Norwegian/New Zealand (Richmond/Nelson) band The Southern Alps releases their debut album

First some geography: Completely alone, surrounded by a never-ending blue ocean, lies New Zealand. And there, a mountain range known as the Southern Alps rises up towards the sky. There you’ll find lakes full of fish, evergreen blankets of native bush, ice blue glaciers, and snow covered peaks that rise over three thousand meters. That's very high. And it´s really, really beautiful.

A little more geography: It's quite a distance from the Southern Alps to Norway. No actually, it´s really, really far. It is 17 678km.

About the music: There, in Norway, on the ground floor of an old wooden house in a little town called Drammen, lives singer/songwriter Brent Librizzi, who grew up near the foot of the Southern Alps. Together with Frode Bjørnstad and Marius Ilagsmoen he started a band around 240 years after the mountain chain in New Zealand was named. With guitars, banjo and mandolin, they play simple, honest, acoustic indie-pop sometimes inspired by Americana. The songs are packed in a soft blanket of homesickness, and tell tales of New Zealand’s rivers, cities, road trips and love. About standing by the sea, looking at the boats at the harbor with your father and there is also a song about a lake named Rotoiti.


Now to the point: The Southern Alps have made a beautiful, warm, debut album that will be released digitally and on vinyl on Christmas Eve: December 24th 2011

Digital single: “Ten Tons of Snow” (PPD001) was released through Phonofile Monday November 28th 2011.

The single is available on these links:

Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/1TvM9qjVNzhn48XWrWpK4k
Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/the-southern-alps/ten-tons-of-snow
Itunes: http://itunes.apple.com/no/album/ten-tons-of-snow-single/id483910385?l=nb

The album ‘The Southern Alps’ has catalog number PDR004 and is being released by Public Demand Records on December 24th 2011.