The Warm, Dark Circus has made it into several lists for best albums of 2023!
#1 on Prog Archives across all genres and locations
An “Album of the Year” on Avant Music News
News
New Merch celebrating The Warm, Dark Circus!
We’re excited to announce that we have new Jack O’ the Clock merch available.
Check out our shop on threadless. Thanks to Shavonne Yu for designing the artwork, a clever variation on Albrecht Dürer’s original engraving, containing the lyrics to the track “Dürer’s Rhinoceros”.
The Warm, Dark Circus Full Release and New Interview
The Warm, Dark Circus is now available on Spotify and other streaming services, as well as Bandcamp and Wayside Music for physical CDs.
Check out an extensive interview with Damon in Pienemmät Purot about the new album, influences, latest news on the band, and much more!
Press Highlights
“Picture a dark chest of drawers with no indication of what is stored inside each one of them…The Warm, Dark Circus continues the band’s journey through a carefully crafted musical landscape wherein the signposts can be deceptive but always point to something interesting and adventurous.” — Here Comes The Flood
“really rich and downright head-spinningly complex, yet seductively addictive” — Pienemmät Purot
“like a fiction anthology that picks at reality with poignancy and disturbing insight….Musically…The Warm, Dark Circus stands out as one of their best…It is as if they have captured the characteristics of the last 75 years of Western music and reprocessed them into a new genre.” — Avant Music News
“…beautiful acoustic instruments working together with a top-notch rhythm section to produce a wonderful kind of modern art music…I find myself enjoying listening to it so much that it gets to the end without me having written a word…” — Exposé
The Warm, Dark Circus – October 27
The Warm, Dark Circus available on Bandcamp and Wayside Music! The album will be available on streaming services November 17.
Jack O’ the Clock will be celebrating the release with a show in Vermont on October 27. Please inquire at jackotheclock17@gmail.com for the addresses.
A kaleidoscopic trip through the anxieties and possibilities of the present moment, the new album ranges through some of the weirdest, heaviest landscapes we’ve ever visited. Containing two epics that have been under construction as long as the band has been in existence alongside a handful of newer studio creations, it is the culmination of many years of experimentation and refinement lyrically and musically, a musical palimpsest.
Damon Waitkus – vocals, guitars, hammer dulcimers, piano, flutes, etc.
Emily Packard – violin, viola
Jason Hoopes – bass
Jordan Glenn – drums, accordion, synth
Kate McLoughlin – bassoon
Thea Kelley – vocals
Victor Reynolds – guitars, recorders, harmonica, vocals, etc.
Ivor Holloway – saxophones
Jon Russell – clarinets
Keith Waters – baritone saxophone
Karl Evangelista – electric guitar
Art Elliot – piano
Josh Packard – cello
Ben Spees – microtonal guitars
Myles Boisen – pedal steel
Ventifacts – Chronic Town and Updates on New Album
Ventifacts New Release – Chronic Town
Damon Waitkus’ microtonal collaboration with Ben Spees of The Mercury Tree, VENTIFACTS, has just released an EP covering the entirety of R.E.M.’s release Chronic Town, as one continuous, barreling suite of songs.
Damon: The essential ghost of R.E.M. was never so upfront for me as in their earliest material…There’s always been something appealing and natural about going microtonal with this stuff–something in the pungency of the expanded pitch pallet seems to bring back the hauntedness that grabbed me when I first heard these songs.
LISTEN HERE on the bandcamp.
What’s new with Jack O’ The Clock?
What’s new with Jack O’ The Clock? Damon (voice, instruments) and Emily (violin), with help from Kate (voice, bassoon), Thea (voice), and Victor Reynolds (instruments), are currently working on overdubs for a new album of material derived from the many recording sessions we did with Jason and Jordan before leaving California in 2019. Though these were the same sessions that produced our 2021 album
LEAVING CALIFORNIA, the mood and energy of the new album is a world apart. Look for updates on this process on this site in the coming months.
As for the live band, Damon and Emily have been rehearsing a slew of new composed material with founding member Kate McLoughlin, Victor Reynolds (bass/guitar) and Ben James (drums). We hope to start playing out locally before too long under a different name, but the material is complex and we are not quite ready yet!
over 4 years since we’ve played together, but it hardly felt like it.