Hale has been mesmerizing audiences touring the West Coast of the United States and Canada for the last two months with a four piece band made up of his hypnotic vocals, Cheshire Cat grin and signature open-tuned acoustic guitars, two cellists, and virtuoso keyboardist Peter Capelle who provides everything from ambient electronica to straight up mind-blowing piano embellishments. The band has performed in major cities from Los Angeles to Seattle promoting Hale’s latest solo magnum opus entitled Ballad On Third Avenue. Their final concert of the tour in Vancouver is being filmed for use in the next episode of the weekly television series The AfterHours Show. The show will also feature extensive interview footage with the singer, who will hopefully shed some light on the recent rumors about the breakup of alt-rock supergroup Transcendence, which Hale has fronted for ten years, which also includes Ex Norwegian singer Roger Houdaille and Dreaming In Stereo guitarist Fernando Perdumbo. The critically acclaimed indie band’s record label is months away from releasing their long awaited new album All Your Heroes Become Villains. Leaked copies of the band’s last recorded work have garnered hyperbolic raving reviews in the music blogosphere for over two years, but rumors abound about the album’s release date being delayed due to the band’s secret demise while the members have busied themselves with various solo projects.

Regardless of whether the Transcendence mystery is cleared up or not, Hale will certainly make for an intriguing subject on Mohseni’s AfterHours Show. Controversy, mischief and intrigue are as ubiquitous when Ed Hale is in front of a camera as are his always present scarves and eye makeup. History, politics, art, music, beauty, truth, philosophy, sex, technology and design and just about anything else pop-culture usually abound whenever the singer is interviewed. Not to mention a conspiracy theory or two. Viewers can also look forward to discussions about Hale’s recent interfaith wedding and subsequent conversion to Islam, his upcoming trips to Pakistan and Israel/Palestine, as well as his non-profit organization PeaceWithIran.com and his controversial meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year at the United Nations. All this while openly professing to be “an active practicing Christian and member of the United Methodist Church, but entirely understanding and empathetic to our fellow atheist brothers and sisters around the world…” make Hale an enigmatic figure. Perhaps Mohseni and company are biting off more than they can chew in a one hour show. But hey there’s always the sequel!

ARTIST WEBSITES: www.edhale.com, www.myspace.com/edhale, www.facebook.com/edhalemusic

ASCOT MEDIA’S CONTACT INFORMATION
Rodney Foster – Ascot Media Group, Inc.
rfoster@ascotmediagroup.com
281-324-2180

Ed Hale will perform 4 IPO Festival dates.

A rare treat for fans of singer-songwriter-recording artist Ed Hale who live on the West Coast, the artist’s record label (Dying Van Gogh) has confirmed that Hale will be performing in four West Coast cities in the month of August in support of his Ballad On Third Avenue album. Ballad has been the biggest selling album of the artist’s career and the highest charting thus far, reaching #14 on the CMJ Most Added Chart. It showed Hale taking yet another leap in his constant genre-jumping musical explorations – this time to a minimalist, stripped down all acoustic sound primarily composed of acoustic guitars and other stringed instruments (even the Russian “balalaika” makes several appearances), piano, bass, and lush cello and string arrangements.

The news was first announced by the International Pop Overthrow Festival, that Ed Hale and band will be performing at all 4 dates of their West Coast Tour circuit this summer. The long-running IPO – one of this summer’s few tours not cancelling dates — is a veritable feast for music lovers and fans of catchy power-pop which often showcases the best artists of contemporary music each year.  Hale’s first West Coast show will be in Los Angeles, at The Joint on Sunset Strip, on Saturday August 7th, with subsequent stops in Portland, OR, Seattle, WA and Vancouver BC. Dates, times, and venues can be accessed from Hale’s website, www.edhale.com or the Official IPO Festival website, www.internationalpopoverthrow.com. Hale will also be conducting media interviews while on tour in these cities.

