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White Magic

Description:

White Magic
Dat Rosa Mel Apibus
(Drag City)
Released: November 14, 2006


***PRESS RELEASE***
White Magic is the spellbinding and haunting collaboration of Mira Billotte, formerly of Quix*o*tic with Sleepy Doug Shaw, Jim White, Tim DeWit, Tim Barnes, Samara Lubelski, Shahzad Ismaily, Jesse Lee, Karen LeBlanc and Brad Truax. Two and a half years after teasing us with the release of their acclaimed six song EP "Through The Sun Door", they¹ve finally cultivated their full potential in the form of a full-length album titled Dat Rosa Mel Apibus.

Mira's vocals conjure up comparisons to artists such as Nico and Karen Dalton. There is a stormy quality to her sound, distant yet reassuring, soft and deliberate. White Magic tells stories with an acute intensity, painting lonesome and sensuous fairy-tale like landscapes through their eerie and illusory song.

Dat Rosa Mel Apibus elaborates on the emotive and plaintive moods found on "Through the Sun Door". Mira Billotte¹s arresting vocals over sparse arrangements melt into beautiful ballads, with Mira's precise timbre and phrasing the song sways through dramatic and brooding turns.

***PRESS REVIEWS***
Pitchfork Media
Like an acoustic Electrelane, White Magic weave monkish mantras and spiraling instrumentation into weirdly amorphous yet direly catchy pop: This is some snake-charming, kaleidoscopic, aboriginal shit. "The Light" uses hidden hinges to amalgamate several distinct, melodically ingenious permutations of billowing vocals, terse pianos, rumbling drums and sinuous guitars in a seamless unfurling motion.

The chunky bass-plink-plink piano phrase slyly accumulates squiggly digressions, while imbricate vocal harmonies doppler complexly through the fluctuating arrangement. They intone fallow vowels; chirp clipped consonants; helix around each other in dizzy oscillations; and resolve, out of a languid soup, into actual, emphatically moaned words with big rounded edges. The song in total describes a gentle pitch and yaw, like liquid sloshing in a bucket, reflecting back a cockeyed world symmetrically distorted by concentric ripples.

Spin.com
"White Magic's debut EP played raw and visceral, its witchy minimalism as perfectly efficient a chord-striker as a cold spoon to the exposed nerve of a rotten tooth. The 12 songs on their full-length debut, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus, are still rooted in abrasively plunk piano keys and throaty dirge, but they flush out the EP's elements, adding flecks of blue to its flame.

The hushed ferocity of Sun Door's "Keeping the Wolves From the Door," for example, is darkened and twisted by woozy, droning sitars on "All The World Wept," while "One Note"'s steely, knuckle-roll piano riff comes back cross-eyed and ululating on album-opener "The Light." Everything...expands. Other standouts "Sun Song," "Katie Cruel," and "Sea Chanty" intoxicate, filling tvast space of Rosa with far off bells, low-tide surf, and seasick funeral incantations."

***LINKS***
myspace.com/whitemagicmusic (myspace)
dragcity.com (record label)

***TOUR DATES***
• 01/04/07 - New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge