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Kid Creole interview

2011-09-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Back in the heat of the New York summer (remember when it was hot out? Me neither), I spoke via Skype with August Darnell, a/k/a Kid Creole. I worried that the distance of thousands of miles might create a real distance in the dialogue as well, but the moment Darnell opened his mouth, I was put at ease. This might've been the easiest interview ever. Darnell is a raconteur without parallel. My prompts were few and I just let the man rap.

When were you last in New York City?

It’s at least ten years since I lived there, but I was justthere two months ago. Got grandchildren there. I can’t tell you how many Ihave. You can’t print that. I still love the city. The best part of it is thatI can get out of it in a week. I live in Sweden now, far from the maddeningcrowds. I’m loving it. The album was cut here in my home studio. I’m in southSweden now.

How do you deal with the Scandinavian darkness?

You don’t deal with it. You hibernate or get out of town. Wetour and don’t get stuck in the snowstorms.

Why’d you leave in the first place?

I got fed up with NYC! I was fed up with traffic. I crackedone day when I had to go to my dentist ten blocks away and it took two hours toget crosstown. And I said, I don’t need this. I’m getting out of here. I livedin England, Denmark, Stockholm and now I’m here in southern Sweden.

You have the same inspirations there?

Hell no. Without New York, there’d never have been SavannahBand or Kid Creole. NYC was everything.I love the city for what it gave me but when you reach a certain part of yourlife and you find you want life to be easier, rather than an everyday struggle.There’s no town that could give me the power that NYC gave me. My favorite linefrom my songs was “Going Places”: “When you leave New York, you go nowhere.”I’m a New Yorker for sure.

What's the biggest change you notice now?

The biggest change is Times Square. There’s nothing likeTimes Square. My brother and I used to just go down there for the thrill,because 42^nd Street was dangerous. On every other corner was aprostitute, a bordello, a porn cinema, and people on every corner hustling.It’s so clean they should just rename it. Big business has taken over TimesSquare. I thought the greatness of Times Square was it was the Theater Districtand its rich patrons pouring out to the street and they’d mingle with the lowest dregs of society known to mankind. I used to get athrill out of that. The danger, the edge of it is gone. Prices have gone up, but you still don’t get more for yourmoney. You still have traffic jams, cabbies trying to kill you, but it’s stillthe greatest city in the world.

In the summer, I always think of you, because everyone wears fedoras.

I noticed the fedora was making a comeback there. It was amazing.You don’t have that in London, Paris, and you don’t have it here. It’s great.Fashion is still great in Manhattan. There’s a pulse in the city. I think Brennan mixing in Brooklyn analbum recorded in a forest in Sweden made a juxtaposition. The juxtapositionbetween my forest here in Sweden and Brennan Green’s urban jungle in Brooklynis poetry in motion.

Why did you make an album after all this time?

It was not my idea. Strut had the idea. They wanted to putme together with Andrew Butler of Hercules and Love Affair. I Googled him andwent okay, he’s definitely influenced by Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Bandand Kid Creole, so I thought the combination would work. I knew he was popularin the underground dance clubs, just like we were. I trusted it.

The originalplan was to write 50/50, but it didn’t turn out to be as simple as that. Ourschedules conflicted and we were never together in the same part of the world.We were never together in the same room. I’ve never met the guy! I only saw himon Skype chats. We were never in the same room, which is uncivilized andridiculous and that’s modern society for you. He sent his songs to me, I sentmine to him. A hundred and ninety-eight emails later, we’d be saying: “Can youchange the bassline on the third bar of the fifteenth section of the fourthverse and can you mute the triangle on the third verse…” It became ridiculous.All the things we were doing we could’ve done in one room. That’s whentechnology works against you.

It took too long to do the album. If we had beenold-fashioned about it, it would’ve been out two and a half years ago! To behonest with you, I got frustrated with it but I’m sure glad I did. I love the results. I’d never do it this way again though.

Speaking of Andys, did you ever hear Coati Mundi's album?

I listened to it in the car and it was spectacular. Andycame a long way and I love him and his humor. He was the zaniest character Iknow. I miss having a comic foil onstage. Sometimes the shows gettoo serious. I’m singing “Mister Softee” and the audience is taking it seriously?!He was like a Marx Brother.

You have a song on the new album that unpacks what happened with the Savannah Band.

Tommy Mottola said to me: “Savannah Band had the potential tobe one of the largest bands in America back in the 70s.” It was like Rome, wefell from within. The Savannah Band self-imploded. Our sibling rivalrydestroyed it. My brother and I couldn’t take it to the next level. We were hugeand had a hit record, wrote well together, and we had a great songstress, achanteuse Cory Day. We had everything going for us. We destroyed ourselves. Iwrote “Stony and Corey” as tribute to my brother and the songbird, they werethe two most influential people in my life in terms of being a musicpersonality.

How does it feel to be sampled like you are?

Being sampled was a great feeling, man. M.I.A. and Ghostface? And then Cee-Lo covered “HardTimes," too. I get my royalties and I’m flattered. Artists get annoyed by samplesand downloads. To me though, it’s flattering when a new artist comes along and utilizes yourmusic so that new listeners can discover the original.

What do you listen to now?

I have my old favorites more than explore new things. I have children and they always keep me abreast. What I also miss is that you never have to leave the island of Manhattan, you just travel your block and the islands come to you. The music of every nation can be found there.

I like Rihanna right about now but my favorite is still Beyonce. She’s agoddess. She’s up there with the likes of Diana Ross, Tina Turner, those largerthan life female vocalists. Beyonce is a goddess. I love her stuff.

Kid Creole

2011-09-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

Today in the Village Voice is my feature on the return of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. Such a pleasure to chat with the man (my full transcript will appear before long) and revisit his body of work. Watching some of these videos --with these two posted by former sidekick Coati Mundi-- makes me pine to see the group in their prime:

“It was a strange year that year and it is a strange year this year. The blue of the sky looks rather black to the eye.”

2011-09-11T10:55:00.000-07:00

In a friend's water closet reading stack sits a book by William Cooper. I don't believe I have seen that name since 1991, the year that punkrock broke, when I religiously read FlipsideMagazine. That newsprint rag not only told me about folks like Beck, Unwound, Fitz of Depression releasing seveninches, but --if memoryserves-- it used to run Cooper's missives as well as those of someone namedJolly Roger. The latter's monthlycolumns went beyond the joys of TheAnarchist's Cookbook (which was always behind the counter atthe bookstore, next to Madonna's Sex) explained how to create new identitiesfor yourself, how to make your marijuana seeds sprout, as well as how to makehomemade napalm (it involved dissolving styrofoam peanuts in gasoline). I mayhave made half-assed attempts at all three in high school.

Cooper's most famous book (or at least, the one that would one daywind up as toilet reading) is Beholda Pale Horse, ahodge-podge of UFO sightings, government cover-up memos, and secret societycabals running the world and installing a New World Order. Thumbing it some twodecades after its publication date, I was struck by a line that went: "Thenumbers 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 39 have special meaning to the Illuminati." For abook published in 1991, it's easy to have a few of those numbers stick now.Wondering just what such a figure might make of this "post-9/11"world we now inhabit, I instead learned that Cooper was shot dead by sheriffsin November of 2001. Squirting some homemade napalm on the fire, Cooperpurportedly hinted in a radio show from June 2001 that an attack on the US would beblamed on some disgraced Saudi prince.

I wonder why it feels relevant to even mention this here. Perhaps its that underground thoughts go hand in hand with underground music. Perhaps paranoia and punk were always entwined for me, like The Anarchist's Cookbook and Madonna on that same shelf. Perhapsit's because I'm with this book hundreds of miles from Ground Zero (along with New York's 9/11 double issue) and for thefirst time in ten years, I won't be in New York City on this day. And I won't call it by those two numerals. It's always September to me.

And so I amtrying to re-remember what it was like, newly arrived to New York, to wake up in the city on that September day, toclimb up on my roof and watch the two towers burning, smoke billowing into thatimmaculate blue sky. Trying to remember who I was then, when I woke up extremely hungover, when my roommate knocked on my bedroom door and told me to wake up "to witness history," it was hard to fathom the events of that day. I remember that September 10th was an extremely late night for me and my friends, one where we stayed out until the wee hours of morning, inhaling and imbibing the substances necessary to remain up until that darkest hour of morning. Sleep that night was tumultuous and fraught. I was restless in a way I had never been in my life. I thrashed through the sheets and just barely fell to sleep before that knock came.

A few things remain in my mind upon waking up: First was a news item from the week previous was about an ultralight plane had been flown towards the Statue of Liberty. So when I thought of a plane striking the Tower, a harmless little fly of a craft is what came to mind. The other is that just a few weeks prior, the city had detonated the two water towers that loomed over the Williamsburg skyline, erasing them from the sky in a matter of seconds. So I stood on my rooftop and saw those two buildings, their concrete pluming into the sky up above.

Technically, I never went inside the World Trade Center in my first months of living in New York City. But I did go into its basement. A temp agency scheduled an interview for meat WTC 1 and so I went downtown one July morning, where I was soon ushered into thebasement of that building. I had been without work for three months and my funds were depleted. I needed a job desperately. I was fucking broke. And yet...

Before I left Texas, I worked in a government building, one which also housed federal judges. They constantly received credible death threats. One had to go through metal detectors to even enter the building. The windows were so darkly tinted that I never knew the sun was shining until I left at the end of the workday. Being in Austin, but a few hundred miles from where the Oklahoma City bombings had taken place, that pall remained over the place. How could it not? I wasn't just working a job out of college (so as to save up for a move to NYC), I was working at a place that was a target. And I swore to myself when I moved that I would never work in a target again.

So sitting in the basement of the World Trade Center, hungry and broke, I threw the interview. Walking down the hallway after, my guide not only pointed out where thebathroom was but also where the bombs had detonated back in 1993, pointing outboth in a casual way that was nauseating. How could you carry on with your work knowing that someone had tried to destroy the place? I left as quick as I could and never returned their phone calls. I remained willfully unemployed. My family and my roommates thought I was crazyto not take that job.

It would be another month before I had a real job and years beforemy present occupation, writing about music. In reading some of the remembrancesof that day, like those by Hua and Mark,I wonder what I might have listened to on that day. Such sounds escape me now. Instead, I recall carrying out mundanetasks like doing my laundry and buying an extra can of Goya beans and two gallons ofdrinking water, all under two strips of black smoke.

Somewhere on the web, I recently found a list of my top albums of 2001. I wonder at who that person was who listed and listened to such albums. Of greatest relevance for that time was of course the unreleased Wilco album, with its lyrics about tall buildings shaking and voices escaping, not to mention the paranoia-inducing samples from the "number" stations. I wonder what Bill Cooper would have had to say about The Conet Project.

But the only sound I still remember cameat night. It was not music. We all convened, friends and strangers and neighbors, on the Williamsburg waterfront to commiserate and hug one another, to downwhisky straight from the bottle and stare at the sirens silent and shining across the blackwater of the East River. Ambulances were in a line like an unclasped ruby necklace, flaring their incandescent red lights and snaking up and down the FDR in a long procession, both north and south. I don't recall their wails reaching me. Instead, I remember the heartbeat of hand drums all aroundme, somehow giving meter to the black night.