Hale will be performing 45 minute sets with a four piece group comprised of some of Brooklyn’s thriving music scene’s best players, the same guitar, bass, piano, and cello setup that he’s used in all of his live concerts to support his latest album. “Haunting,” “Irresistibly catchy,” and “instantly recognizable melodies that stick in your head for days” are some of the phrases used by the press to describe the singer’s latest critically acclaimed work. Which is exactly what Hale and company bring to the stage in their live performances — accompanied by lush, ambient, often open-wide improvisational acoustic music with Hale’s Bowiesque baritone soaring in and out of the hypnotizing music the band creates behind him – similar to Tim or Jeff Buckley or Muse’s Matthew Bellamy, a style the singer started calling “whisper pop” upon the album’s release.

In a whirlwind year that showed Ed Hale doing everything from skirting the globe meeting with Iranian dignitaries (including a stop at the UN to meet with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), or tribal Village Chiefs in West Africa to continuing to run his New York based uber-cool Dying Van Gogh Records label, a year certainly climaxed by the singer’s multi-cultural lavish public wedding in Manhattan to Persian beauty Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai, it is good to see Ed Hale back doing what he does best. Fans of the singer hope that these West Coast shows are just the tip of the iceberg and may hint at a full-blown US Tour, but at the very least they show that making music still reigns supreme in the life of the Mercurial Renaissance Man.

Saturday August 7th Los Angeles, CA – The Joint 9:30PM
Friday August 13th Portland, OR – East End 10PM
Friday August 20th Seattle, WA – El Corazon 10PM
Friday August 27th Vancouver, BC – Railway Club 8:30PM

ARTIST WEBSITES: www.edhale.com, www.myspace.com/edhale, www.facebook.com/edhalemusic

ASCOT MEDIA’S CONTACT INFORMATION
Rodney Foster – Ascot Media Group, Inc.
rfoster@ascotmediagroup.com
281-324-2180

Shelton Ivany
National News Bureau

In a recent review Shelton Ivany of the National News Bureau said of the album, “Ed Hale’s “Ballad On Third Avenue” has a fearless and eloquent songwriter who is a dysfunctional artist and a lost soul sound to it; finding love romantically and losing it tragically. If you need a good cry on Third Avenue, and we all do, then carry this album wherever you go. I do.”

Listeners will have a chance to call in and ask Ed Hale questions live on the air as well as participate in call-in contests for more giveaways during the interview.

“All of this makes sense with Ed’s new solo album [Ballad On Third Avenue] continuing to gain traction in the media,” stated the singer’s publicist Trish Stevens of PR firm Ascot Media. “But one would think they’d bloody be prepared for it. It’s unacceptable if you ask us and it’s making our job a bloody nightmare. There have also been several instances where the  website just says “Site Suspended” on its homepage for hours. How is that acceptable?” Stevens goes on to explain that in the last four weeks alone the website’s hosting service, Utah based MidPhase, has told the PR company that the website edhale.com has crashed their servers on six separate occasions with CPU overages up to 90% at their worst due to traffic increases and excessive simultaneous traffic and in some instances the web-hosting company has admitted to “pulling the plug” on the singer and suspending the website temporarily to avoid full system crashes on their shared servers. They have recommended the singer’s record label Dying Van Gogh migrate the artist’s website to a small array of dedicated servers which should be more than enough to avoid any further overages. The move is in process now and should be completed by week’s end.

A Midphase Sales rep named “Brock” stated “It isn’t a question of how many visitors the site is receiving so much as what those visitors are doing while on the site. These days, especially on music related websites, users will stay on a website for much longer periods of time and listen to music or watch videos, which takes up a lot more bandwidth than just reading a blog. Have ten thousand of them all doing it at the same time and this is what is bound to happen. If the traffic continues to increase on edhale.com for instance we just need to be prepared for it and know what type of site it is. Then yes, it’s a no brainer. We can handle it.” Midphase sister company WestHost Servers has been commissioned to fix the indie-rock singer’s problem, but cannot guarantee when they will have the website moved over to the new servers; which leaves the singer and his fans sitting ducks for more down-time or another suspended account at any minute. “Tell me that it’s normal for a web-hosting company not to have a backup plan in case one of their client’s traffic increases. For now all press distribution for Ed has come to a full stop due to this and if you ask me that’s just not fair.”

