Photo Leon Dale

Tonight Leila plays songs from her new unreleased album with NYC based drummer Federico Ughi followed by Afrobeat band Sensemaya at Terrace F. Club Princeton!

Rooftop benefit party in Brooklyn for Linea Rossa…

saturday 17 september, 8pm
NOsweetNO
Alberto Fiori + Leila Adu & guests
Arturo Vidich
Katy Gunn
Saurbah Tak
DJ set by Dak
@ The Mothership
252 Green Street, Apt 2L
11222 Greenpoint Brooklyn
NEW YORK

Photo Melissa Cowan, Styling Jasmine Sparrow

After a killer show in a bizarre snowy week in NZ at ‘Antarctica,’ Adu swings into the LA artrocker heat doing a solo show at Chinatown art gallery Human Resources and finishing off with a Cocteau Twins tribute as guest vocalist in LA band ‘Queue’ at legendary venue The Smell

friday august 26, 8.30pm
Leila Adu
howardAmb
@ Human Resources
410 Cottage Home St in Chinatown, 90012
LOS ANGELES

saturday august 27, 8.00
‘COCTEAU TWINS TRIBUTE’
Life Group
Upsilon Acrux (featuring Barrie Rose)
Magic Johnson
Luis Naranjo and Dani Elowe project
QUeUe (feat. Leila Adu)
Abe Vigoda
Dunes
@ The Smell
247 s main street downtown
LOS ANGELES

10 August 2011- For Immediate Release:
Antarctica, Friday, August 19, San Francisco Bath House, $15 presale ($20 on the door)
featuring: Leila Adu, Riki Gooch, Alphabethead & The Labcoats
w/ selections from the MLKBDGR crates. Tickets – Under the Radar

Antarctica – that wide, white space, a place where the imagination is free to roam. You will be taken to the musical equivalent of a place like that: Leila Adu, Riki Gooch, Alphabethead, The Labcoats and MLKBDGR have the staple secret. They can take you there.

These are artists-as-explorers. This is sonic excavation. Something you can really dig.

Photo by Leon Dale

Leila Adu is readying her fifth album – she’s fresh from winning MTV Iggy’s Artist of the Week and has returned to New Zealand from her American home-base to tour and record. In recent years she has wowed audiences across Europe and America. She has performed improvised and composed pieces, as a solo artist, in small combos and with larger ensembles – she has two tracks featured on the upcoming album from Italian electronica act, MDF. Leila writes songs that are tiny but bold; huge but obtainable. She is a unique voice as writer and composer; she’ll take you to an aural Antarctica – a place of infinite discovery.
Media Relations/Hi-Res Images

Riki Gooch has produced solo singers, backed folk-pop players; he masterminded the Eru Dangerspiel big band and has played with a couple of other bands you might have heard of. Is he Wellington’s own Moondog? Or is he the Capital City’s Fela Kuti? Riki has created soundscapes across electronica and dub; he sits inside the beat while living further beyond the fringe. He has a heavy metal bebop inside him that pulses deep. For this performance Gooch will be performing his Cave Circles EPs with video artists Toby and Melissa Donald. And Ant Donaldson will be on stage with Riki. They’ll take you to an aural Antarctica – a place you have never been before.

Alphabethead is a wizard of the turntables – a composer who places found sounds in surprising new contexts. He takes tunes you think you’ve heard before and makes tunes you’ll never hear again. He charts his own path through almost every genre. With Alphabethead it’s always a fresh journey through the past to the future. He can take you to an aural Antarctica – he’s a sonic navigator.

The Labcoats is an improvising collective that knows how to uncover a buried groove. They have science at their fingertips and wear their art on their sleeves. No turn will be left unstoned in the search for a new jazz; a new way to groove – a new set of moves. The Labcoats will lay you out like patience itself has been etherized and feeling stable. They’ll take you to an aural Antarctica – they may just build you a brand new one.

MLKBDGR – will be providing the glue; the invisible threads that stitch the spaces together between these vibrant acts. MLKBDGR will take you to an aural Antarctica – he’ll steal one for you; he’ll slip it to you quickly.