Ten years later, a quote I affixed to that record list remains the most resonant, more than any of those albums. It came from a Gertrude Stein book I was reading at the time and it worked as well at that moment in time as it does now, ten years and a lifetime ago:

"It was a strange year that year and it is a strange year this year. The blue of the sky looks rather black to the eye."

school's back

2011-09-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

Nothing says welcome back to school like this series of photos from an Iggy and the Stooges gig at a high school, circa 1970.

Yoga Records interview

2011-08-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

The last of my New Age interviews (finally) and one of the most insightful. Douglas Mcgowan is the force behind Yoga Records and a spate of reissues that have appeared through Drag City and Important Records, to name but a few. You shouldn't miss albums he's brought back into the world, such as Matthew Young's Traveler's Advisory, the self-titled Ted Lucas album, or the supremely twisted soundworld of Dwarr. Yoga also just reissued the stellar third Bobb Trimble album and I've recently learned that the first Dwarr album is due soon as well. But Douglas's forte remains New Age music and beyond just appreciating the music, Douglas grasps its wider socioeconomic implications as well, tying its rise to the re-election of Reagan in 1984 and understanding its current renaissance as part of cassette culture.

I was trading records and one collector broke out a record by Jon Bernoff and Marcus Allen called Breathe. It has the cheesiest cover I’ve ever seen and I thought they were putting me on. The idea of putting a frame around this music and saying it had validity as a genre was as weird to me as it is for just about any person on the street. Seeing someone else excited about it, who I respected, put it in a different light. It brought my attention to the fact that there’s all this sort of music that is psychedelic if only you are willing to look past the label.

For myself, New Age comes with some much baggage on it.

New Age is a thoroughly discredited term. Part of why I like the term is because of how much it bothers people. It’s reclaiming it. for me, calling it ambient or downtempo or all these other things that you hear people try to call it is sort of disingenuous. It’s repackaging something. I like it in its original state. It was at its zenith when it was called New Age and there wasn’t anything else that anyone called it in the years between 1975 and 1985.

Is the fact that this stuff was for the most part outside of major labels and doing private pressings of their music part of what appealed to you?

Absolutely. It’s one of the very first completely amateur-driven genres. It’s one of the first modern private pressing phenomenas in music. It was almost entirely a private-press phenomenon. That makes it really interesting from a sociological perspective and from looking at the history of the business of it. It was a genre founded by entrepreneurs and guys who were looking at Stephen Halpern’s success and trying to emulate it. It was never a creation of major labels. The major labels came in and ruined it. It’s not as simple as that, but by the time the majors arrived on the scene the best work had already been done.

What was the tipping point of it?

I think Steven Halpern founded the business of New Age music and Windham Hill perfected it. it basically became commercialized and digitized around the same time and it flowed perfectly into Reagan’s remaking of America, where something that started as a counter-cultural hippie movement was completely co-opted. Why it all happened at the same time, you can’t point to one particular thing. But people were looking at the massive sales that Windham Hill was doing and how easy it was to do and wanting to have a piece of that action.

It’s not dissimilar to people calling themselves “screenwriters.” It’s people chasing after an easy and massive payday. It’s a thing for amateurs that amateurs convince themselves that they can do. Sometimes they’re right. It also just attracts an element of people going: “I’d like to make music and I’d like to make money doing it. I can put a fishing weight on a synthesizer and modulate the pitch for twenty minutes and I’ve got Side A.” That was incredibly attractive to a lot of guys who were coming at this with less than pure musical motives. It was a genre that attracted amateurs.

Which is its best and worst quality.

It was definitely a double-edged sword. The amateur element is what makes all the best releases so charming because they are often handmade and have the beginner’s touch in a good way. Then you have subsequent waves of imitators. Each wave was less concentrated and powerful. The earliest people like Paul Horn and Steven Halpern were true originals and it’s easy to forget that because when you look back at it now, it seems like such simple music. they did invent the ideas of what they were doing. JD Emmanuel is a good example of a second wave of people refining it. after that, it’s just diminishing returns.

What was the impetus behind Yoga Records?

I chose the name Yoga because I wanted something simple to the point of absurdity, like Apple Computers. You wouldn’t be able to forget it. I wanted it to have a meaningless quality. A lot of people hear that word and feel a sense of revulsion. Just this year is the year where it’s reaching critical mass and convince myself that there is a market and that it won’t be out of context like the way the Dwarr project would be. It was met with indifference. It was too far out of context. I’ve been waiting five years for people to get more into it.

What do you think is responsible for this shift back to respectability?

I think the reason it’s booming in popularity is because it’s good (laughs). The good stuff is good. All things being equal, I think it’s more fun to enjoy something that is frowned upon. There’s a rebelliousness to embracing something that has been discarded and deemed worthless by the culture at large. You could see the same thing happening in the mid-90s with lounge music. everybody knew lounge music was stupid save for well, Martin Denny and Esquivel, these guys were great artists, they were timeless. The act of sifting through that stuff and figuring out what’s valuable about it helps the people who are really engaged as listeners become a part of the story of the music. They get to say: “We were early adopters” and that’s always fun.

The other part of it is we are in such deep need of chilling out these days. Popular culture doesn’t leave you with any room for meditation or space. There’s nothing slow about popular culture. There’s nothing reflective or even humble about popular culture. There’s no pause in anything. Especially for people who are 16 years old, who literally have never known the world before cell phones or internet, it’s something entirely new. That revolutionary thought that something so simple that runs counter to the speed and intensity of popular culture can have value and utility in their lives. It’s something that actually helps you come down and ground yourself. It’s like an antidote. Sitting and quietly listening to a New Age record is the opposite of checking your Facebook every two minutes. It’s as far from that kind of mentality as you can get. People are excited by that.

It has a mental effect like that for me.

There’s not really any room for irony to operate within New Age music. I think it appeals to people who have very evolved sense of irony for whom something where irony can’t exist is a good thing. I think also there’s the matter of the imagery, styling, and packaging and all of the handmade elements of it are super attractive to people. In a weird way, it’s a precursor to the way indie music is packaged now. The creativity of record covers today echoes the creativity of the visionary art of old New Age packages. When people see the cover of Breathe, it’s like…yeah, these are all of my favorite pastel colors!

Does the cassette culture play into this as well?

Definitely. New Age is a cassette medium. The length of the tapes, the ability to do short runs yourself, the fact that tape doesn’t pick up noise over time, which has a big effect on quiet music. I’m completely for cassette culture. I wish we could have the enthusiasm we have for records about cassettes. Cassettes are much more readily recyclable and to be honest, it’s heresy to say, but cassettes sound better than vinyl when everything is being done right. JD Emmanuel very forcefully told me that. Cassettes were good for the counter-culture. Cassettes kept it alive and they’re the democratic sound medium. You could say the same thing about CDRs, but they’re ugly. Tapes can be re-used.

In these New Age articles that come around of late, I always think of those bullshit ‘comics aren’t just for kids’ stories that accompany graphic novel magazine features. I’d love to see the discussion move past that. New Age isn’t just crap. I’d like to see it move past that really quickly. I’d like to see more new artists get into it. It’s really exciting that people aren’t just looking with nostalgia but that they’re innovating within the form.

Animal Collective New Age interview

2011-07-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

The peg for the New Age story stems from a Zamfir sample that Animal Collective used for their Fall Be Kind EP from 2009. Yet their love and appreciation for such New Age fare extends beyond that. The Geologist hepped me to Claire Hammill's ephemeral all-vocal album Voices a few years back and even amid their pop noise scramble, there remains a focus on tone and sustained sound that hints at much deeper listening practices. It was crucial to have their input for the piece and both Brian and Dave Portner obliged:

Brian "The Geologist" Weitz

I came to new age music through drone and ambient records that would be considered more experimental or minimalist than new age. I did a radio show on WKCR in New York that went from 1-5 AM and some nights I would just choose 4 long pieces to play. Things like Alvin Lucier and Charlemagne Palestine were big for me. This was in college and during those years I spent a semester living in the desert in Arizona which had a big effect on my music listening habits.

My pace of life slowed down a lot from when I lived in New York and it was easier to notice the subtle changes in the natural day, which required a certain amount of patience and willingness to concentrate on small details that unfold over longer periods of time. I wanted the same kind of feeling from records I was listening to. I'm not sure I'd describe the effect this has as relaxing. I suppose it is, but it's more the hypnotic quality of it that I find appealing.

Eventually, I came to hear some private press new age records that weren't all that different from something like Terry Riley and the boundaries started to disappear for me. I think the reason there is a stigma attached to a lot of new age music is because of the personalities associated with it. I don't have a problem with it, but I think there is sort of a naive optimism to the aesthetic. It's the same thing that turns a lot of people away from hippie psych records. I like those too though.

I think the recent popularity is similar to the popularity of a lot of hippie psych folk stuff from a few years ago, but I'm not sure I know why it's happening. Maybe it's a distance thing. Those personalty types typically associated with those music styles aren't as prevalent and people who have a more punk attitude don't have to interact with them and feel the need to push back. In fact these days the people making experimental music that sounds a lot like new age stuff have a more underground punk aesthetic, which maybe makes it easier to swallow.

Dave "Avey Tare" Portner

Where did that Zamfir sample come from?

I came across it because I was getting more into Eastern European music, Bulgarian, Hungarian, etc. that melody on the record stuck out. The flute stuff is really crazy. It was tough to work into a song.
It didn’t dawn on me that people would have the reaction that it was a New Age flute thing. It seemed normal and something that would work.

I know Zamfir’s music because of those infomercials in the 80s.

I didn’t even associate it with that; I just stumbled upon that record.

I think Gang Gang Dance goes for that kind of stuff as well, the cheesier the tone the better.

There’s a side of me that really loves this ambient space-out music. A few of us trade these ambient records every now and then. Like Iasos, just music like that. That record I suggested to you, Syrinx, I think those guys even played with Zamfir. To me, the world treads the line between…you look in the New Age section, the experimental section, similar records fall into either one.

They’re both into suspension and drones.

My love of New Age music comes from me liking drone and minimalist music, things with microtones. But there’s also this side of me that comes from my mom, who listened to a lot of New Age music when I was growing up. We used to go to Miami a lot, and there was this New Age store that had all these tapes. I remember looking at the covers with dolphins on them. I remember my mom bought Deep Breakfast by Ray Lynch. I love that record. That’s the side that’s super cheesy to me, adult contemporary. Yoga videos my mom used to watch with people sitting in front of waterfalls doing yoga poses. I associate it a lot with certain childhood things.

I guess people are getting into it. A lot of it is ‘out there,' if you get into that kind of thing. Ambient music has gotten more popular. People are into the peacefulness and it’s good music for being calm. I listen to that kind of stuff around the house and on tour. I have things on my iPod. Being on tour and listening and playing loud music, I want to listen to something that’s going to calm me down.

Greg Davis interview

2011-07-15T08:46:00.001-07:00

Researching New Age music and its reincarnation, it became imperative to chat with Greg Davis. (As introduction, I had to come clean on writing this review of his work.) While gaining renown as a musician/ composer, Davis has also curated the incredible Crystal Vibrations blog. There's too much good stuff tucked away in there, but you'd be remiss in not aligning your skull with albums like Laraaji's Essence/ Universe, Steve Roach's Structures From Silence, and more.

