When in New Orleans, pick up a copy at a very supportive community shop such as McKeown's Books or More Fun Comics for a cool tenner. If you want to spent a few more bucks, head over to Mushroom Records. Not in New Orleans? Order by mail from Backporch Revolution. You can also download it on iTunes, but you'll miss Miranda's pretty artwork.

You can now also get the new album online via iTunes.

The new CD is The Answer's in Forgetting -- Get it here.

As promised, here's a free mp3 download from the new album which will be released next week, the first track “Trebuchet”. Get it from this page.

Hell yeah.... the new album's done. The first pressing will be available on November 27th. It's called "The Answer's In Forgetting..." and features some killer tunes and amazing artwork by Miranda Lake. There will be a free mp3 soon... keep watching here for details and also check Backporch Revolution.

Chef Menteur has been spending the months since April working on our new album. We've gotten most of the tracks down and are starting to finalize some of the mixes. The new record should be out by mid-autumn.

Meanwhile, several side project shows in the New Orleans area: Time Promises Power (featuring Alec and Dan) are doing an improvised noise/loop piece on 7/7/7 for An Evening of Difficult Music #8 employing found answering machine cassettes that Alec has been collecting for years from thrift stores and a homemade 5-oscillator noise machine (the latest in a series) that Dan built.

Also, the all-acoustic drone project Murmur featuring Chef Menteur members will be performing at the Circle Bar in New Orleans on 26 July.

For more on these events, please visit the Backporch Revolution site.

The 2007 New Orleans Independent Sound Experience (NOISE) will be held this weekend, Saturday March 24, at The Big Top. It's our first live show since August's Proud To Swim Home release party, and it's also going to include performances by a reunified Electrical Spectacle (our former keyboardist/drummer Mike's band) and former keyboardist/collaborator Bryan Killingsworth in a duo with drummer Austen Travis. Also new weird acoustic side-project Archipelago and anonymous Acadian assault team the Uptown Cajun All-stars will perform early in the show -- music starts at FOUR PM so get there early. For more information see the Backporch Revolution site.

Watch Chef Menteur's live version of Black Sabbath's “War Pigs” from the 6/6/6 show (with help from Dubya), now on YouTube..

Washington, DC—In an impromptu press conference today, a New Orlears based band named Chef Menteur has agreed to cede its name to President George W. Bush. A spokesman for the band, said in support of this unprecedented offer, only that the group's decision to give up its name was due to a collective understanding that '...we are not worthy.'

It is not known if Bush will himself employ the term or he wants it for the Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, or his chief advisor, Karl Rove. One source said that Bush may in fact think the name means Chief of Men, or has something to do with cooking, as he looks for French support in the upcoming war with Iran. Rumor has it that the noted actress Grace Zabriskie, perhaps best known for her role as Laura Palmer's mom in Twin Peaks, orchestrated the negotiation.

On Tuesday, August 29, 2006, the one-year anniversary of The Severe Weather System That Shall Not Be Named, we're having a CD-release party at the Circle Bar with other friends on our label, Backporch Revolution. The album, which is a fund-raiser for hurricane relief is called Proud to Swim Home (more info here), and the show at the Circle Bar will also include potpie and B. Killingsworth.

Nick Southgate of avant-garde/experimental British music magazine the Wire reviews We Await Silent Tristero's Empire in issue #265: "Expansive... epic... shimmering, lush... wonderous space rock ambience." We can keep quoting adjectives or you can just read the review.

We Await Silent Tristero's Empire... drones and throbs like one big continuous art piece— this is noise rock in the vein of Acid Mothers Temple or Kinski...
(read more)

At the Circle Bar on April 25, Chef Menteur returns for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. (Technically, they performed under the name once in October but that was just Alec and Jim doing some improv with a minimal setup.) This show will have the full line-up plus new member Dan Haugh on drums and Moog. See the backporchrevolution site for more details.

We just passed the six month anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and celebrated Carnival like there was no tomorrow, because now more than ever we know what that can mean. We've got a new web server and we finally got a practice spot while we continue to (re)build our own space. So, we'll be booking shows soon. And, in the news: The emperor got caught on tape again: turns out he knew all along and was just playing dumb. so Kanye West was right.

Let's just impeach the bastard already.

Chef Menteur's brand new collaboration with Alexandra Scott, "Oceanic no. 13" will appear on the compilation. (As Alexandra is now living in NYC, the vocal tracks were sent back to NOLA over the net.) It's an underwatery, sirenic groove rolling in the salty surf of the relics of past civilizations... a mermaid's paean to the cities lost to the seas....

The story has dropped off the radar for most people, but New Orleans is not coming back (at least not quickly enough, even if parts of the city now have power and the streets have been cleared) and not getting the vital aid and protection that was promised. Many people who were supportive during the immediate aftermath do not realize what dire shape the city is still in, and that the city's cultural, economic and physical survival depends on people putting pressure on the government to rebuild the levees and help fund an economic and residential comeback.

We can bail out multibillion dollar corporations and third world countries, why not one of our own cities? It is sickening.

