Haitian Rail on The Inarguable

Here's a review for Haitian Rail posted by The Inarguable. A great way to start off tour!

http://www.theinarguable.com/2013/09/ricartmillevoi-quartet-haitian-rail.html

Testin'

Many Arms just got back from a short tour up north. When we were in Toronto, our good friend Colin Fisher sat in on tenor sax for our set and destroyed. We're going to be recording in January and we're SO STOKED to rock with Colin this time around.

I received my test copy of In White Sky today and it sounds awesome. No official release date soon, but keep an eye here and at The Flenser for some news.

Also, Haitian Rail, the album I did with Ed Ricart, Travis Laplante, and Ches Smith, will be released in early 2013 on Gaffer Records on LP!

Many Arms got a great review in Dusted by Brad Cohan and Black Figure of a Bird was just reviewed along side the other New Atlantis releases on Terrascope. Johnny DeBlase's Quartet album, Composites, was reviewed over at Something Else!, home of one of my favorite music columns, Steely Dan Sunday.

Something Else Reviews

New review posted this weekend for Black Figure of a Bird:

Nick Millevoi – Black Figure Of A Bird (2011)

Posted by S. Victor Aaron

When I was very young, I’d pick up my brother’s guitar or tap on my mom’s
piano just to try to see what kind of cool sounds I could get out of them. I
wasn’t concerned about notes, chords or songs, I merely wanted to get the
 things to make some sort of resonance that would resonate with me. Nick
Millevoi looks for the same primal satisfaction from his 12-string guitar but
 with informed with technical mastery for his solo release Black Figure Of 
A Bird. Millevoi, as our fringe music lover audience might recall, co-leads a
 free metal-jazz trio called Many Arms and about a year ago we put an ear 
on their second album Missing Time.

Millevoi’s new solo record, as indicated above, was recorded entirely and
only with a 12-string guitar, using different tunings and no discernable effects,
except on “Nothing Forms A Liquid”. The whole record feels created on the
spot and probably was, as songs are coherent in mood but are otherwise
unstructured and unpredictable. Most of the half dozen pieces are fairly brief,
save for “What Sunlight Does Make It Through” and “Nothing Forms A Liquid.”
The former basks in rich chords shimmering from 12 strings that for a moment
corrodes into slashing strums before returning to the calm. The latter track
explores chiming sounds that somewhat resembles a glockenspiel, exploring
the space between the notes as much as the notes themselves. “Life In Ice”
 alternates among strident strums, pensive staccato lines and Bruce Eisenbeil-
styled string scraping. On “Warm Green Discs,” light and fleet fingerings share
space with forceful strumming of alien chords. “Bruxer” (video below) is an
intense eighty-eight second ride on the metallic side.

Clocking in at less than 26 minutes, Black Figure Of A Bird comprises more
of a short story than a novel. Nonetheless, it’s s fascinating look into the music
of Nick Millevoi at its naked core.

Black Figure Of A Bird released last September 11 as one of the inaugural releases
of New Atlantis Records. Visit Nick Millevoi’s blog.

http://somethingelsereviews.com/2012/02/11/nick-millevoi-black-figure-of-a-bird-2011/

Hello 2012

Hello 2012.

The Deli put Black Figure of a Bird on their year-end list. I love The Deli, they're the coolest:

http://philadelphia.thedelimagazine.com/8206/qd-tran’s-top-15-local-albums-2011


I've finished my new solo guitar album. Eric Carbonara made my guitar sound huge and punishing. I'm looking forward to releasing it, but I'm going to have to find a label first!

Tomorrow I'm heading to Oakland with Dan Blacksberg to meet up with Drew Cecatto and work with Roscoe Mitchell on the composition he's going to be writing for our trio (Archer Spade + Drew Cecatto). I'm totally psyched to get to work with Roscoe, who is a total hero. I'm also psyched to play with Drew and Dan because I think we make really great music together but we get to do it so rarely since we're bi-coastal.

See you soon!

Philly Weekly's Monday Morning Comedown

This week's Monday Morning Comedown (5 new videos every week) features the video to "Bruxer."

Elliot Sharp writes:

Nick Millevoi – Bruxer: Philly guitar destroyer Nick Millevoi (Many Arms) released his first solo album earlier this year called Black Figure Of A Bird. Last week he dropped a video for the song “Bruxer,” where the classic B&W images accompany his burning, terrifying 12-string electric axe chops and zigs and zags. He’s playing Highwire Gallery on Saturday, August 20.