Greg Davis

I’ve been a big record collector for years and years (probably since I was about 14-15 years old). And in the past 6-7 years I started to buy and try to find good New Age records. They are often the cheap records at the store and so I've bought alot over the years and just slowly weeded through them to find the gems and the good music.

A lot of the best New Age albums, to me, are the ones that are an outgrowth of the hippie / psychedelic scene of the 60s - 70s. People had been living in communes for years and digging into alternative spiritualities and lifestyles and getting blissed out and started making some amazing music. It seems that New Age music really got its start in the late 70s (although there are a couple of isolated earlier examples). Some of those first Stephen Halpern records or the first Iasos records are often cited as the original New Age records. Halpern's 'Spectrum Suite' especially has all of the trappings of New Age: The New Age speak on the back cover, chakra zones, sound healing, sonic incense, all that good stuff. And it was released by Halpern himself on his own label. Halpern, Iasos, Joel Andrews and others were part of a California scene that probably started in 1973 at the festival to honor the Comet Kohoutek, it kinda started there and blossomed and that coincides with the following...

It’s really hard to say what the first New Age record is. There was stuff coming out of the German music scene like Ashra, Deuter, Cluster, Peter Michael Hamel and others that might be considered New Age. Paul Horn goes back to the late 60s with 'Inside', but I see him coming more out a jazz background then into hippie / eastern mystic vibes. 'Inside' was a very successful record and he mined that for all it was worth. Along with Horn, people like Vangelis, Paul Winter, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, Harold Budd, etc and others helped lay the foundation and groundwork for New Age.

It really was an outsider music, made on private press labels and distributed to local gem shops and New Age bookstores and things like that but like any genre or style of music, it eventually becomes commercialized --especially given the climate of the 80s-- and New Agers started to see $$$$$ in their eyes. And I think by the mid 80s, the soul and the original inspiration for New Age music died out and left and now it’s become this big huge business (even for many of the original artists). So my main window for good New Age music has been from about 1975-1985.

It wasn’t too hard for me to work past the baggage of the New Age genre. I'm always interested in giving any kind of music or sound a chance even if it’s totally maligned. Plus I seem to resonate with core New Age ideas and beliefs in some ways so it doesn’t always turn me off. And being a big fan of drone, ambient, cosmic and psychedelic musics, all of this can be found in the New Age world.

I started the Crystal Vibrations blog in 2007 because I wanted to share GOOD New Age music and try to give it a better name again and show some people that there are some really great records out there that are considered New Age. To me, good music is good music, I really don’t care what the label / genre / style is. Also, when I decided to start a music sharing blog, I wanted to have something unique. I didn’t want to just make another jazz blog or African music blog or psych blog or something like that, there are hundreds of those out there and they do it well already. So I felt this could serve a little niche and turn some people on to some weird old record and cast them in a new light.

I think people are gravitating towards it because of what has happened in the cassette underground in the USA. There was a very prominent noise cassette / show culture bubbling up again that was becoming the hot new thing for awhile, but then bands like Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never started to come out of this scene playing a different kind of music using synths and pointing back to kraut rock / kosmiche / Berlin school / New Age styles. And then eventually many folks in the noise scene started shifting from making harsh noise music to making placid ambient spacy droney musics over the course of a few years.

It was a remarkable transition to watch (I've also been loosely a part of it with my own music). And I think this movement into a softer, more spacious music has fueled an interest in some older New Age musics that share some similarities. All of the lines get blurry as you know...(I won’t take the time to talk about new bands / musicians that have co-opted New Age fashion and ideas just to be cool or different, I'm more interested in how New Age music has influenced the music of today)

I think New Age music can serve as a remedy for ADD music listening habits or help people cool and calm their minds a little bit. And especially with longer pieces, it gives you time to get immersed in a space and chill out. I think the ubiquity of drone music (New Age or not) was also a response to the internet / information / cell phone / Ipod age.

I've been able to move my threshold for liking pretty cheesy New Age music pretty high at this point. But I feel like I still have a perspective on what’s good and what isn’t. I think the cringe worthy stuff is the New Age music that is all talk and no play if you know what I mean. There is a bunch of New Age rhetoric / jargon and then the music is lousy or tossed off. Mostly the music where the artists just seem to be in it for the money is the ones that turn me off. I wholeheartedly love the spirit of New Age music (when its right) and I really gravitate towards the synth side of things (I tend not to dig strictly instrumental New Age, although there are some fine exceptions).

I do get a bit of feedback from the blog. It has quite a few followers if that means anything. And people really dig the fact that I'm curating and unearthing these musical treasures. Its not an easy job but someone's gotta do it. I've noticed since I started my blog that some other share blogs have started posted some of their favorite New Age records too. My best story about the blog is one guy got in touch with me who I think used to own a New Age bookstore or something and he said he had a box of like 200 New Age cassettes, so he donated them to the blog, I just had to pay shipping on them. So the majority of the posts in the near future will be from that collection. There is a lot of great stuff in there (and a lot of bad stuff!).

Blues Control/ Laraaji interview

2011-07-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

This fall, the RVNG Intl. label will release another entry in their highly ambitious FRKWYS series, this one documenting a studio meeting between experimental noise duo Blues Control and one of the godfathers of ambient/ New Age music, Laraaji Nadabrahmananda. Once known as Edward Larry Gordon, Laraaji released the seminal Ambient 3: Day of Radiance on Eno's label and continues to create some of the most transcendent music around. So it made sense to talk about this collaboration for the New Age story, so I reached out to both parties:

LARAAJI

Were you surprised that a new band like Blues Control they reached out to you?

A: LEA AND RUSS'S INVITE STIMULATED MY CREATIVE PERFORMANCE IMAGINATION. I FELT HONORED THAT THEY WANTED TO REACH FOR AMBIENT EXPERIMENTATION WITH ME.

Were you familiar with their music at all?

A: NOT AT ALL BUT INTUITION SAID THIS WOULD BE A FUN AND MEANINGFUL

EXPLORATION. I TRUSTED THAT WE ALL WOULD CONTACT MAGIC IN THE STUDIO.

How did you feel about the music you enacted together?

A: THE MUSIC RESULTS NEEDED SOME REMIXING TO LOCATE THE BLEND THAT FELT BALANCED TO US ALL.. I WELCOMED THE CHANCE TO JAM THROUGH SPONTANEOUS INSPIRATION AND THEN EDIT DOWN TO VERY NEW ENERGY MOVING MUSIC. I ENJOYED THE FUN SPIRIT WE ALL HELD AND WHICH CAN BE HEARD IN THE MIX DOWN.

Do you ever worry that younger listeners might not take the time to be more contemplative and receptive in this culture?

A: I HAVE FOUND YOUNGER LISTENERS ACROSS THE PLANET WHO DO DIVE DEEP INTO CONTEMPLATIVE LISTENING. AND I FEEL THERE ARE DEVOTED MUSICIANS CULTIVATING THEIR ROLES AS BRINGERS OF DEEP LISTENING INSPIRATION. I ACCEPT MY ROLE IN HELPING LISTENERS YOUNG AND ELDERLY TO LOCATE THEIR DEEPER STILLNESS THROUGH CREATIVE AMBIENT MUSIC LISTENING.

Or has there always been such a struggle for higher consciousness through each age?

A: THERE SEEMS TO BE A PRESENCE OF RIGHT ARTISTS GUIDANCE IN EACH AGE PROVIDING INSPIRATION FOR HIGHER EMOTIONAL SELF CONNECTION. THE STRUGGLE TO IDENTIFY THE ESSENTIAL SELF IN EACH AGE APPEARS REAL, BUT THE WAY SHOWERS AND THE TOOLS ARE HERE.

BLUES CONTROL

How did you become aware of Laraaji's music? What did you think about it? Were you into other "New Age" artists as well or did that type of music not appeal to you?

We first became aware of Laraaji's music when we bought Ambient 3: Day of Radiance. That release seems to be the usual gateway to his music. We loved it so much that we started including it in gifts to family and friends for a while. We had already been listening to other new age artists by that time; Laraaji wasn't our first trip into the genre. This was in the early 2000s when our interest in noise music was waning, and consequently we started exploring different types of psychedelic music more avidly, including new age, krautrock, synth and electronic music.

We started our own new age band Watersports in 2003, and we were looking for new age-related lps/cds/tapes wherever we could find them - from dollar/thrift stores and used lp stores, to big chains like Target and Virgin Megastore cutout bins. Thankfully always cheap! There was a Barnes&Noble near Russ' dad's house in the suburbs that had an awesome new age CD section in the early 2000s. Every time we visited, we'd pick up anything that looked interesting or old. They eventually downsized the store, but for a while the new age section was extensive. We always joked that we were dying to meet the new age buyer and find out who this person was.

When we started Watersports in 2003, we didn't know anyone at all who was playing new age music, and we only knew one person who listened to it (our former roommate Joel St. Germain). I remember playing new age records at our house for friends around this time and getting fully laughed at. People would shake their heads, and just say "I don't know, man." We bought an Envirascape fountain at the Fulton Mall, and we included it in our early shows, mic'ing the water and nature sounds, and using it as a visual focal point. People ridiculed us for that too, hah. Our influences when we started out were Deuter, Golden Voyage, Environments LPs / Nature sounds CDs, Paul Winter, Klaus Wiese, Henry Wolff/Nancy Hennings, Wendy Carlos - Sonic Seasonings, Shadowfax, Georgia Kelly, Steve Hillage, Vangelis, Eberhard Schoener, Jade Warrior, Synergy, Messaien organ works, Charles Lloyd, and many more.

As Watersports evolved, we explored a lot more new age/kraut/synth/electronic music and also got deep into our classic rock/blues/hard rock interests, and that's how the idea for Blues Control started. The influences for BC are diverse, but we still include a lot of new age in what we do. I remember a review of an early BC show compared us to Kitaro, which was meant to be a diss at the time. Musically, I took it as a compliment.

Who's idea was it to collaborate, RVNG's or yours? What made you think that Blues Control would be a good fit with him? What was it like improvising with him in the moment? Did you do his deep listening meditations as well?

When Matt invited us to do a FRKWYS collab record, it didn't take long for us to suggest Laraaji, and Matt was all for it. Aside from loving Laraaji's music, we had already communicated with Laraaji in the past and always got a good vibe from him. The first time we went to see him play live was in 2004 at an in-store benefit for Tribal Soundz in Manhattan. His set that night was amazing, and I had a pleasant conversation with him afterward when I bought a CD. Then in 2010, I emailed him to see if he would play with Blues Control at an ESP Records in-store. He declined due to previous travel plans, but my communication with him via email was great - he was and still is a really open, joyful, down-to-earth person.

I had no idea if he would be interested in the collab idea, but his response turned out to be very positive. We scheduled a phone call to discuss details, and it all came together quickly after that. The only things he wanted to work out beforehand were instrumentation and key, so as to encourage a spontaneous and inspired improvisation. We met at Black Dirt Studio in upstate NY in December 2010. The first serendipitous sign was when everyone started setting up gear in the studio, and I realized for the first time that our setups were incredibly similar. Laraaji brought along a musical friend, Arji Cakouros, who joined in occasionally, and we all improvised for 4 hours on a single day. The jams frequently went as long as 45 minutes, and Laraaji deftly moved between very different soundworlds with ease. Everyone, including the engineer, was marveling at Laraaji's coordination, timing, and musicality.

