atonal and abrasive, with a lyrical romanticism that seemed to befit only the grittiest creatures of the night—sort of froze in indie rock memory as a period aesthetic, a nostalgic throwback to a time when people in the urban underground were throwing around words like “dance-punk” and “electroclash.” But what’s surprising about the wonky synth lines and smiting, deadpan vocals on their excellent return to the studio, The Way Things Fall, is how very fresh and of-the-moment they sound, like something you might hear at a fog-machine-filled cold wave party today, only with an emphasis on clarity of form, instead of hazy subterfuge.”

    Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2013/05/07/stream-adult-s-the-way-things-fall-album/#ixzz2Sy6wAf7x

  • Stream a new ADULT. track + 4 Euro shows announced for May.

    We are happy to announce 3 ADULT. live shows for May 2013. These will be the first shows in Europe for 6 years! The London show is at XOYO on Thurs 15th May with Light Asylum.

    TICKET LINKS HERE >

    15.05.13 London @ XOYO + LIGHT ASYLUM

    16.05.13 Berlin @ Festsaal Kreuzberg

    18.05.13 Brussels @ Magasin 4

    20.05.13 Amsterdam @ Bitterzoet

    The excellent Idle (Second Thoughts) track (above) is taken from the forthcoming ‘The Way Things Fall’ album due out on Ghostly International on 14th may 2013. 

     

     

  • Ghostly International announce new ADULT. album for May.

    The Ghostly International Record label have announce the new ADULT. album ‘The Way Things Fall’ will be released on May 14th 2013.

    “A good friend of ours said after hearing an advance copy of this record that ADULT. used to sit on the sidelines and critique the idiosyncrasies of culture, but now we are on the inside, sending our message out.” So says Adam Lee Miller of The Way Things Fall, ADULT.’s fifth album and a record that genuinely deserves the oft-abused music industry epithet “long-awaited.” Miller pauses before adding wryly, “We agree.”

    The Way Things Fall is an album that looked like it might never happen, because since the release of Miller and his partner Nicola Kuperus’ last record — 2007’s Why Bother? — the duo have been largely absent from the world of music. “After a long world tour, we totally burnt out,” Miller relates. “We decided we wanted to do something completely different.” That something was a trilogy of films entitled the Three Grace(s) triptych, completed in 2010, along with a variety of other pursuits, including managing a major commercial building renovation and working on their visual art projects.

    When Miller and Kuperus re-entered the studio in 2012, there was no intention of making another album — they planned to record a 12″ containing two new songs they’d written in 2012 for their return to live performance at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art. But it turned out that the time away from music had recharged ADULT.’s batteries, and then some. “We were apparently a dam that was ready to break,” says Kuperus. “We were writing frantically, as if in a frenzy.”

    The result is a record that sounds both focused and coherent, flowing with a conceptual ease. “[The album] flowed efficiently and agreeably for us,” says Miller. “We have never worked better together. We believe this is because we exorcised all of our demons through our past records, we have no baggage, we started anew. We left behind the self-conscious adolescents.” And indeed, ADULT. have never sounded so self-assured, so poised, and so vital.

    The songs are some of the most memorable the band have recorded — Miller describes them as “the closest we have to come to writing traditional ‘pop’ songs, even though we know they are totally mutants,” and he’s right on both fronts. From the whiplash synth lines of the opening “Heartbreak” to the ship’s bell sample that closes the record, the songs are full of the sort of memorably twisted melodies we’ve come to expect from the band. Analogue sounds predominate, and notably, there’s no bass guitar at all: “This wasn’t a conscious decision, but something realized at the end of the process.”

    The lyrics address issues that Kuperus describes as “personal and universal,” illustrating themes of relationship-related fear and doubt with striking and occasionally surrealist imagery — “Nothing Lasts” finds Kuperus claiming “I can see in to your mouth/ Down into your throat/ Straight to your heart/ Tears me apart,” while the somber “A Day Like Forever” deploys images of time stretching and disappearing, and “Tonight, We Fall” describes feelings as tangible objects that “stick to you, stick to me.” The contrast between the reflective lyricism and the squelching analogue synth textures they inhabit creates music that’s both deeply heartfelt and viscerally thrilling, something that’s been a constant feature of ADULT.’s work over the years. 

    Ghostly

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    Adult Period

  • LittleBig welcomes ADULT.

    We’re very pleased to announce that LittleBig are now handling european bookings for seminal Detroit duo ADULT. They recently signed to the excellent Ghostly International label who reissued their seminal debut 2001 album RESUSCITATION and then released a 7″ with 2 covers by ADULT. ‘Shari Vari’ & ‘122 Hours Of Fear’.

    After the pair stepped out of the limelight at the end of 2007 to focus on a film trilogy and soundtrack, we are expecting them to release new material this summer, news to follow.

    Whatever you do, just don’t call it a comeback.