Follow the link to see the video as well as well as videos by ASAP Rocky, Marissa Nadler, Prince EA, and Jay-Z and Kanye West.

http://blogs.philadelphiaweekly.com/music/2011/08/15/monday-morning-comedown-new-videos-by-nick-millevoi-asap-rocky-marissa-nadler-prince-ea-and-jay-z-kanye-west/

Review from Gapplegate Guitar Blog

Here's a great new review from the Gapplegate Guitar Blog:

Nick Millevoi: "Black Figure of Bird" Delivers High Impact 12-String Electric Guitar Solos

This past March I covered the avant power trio Many Arms and their high energy assault speed metal. The guitarist on that was Nick Millevoi. Nick has been busy since then, among other things putting together a solo CD of 12-string electric guitar pieces, Black Figure of a Bird (Sundmagi na001). It just came out and will no doubt be turning a few heads around.

Essentially Nick has created some structured outness for six episodic segments that have an overal aura about them but also pacing and variational depth. He uses the full sonarity of the 12-string. He'll deviate from standard tunings (it sounds like) to fashion open resonant chords of an unusual sort, make interesting use of chiming harmonics, then come in with dynamically alive industrial trance figures (sometimes sounding a hair like late Crimson or the League of Crafty Guitarists only much more insistent), and so on.

There is a good deal of really interesting guitar work happening on Black Figure. The sounds he gets set him apart; the note choices, chord voicings and rapid strummings put him in a league of his own.

This is sometimes startling, ever-engaging, bright-dark and brittle music. And what seems most encouraging to me is that it is music first and foremost. It is rather remarkable as guitar music as well but you go away from the disk knowing you have heard good music.

Welcome to the Millevoi Zone....you can get there from here. I recommend that you make the trip.

http://gapplegateguitar.blogspot.com/2011/08/nick-millevoi-black-figure-of-bird.html

Black Figure of a Bird officially released today, buy it here!

Black Figure of a Bird is officially released! And now you can buy it in the "discography" section for $10 plus $2 s&h. Check out Aviv Rubinstien's video below and get psyched!

BRUXER - new video by Aviv Rubinstien!

With all due respect to Rod Serling:

Videos from May 6 at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia

Black Figure of a Bird named The Deli's Album of the Month for April

"If the massive resurgence of fuzzy, static-laden, shoegaze-y music in the past five years is any indication, music fans love noise. But Nick Millevoi, a key figure in several projects before this, isn’t reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine in the slightest. Instead, his frenetic twelve-string compositions owe much more to the No Wave scene of ‘70s/80s New York, a flash-in-the-pan group of musicians who used noise, minimal structure, and sometimes utter intimidation as their claim to notoriety. The noisiness found on Millevoi’s Black Figure of a Bird offers virtually nothing in terms of the warmth, delicacy, or etherealness that’s expected from today’s shoegaze trend-followers. In fact, the title of the last track, “Nothing Forms a Liquid”, might be a perfect descriptor of what’s going on here. Millevoi’s lone guitar is all treble, a chiming, brittle tonality that maps out into a dozen angles at once. His compositions are fiercely bare-bones, but with an undeniable life-blood churning somewhere at their core.

“Warm Green Disks” shows something of Millevoi’s jazz leanings, as well as a serious King Crimson vibe (Larks’ Tongues in Aspic era), in its constant, spidery movement up and down his freakishly-tuned scales, before building into a fuller, more atonal onslaught. This structure becomes a pattern, consistently finding new variations over the course of the record’s brief tracklist. “Life in Ice” offers a similar chordal fury interspersed with noise-making that gives you, quite chillingly, the effect of ice cracking and splintering off beneath your feet. “What Sunlight Does Make It Through” is about as gentle as the record gets, with spacey swaths that grow increasingly more tense and effects-laden. “Bruxer” is like a Greg Ginn solo pushed to its limit and looped for a minute and a half, and “Nothing Forms a Liquid” experiments with excessively-overdriven pinch harmonics.

Black Figure of a Bird isn’t for everyone; it really only caters to that specific set of listeners who enjoy atonal guitar experiments. But those who feel themselves a part of that category will undoubtedly find these tunes both visceral and fascinating." - Joe Poteracki

http://philadelphia.thedelimagazine.com/

City Paper preview

Nick Millevoi
Thu., March 31, 8:30 p.m., $5, with Colin Fisher and Josh Carrigan, The Marvelous, 208 S. 40th St.