Improvising with Laraaji was an emotional, spiritual, positive, healing experience. I really can't convey the immensity in words... It's rare that I cry from sheer joy, gratitude, and awe of beauty, but I was holding back tears at one point during the session. The experience affirmed my initial love and understanding of music and the inscrutable/infinitely beautiful/meaningful universe, and made inconsequential a lot of negativity I had come to associate with modern life and modern music.

Oneohtrix Point Never interview

2011-07-07T06:27:00.000-07:00

As Oneohtrix Point Never, Daniel Lopatin has staked out a previously uninhabited/ inhospitable ground between bracing electronic noise and the warm washes of New Age. With albums like Rifts and Returnal, OPN was one of the acts that drew what it needed from the New Age aesthetic while leaving the rest behind, and sure enough, Dan waxed eloquently on the subject (though he later apologized for being too intellectual).

Can you tell me how you first got into New Age music or what got you to see beyond the stigma of such sounds?

A lot of new age is slightly more watered down kosmische musik made with very specific purposes in mind, like I remember certain Michael Hedges records came with instructions. Although I doubt they'd ever admit it, some of it was made by otherwise legitimized kosmische musik legends like Tangerine Dream and Vangelis. The only difference is there's no discreet new age rhetoric, although Vangelis was very much into glorifying epic terrestrial landscapes and that is very new age in its own way.

I always enjoyed the idea that somehow certain striated musical textures (kosmische, krautrock) are considered high brow and how smoothened (new age) textures signal something more pop. For a while I was into seeing how you could take something smooth and make it more striated via synthesizers and samplers and loopers. Because I mostly listen for texture, new age was is a huge resource for all kinds of non rhythmic texture that can act as a sort of jumping off point.

Does such music have a mental effect for you when you listen to it?

It does but it's not very relaxing. It often stresses me out in the sense that I think about how strange it is that an artist would feel that relinquishing their role as composer and letting music just freely float and just be would ever be a good thing. There's a superficial dissolution of the ego in both new age music and western mysticism that I find amusing. It's also very creepy in a sexual sense. Deuter, Andreas Vollenweider and even 80s Vangelis to a certain extent make perverted sounding new age music. They introduce this smooth jazz sexiness that is like some weird form of headphone molestation. It's uncomfortable.

It's contested whether or not my favorite new age records are actually more pure "ambient" records but often I can't really tell the difference other than the wrapping. But I love Steve Roach - Structures From Silence. For me it's on par with Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II in terms of emotionality. A more obvious and actual new age record that I love and don't find sexually creepy is Iasos - Elixir, whose title says it all.

Do any of the other aspects of New Age music (be it vegetarian lifestyle, yoga, crystals, etc.) resonate for you at all?

Not at all -- I'm pretty pedestrian in terms of my lifestyle choices. I think people love the sounds because they heighten or color reality in an interesting way that music on FM radio or MTV2 or whatever doesn't really do. At least not at the moment.

The New Age of New Age

2011-07-05T07:16:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday, I wrote a large piece for the LA Times about what I dubbed "The New Age of New Age," the wave of new artists and producers drawing on the soothing, chakra-massaging sounds of New Age music for their own purposes. For the story, I talked to artists like Animal Collective, Blues Control, Oneohtrix Point Never, Laraaji, and Greg Davis, as well as Douglas Mcgowan of Yoga Records. lots of interesting insight was offered, so over the next few weeks, I'll be posting their interviews in full here.

America!

2011-07-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

So good that I have to re-post and re-crank this song for the 4th of July.

And some 7 1/2 minutes into this is the official video for it:

RIP Peter Falk

2011-06-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

"I'm a helluva guy. I think yer a lovely lady."

Macca

2011-06-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

I just reviewed the recent reissue of Paul McCartney's half-baked (take that in many ways) solo album, McCartney II, for Resident Advisor. What's funny though is the adverse reaction from the RA readership, deeply offended that "rock" was held up for inspection over there. At first, I thought their xenophobia was strong. But then I realized that when I wrote reviews of albums by Augustus Pablo, Keith Hudson, Roy Ayers, and Terry Callier back in the early aughties for Pitchfork, they were greeted with similar disdain by the readership. Though in hindsight, that was just racism, right?

betadad

2011-06-20T07:03:00.000-07:00

This is yet another Father's Day that I did not celebrate. And when Emusic pitched its writers on songs about fathers, I bristled at the idea, trying to push it far from my mind. And yet, I wound up writing about two for their Father's Day feature. One is on Ras Michael's "Don't Sell Daddy Any More Whiskey" as "The Drunken Dreadlocked Dad" and Riley's bittersweet rocker "Daddy's Come Home" as "The Parolee Dad."

The Shaggs

2011-06-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

Today I have a story on the off-Broadway musical based on The Shaggs. My tone might be slightly acerbic, but in no uncertain terms, I have --if not loved-- then admired the music that the Wiggin sisters made under duress.

Fifteen years ago, I was in a Half-Price Books in Houston, Texas, trying to find the bathroom. Instead, I happened upon a backroom filled with merchandise that wasn't on the floor just yet. Staring back at me was a copy of The Shaggs' lone 1969 album, Philosophy of the World. No, it was not the original, but the 1980 Red Rooster reissue. Still, it was $3 well-spent.

I only wish that in the piece today I could have included composer Gunnar Madsen's explanation on how the Shaggs put their music together:

Dot wrote the songs and she wrote the melody to go with the lyrics and didn’t really know much about 4/4 time and tried to fit the lyrics into regular phrasing. What she ended up creating were mixed meters: 3/8, then a 2/2 bar, and then a 5/8 and then a 4/4. Meanwhile, it sounded like her sister Helen got drum lessons because she knows how to do basic 4/4 beats like “The Twist” but she can’t follow the shifting meters that Dot does. So in each song, you’ll hear Helen try to stay with her sisters but then just go into 4/4. So she’s going off in one direction while Dot and Betty are singing their melodies in mixed meters.

I was also puzzled by the recording of “Philosophy of the World.” The vocals are one bar behind the guitar but they’re in unison. And I realized they must have overdubbed the vocals because it’s one beat off. The sound pulls your mind in two different directions!

Ford & Lopatin

2011-06-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

From the band formerly known as "Nails on a Chalkboard" (as well as Games), I did a brief chat with Ford & Lopatin's Joel Ford about jazz fusion and the like for The Voice blog. Check it here.

And while I'm at it, I will be posting another interview with Dan Lopatin about his love of New Age music here before too long...

some new jams

2011-06-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

Robert Pete Williams

2011-06-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

It came out a minute ago, but since I finally received my copies over here, I should state that I wrote a brief set of notes about the alien yet intimate blues of Robert Pete Williams for the reissue of his Louisiana Blues album. Every so often, humans like Captain Beefheart and Black Keys take a crack at Williams' uncanny blues "Grown So Ugly." His other songs though, remain well out of reach for most folk. That said, people who own a set of ears that connect to their heart need to hear the man. You can pick it up here.

Mountains

2011-06-02T10:29:00.000-07:00

Oh right, my profile on Brooklyn's Mountains ran this week at the Voice.

The Story Collider

2011-05-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

This week, I wrote a feature for the Wall Street Journal about The Story Collider, a variant on The Moth storytelling model that involves peoples' interactions with science. Lots of talk about critters, dinosaurs, and being locked up in a Hong Kong Zoo with monkeys, some of which can be heard via their podcast.

2011-05-21T07:47:00.001-07:00

ATP

2011-05-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

Two Big Boys

My ATP wrap-up ran at Spin earlier this week. And it's taken almost another week to unravel from what was simply an exhaustive ecstatic music marathon. Here are some extra notes and observations that got left out:

Black Dice: what my original text said before the edit was that the Dice sounded like "a rave on a landfill." Can't clean up the cultural trash element in Dice's aesthetic.

Eric Copeland: Papua New Guinean dancehall? Yeah, but that's denying the familiar-yet-alien rhythmic structures that the man concocts. It's beyond belief that for all the mind-boggling amounts of ideas that go into Black Dice sets, Eric still has plenty left at his disposal for his own purposes. And he makes it sound like pop, too.

Mick Barr/ Orthrelm: Too easy to call what Barr does with a guitar "shredding." In fact, I feel now that it's the exact opposite: he is intricately weaving tapestries instead with it. One of the festival's highlights was to watch neophytes approach the stage and stare agog at his playing before walking away with this heartbroken look on their faces. His solo set made me think of what an opera comprised only of a guitar solo might sound like, deeply moving and melodically unfurling for what seemed like hours. He later said that his solo set stemmed from his aborted attempt to score for a string quartet, so he did it all with his guitar instead.

Big Boi: At the end of "I Like the Way You Move," the man also dipped into 2 Live Crew joints like "Move Something" and "Throw the D." As if playing a dozen platinum hip-hop classics weren't enough, he also nodded to Queen's "We Will Rock You."

Spectrum: My dark horse favorite of the festival. It was uncanny to walk into their show and realize that I knew all these songs. It was like I had unearthed a lost crypt from my musical past, realizing that I had spent hours with the Spaceman 3 catalog, yet had forgotten all of that music over the years. Or that I had perhaps heard it all while submerged in a dream and now I was awake with such knowledge recovered. I'm hoping to approach a piano soon and re-remember that I know how to play "The Blue Danube Waltz."

Grouper: How does Liz create a synesthetic sound that is the eerie vision of moonlight obscured by clouds?

Group Doueh: The greatest Sunday morning ever consists of downing a cup of black coffee and then watching Doueh elevate the room. "The golden shred" someone quipped afterwards and it's true that Doueh nonchalantly pulled off the most relaxed guitar pyrotechnics I've ever witnessed. Avey Tare later told me that Doueh has a specially built Strat with a built-in flanger on it, which must be why every note sounds like the opening snake lick of "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)."

Halima from Group Doueh, Micachu, Khaira Arby, Lizzi from Gang Gang Dance: I still can't put my finger on the electrical current from Sunday that was these powerful female vocalists, but it coursed through all these sets, and they all seemed to build towards Gang Gang Dance's penultimate set of the festival. In years past, I might have copped to admitting that maybe her voice was the weak link in the band, but that's absolutely not true. She made British and Malian voices all make sense flowing out of her throat. Transcendent.

new jams

2011-05-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

America!

2011-05-03T08:14:00.001-07:00

titus a

2011-04-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

Two months ago, I went on tour with Titus Andronicus through the Garden State as they shot a video for "No Future Part Three: Escape from No Future." The results premiere today and the video was well worth the wait. If you don't blink, yours truly makes a brief appearance during the New Brunswick basement party concert.

Dog Eat Dog

2011-04-28T07:39:00.000-07:00

In this week's edition of the Village Voice, I wrote a brief story about Dog Eat Dog, the short-lived (in dog years) no-wave group who only just recently had their sprightly music reissued.

my fins are in the air

2011-04-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

Last night, I capped a day of lamb and Cadbury creme eggs (and Peeps and SweetTart jellybean eggs and Cadbury milk chocolate eggs) with going to see Neil Young and Bert Jansch perform at Lincoln Center. It was a sweet night.

