Chapter Music had a huge 2011, our biggest year ever, with blockbuster, world-rattling releases from behemoths like Twerps, Laura Jean, Dick Diver and Geoffrey O’Connor. But we’ve got a sneaking suspicion that 2012 is going to be even bigger.

For a start, it’s our 20th birthday! That’s right, back in 1992 a pimply 17 year old Guy Blackman gave birth to Chapter Music with a compilation tape of Perth bands called Bright Lights, Small City. We’ve got a bunch of amazing things planned to celebrate our 20th, so stay tuned for more info in the months to come.

Right now, though, there’s a lot of news we wanna tell you:

CHAPTER CURATES FINAL FRIDAY NIGHT AT EAST BRUNSWICK CLUB

For the final Friday night at the sadly soon-to-close East Brunswick Club, Chapter Music has curated an amazing lineup, a co-headline show for expansive poet-rockers Dick Diver and synthual slink-master Geoffrey O’Connor, who both released fantastic albums on Chapter late last year. They will be joined by relocated Canberra emo-rap visionary Jonny Telafone, and high-cheekboned pop sprites Velcro.

Friday, February 24

East Brunswick Club, Melbourne

Dick Diver, Geoffrey O’Connor, Jonny Telafone, Velcro

tickets $12+bf here

TWERPS DO REAL ESTATE, GIRLS, SXSW, JESSICA ALBA

Twerps have a busy few months ahead of them, after their October debut album turned them into global shamble-pop sensations (including a recent Twerps-endorsing tweet by Jessica Alba to her more than 2 million fans!). In February they’re supporting US heroes Girls at their Melbourne show, then in March they pick up with sunny New Jersey buddies Real Estate for Melbourne and Sydney supports. All this before they head to US music mega-conference SXSW for some boozing and shmoozing, and then stick around until May for a huge US tour. More US details to be announced soon!

Wednesday, February 8

Corner Hotel, Melbourne

Twerps support Girls (US)

tickets $45+bf here

Friday March 9

The Standard, Sydney

Twerps support Real Estate (US)

tickets $42+bf here

Monday March 12

Corner Hotel, Melbourne

Twerps support Real Estate (US)

tickets $42+bf here

GEOFFREY O’CONNOR NEW SINGLE, REMIX EP, LANEWAY ETC

To celebrate the release of Geoffrey O’Connor’s new single Proud (lifted from last year’s celebrated solo LP Vanity Is Forever), Chapter Music has teamed up with Sydney label Yes Please to release a digital EP featuring remixes by YP artists Oliver Tank, Guerre and the Townhouses. The Oliver Tank remix of Whatever Leads Me To You was premiered by Triple J’s Home & Hosed show last week, while Guerre’s take on Proud appeared on Pedestrian TV, and the Townhouses’s So Sorry remix can be downloaded from Sydney blog Life Aquatic. You can also stream the EP in full from Geoffrey’s bandcamp.

Geoffrey is, of course, as busy as a beaver with live shows too, having just come off a series of gigs with glittery pop kids Alpine. Next up he’s doing the national Laneway tour, as well as supporting US crash-pop stars Pains Of Being Pure At Heart in Melbourne.

Thursday February 2

The Hi-Fi, Melbourne

Geoffrey O’Connor supports Pains Of Being Pure At Heart (US)

tickets $45+bf here

Laneway Festival

Saturday January 28 – Brisbane

Saturday February 4 – Melbourne

Sunday February 5 – Sydney

Friday February 10 – Adelaide

Saturday February 11 – Perth

more details www.lanewayfestival.com.au

Friday, February 24

East Brunswick Club, Melbourne

Dick Diver, Geoffrey O’Connor, Jonny Telafone, Velcro

tickets $12+bf here

www.facebook.com/dickdiverband

www.facebook.com/geoffreyoconnormusic

www.facebook.com/twerpsmusic

It’s been a crazy month of album launches for Chapter Music’s fine fillies and foals, one that we’ve cleverly dubbed Chaptember. Geoffrey O’Connor, Twerps, Dick Diver and Laura Jean have all been roaming the nation launching their respective new albums (which for some reason we decided to release all at the same time).