By Shaun Brady

[ jazz ]

Granted, Philly guitarist Nick Millevoi usually has help in creating the ferocious squalls of noise he conjures on a regular basis: trombonist Dan Blacksberg in the duo Archer Spade, his triomates in Many Arms, and the like-minded genre-mashers of Make A Rising and Electric Simcha. But just because he goes it alone on his new CD, Black Figure of a Bird, doesn't make him any less dangerous. On his solo debut's half-dozen tracks, Millevoi wrestles a 12-string electric into doing things it clearly doesn't want to do, creating harsh textures, blistering runs, odd-angled lines and punishing eruptions. The occasional moments of breath and clarity seem a merciful respite for the instrument.

Thu., March 31, 8:30 p.m., $5, with Colin Fisher and Josh Carrigan, The Marvelous, 208 S. 40th St., nickmillevoi.blogspot.com.

http://www.citypaper.net/music/2011-03-31-nick-millevoi.html

Deli Interview

Here's a link to an interview that I did with The Deli about Black Figure of a Bird:

http://national.thedelimagazine.com/5012/where-my-mind-nick-millevoi

Where Is My Mind?: Nick Millevoi   - by Q.D. Tran “Philly guy Nick Millevoi always seems to be in the middle of something interesting - saw him do a lovely solo show a couple weeks ago.” That was a quote from our interview withNotekillers’ David First when we picked his brain about whom he was currently into at the time. How true that statement turned out to be! I had already heard of Millevoi from his work withMake A Rising (who were actually The Deli Philly’s first Featured Artist(s) of the Month). He’s working on a new project with trombonist Dan Blacksberg as the duo Archer Spade and still pushing the boundaries of improvisation with his avant-garde punk-jazz trio Many Arms (Engine Records, Majmua Music). Well, he also has his new solo album of 12-string guitar compositions coming out in April titled Black Figure of a Bird. The 6-song EP will be released by DC's New Atlantis Records and Sunmagi Records as the first of a series of three collaborative releases which also includes efforts from Peter Brotzmann and Han Bennink, and Jason Ajemian. Black Figure of a Bird really spotlights this shredder and master craftsman making a statement while finding his own sound. He’s having his CD release party this Thursday, March 31 at The Marvelous. We had a chance to catch up Millevoi to talk shop and the absurd (or is it?). Find out why he thinks there is a very good chance we’ll have more hard proof in the next few years that aliens have lived among us (if they aren’t still living with us now), what cover song guided him down the path to his obsession with the guitar, why he thinks The Edge is the most overrated guitarist in music history, and much, much more. The Deli: What made you want to play a 12-string guitar? Nick Millevoi: About a year and a half ago, I had been listening to a lot Pharaoh Sanders and thinking about how huge his tenor sax tone is, and I wanted to figure out a way to get a bigger sound out of the guitar that didn’t mean using more pedals or more amps. A friend offered to lend me his 12-string electric, and I found exactly what I was looking for! TD: What inspired you to do a solo album of 12-string compositions? NM: I think it’s important to play solo music, which is something I had been reading Anthony Braxton talk about a lot. I love so much solo music, so the time came that I thought I should make my own contribution to the body of experimental solo guitar music. I had been working on developing my own solo vocabulary but felt like I had a final hurdle to cross before something came to fruition. There’s something about the 12-string that immediately spoke to me and I just started to write, and once I started to experiment with alternate tunings, all of the music that is on this album came about quite quickly. TD: Was there much cutting and pasting or overdubbing with this album or was it basically Eric Carbonara hitting the record button while you just play your ass off? NM: This album was all recorded live. Eric had a really good vision for how to record and set everything up, and I just sat in the room and played everything a couple of times until I was totally exhausted! TD: You’ve certainly been involved with many projects. What do you find most enjoyable about the collaborative process? NM: The most enjoyable part of the collaborative process is having other people involved shaping what is being created. For example, I play in a duo with trombonist Dan Blacksberg called Archer Spade where we compose in collaboration using extended and non-extended techniques of both of our instruments. We work best this way because we both offer such intimate relationships with our instruments that we need to rely on each other to work things out. In Many Arms, a lot of the fruits of collaboration come about from pushing each other in improvisations where the group interaction keeps getting more intense, going longer, faster, and the energy keeps going in a way that no one of us can control. TD: What do you like best about doing a solo project? NM: I really love the sound of an unaccompanied guitar so for me, this is just another case of making music that I’m really excited about! TD: What’s the most challenging thing about a solo project? NM: I’ve been trying to play solo guitar music for a long time now, but in