2011-04-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

Michael Chapman: Fully Qualified Survivor

Having worked with the label in the past on titles like this and this, I've always loved and supported what Light in the Attic does, from reissuing Karen Dalton and Kris Kristofferson's earliest demos to unearthing Jim Sullivan's singular U.F.O. But I'm grateful for the label releasing UK folk guitarist's heady second album, Fully Qualified Survivor, which I've listened to as much as any new record in 2011.

For all my love of Mick Ronson-era Bowie, early Elton John, British string-benders like Bert Jansch, and anything that features Paul Buckmaster's strings, somehow Chapman's work (which is a nexus for all of the above) slipped under my radar for years. From its mulch all of the afore-mentioned folks arose, with Ronson's searing electric leads intertwining with Chapman's acoustic lines and catching the ear of Bowie as he was about to record The Man Who Sold the World, and producer Gus Dudgeon's deft mixing of folk and rock leading to future work with newcomer Elton John. And Buckmaster would soon be working with everyone from Harry Nilsson to Miles Davis.

You don't need to respect or revere the above names to fall for the album though. Chapman veers from the majestic (on 9-minute opener "Aviator") to the whimsical ("Naked Ladies & Electric Ragtime" afterwards) to snarling prog-punk ("Stranger in the Room") and back (on one of the finest moments in UK folk-rock, "Postcards of Scarborough"). The sticker says to enjoy it with a joint on a lazy afternoon but it really creates its own high. And it shreds. That the man is playing two shows this weekend in New York City will make him as relevant as ever.

Kurt Vile: Smoke Ring for my Halo

Kurt Vile's latest album neatly coincides with the purchase of a car. And it really sounds like our old car as well. It idles in fits and starts, is slow to get going, equally slow to come to a stop, has smoke residue inside the windshield, seems to be shaking apart at times, has rust spots along the faded paint, empty coffee cups rolling along the floorboards. At times it barely works, seems like it might breakdown, but it does get me there.

Our car would be a teenager at this point, as old as I was when I got my first car. And this disc has been my driving soundtrack for most of it, echoing what I would drive to as a teenager myself: Sonic Youth, Royal Trux, Dinosaur Jr. If there was a rap album dropping right about now that sounded like Bizarre Ride II tha Pharcyde and Dare Iz a Darkside I'd probably be all over that as well.

Woo: It's Cosy Inside

A friend at Other Music suggested I check this out, namechecking albums I've been obsessed with recently: Penguin Café Orchestra, Cluster's Sowiesoso, Jimmy Giuffre's Freefall, Durutti Column's Vini Reilly. It slots in along these without a doubt. But when I passed it on, I told a friend that Woo are the Sparks of New Age.

They are two brothers (Mark and Clive Ives) who cannot help but inject their sense of humor into their music. They anticipate things like chillwave but really exist outside of such genres and considerations. The warped and delightfully disorienting miniatures that comprise this album bear titles like "No More Telly" and "Purple Pussy" and their sense of play runs through every note. Most of their output came out on cassette, so check out their own Woo website for more of their music.

more vacation jams

2011-04-19T16:06:00.000-07:00

It was a long vacation...

vacation jams

2011-04-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

Been a minute since I updated here, mostly as it took an extra week for my brain to turn back on after a week of vacation, mostly soundtracked by Balearic tracks like these:

James Murphy interview (re-run)

2011-04-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

In light of LCD Soundsystem's final show this weekend at MSG, I thought I would pay tribute and re-visit and old dialogue I had with the man back in late 2007 about a piece I was writing about the return of disco and how it related back to punk rock.

Do you think disco is the new punk rock?

It depends on what strata or circle you travel in. For me, disco has been a big part of my musical landy-scapey for along enough time that, it’s not really the new anything to me. That make any sense? So it’s weird.

Talking to folks like Thom and Morgan, 13-14 years...

Rightrightright. You know, jerks like me ruining it for everybody. Nah um, I don’t know, it’s just a pretty weird definition. For most people, language is defined by usage. Most people use it to mean something I don’t like very much. Studio 54 which was the one disco that wasn’t music-driven, the only disco that wasn’t music-driven.

Yet it’s what everyone thinks of.

Hanging out with Liza Minelli, shit like that.

Warhol...

Right. That was not a music...that doesn’t seem like a very music-driven story. The disco that I think is germane and still pretty interesting is the idea that it really came from a gay, black and Latino scene, which is about as punk as it fucking gets. When punk means college kids…

Privileged...

Well, just like...privilege is a weird word. It still recalls preppy. It’s just like punk rock in the 90s got so straighted out.

It’s very mall culture now.

There’s always going to be punk rock that’s interesting. It’s a much easier thing to commodify and sell to kids. Warp tours and stuff. Extreme sports wear. Disco is very difficult to sell to a high school football player. It gives it some sort of distance.

Gay, black, and Latino is never going to become a selling point.

Also, disco now, they think of it as That 70’s Show, feathered hair. Disco was a weird time in history where if you DJ’d on Saturday night at a straight club, you had to play boring dumb shit. The only place you could music where people knew their fucking music was gay clubs. A very different conception now. Oh, gay clubs, you just play, they’re always there for the music. It’s such a weird misconception of that scene.

When I talk to the Europe guys about it…

Oh. Very different. Disco is very different over there.

What’s so weird is it became so maligned in the states.

Right. A racist and homophobic backlash to a certain degree. When they did the “Disco Sucks” record burning it was mostly just black music. None of those records had anything to do with disco.

When did the tide start shifting?

There’s two or three...to get PBS about it. There's a handful of things that are important. One is that massive…overtaking of American musical culture by hip-hop. And hip-hop producers, most of them, certainly the good ones know their disco. Like it’s were you get a lot of your samples and that crossover culture of the nineties, A-1 records being partially hip-hop and a disco place. Vinylmania and A-1 being this weird crate-digging place. People making trip-hop wound up buying records with disco on them. That culture, a certain degree where Thomas comes from, or Tim. There’s the coming from techno side, Morgan and Danny stuff. For me, I’m a phase later than that. Morgan will say he’s old school, unless you compare him to David Mancuso. But compared to me and somebody else. There was that upswing in the re-examination of Larry Levan, specifically as a person.

Understanding that he wasn’t just a DJ but cutting.

It was a life. That book, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, was the culmination of some stuff that was happening. But also it was the start of some other stuff. That book wouldn’t have come out if there wasn’t stuff to talk about. For me though, reading that book was a big big big deal, because I at the same time, rather than being into disco, was into the stuff that would’ve been the LES, downtown, Liquid Liquid, ESG, A Certain Ratio, and starting to listen that being like, “Hey, This is sorta like disco, how is that possible?” I thought that punk and disco were bitter enemies. That was the story we were told.

Two separate sides.

And then you put on “Magnificient Seven” and that sorta just sounds like disco. I started investigating it from that side. Well, I like this kind of disco. I don’t like stuff with the big choruses and girls singing.

String sections.

Right. I just wasn’t sure how to react to that stuff. I had this vision of it being like bell-bottoms. The crossover to me seemed to be more about hip-hop than about disco anyways. Where LL and “White Lines” where those scenes intersected. The beginning of hip-hop, DJ culture, that getting involved in downtown New York. Fab 5 Freddy being the conduit. That world seemed to be the connection that was going on for me. In that book, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life came out and I started realizing that the way Bambaataa found records and the way that the disco guys found records, they were there trying to surprise each other all the time. they were trying to be the first guy to play something that you never think of as disco and get them to dance to it.

Those guys were going through every sort of record of any genre.

You couldn’t go to the disco store. It didn’t exist. Tribal house section…they also didn’t sleep. Francis Grasso would DJ 14 hours a day on meth. That’s pretty fucking punk, far as I was concerned. How much, how un-frivolous it was, making music that way. That seems really impossible to front on. So there must be a lot more music and a lot more to it. so I just started looking in the back and going to Vinylmania and trying to buy up things that sounded interesting that I read. Listened to them and see how I felt. I met Charlie, who ran Vinylmania. He was always weirded out by me. What’s with the 29-year-old, digging in the weird section that had gone to sleep. That’s where I found most of the music I had.

Who took you to your first disco?

The first time I went dancing, really --first time I went to a dance club-- the first time I went to a club not to see a band, but to dance. I moved to New York and went to the Roxy the week I moved here. A really weird experience where a lot about New York. Where I accidentally got VIPed. There was this huge line, no one would wait in this line, you know what I mean. And I went and walked up with my roommate and these two girls. I was looking at the door at the bottom of the stairs. Is this the fucking place? This guy lifted this rope up and we got to the front. It all happened in like two minutes. I walked up the staircase and there was a guy there. I drank free all night. It was a complete accident of saying the right thing to the right people, totally by fluke. Always meaning something else. A great night, but I didn’t do much after that. Once I had to payfor things, I couldn’t afford it. David Holmes, Tim, Marcus were playing. First time I went out to the club. I’d go out when Marcus DJed.

45’33” is it about a particular night?

What’s the song about?

It’s like the night a DJ saved your life?

I never think of the lyrics at all.

When I listen to it, it’s this loving tribute to all these facets of disco: house, acid, Hot Chocolate, Arthur Russell, Larry Levan...

Oh, I know what you mean. I thought, God, it’s just a bunch of nonsense. With albums I feel pressured to make songs, there’s a different structure to a song on an album. It was nice to just be free of it and just go more disco than I normally would with vocals. Be a little more...um...one-dimensional per track. I don’t think it winds up feeling like that. When I find records, there’s this one thing I love. I love this one thing. I tried to make songs built more like that. One thing I was really attached to. I wanted to make it a little like a DJ set. But, more just like...what a weird opportunity to make something like that. It made me really happy. You have to have a goal and deadline.

Masturbatory to be in the studio making a 45-minute track for yourself.

It’s just so much work and it’s so terrifying and really hurts that you need someone to tell you that it’s time to be done. You think of these great 12”s that came out, they didn’t come out for these. People like to make things easy for themselves by having altruistic motives and meaning and I don’t think it exists. I think people made some of the best songs because “My friend Dan works in a studio and nobody’s there Sunday so we can sneak in if we don’t tell anybody.” Make a track. There’s your Dinosaur L “Go Bang.” “We need to put something out, so let’s get in there.”

There weren’t these “I have a vision.” If they had something to say, it’d get said at home or working for this stupid thing. I like that about that. There’s too many 12”s. There isn’t that myth that punk rock has of “I’m pissed and I’m gonna do something for real.” It’s more like “I’m gonna make people dance.” The pressure’s off in some ways, the pressures is on to make something work. It frees you up to be more genuinely creative, I think. It does for me. As soon as I started thinking about making people dance, my life got a lot better. The music helped, but…you can just be genuine about wanting to do stuff for people without --say you’re in a punk band, “I just want to make people happy with the music” people are like sell-out, asshole, douche bag. It doesn’t really work. Truth is, what’s wrong with that? Wanting people to be happy. People have lost the ability to say they want to make people happy cuz they’re so afraid of people thinking they’re catering to the lowest common denominator to feed their own ego. There’s a very big difference. Trying to make people happy is not the same as trying to make a hit at all costs. It’s a lot more respectful, I think.

