Our dear friend and band mate Stephanie Morris passed away on June 1, 2009. Stephanie sang on our most recent album, qhnnnl, and performed live with us for the past year and a half, singing, playing guitar and keyboard. In that time she managed to become an integral part of our group, both musically and socially. Stephanie's passing took us all by surprise and has left a giant hole in the lives of many, especially her husband Nathan and her family.

We are trying to collect video of Stephanie's time in Dianogah. Please contact jason@dianogah.com if you have anything you would be willing to send. We'd prefer an actual DVD in lieu of digital files if possible. We will share this video with her family.

At this point we have decided to continue with our plans to play the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago in July. This was a show that Stephanie was going to play and we plan to pay tribute to Steph in our set.

Beyond Pitchfork we are not sure what the future will hold for us.

Thanks to everyone who helped make Dianogah Mini Euro tour 08 a success.

Thanks to all of the bands that played with us. Thanks to everyone who came to the shows. Thanks to the promoters who booked our shows. Thanks to the venues. Thanks to the people who made us food. Thanks to the people who let us sleep at their houses. Thanks to the people who talked with us and made us feel welcome. Thanks to GPS. Thanks to European beer and coffee. Thanks Gijs for the van and gear. Thanks Jeff for the help. Thanks Ago and Giovanna.

Super special thanks to Simmo for booking our shows...and to our wives for letting us go.

The sheer adventure was our motivation for wanting to tour Europe for the first time eight years ago. Now that we've done it four times I think it's safe to say that the people are the reason we always want to return.

We stopped off and recorded a few songs for the At Home Anywhere blog while in Brooklyn on our last tour.

The songs are

01. Pinata Oblongata (featuring Stephanie Morris on clarinet)
02. Snowpants
03. Stalled (Handsome Family cover)

Enjoy.

We've been spending our time getting ready for the two Sept. shows and the Euro tour. Jay is leaving for Europe a few weeks before the rest of the band for a few poster shows, which means we might be a little rusty at our first euro rock show. Sorry Antwerp.

The good (or scary?) news is that we are preparing 22 songs for the tour. This is by far the most songs we've ever prepared. For most tours we can only agree on 12 or 14 songs that we want to play and that's what gets played every night. I guess we are getting more agreeable in our old age? I'm hoping we can change things up each night. I expect the core of our set will be songs from qhnnnl and then we'll mix it up with songs from the other three albums.

Jay and I saw Andrew Bird play at Millennium Park in Chicago last week. It was an amazing show. Something like 15,000 people attended and Andrew was really on. He played for about two hours. Maybe with our 22 songs we can try to do the same... however, I'm not sure anyone could handle two solid hours of be-de-lee-be-de-lee bass noodling.

-Jason

It rhymes with "kennel" or "fennel" and is available for mail order from our website.

Dianogah Store

we are in the process of booking a short european tour for october. the dates are oct 4-11.

as you can see by the dates the tour is going to be a short one, so we will not be able to play everywhere that we would like (sorry Prague!) and we will only doing shows on the continent unless someone with a private jet and huge bag of cash contacts us (we are saving the UK for a later tour).

Please get in touch if you want to set something up.

The official release dates for qhnnnl have been pushed back. It will be out Aug 25th in Europe and Sept 8th in the US.

There is still a May 31 record release show in Chicago and a June east coast tour. CDs and LPs will be available at all of the shows...and apparently at record stores in all of the cities we are playing starting sometime in June. I think we might also be doing mail orders starting in June, but that is subject to record label approval.

We realize it's not the best release scenario, but the tour and record release show were booked based on earlier release dates. We're just trying to make the best of it.

There will also be a short European tour in October.

A song titled "a breaks b" from the our record qhnnnl is now available as an MP3 as part of a Southern Records digital comp put together by Dazed Digital

Hey folks. Please get in touch if you want to set up a show in June. We are planning to do a short tour of the east coast and the midwest to promote the release of qhnnnl. Seeing as how we haven’t toured the US in about six years a lot of our contacts are a bit outdated...so any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks!

jason@dianogah.com