In the meantime Ascot Media publicist Rodney Foster suggested that now would be a good time to “friend” Hale on Facebook or MySpace until the problem is solved. The latest news, music, videos, tour dates, and status updates all can be had via the singer’s Facebook or MySpace pages. “Increases in traffic to a client’s website are what we get paid to do. But not to crash them! This is a first for us,” commented Foster. “But Ed’s new CD is brilliant and we’re honored to be working with him. I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t the last time this happens. Especially with his summer touring schedule now in the works.”

Ascot Media has requested that all Media contact them directly for media requests to avoid experiencing hold ups or bogging down the singer’s website any further until the new servers are in place.

Rodney Foster rfoster@ascotmediagroup.com or 281-324-2180

The concerts will feature at least the same five piece lineup Hale has been performing with over the last six months since the new solo album’s release: Hale, seated as he’s been for all of the dates supporting the new album, on acoustic guitar and vocals; accompanied by piano, keyboards, cello, and bass guitar.  Drums may or may not find a place on stage with the band this time out. “The last show we did was at the IPO concert in New York and we didn’t have Derek there [drummer], and frankly we all thought it actually sounded better. You could hear more of the subtle intricacies and melodies that all the other more melodic instruments were playing without the pounding of the drums,” Hale commented. “I think it just has to do with the idea of these songs being acoustic, very soft and intimate. We also tend to be able to improvise a lot more without drums… the crowd loves it, it’s trance-like man, and let’s face it, that’s a dream come true for us to be able to just go off like that into these nether worlds of sound whenever we want to and break free from the rhythm completely. We can’t easily do that with drums on board.”

Cities and dates are being posted on ReverbNation.com and on the Ed Hale Page on Facebook so check periodically as more cities are added. No plans yet for Mid West or East Coast have been announced.

Ed Hale Married Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai on February 13th, 2010

New photos of the February 13th wedding between singer/songwriter Ed Hale and the beautiful Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai have started to appear online in different photo albums on Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr.

The most recent album is by indie-photo-journalist/filmmaker Flavia Molinari which can be accessed here if you are on Facebook.

If you do not yet have a profile on Facebook you can still view the photos by clicking here, though there may be less information and user interactivity available in this album.

A more ample and broad collection from a wide variety of family, friends, and fans can be viewed by clicking here.

Happy viewing and congratulations to the new couple!

DVG Records Company 2010

‘All Hale, Ed!’

Ed Hale, the iconic singer of the rock group Transcendence, never known for doing things ‘ordinary,’ definitely did it his way in what may be the ‘interfaith wedding of the year!’

On February 13, Hale’s last Triple A radio hit single, ‘I Walk Alone,’ no longer applied to him as he and the beautiful Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai, began their life together in a style that crosses all cultural barriers.

At a church on the corner of Park Avenue in New York City, they were joined in a formally Islamic fashion in a traditional Persian wedding, followed immediately by a traditional Christian wedding.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ed Hale about all this, and first wondered, being that he just married his soul-mate (congratulations!) in a Multi-Interfaith, one-of-a-kind wedding, if he could kindly explain this a little more. “Thank you for the congrats. Nahal and I knew that if we were going to have a wedding that it needed to be special. Something that was bigger than just the binding of the two of us as one. If we wanted to do that, we could have just eloped off alone the two of us and done it privately. But we felt a responsibility to our friends and fans and family… we wanted to share it.”

“Many people already knew our story. How long we had been together. How in love we were. Always the iconoclast, I wasn’t too knowledgable about weddings per se, but I knew that if I was going to get married in public that it had to be about more than just the two of us. So we really worked hard at this idea of ‘celebrating love,’ in all its shapes and forms… rather than just making it about us.”

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