That Italo aspect...

Is hip with the kids. I have not found my way into most Italo, to be honest. Just in general. I haven’t picked up Italo…I’m a little fuzzy of the definition is other than it’s Italian. Most of the time things people get excited about, I’ll listen to it…a lot of it doesn’t do it for me, it doesn’t work for me on the dancefloor and that’s a big part of it. it’s really effective in the filesharing nerd festival but it’s (laughs) I just haven’t ofund that many tracks.

Is Black Devil considered Italo?

I love that stuff but don’t find it effective played out. it’s not as effective as Candi Staton or Liquid Liquid. I think it’s beautiful, but…I like to play for people who don’t know what the stuff is. Not just “Awww yeah,” (trainspotters). I’m not saying that’s what people do. I’m never into that. I hate that. I hate the too much pride in knowing something and fetishizing it. I find it’s a great way to squeeze and kill it. What you love is what other people don’t know about it. Are you going to be evangelical about it? Not being evangelical about something you love I find really questionable and dubious. I’m super-evangelical about the things I love. To be something else, what are you doing? Keeping it cool school? Not that interested.

To testify.

Right. There are moments --don’t get me wrong—- where I find a 12” and I hop no one else finds this, for at least a couple of months. Usually they find it, fuckers. You want to find something and get people psyched about it. I don’t have to ‘really know,’ I can make music. I can go make it. I don’t get that wrapped up in the pride of owning something rare. It’s very ugly, that mentality to me. It’s very un-giving, very selfish and arrogant.

It’s misconstrued.

It’s condescending: “You can’t handle this.” I think people can handle amazing things. The secret of the DJ set is to get people to feel you’re not making fun of them. You can get people to listen to crazy shit if they don’t think you’re trying to be an asshole.

And your Fabric mix with Pat?

It was a pretty simple idea. We’ve been DJing together on tour. Rather than over-think what we should put on the mix, what will make us look really cool? What will sell a bunch? Pile up all the records we play everytime that I haven’t put on mixes before. A few things we bought recently, see what they can license and then go mix them together. It’s pretty straight forward, but it made me really happy. I bought a Bozack for it. it sounds so fucking crazy good. I like that it’s not real perfect. Old DJ mixes are never perfect. New mixes done by computer are all so perfect, I just don’t give a shit. A perfectly recorded piano sounds like a sample. I don’t care. If you record it at Abbey Road, perfect, it sounds like a sample. There’s no…I don’t care. Just trying to do as good a ob as you can with two turntables seems like a fun solution.

It sounds celebratory.

We love those tracks, man. But the artwork they do for those things is so bad.

Why do you think people are getting back into disco?

Why do I think most people are? Because they are told that it’s cool. Its why most things happen. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. Why do people get into Jesus? It’s attractive, it’s different, it’s fun, you can dance.

A forbidden thing?

There’s always that.
(tape cuts off)
I think it’s just, there’s good reasons. Most of the world operates on pretty dumb reasons. I don’t mean that negative, it just is. You have to recognize. I get more people come to see me DJ, it’s not because more people fell in love with disco independently. That’s how it always works. That’s how I found out about 90% of the bands I grew up on. Somebody at the record store. Listened to it and either liked it or didn’t. that’s the difference between people and bricks. Everyone listens because they’re told its cool. It’s what you do with what goes into your ears. You’re either going to listen, trust your tastes, or (pantomimes). I think disco is just having a moment. Hopefully it doesn’t have another moment. Well, who cares? Think of how it blew up after Studio 54 and the backlash people still kept making the exact same amount of records. It didn’t have any affect on actual disco. Big explosion happened, they ignored it. It just doesn’t make a difference. In its own culture. sorta like hardcore. Skinhead hardcore, Oi! bands, it’s totally irrelevant what’s on the radio, what’s happening. They’re just “Oi!”

It doesn’t matter if ska takes off...

Exactly. Oi! bands just keep going. There’s something good and horrible about that at the same time. I try to figure out the line without being a culture-crushing vampire dilettante like Madonna. (Laughs) Is that harsh?

new jams

2011-04-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

A few more jams culled from California dreaming:

TV on the Radio

2011-03-31T09:37:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I also got the chance to chat with Tunde, Kyp, and Jaleel about the new TV on the Radio album. The story appeared today. They specifically requested that I not say: "You can hear the sunshine in their voices on the new album." Instead, we talked about recording down the street from Charlie Sheen's house, living in a housing complex with retired porn stars, and having people constantly think they were homeless.

The Feelies

2011-03-31T09:25:00.000-07:00

On a day when Central Jersey was flooded, I forded two streets-turned-rivers in central Paterson to get to the Feelies practice space in neighboring Haledon. I was an audience of one as the band played two new songs and then tore into "Original Love" from Crazy Rhythms. I wrote about my afternoon in Glenn Mercer's basement here.

RIP Supermax

2011-03-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

RIP, Kurt Hauenstein, the beardo genius behind Supermax:

Extended play: two Hauenstein studio projects, London Aircraaft and Bamboo:

japan

2011-03-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

My obsession with Japanese culture runs deep, but having never been to the Land of the Rising Sun, I am at a loss for words at this moment. So instead, I will share Amy Andronicus's recent tumblr post about her time spent in Japan and what she gleaned about the culture during that brief window of opportunity. I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon in the Titus Andronicus van for a story on the group and we bonded over the unlikely subject of suffering debilitating head injuries. But judging by her insight here, it seems that her head is feeling better.

new jams (california edition)

2011-03-15T11:40:00.000-07:00

A few tunes I picked up while digging around in LA. Some sweet reggae vibes, some classic rock, a few dance tracks as well:

fletawood mac

2011-03-08T10:51:00.000-08:00

For most of 2011, I've been obsessed with an obscure album cut from Fleetwood Mac, 1973's "Hypnotized." It's gone on every mix made thus far, and led me to pick up an album that I had always avoided because of its woeful album art, Mystery to Me.

So it's a no-brainer on my playlist for cruising around California. Stops off at records shops lead to more Fleetwood Mac 45s (like this one), but what's been uncanny for me is the sudden appearance of record players in all of my friends' homes. Arriving at our friends' house in San Diego, the LP that was in mid-spin was Fleetwood Mac's massive double album, Tusk.

And pulling up to a friend's house in El Segundo, the sleeve atop his record player is...Rumours. The next day, staying at another friend's house in Hollywood, he had a copy of Christine McVie's The Legendary Christine Perfect Album near the top of the stacks. All of which gives me the impression that by law, Californians must listen to Fleetwood Mac.

the beta who fell to earth

2011-03-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

A friend recently asked me for some advice on filmmaker Nicolas Roeg. For those that don't know, I'm quite the fan of the man's work and yet, when I suggested starting with the bewildering Performance and just running through 1979's Bad Timing, I hiccuped when it came to recommending his 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth. Even though I remember bits of it from my youth (giving me a preternatural fear of riding in elevators and getting nosebleeds), even as I obsessed over Roeg's oeuvre, this film always left me cold.

Before handing over that block of DVDs, I gave it another chance, starting with the Walter Tevis book first. As I read it, I marveled how different it was from the film. Until I watched the film and realized that it stayed rather faithful to what was on the page (save for casting the lithe Candy Clark in the role of an obese fiftysomething ginhead).

Part of the problem with the film is the nasty cut the studio imposed on the finished film, making an already abstracted story all the more difficult. Or as one commentary puts it, "a mystery with all the clues cut out."Knowing the story helped get over the lumps, but while I still remain lukewarm on the film, there's an astute observation made by Bowie in the commentary about his alien listening to the otherworldly voice of Roy Orbison with all of his televisions on at full blast. With those thick black frames and his black attire housing that tremulous, lonesome, singular voice in a human form, it's an inspired soundtrack choice. And it no doubt resonated with another director, David Lynch, who seems to always reach for Orbison's oeuvre when the scene calls for disquiet, estrangement, and otherworldliness.

betus andronicus

2011-02-28T12:22:00.000-08:00

Photo courtesy of Nick Brandreth

I woke up early one Sunday morning and proceeded to shadow New Jersey's finest Titus Andronicus as they enacted a dash from one tip of their homestate to the other for shoot their latest video. A summary of said Garden State excursion can be read here. It started in the Pine Barrens of Little Egg Harbor and wrapped up in Jersey City. There were stop-offs at Asbury Park as well as New Brunswick, where I relived my salad days of basement hardcore shows at a spot lovingly called "Fuck Mountain." And somewhere in there, we stopped at the Grease Trucks and I ate the Fat Darrell sandwich. Within an hour, it felt like Fat Darrell had eaten me instead.

some new jams

2011-02-25T12:51:00.000-08:00

Soul Clap

2011-02-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, I wrote about Brooklyn's Soul Clap dance contest, a happening fueled by early 60s soul 45s spun by Jonathan Toubin and former Cramps' member Kid Congo Powers. It's one of the rowdiest dance parties I've been to in awhile, and remain struck that hundreds of twentysomethings can get down to some of the most obscure cuts of that era and dance with little inhibition.

julianna barwick

2011-02-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

This week in the Village Voice, I profiled Julianna Barwick and her latest album, The Magic Place. The year is still young, but I've easily listened to this album more than any other in 2011. It soundtracks most sleepy mornings and since the promo arrived last December, I also confessed to her that it made for the best "non-Christmas" Christmas album. Which is most definitely a compliment.

above and beyond

2011-02-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

Awhile back, I realized that I had written about both Winter brothers within the span of a week: Johnny for a Wall Street Journal concert listing, and his brother Edgar for one of Wax Poetics's re:Discovery items. I'm not familiar with either albino, but Edgar's lone cosmic disco entry, "Above and Beyond" is ridiculously great track. It appears in the latest issue of the mag.
If that's not enough, the issue is a true bounty: stories about the Belleville Three (Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson), Ron Hardy's The Music Box, Wally Badarou, and Tom Moulton. Of special note is one of my all-time favorites, Hamilton Bohannon. It broke my heart to learn that another writer had unearthed the man before myself, but a feature on the Mighty Bohannon's influence on dance music is well worth it regardless.

Prince

2011-02-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

The internet already knows about how Prince kicked a Kardashian off his stage for her non-dancing ass, but that wasn't the best part of the night. Throwing the mic to Chris Rock for a few lines was nice. Somebody holding up this old-school photo of Prince on her iPad while he sang to her was nice. Jamming for two-plus hours through an inexhaustible catalog was very nice. Prince saying he couldn't sing "If I Was Your Girlfriend" because someone in the audience was gonna wind up pregnant was nice too. Which is not to say that in seven months I won't look like these guys.

Not nice: the girl in front of me who decided that the ideal time to read Prince's Wikipedia entry was during the concert. Maybe next time you should look up and see him dancing his ass off less than 60 feet away from you.

brooklyn comedy feature

2011-02-05T16:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote a feature in the Wall Street Journal on the uptick in alternative comedy nights taking place in Brooklyn, focusing on nights hosted by Hannibal Buress, Eugene Mirman, Yannis Pappas, Kurt Braunohler and others.