RG “A humble, yet incredibly talented maestro showing us the way forward.” –3 Network News

AH “Alphabethead amazed and dazzled with his rapid and accurate hand work, sliding effortlessly from turntables to sliders to switches and balance – no wonder he won – this is a man possessed.” – Melbourne ‘In The Mix Awards’

LA “This young New Zealander of Ghanaian descent treats genre distinctions in much the same way that Godzilla treated those little cities made out of cardboard.” –MTV Iggy

Antarctica artists are available for interviews at: point 3 recurring and leilaadu.com

Tickets – Under the Radar

11.00am Saturday 13th August
11.30am Sunday 14th August

Tickets are available via Ticketek or at the Film Archive

Directed by Amy O’Connor and Co-Produced by Anna Cottrell. Sound by Victoria Parsons, Mixed by Gareth Ruck, Cello played by Nigel Collins & Original Music by Leila Adu

Krake Festival 2011 from lasal on Vimeo.

MDF feat. Leila Adu electronica track – ‘Prendi Uno’ – is currently showcased on Berlin’s Krake Festival video. Italy based electronica project MDF, will release their album featuring two tracks with Adu’s vocals later this year along with a new video for ‘Prendi Uno’ –> stay tuned…

Video shoot for 'Prendi Uno' in Rome, 2011

San Fran Bathhouse presents a killer line-up for this one off Wellington show…….explorations, new creations and unreleased adventures from the following artists….

Leila Adu (check her recent MTV Iggy Artist of the Week)
Riki Gooch
Alphabethed
The Labcoats
with selection support from MLKBDGR (rosco & izz the wizzz )

$15 pre-sales & $20 on the door!!

Tickets available now online Under the Radar or instore at Slow Boat Records on Cuba Street

Photo Alison Gilmore

“The readers have spoken. This week, we stray away from conventional logic to honor New Zealand’s jazzy, delightfully erratic alt-pop virtuoso Leila Adu, our new Artist of the Week!…” by Halley — Read more: Artist of the Week: New Zealand’s Unpredictable Leila Adu

“Leila Adu is an artist with the ability to strike endlessly fascinating balances. She is a classically trained pianist, with a graduate degree in composition, who plays a lot of rock clubs and festivals. Her music combines the dissonance of avant garde composers and free jazz artists like Sonny Sharrock with the playful experimentation and fierce social commentary of punk provocateurs like Nina Hagen and Eve Libertine…” by Beverly — Read More: Bands We Like: New Zealander Leila Adu’s Mercurial Keys

Sunday May 15 3pm – 7pm
Anzac Hall
Featherston

Leila will play alongside a group of musicians and dancers including Warren Maxwell and his headlining band Trinity Roots along with Urban Dance and Rescue, The Buttercuts, Paddy Bleakley and his band of fellow funky freaks. The ‘Us for Them’ event is put on by the Te Waka Toi o Paetumokai Featherston Arts Trust uniting Wairarapa communities to raise funds for Christchurch Women’s Refuge, an organisation that helps families and communities create better futures for themselves by supporting women and children to become and stay safe from family violence. Please Support the Refuge who are in special need after recent government funding cuts and the Christchurch earthquake.

THE BIG BUSK – Child Cancer Foundation

Friday 20 May Midday – 3pm
Plum Cafe
103 Cuba Street
Wellington

The Big Busk 2011 is part of New Zealand Music Month in May, bringing together hundreds of Kiwis singing New Zealand music for New Zealand children with cancer. Plum Cafe is hosting Leila Adu, Barnaby Weir, Louis Baker, Lisa Tomlins, Chris Yeabsley, Eva Prouse, Ryan Prebble, Lucien Johnson, Iva Lamkum, Dan Yeabsley, Nikita Bryant, Trya Keelan, Claire Terry, Mara Simpson, King Homeboy, Toby Laing and Andy Mauafua. How you can help

With no venues left open in her hometown, Leila performed an impromptu house concert in Christchurch and a tour concert in the capital of Wellington where she found brilliant Film Director and Choreographer, Alyx Duncan— director of the award-winning music video ‘Fuji’ for Wellington-based band Minuit

Screen Shot from Alyx Duncan's Award Winning Music Video 'Fuji' by Minuit

Alyx and Leila are working towards the video single for a new album – the track was recorded in London by Alex Morris at the Briggs Warehouse and features Leila’s vocals, rhodes & analog synths with De Santis (aka MDF) drums