the past few years, I’ve been really inspired by reading about Anthony Braxton and his solo saxophone music and listening to people like Eric Carbonara and Joe Morris, who both have totally singular solo guitar sounds. I think the hardest part has been looking at music like theirs that’s so individual to the people creating it and trying to figure out what kind of statement I was trying to make. TD: Why did you name the album Black Figure of a Bird? NM: It’s a reference from the great noir novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. A lot of the imagery I associate with the music on this album is based on noir films, sci-fi, and outer space. TD: What would you like someone to takeaway from the album after listening to it? NM: Some kind of feeling of catharsis, maybe more energy. Also, if people listen loudly enough, I’d expect their ears to ring. TD: Do you prefer playing a 12-string or 6-string guitar, and why? NM: I don’t have a preference. They’re both really different in terms of color, so I use them each in different settings. Right now I’m using the 12-string for my solo compositions, but still mostly using 6-string for solo improvisations. Both are really great for high energy group playing though. I think the 6-string is probably more direct in that context, and someone just told me that the 12-string sounded scary after a Many Arms set. TD: Please name a 12-string guitarist that we should check out. NM: Arto Lindsay is my favorite 12-stringer. TD: Who do you think is the most overrated guitarist in music history? NM: Probably The Edge. I just watched that movie It Might Get Loud. I thought it was lame, but since I teach guitar, I felt compelled to check it out. The Edge spends more time talking about his effects than guitar, and there is a scene where he goes outside to play guitar, and he has to take his effects rig with him. I don’t think that should really count as playing guitar. I remember reading a Keith Richards quote where he said any good song should work on acoustic guitar, and I think that works for what he was talking about, but maybe not for all music, but I will say I think if you’re a guitarist, you should at least be able to make music with just a guitar. TD: Who do you think is the most underrated? NM: I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anyone seriously talk about Ronald Jones, who was a member of the Flaming Lips in the nineties. He plays one of my 10 favorite guitar solos on the song “The Abandoned Hospital Ship”. It totally rips a whole in the fabric of the song! I’m not sure I’m ready to say he’s the most underrated guitarist in music history since his output is so minimal, and I’m really only basing it on one solo, but he was certainly capable of greatness. Also, Jerry Garcia is certainly a revered guitarist, but I think a lot of people, particularly in experimental music, write him off because of his stereotypical fans and what the Dead became in the eighties and nineties. His sixties and seventies output is definitely some of the greatest rock guitar playing that exists. TD: What was the first cover song that you ever learned to play on the guitar? NM: I started learning guitar because of “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but it was too hard for me back then, so the first song I really got into was “Come As You Are”. TD: We all know that guitarists can sometimes be show-offs and wankers. What do you think is the cheesiest guitar move that you secretly enjoy seeing live? NM: Whammy bar dive-bombs on a Floyd Rose, which is an awful type of bridge system on shredder guitars that nobody should ever buy. When I hear one, I do get a bit jealous that none of my guitars can do that. Especially when they bring it back into a harmonic or a sweet high note. TD: I thought that I read an interview where you said that you believe in aliens. Is that true? If so, do you think alien astronauts/ancient aliens existed? NM: Totally true. I believe in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. I try my best to remain skeptical about their current involvement on earth, but there is a lot of evidence that can’t be argued away. I think there are really convincing arguments for ancient aliens, but so much of it is sensationalized so people can feel comfortable convincing themselves it’s not true. I think there’s a very good chance we’ll have more hard proof in the next few years. It’s quite chilling to think about. TD: What is your favorite thing to get at the deli? NM: Whitefish salad on a poppy bagel with lettuce and tomato.

Record release show announced!

I'll be celebrating the release of Black Figure of a Bird on March 31 at West Philly's the Marvelous with my friend Colin Fisher from Toronto, who will be playing an improvised guitar set, and fellow Philadelphian Josh Carrigan. I'll then be going on tour for 9 days with Colin. All of the information for the Philly show is on the "Upcoming Shows" page and the tour dates will be announced soon.

New tracks posted from my forthcoming solo 12-string guitar record

If you look to the right you'll see a SoundCloud player. That's the first track from my new solo 12-string guitar album, The Black Figure of a Bird. I'm really stoked about it. The CD is coming out in April and I'm working on putting a tour together with my good friend, Colin Fisher. More news soon!