Doug Fir Lounge Ting Tings

the ting tings tour starts new round of north american dates

Indie pop's fastest rising stars The Ting Tings will hit the road for a fresh North American tour this spring. The 23-city outing begins March 16 at Webster Hall in New York, NY, and concludes April 15 at The Fillmore in San Francisco.

The coast-to-coast run will make stops along the way for a March 20 set at 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, an April 5 show at Metro in Chicago, IL, and an April 13 concert at Doug Fir Lounge in Portland, OR. The duo also has a single date slated for Canada: April 11 at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, BC.

The Ting Tings are continuing to support their May 2008 breakthrough, "We Started Nothing." In their native UK, the record topped charts and gained accolades from music critics, which surprised self-proclaimed "unintentional band" members vocalist/guitarist Katie White and drummer Jules De Martino.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the dance chart success of singles "Great DJ" (No. 3) and "Shut Up and Let Me Go" (No. 1) helped propel the album to a peak of No. 78 on the Billboard 200. The album currently resides at No. 93 on the Billboard 200, and has been on the chart for 22 weeks so far.

The band's records are heavily layered with electronic and percussive tracks, but White and De Martino have no problem reproducing and reinventing their songs on stage. The duo relies on an improvisational sense of intuition to know where to take a song during live sets.

"It's really quite free how we can perform," White explained in a statement on the band's Web site . "We just watch each other and telepathically know where we want to take it so it's different every time we perform."

De Martino acknowledged that hardwired motherboards help the duo maintain a layered sound during live performances, adding, "We make 'mistakes' all the time. If I hit the wrong pedal, Katie will look at me, change the chords and we go into a jam. We change up our song order quite a lot. There's no right order, no time code, it's all completely live. It's a wonderful way to work.

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