Now the month of musical madness is beginning to wind down, but there are still a bunch of shows left to play out, including the cherry on top, Chapter’s label showcase night for Melbourne Music Week inside the incredibly spooky Old Melbourne Gaol.

Here’s a list of what’s left to come:

Friday November 18 – Sydney – Geoffrey O’Connor and Twerps joint album launch – Goodgod Small Club – tickets here

Friday November 18 – Brisbane – Dick Diver joint album launch with Royal Headache – Woodland – tickets $10 on the door

Friday November 18 – Brisbane – Laura Jean album launch – Black Bear Lodge

Saturday November 19 – Melbourne – Dick Diver album launch, with the Harpoons and White Woods – Phoenix Public House – tickets here

Wednesday November 23 – Melbourne – Chapter Music showcase for Melbourne Music Week, with Primitive Calculators, Essendon Airport and Fabulous Diamonds – Old Melbourne Gaol – tickets here

Saturday November 26 – Adelaide – Twerps album launch with Hit the Jackpot, Old Mate and Matt Banham – Metro Hotel – tickets $10 on the door

Friday December 9 – Sydney - The Apartments single launch with Peter Fenton (Crow) – the Factory Floor – tickets here

www.facebook.com/chaptermusic

Crayon Fields frontman turned sultry synthmeister Geoffrey O’Connor is launching his new solo album Vanity Is Forever, starting this week in Melbourne.

To celebrate, Chapter is offering a special two-for-one deal. For a limited time, Australian customers who buy Vanity Is Forever on CD from the Chapter webstore will receive a free copy of Geoffrey’s 2007 CD Liquorice Night, released under the name Sly Hats!

Also check out this great remix of Vanity’s second single So Sorry, by Melbourne producer Hidden Suns.

Geoff’s tour dates are as follows:

Friday November 4 – Melbourne – Northcote Social Club – with Super Wild Horses, Forces and Evelyn Ida Morris – tickets here

Friday November 18 – Sydney – Goodgod Small Club – joint album launch with Twerps + Holiday Sidewinder – tickets here

Chapter Music soul siblings Twerps and Dick Diver both release their long-awaited debut albums today, in a knock-em-dead two-hitter sure to leave fans reeling all over the globe. The two bands are very different, with Twerps all scrappy and drunk and loveable, and Dick Diver more sprawling and poetic, but together their albums Twerps and New Start Again form a picture of Melbourne DIY pop music in 2011 that’s pretty damn exciting.

You can hear Twerps tracks Dreamin and This Guy via Pitchfork. The album is a co-release with US label Underwater Peoples and will be released in the US on Tuesday October 18.

As of today, you can stream Dick Diver’s entire album New Start Again on Mess+Noise.

And you can get both albums now from the Chapter webstore!

Both bands are kicking off their album launch tours in Melbourne with instores at Polyester Records’ city store. Twerps’ is this evening at 6pm, while Dick Diver will play a stripped-back set next Friday, October 21.

TWERPS ALBUM LAUNCH DATES

MELBOURNE

Today, 6pm

Polyester Records instore – 288 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

all ages, free

MELBOURNE

Saturday November 12

Tote Hotel – 67-71 Johnston St, Collingwood

with Terror Of the Deep (NZ), Darren Sylvester, Peak Twins + DJ Dry White Toast

tickets $12 on the door

SYDNEY

Friday November 18

Goodgod Small Club – 53-55 Liverpool St, Sydney

joint album launch with Geoffrey O’Connor + more TBA

tickets $12+bf from Moshtix / 1300 438 849

ADELAIDE

Saturday November 26

Metro Hotel – 46 Grote St, Adelaide

supports TBA

tickets $10 on the door

DICK DIVER ALBUM LAUNCH DATES

MELBOURNE

Friday October 14, 6pm

Polyester Records instore – 288 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

