Venture Bros Season Five on DVD and BluRay

VentureBros_S5_DVDSeason Five of The Venture Bros is out now on DVD and Blu-ray. The release feature all eight episodes from its fifth season, (one of which is a double episode), plus the bonus episodes “A Very Venture Halloween” and “From the Ladle to the Grave: The Shallow Gravy Story.” You’ll also find deleted scenes and episode commentaries from creator / director Jackson Publick and fellow writer, director and executive producer Doc Hammer.
JG Thirlwell is particularly proud of the scores he created for the show on season five, so keep your ears open as well as your eyeballs peeled.

Foetus "Soak" and JG Thirlwell "Blue Eyes OST" albums out now!

Ectopic Ents is proud to announce the simultaneous release of two new albums from JG Thirlwell: Foetus “SOAK” and JG Thirlwell’s “The Blue Eyes Original Soundtrack Recording

The albums are available on CD from the shoppe at foetus.org, where you can also listen to previews. The albums are also available digitally here, and also from iTunes, Amazon and regular digital outlets. The albums, however, are not available for streaming on Spotify, Pandora etc. All copies of SOAK come with a free sticker of a variation of the cover artwork, personally signed by JG Thirlwell.
SOAKsticker_5WHAT IS SOAK?

The album kicks off with the beat-heavy “Red and Black and Gray and White”, a celebration of the color scheme of Foetus album covers and an opportunity to proclaim them in the patriotic style of cheer-leading and military cadence. The track employs the drumming of Jeff Davidson, where exuberant paramilitary rhythms collide with chain gangs, big band brass stabs and call-and -response vocals kick off the album in a blistering breathless blast, echoing JG’s intense action-packed scores for the Adult Swim cartoon Venture Bros. “Pratheism” continues JG’s voyage into opera which began with HIDE’s “Cosmetics”, this time abetted by mezzo soprano Natalie Galpern. In the multi-movement composition, which will also appear in Thirlwell’s forthcoming opera, heavy drums drive the bombastic orchestrations, propelled by urgent choral vocals and pulsing analog synthesizer. Singer Abby Fischer joins JG on the lilting seductive piece “Alabaster”, also written for the forthcoming opera, the track being a paean to the singer’s inanimate partner. JG’s version of The Normal‘s electronic post-punk classic “Warm Leatherette” originally appeared in the 7″ box set collection Recovery along with the likes of Johann Johannsson, Fennesz and Alva Noto. JG was commissioned to record a cover version of John Carpenter‘s “Halloween” while creating the sound design for the website of the remake of the classic horror film. JG decided to resurrect it, merging it with an original piece “Turbulence”. In the same way that Wendy Carlos‘ “Switched on Bach” took classical music and re-cast it in the electronic musical idiom, with his versions of “Halloween” and “Warm Leatherette”, JG is taking classics of electronic music and recasting them in a symphonic idiom, reconfiguring them from the minimalism that made them distinctive at the time into a bombastic maximalism. “Kamikaze” is a post-millennial psychedelic meditation on Japanese suicide pilots, evoking a classic romanticism in it’s Beatle-esque refrain. JG’s eccentric interpretation “La Rua Madureira” follows, complete with balkanized mid-section and dream sequence, summoning the author of the song, tragic french chanteur Nino Ferrer, who shot himself in the heart in 1998. Following the twisting cinematic opus of “Spat”, Secret Chiefs 3 remix the Foetus track “Cosmetics” , turning it on it’s head and infusing it with some of their style while retaining the mad collision of opera and prog. The album closes gently with the meditation-cum-lullabye “Mesmerin”, blurring the line between anti-depressants and religious awakening.
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BlueEyes_newdig_4WHAT IS THE BLUE EYES SOUNDTRACK?

JG Thirlwell’s chamber soundtrack to the film “The Blue Eyes” is also released on the same day. The original score was created for Eva Aridjis‘ Mexican-lensed supernatural thriller, and is performed with an ensemble which includes Manorexia alumni Karen Waltuch on violin & viola and Isabel Castelvi on cello plus Nathan Koci (Ensemble Modern, Bang On A Can etc) on french horn, James Ilgenfritz (Lukas Ligeti, Anthony Braxton ) on contrabass and Marcus Rojas (David Byrne, Steven Bernstein) on tuba and bass trombone, with JG on everything else, including piano, electronics and percussion. The film, set in Chiapas, Mexico, stars Allison Case (Hair, Mamma Mia, Nurse Jackie) and Zachary Booth (Taking Woodstock, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Darkhorse) and was released theatrically in Mexico.

JG Thirlwell's Venture Bros soundtrack available once more

VBs OSTThe long unavailable soundtrack album The Venture Bros : The Music Of JG Thirlwell has been repressed on CD and is now exclusively distributed by Thirlwell’s label Ectopic Ents. Thirlwell has been hard at work creating huge amounts of exciting music for the score of the fifth season of the Venture Bros, which will premiere in 2013 on Adult Swim / Cartoon Network. The network recently broadcast a season five teaser in the form of the hugely popular Venture Bros Halloween special.

Venture Bros Halloween Episode

A new episode of The Venture Bros will premiere at 11.30 pm on October 28, 2012 on Adult Swim / Cartoon Network, featuring an exciting new score by JG Thirlwell. Though this Halloween-themed episode is part of season five, the rest of season five will not start airing until 2013. According to Jackson Publick : “Basically, when we did the math and figured out that we probably wouldn’t be able to premiere season 5 until the beginning of 2013, I got super-depressed over the prospect of a Venture-less 2012. Doc was already half done writing a spooky sort of episode that he wanted to take place on Halloween, so we made it official.” Entitled “A Very Venture Halloween”, the episode was created and directed by Jackson Publick and written by Publick and Doc Hammer, both of whom also provide voices for the special.

Venture Bros Season Four Part Two out now on DVD

Venture Bros Season Four Part Two is now available on DVD. The disc contain eight episodes, including the double length season closer “Operation P.R.O.M.”, and is brimming with new scores by JG Thirlwell, as well as commentary on each episode by Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer. It is available at Amazon, the Adult Swim store and many fine retailers.

New Steroid Maximus live videos posted

Four videos from the Steroid Maximus at Prospect Park bandshell in Brooklyn show last summer have just been posted in the video section of foetus.org. For the show (which was part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival),  JG Thirlwell assembled and conducted a twenty piece mini-orchestra.

Among the clips is an edited version of a Venture Bros medley which includes versions of “Fumblestealth”, “Bolly” and “No Vacancy (Venture Bros Theme)”,  as well as an explosive version of “Gawker” from the Venture Bros soundtrack and two tracks from the Steroid Maximus album Ectopia: “L’espion Qui A Pleure” and “Aclectasis”.

The videos were shot by Drew Ravani and Margarita Jimeno, and edited by Rimma Dreyband.