Posted on: October 15, 2009 Posted by: anfnewsacct Comments: 0

On the heels of a new EP and recent North American tour, Austin group The Octopus Project are returning to the studio to record their next full-length. To tide fans over in the meantime, the band’s first two albums have been reissued on vinyl and are available in stores now. The band’s haunting debut, Identification Parade, was originally issued by Peek-A-Boo Records in 2002, and deftly combines the experimentation of progressive post-rock, the blips and bleeps of electronic music and the raw, human ROCK of rock. Recorded and assembled over several years while the band was still mostly a recording project, Identification Parade is far more etherial, hypnotic and atmospheric than subsequent albums, and has been best described as “ambidextrous equipment failure junk-tronica.”

Several years and many tours later, the 2005 sophomore album, One Ten Hundred Thousand Million, captured the barely-controlled chaos of The Octopus Project’s live performances in a rich, surround sound, 3-D, technicolor studio amalgamation injected with the wild energy they felt in noisy, tightly-packed clubs. It was this album that caught the attention of Rolling Stone Senior Editor David Fricke, who described the band’s sound as “an outtake of the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ with Mogwai as the studio band” and “tightly composed bundles of synthesized whoop and circus-calliope cheer… like Stereolab with happy feet.”

Identification Parade has never appeared on vinyl until now. One Ten Hundred Thousand Million was originally released on vinyl in a very limited edition of 500 copies with alternate hand-screened cover artwork. Peek-A-Boo Records is very excited to finally make both of these stellar albums available for vinyl enthusiasts.

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