all ages, free

ADELAIDE

Saturday November 5

Format – 15 Peel St, Adelaide

tickets $10 on the door, supports TBA

SYDNEY

Saturday November 12

Goodgod Small Club – 53-55 Liverpool St, Sydney

with the Harpoons and Max & Ella (Songs)

tickets via Moshtix / 1300 438 849

BRISBANE

Friday November 18

Woodland – Coniston Lane, Fortitude Valley

joint album launch with Royal Headache + more TBA

tickets $10 on the door

MELBOURNE

Saturday November 19

Phoenix Public House – 133 Sydney Rd, Brunswick

with the Harpoons and White Woods

tickets via Moshtix / 1300 438 849

www.facebook.com/twerpsmusic

www.facebook.com/dick.diver

As part of Melbourne Music Week’s label showcase series Labels Live, Chapter Music is presenting an amazing show at the very spooky Old Melbourne Gaol.

Reformed 70s synth-punk legends Primitive Calculators will put on a typically savage and hilarious performance, showcasing new material from an album currently being recorded – their first ever studio album in a 30+ year lifespan – which is due for an early 2012 release on Chapter.

The drily intoned vocals and flailing polyrhythms of Essendon Airport make a welcome live return, after Chapter’s acclaimed reissue of their 1981 post-funk classic Palimpsest.

The hypnotic minimalism of sensual duo Fabulous Diamonds will round out this darkly eccentric bill, at a venue so atmospheric and amazing, it’d be criminal not to come!

Melboune Music Week and Chapter Music present:

CHAPTER MUSIC LIVE @ OLD MELBOURNE GAOL
with Primitive Calculators, Essendon Airport and Fabulous Diamonds
Wednesday November 23, 8.30pm
Old Melbourne Gaol (377 Russell St, Melbourne)
tickets $12+bf from Moshtix / 1300 438 849

Also check out the Melbourne Music Week website.

This is very exciting for us! Crayon Fields frontman Geoffrey O’Connor is releasing his first album under his own name, Vanity Is Forever, and it’s his most ambitious, dynamic and sophisticated work yet.

O’Connor’s fractured romantic reflections and lustful tributes play out over vast synthscapes, colossal stadium drums and flanged orchestral sweeps, creating a world that is at once ethereal and strikingly vivid.

With a combination of restraint and fearless abandon, O’Connor embraces the conflicts of modern love in a manner as ambiguous as it is blunt, and as shameless as it is generous. His songs indulge in ecstasy, love, pride, failure and all the glamorous contradictions they become. He is both an adult with a juvenile mind, and a geriatric in the body of a young man.

Painstakingly refined over two years, Vanity Is Forever is O’Connor’s most fully-realised album to date, an epic pop melodrama that shifts seamlessly between seductive high-production dance hits, suave funk joyrides and modern synthetic power balladry.

Recently, O’Connor has mesmerised audiences with an extravagant live show of dueling synthesizers, lazers, light sculptures and hypnotic projections. His diverse solo output – under both his own name and previous solo moniker Sly Hats – has seen him handpicked to support a the likes of Fleet Foxes, Jens Lekman, School Of Seven Bells, Andrew Bird and First Aid Kit.

You can pick up a copy from the Chapter webstore here!

The man about whom the Go-Betweens sang Don’t Let Him Come Back…is back! Revered pop romantic Peter Milton Walsh and his band The Apartments return with their first new recordings since 1998. The resigned beauty of Black Ribbons, presented here in two distinct versions, is the first evidence of a newly invigorated Walsh, who has been the sole constant in The Apartments since the band formed in Brisbane in 1978.

Listen to “Black Ribbons” here.

After a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spell in The Go-Betweens (that still inspired both Don‘t Let Him Come BackandBefore Hollywood track That Way), Walsh released debut EP The Return Of the Hypnotist in 1979, by which time the original incarnation of the Apartments had already split.

He then headed to New York for a couple of years, moving to London in 1983 to play bass for the Laughing Clowns just long enough to tour the world with the band and record their second album Law Of Nature in 1984.

Walsh then got together a new Apartments, releasing  second single All You Wanted which resulted in them being signed to esteemed UK label Rough Trade. Finally, The Apartments’ debut album The Evening Visits…And Stays For Years, recorded in London with the help of members of Orange Juice, Everything But the Girl and The Triffids, was released on Rough Trade records in 1985.

The Evening Visits is a classic of grand, literate and incisively emotional pop. Signature tune Mr. Somewhere was covered by 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil, and the band found themselves lauded in Europe, where they began touring. The Shyest Time single followed in 1988, lifted from the Some Kind Of Wonderful soundtrack to promote the movie by teen-flick auteur John Hughes.

After a decade’s absence, Walsh returned to Australia, forming a new Apartments and releasing a series of acclaimed albums, including Drift (1993), A Life Full Of Farewells (1995), Apart (1997) and Fête Foraine (1998).

Due to Walsh’s increasingly reclusive nature The Apartments career was marked more by silence and disappearances than the usual band routines. Yet, Walsh was lured out of musical retirement in 2007 to play the first live Apartments shows in Australia since he had long ago left the country for Europe. Later alerted to interest shown by fans via La Blogothèque, the legendary French music blog, Walsh took a version of The Apartments to France in the Autumn of 2009. There he played a handful of rapturously received dates, including a sold-out show in Paris and other French cities.

Recently, the Apartments have also been championed by a new generation of US pop lovers, featured on recent mixes and playlists from the lo-fi likes of Blank Dogs and Big Troubles.

Suitably reinspired, Peter is now at work on a new Apartments album, with Black Ribbons a tantalising first glimpse of riches to come.

You can pick up Black Ribbons from the Chapter webstore here.

It was the talk of the town in 2009, a sold-out, nine band monster fed on vegie sausages, a lucky dip and ridiculously cheap vinyl and CDs. And now, after a lay-off year in 2010 (not sure what happened there) Chapterfest is back for 2011!

Chapter Music has been devilishly busy of late, gearing up for an end of year release frenzy, including newies from Twerps, Geoffrey O’Connor, Laura Jean, Dick Diver, Essendon Airport and the Apartments. So we thought it’d be a shame not to celebrate all this great music with a live rock’n'roll partay!

As an extra yeehaw, we’re also announcing a two week Chapter sale, with all CDs going for $15 (double CDs $20) and all vinyl LPs $20 for Australian customers on the Chapter Music webstore! This sale will only last until Friday August 26, so be quick.

For Chapterfest this year, we’ve upped the band count to a whopping eleven, including surprise US headliners Wet Hair, the influential Iowa City kraut-pop trio whose latest album In Vogue Spirit (through Sub Pop subsidiary De Stijl Records) has been a blog mega-favourite since its release in May.

There’ll be a vegie-friendly BBQ, a lucky dip for the early arrivals, mind-numbingly awesome prizes and the same insanely cheap and incredibly amazing records from across Chapter Music’s almost 20 years of existence. It’ll also be your first chance to lay your hands on some of the label’s vital upcoming releases.

So here’s the lineup and the details in full:

CHAPTERFEST 2011
Saturday September 17
The Tote Hotel, Collingwood
doors 7.30pm

Wet Hair (US)
Bum Creek
Twerps
Fabulous Diamonds
Laura Jean
Geoffrey O’Connor
Pikelet
The Cannanes
New Estate
Jonny Telafone
Guy & Marcus Blackman Experimentations

tickets $16+bf from www.oztix.com.au – on sale now!
$20 on the door if available

Chapterfest 2009 was a total sellout, so don’t shilly-shally, buy your tickets now!