2011-02-03T18:45:00.001-08:00

Betace's High

2011-02-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

Starting this Friday and running throughout the month of February, I will be doing a weekly residency at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan. Which is apparently a scene of some sort, according to this Sunday's NY Times article. While Q-Tip throws down in the basement, I'll be up in the spacious lobby from 8pm to midnight. The best part of the night? I'll be playing four hours' worth of old-school country, redneck funk, and bootcut soul! Expect to hear lots of Willie and Waylon, along with lasses like Jessi Colter, Terri Gibbs and Dolly Parton, not to mention dudes like Steve Young, Travis Wammack, Gene Clark, Joe Tex, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gary Stewart, and Billy Joe Shaver, to name but a few. Put some scoot in your boots and tears in your beers!

2011-01-31T19:42:00.000-08:00

Funny, I can read the label on that tear gas canister.

2011-01-30T15:35:00.001-08:00

mark bettaman

2011-01-26T07:51:00.000-08:00

Today marks the end of an era at the Times, with Mark Bittman announcing the conclusion of his weekly column, The Minimalist. Can I say I have read and cooked over 700 columns worth of his work? No. And I can't even say that Bittman taught me how to cook (I mean, I have a mother and a grandmother, y'know?). And well, he hasn't taught me anything about LaMonte Young or Steve Reich, minimalists both.

But did he offer a new perspective on consumption choices? Did he help me understand the process of cooking and eating? Did he encourage me to stop buying things like cake mix, packaged granola and salad dressing in a bottle and instead DIY? Did his columns and cookbook allow me to experiment with things at the vegetable stand that I had never risked buying before? Did I make a white bean soup with collards and brisket just last night out of his Minimalist Cookbook? And did a casual discussion at a bar with a woman about --of all the recipes in the world-- parsley cream sauce, lead me on a new life adventure? Unequivocally yes.

(Incidentally, his parsley cream sauce recipe is one of the few disasters.)

new jams

2011-01-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

Pazz & Jop Ballot

2011-01-19T07:51:00.000-08:00

Funny, a month on I would have failed a pop quiz if you had asked me what it was I wound up voting for in the 2010 Pazz & Jop Album's Poll. Regretted forgetting about Erykah Badu, Robyn, Motor City Drum Ensemble, and The Crystal Ark single but am grateful to have somehow made it through the year without remembering Kanye or "Fuck You."

But I'm pretty pleased with how my singles ballot came out, with only four of the ten garnering another vote (#1, 7, 9 and 10). I know the trend is that thousands of singles get only one vote for them, yet it's still satisfying to shine a light on some of the new music that got to me this year. Then again, it's also weird to realize that some of my respected peers posted zero (or like, four) singles.

1	Try to Find Me, "Get to My Baby (TBD Extension)" Golf Channel
2	Bubble Club, "Violet Morning Moon (Dr. Dunks Remix)" Bubble Club
3	Mim Suleiman, "Nyuli" Running Back
4	Tiago, "Rider (COS/MES Remix)" Ene Japan
5	Mick, "Macho Brother (DJ Nozaki's Macho Break Mix)" 10 Inches of Pleasure
6	Entro Senestre, "La Caccia" Wt
7	Oneohtrix Point Never, "Returnal" Editions Mego
8	Crue-L Grand Orchestra, "(You Are) More Than Paradise (Theo Parrish Long Version 1)" Crue-L
9	Midnight Magic, "Beam Me Up (Jacques Renault Remix)" Permanent Vacation
10	Justin Bieber, "U Smile (800% Slower by Shamantis)" Mp3

arthur's landing feature

2011-01-16T12:20:00.000-08:00

In the Friday edition of the Wall Street Journal, I wrote a feature about Arthur's Landing, an eclectic collective of musicians like former Modern Lover Ernie Brooks, minimalist composer Elodie Lauten, trombonist Peter Zummo, and others who continue to perform the music of their dearly departed friend and colleague Arthur Russell, nearly two decades after his death.

A year ago...

2011-01-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

A year ago, I was walking down my street when a plywood wall from a construction site fell and struck me on the side of the head. I blacked out but didn't fall down. When I could finally see straight, I staggered home and soon wound up in the emergency room. What was worse was what followed: the realization that my head was not okay. There was the awful sensation of my brain being shaken. Music and noise were overwhelming. I could only board the subway with earplugs in, and standing in a public space became traumatizing. Concerts were completely out of the question. I could barely get out of my house without being seized by fear at the unfiltered sensorial data that would soon assault me.

What was worse was the sudden struggle to write. Words and ideas now remained cloaked behind curtains, deep underwater, submerged under shadows, far from my searching fingers. I would commence writing a sentence and by the time I typed the period, I would have no idea what the beginning had been. And when I did write, I missed deadlines by days or weeks. What once flowed like water was now more like chipping at compacted ice, the process itself flailed from hours into days. It was a fraught time, my future as fuzzy and dim as my thoughts. The fear that I would never be able to write again was a palpable one. How can the head assess its own state? What examining thought can determine that the thought process has returned to its original state?

I wasn't recovering. My paranoia deepened, I was reminded every day that the only thing I believed that I possessed, my head and my thoughts, were no longer mine. Only when I went to see specialists did I learn that a physical trauma to the head means that all of the brain's energies go towards physical repair, rather than psychic maintenance. Meaning that emotional issues from the past, long tamped down by the head, are suddenly loosed. Thoughts and feelings that I had been able to push away for decades were now undeniable. What inmates had once been locked away were now roaming free.

Slowly, my faculties returned. Or rather, I became comfortable with this compromised state and began to accept it as the new normalcy. How I was in 2009 was forever lost to me. In no uncertain terms, last year was the scariest year of my life and I'm grateful just to have the chance to keep fighting.

print bedia

2011-01-07T10:15:00.000-08:00

Starting this week, and alternating weeks with my cohort and near-twin Andy B., I am doing concert listings for the Wall Street Journal. In this week's edition, I highlighted folks like Peter Gordon's Love of Life Orchestra, Optimo, and Lee Fields.

Nu Grooves in Brooklyn

2011-01-05T07:44:00.000-08:00

In this week's Village Voice, I wrote a profile on the uptick in dance music labels in New York City. Shouts went out to Blackdisco, Wurst, Deconstruct Music, and others, but I focused on three growing in Brooklyn: W.T. Records, Long Island Electrical Systems, and Golf Channel. All are worth investigating, and each release varies greatly from one to the next.

2010

2010-12-30T10:46:00.000-08:00

I filed my Pazz & Jop right before Christmas, but can't recall what wound up on there right now. Instead, I recall what didn't make it there. Where to end, where to begin:

VA: Concentration mix CD
With the demise of his Lovefingers mp3 site, Andrew Hogge goes it one better, putting together this breezy, chilled-out mix that finds middle ground between Italian soundtracks, acid-folk, pre-Buckingham/Nicks Fleetwood Mac, French psychedelia, and Balearic house, all of the tracks here Shazam befuddlers.
Dr. Dunks "No P's" (Dolly Parton Edit)
Edward Larry Gordon: Celestial Vibration (reissue)
Virgo 2LP (reissue)

Riley: Grandma's Roadhouse LP (reissue)
Chicken neck and skillet grease country-rock from 1971, dug up by the same feller who found those old Karen Dalton reels and Kris Kristofferson's publishing demos. For my imminent country music residency at the Ace Hotel, this will be in my bag no doubt.
Noveller: Desert Fires

Kreidler: "Impressions D'Afrique"

Malvoeaux: "Targets"

Dadawah: Wadadasow LP
This crucial reissue of an early Ras Michael session kicked off the Dug Out label. All of the singles done so far have varied in terms of the Jamaican spectrum (mighty dancehall, deep Black Ark cuts), but not in quality. Mesmeric, tranced-out drum thunder.
Protect-U: "Double Rainbow"
Motor City Drum Ensemble: Raw Cuts

COS/MES: "Chaosexotica"

Indignant Senility: Plays Wagner
Dark ambient tape project that turns Wagner into GAS, with all the attendant vinyl crackle and analog hiss. For gray mornings and drunken night auditions only.
Anthony Moore/ARP: Freakways
T++: Wireless
Bob Holroyd "African Drug (Four Tet remix)"

Gala Drop: Overcoat Heat/ Sea Power & Change: s/t
Portugal's Tiago came out me from more angles than any other producer of the moment. James Murphy packed his "Motorcycles" track in his DJ bag and even put out his latest single. I myself dropped his earlier single "Coaster" when DJing on Governor's Island as fitting opener for Tiago's band Gala Drop. And as the year ends, I'm listening to his slow-mo EP as Sea Power & Change on repeat.
Efdemin: Chicago
Avey Tare: "Lucky 1"
Welcome Stranger: "Brolene" ("Jolene" edit)

Backwoods: "Blue Moon"
Cost-prohibitive though it may be to convert the yen, the amount of killer nu-disco and house music coming out of Japan right now makes it worth the rate. Mick's "Macho Brother" made my P&J singles list, but I enjoyed Backwoods and COS/MES deeply as well.
Ray Mang feat. Lady Kier: "Bulletproof"
Claremont 56 (beach-house label)
Prins Thomas: s/t

captain betaheart

2010-12-18T10:02:00.000-08:00

My best friend in high school received a cassette from my future best friend in high school, a pink-magenta looking thing with the most grotesque cover imaginable: a man in a top hat topped with a shuttlecock, a fish head pressed against his own face. It had stared out at me before, in the writings of Lester Bangs, on every single one of those "Top __ Albums Ever," but even in listening to Trout Mask Replica, there was simply no path into such wilderness. I didn't get it. Listened to it time and time again, and it was wholly alien, hieroglyphic, off-putting, brusque, obtuse. And when there was a moment of clarity in it, it was strangely...hysterical.

It was the humor of the music that served as portal into the world of Don Van Vliet and Captain Beefheart, of Drumbo and The Magic Band. Lines like: "I run on laser beans"; "I took off my pants 'n felt free/ The breeze blowin' up me 'n up the canyon/ Far as the eye could see"; "A squid eating dough out of a polyethylene bag is fast 'n' bulbous, got me?"; the prank phone call vocals of "The Blimp"; the stoned chit-chat with neighbors at the end of "Hair Pie: Bake 1"; the tape rewinds amid the grunts of "China Pig," through such funny moments, they let me enter into TMR finally.

From there, I became of aware of what made the Captain so revered. That play of words, of images, of outré music (delta blues, free verse and free jazz, feedback), it was that childlike sense of making 'sense' that has stuck with me. With a bit of sugar, the spikes could be digested, too. There's still a rush to be had when the procession of horns finally enters the room on "Hair Pie: Bake 1" or when all the disparate fragments of "Ella Guru" come together via that one looooong drum roll of Drumbo, all cohering into an explosive, cartoonish, wide-eyed chorus.

When I was still in high school, under the spell of Richard Meltzer's insouciant and stoned essays from Gulcher, one of my first writing efforts was about how Trout Mask Replica was the first hip-hop album, citing as evidence the way Arrested Development dressed, the amount of skits embedded in the album, that the music was deemed "phat." In later years, I had the supreme honor of being involved in the putting together of Revenant's Grow Fins box set. Even with the unpacking of mythology, the deflating of said "Blimp" that the book inside revealed (like the atrocious conditions under which TMR was recorded) couldn't help but give me another level of appreciation for what the Captain did, good or ill. And today, I feel similarly to my former-editor Chuck Eddy, who laments in his recent obit, "he barely seems like he's in the music's DNA at all."