Meanwhile the uninformed and the right-wing continue to spread lies about New Orleans: that we're spending levee money on Mardi Gras, that the levees failed through no fault of the Army Corps of Engineers, that there is no connection between global warming and hurricanes, that New Orleans is so corrupt that it's impossible to get money directed to effective projects, and the worst lie of all, perhaps, that the city has already come back and doesn't need help as desperately as before.

All you have to do is take a drive through the Lower 9th Ward (which is so destroyed, it looks with no exaggeration, like an atomic bomb has dropped on it) and many other devastated areas in New Orleans, and see for yourself a city that continues to lie in ruins, the majority of its population still in exile, shops closing down weeks after trying to revive themselves, the City completely bankrupted by the disaster and able to only make slight gestures at recovery.

Perhaps most disgustingly, New Orleans is being asked to justify its existence by some of the right wing talking heads. As if any city in Texas or California or New York would ever be. Anyone with even part of a heart that has ever spent any time in New Orleans knows why it must be preserved. But others argue to allow a city that is almost an entire historic zone, without question the most interesting and unique city in the country, birthplace of Jazz and one of the most important ports, to simply wither and die. What they resent, I am guessing is not the flood dangers, but the uniqueness and freedom that exists in New Orleans. New Orleans does not conform to the ideological blueprint that the current Administration and Congress have and they see this as an opportunity.

Please if you have any civic influence at all—as theoretically as a citizen in a democracy we all do—let your government know that New Orleans needs the help of the entire country before it's too late.

Need more persuasion? Please read the editorial "Death of an American City" in yesterday's New York Times.

You can hear Chef Menteur played on the following internet radio streams and podcasts: SomaFM Drone Zone, Sounds of Tomorrow and Backporch Revolution.

And many thanks go out to KZSU Stanford, WXYC Chapel Hill, WXDU Durham, WMBR Cambridge, and other great college radio stations for adding us to their rotation. And as always our love to WTUL New Orleans—we look forward to your return.

While you're listening, read this review from Foxy Digitalis, and some kind words from Marc of Disquiet.

Lefty has reopened the Circle Bar, and barring any other catastrophes, a bare bones Chef Menteur will be doing a welcome-back impromptu show this Thursday, 20 October. Mike and Chris are still out-of-town so the founding duo of Jim and Alec will be doing a minimalist guitar-and-bass ambient improv session (or two), with maybe a special guest or two. Please come and help us celebrate the rebuilding and renaissance of our fair city.

Hurricane Katrina has devastated New Orleans in the most unimaginable, worst case scenario. All of Chef Menteur got out with their lives and are fortunate to have friends and family willing to house us for the weeks or months ahead, but there are still many people stranded. Please consider giving to the Red Cross or other charity that can help the victims. For many, it is already too late, but there are thousands and thousands of people still stranded and millions displaced.

Stylus. Beat the Indie Drum. Almostcool. Gambit Weekly.

Backporch Revolution is online. A record label for the unwashed masses of intuitive musicians in New Orleans and beyond...

A nice review of "We Await..." in Offbeat.

...now has your favorite ambient tracks.

Victoria Larsson penned a thoughtful review of We Await Silent Tristero's Empire in Six Ten Split magazine. Pick up a copy.

See these great photos shot at our last show at the Circle Bar.

New Orleans: Louisiana Music Factory, Tower Records
Chicago: Reckless Records
Online: Most online music services!

at Rocks Off!, Mushroom, and online at CDBABY. And of course at live shows.

4 MP3s from the album have been added to the music page.

We Await Silent Tristero's Empire, our opus maxiumus and the album the world was waiting for, will be released at our Wed. Feb. 23 show, and will be shortly afterwards available for sale on the internet and at select record shops. WTUL has an advance copy so if you live in New Orleans you can ask them to play a track.

The world finally finds out how we feel about Our Glorious Leader. Antigravity website.

Since our last CD was an "EP" that clocked in at 45 minutes, when we say "full-length" you can be sure we're gonna max out every bit of the compact disc. We're currently mixing material for the new CD, to be released soon on Backporch Revolution.

Somehow, we got on TV: International music network Fuse-TV included us in their special on New Orleans bands, "Amplified Guide to New Orleans." You have to watch carefully. Don't blink!

Chef Menteur and Potpie collaborated on a cover of Brian Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets" for the release "Potpie Plays Eno."

Dan Haugh designed these radical T's, available at Rocks Off!, live shows, and soon, online.

Watch our debut video, for the song "empires sans frontières." Download (Quicktime, 14 Mb).

We contributed the track "Empires Sans Frontières" to WTUL's Songs From The Basement 2.

Chris Rose of the Times-Picayune missed some major food-oriented pun opportunities with us in this article. Oh well, he's a hack by his own admission, and we weren't wearing meat bikinis. See the photos from the show, which was a major media event since Susan Roesgen also showed up. The show rocked despite those pesky reporters.

Our Holy Leader makes a speech to the United Nations, a major part of which is a diatribe against Chef Menteur (mp3)

Our new EP Vive la France! features three of our latest tracks (and 2 older ones). Sop-o-riff-ic.