Yo La Tengo release new instrumental album We Have Amnesia Sometimes

On Monday (13 July), Yo La Tengo launched their new Bandcamp page, and shared an instrumental track titled "James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds".

Since then, Yo La Tengo have been releasing a new instrumental for each day of this week, and today (17 July), the band have combined the five tracks as an instrumental album titled We Have Insomnia Sometimes.

The newest track is today's "Ira searches for the slide, sort of (Friday)".

Ira Kaplan writes of the project on Bandcamp, "If you’ve spent any time hanging out with us at our rehearsal space in Hoboken — that pretty much covers none of you — you’ve heard us playing formlessly (he said, trying to sidestep the word "improvising"). Most of the songs we’ve written in the last 25 years have begun that way, but often we do it for no other reason than to push away the outside world."

He adds, "In late April, with the outside world weighing on everybody, we determined that the three of us could assemble in Hoboken without disobeying the rules laid out by Governor Murphy, and resumed . . . "practicing" hardly describes it, because we’ve done no practicing per se, and anyway what would we be practicing for . . . playing. James set up one microphone in the middle of the room in case we stumbled on something useful for the future. Instead we decided to release some of the things we did right now."

Tracklist:

1. James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday)
2. Georgia thinks it's probably okay (Tuesday)
3. James gets up and watches mourning birds with Abraham (Wednesday)
4. Georgia considers the two blue ones (Thursday)
5. Ira searches for the slide, sort of (Friday)

The band have also announced two livestream shows happening this weekend. Yo La Tengo will perform two 30-45 minute sets in a similar improvisation style to their We Have Amnesia Sometimes recordings. Tickets are $10, and all proceeds will be donated to the Brennan Center for Justice. Tomorrow's show (18 July) will start at 2am BST, while Sunday's livestream event starts at 6pm BST.