Lord knows, he remains in mine though. Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band initiated me into such a sound world and --almost twenty years on-- I've been stuck in it ever since. It's not unlike the end of "Old Fart at Play," as once inside this music, all else can be understood: "The old fart inside was now breathin' freely/ From his perfume bottle atomizer air bulb invention/ His excited eyes from within the dark interior glazed/ and watered in appreciation of his thoughtful preparation..."

Never mind that I haven't been able to sit through all four sides of Trout Mask Replica since the end of my pot-smoking days. Or that upon hearing the news this morning of the Captain's departure from God's Golfball, I am reaching for the albums that surround TMR first: the tough garage of Safe as Milk, the maligned psychedelia of Strictly Personal, the soulful, radio-play maneuvering of Clear Spot and bittersweet moments like "Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles."

Soon enough, I'll get to the sugar and spikes of "Dirty Blue Gene" and "Making Love to a Vampire With a Monkey on My Knee," the free-jazz farewell of "Light Reflects Off the Oceands of the Moon." And as I move deeper towards those first memories of my love of music, I'll no doubt turn to gaze into the glassy eyes of that trout mask itself one last time.

Spin Year-End

2010-12-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

Some blurbs for Spin's End of Year round-up:

Neil Young: Le Noise

Gorillaz: Plastic Beach

No Age: Everything in Between

Beach House: Teen Dream

Eden and John's East River String Band

2010-12-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

I hung out with Eden Brower and John Heneghan of the East River String Band last week and wrote this piece about them for the Wall Street Journal. Tone-wise, it's one of my favorites, if I do say so myself. Enjoy.

texas jams

2010-12-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

A few things items I copped when in visiting Texas:

Level 42: "Something About You" b/w "Coup D'Etat"

Katie Kissoon: "You're My Number One"

ZZ Top: "It's Only Love" 7"

Fatback: "You're My Candy Sweet" b/w "King Tim III"
Widely considered to be the first recorded rap.

Commodores: Movin' On (for "Cebu" alone)

James Gang: Yer Album

thanksgiving leftovers

2010-11-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

The turkey-eating holiday means a visit to the parents' retirement house, which also means a chance to re-visit the archives (i.e., the small corner of a back closet where the records are kept). There was no room left in my digestive tract, but there was a bit of space in the rollerbag, so I packed up a few old albums I hadn't heard in nearly ten years now:

Beastie Boys: "She's On It" 12"
Ugh, the sight of Ad-Rock's chunky, pale legs (with the sock half-off) and Mike D's hairy-ass legs still makes my stomach queasy.

Stereolab: Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2)
Here's hoping the 90s revival brings back a massive re-appraisal of le Groop. Think this is going to spur me to start digging out the myriad seven inches I've tucked away somewheres...

Will Rigby: Sidekick Phenomenon
Bought this from Ira Kaplan when Yo La Tengo played at Tacoland in...1994, was it? The cover of Hank Williams' "Setting the Woods on Fire" is a stone-cold classic.

Sun Ra: Astro Black
Perhaps the most influential musician for me back in my Texas days. A beaming Mr. Ra against a backdrop of black stars makes me smile as well, but I'm crestfallen to realize that skronk has not aged well for me at all. Find myself going to his more percussive, twinkling jazz miniatures more than the sprawling space-noise numbers.

Pink Floyd: Meddle and Atom Heart Mother
Listening to these two albums back-to-back makes me lament bands' inability to realize ambitious epics along the lines of these title tracks, reminding me of my unfulfilled wish that Boards of Canada make a 15-minute track. But in pulling out my copy of AHM, I realized that a snarky Sound Exchange clerk had used the plastic bag for my own private-pressed LP, circling my name and labeling me "local rock star." Guess such frustrations made me into the rock critic that I am today.

betalessi

2010-11-23T09:16:00.000-08:00

Been sweet to see the tolerable hivemind side of the internet, as the Alessi Brothers' "Seabird" flew back around on posts and re-posts --courtesy of the LCD Soundsystem/ Hot Chip collaboration-- and folks hopped aboard its back. Or re-boarded the yacht rock yacht they had gotten off of after Michael McDonald did that Grizzly Bear thing. But will the hivemind get to this?

Samamidon

2010-11-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

My feature on Sam Amidon ran yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. Have a read. A favorite insight of Amidon's that came up in the article but didn't appear in the piece is this:

When we go and listen to field recordings of folk songs in this day and age, you’re often listening to a recording from the 70s of someone still playing the banjo in Kentucky. By definition, that person is an outsider by that point. If he’s still playing old-time fiddle up in the mountains in the 70s it meant you hadn’t gotten a television, that things had passed you by. you’re still an outlier. The trajectory of field recordings in the 20^th century. The ones from the 1920s, the technical quality of playing is really high, everything is enthused, it’s quite professional, almost. Whereas the stuff from later on gets really strange. They’re recording someone in their house and his teeth are falling out, a baby is crying in the background, he forgets half the words…there’s a really eccentric quality to those recordings.

atx

2010-11-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

Since I had a dream last night that I was DJing before the Royal Trux reunion show, now's as good a time as any to mention that I wrote the liner notes for the reissue of Thank You, originally released in 1995. Seeing as how much I have enjoyed re-living the pleasures of Drag City's own recent repressing of Cats and Dogs, it was an honor to be able to chat with Jennifer Herrema about that time.

The Trux greatly influenced my post-high school listening habits, for better or ill, and it's a pity to see how Pitchfork recently pulled their loathsome revisionist history to write them out of the 1990s. But my fandom was tested when they pulled through Austin in the early 90s. Rather than get a set of the dreamy/ druggy songs of Cats & Dogs, we were instead subjected to one of the biggest Fuck You performances ever encountered. Haggerty decided he was John Cale's European Son, scratching up a violin over a drum machine mixed twice as loud, all while Herrema slinked to and fro, singing incoherently and looking like she was liable to murder anyone who gazed upon her.

And then, less than six months on, there was a promo cassette of Thank You making the rounds, the Trux turned into a boogie rock band. It was confusing, to say the least, but it was fun to talk to Jennifer and relive that time with a woman who scared the living shit out of me that night.

betadom

2010-11-15T11:05:00.000-08:00

All the film world loves the lovers at the Criterion Collection for continually unearthing movie classics, but they've really done humanity a favor with the first domestic release of Nobuhiko Obayashi's WTF masterstroke House in the United States. Language continually fails when it comes to unpacking this one, so I'll just say that the wholly innocuous first three minutes of the film are more egghead-scrambling than the last thirty years of cinema, and that that is just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, the DVD doesn't have Obayashi's commercial work of that era. Not to be missed is this commercial, featuring Charles Bronson and the Japanese Nat King Cole:

wfmu record fair fare

2010-11-05T13:21:00.000-07:00

I have successfully avoided record fairs for a dozen years now, after overhearing a conversation with Byron Coley about his sausage diet (wish that was a euphemism for something). But this year, too many friends had tables at the record fair, so I suffered the slings and arrows of hearing grown men cite "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" as excuse for why he can't leave his mother's spare bedroom.

I did find these tracks though:

avey tare interview

2010-11-01T10:53:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of his first solo album, one day I went and had lunch with the Animal Collective's Dave Portner a/k/a Avey Tare. We dipped into some fava beans and talked about the events that led up to the album and just how deep his love of the swamp and its critters really goes.

Are crocodiles your spirit animal?

Yeah, maybe. I don’t know much about that. Lately too, Josh and I and my girlfriend have been watching BBC Life specials, and I’ve been into the reptile one. Everybody thinks crocodiles are cold and heartless. Maybe, there’s this story about this guy in South America who raised a crocodile and he goes swimming with it. And they’re holding each other. I think they’re really cool. They were my favorite animals when I was younger. In high school, I was more obsessed with horror movies and I’d tell Brian that I wanted to be torn apart by them, you know, tossed to the gators. But now that I think about it…They are an old species, so they are ancient and anything that’s been around that long has generated and evolved and has some sort of knowledge.

But for the record it’s more about the swamp.

And what do the swamp connotations mean?

Brian and I liked these southern horror films, Eaten Alive, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Something about the swamp, even some place like the New Jersey pine barrens or what have you, appeals to me. When we were touring and were in Arkansas, there was a swamp monster that lived there. It was the Arkansas Bigfoot. Where we recorded in upstate New York, it’s all swampy around there. The Great Northern Swamp. There’s always something really mysterious about swamps to me. They seem impenetrable and no one ever wants to go in them. In movies, there’s always this fear about being lost in the swamp, that you will never find your way out. They’re uncharted. But there’s a beautiful aspect to them as well, as an ecosystem. All sorts of flora grow in them. I studied them back in middle school and dug them.

You keep referencing these older memories. Does the album feel like a culmination of the past for you?

Not in terms of being old. In terms of what’s been happening to me the past few years, it all seems very current. I wanted to focus the album around darker things that have been happening to me. And the swamp motif made it seem easy to tackle darker stuff. The swamp was a good way to invoke a psychological struggle, stepping into the muck. I was having a hard time getting out, or struggling in a very complicated web of things to get through. I guess, starting two years ago, my wife and I started breaking apart. And that was a really rough struggle over the past two years.

Especially when you work so hard to achieve a relationship, to have it be your foundation, only to have it crumble out from under you…

That intermingled with the Animal Collective stuff, being tied up with the success of Merriweather Post Pavilion, the positives intermingled with the negative at the same time. It messed with my mind in terms of what is to be valued. Over the course of this year, recording the album allowed me to have a bit more time to myself.

What took so long to make your first solo album? It seemed like it was imminent a few years back when you did the Fat Cat split.

It was not having a lot of time. It wasn’t a priority. In the time that I’ve been writing these songs, we worked on Merriweather fulltime, ODDSAC, and whenever there was a moment of free time, we had to finish the DVD. I feel like a lot the process for me went hand in hand with ODDSAC. The first track of the film tied into the album and my songwriting process. I was using the same sequencers to make those songs. The first song on the ODDSAC soundtrack was in this style and structure that was very me. It had this darker vibe and the emotions tied into that were what I was aiming for with Down Below.

My grandmother died around the same time as that song (2008) and my family was really close and she tied everyone together. It was really monumental, losing her. That affected me a lot. I spent a lot of time in my practice space alone and it was this cavernous basement space, humid and moist and maybe that had something to do with wanting to have this feel permeate the music. And to top it off, my sister was diagnosed with cancer. That happened all at the same time. That was intense too. She’s alright, but she lost an eye and had to undergo serious surgery. I spent a lot of time in the hospital. It was about figuring out how to rebuild my life, what the best thing to do would be.

Did the album help then?

I had to get it out of my system, clear my mind. I do that a lot. I build up a lot of emotions inside of me and work them out through music. I guess I’m better at doing it through music than I am in real life. The record has to do with that struggle as well. The first song is about me being able to better express myself through music than through talking to somebody.

I am in therapy for something similar, struggling to feel your emotions in the present moment, rather than storing them up for art.

I’m not good at communicating certain things and that’s something I have to work on.

Maybe it’s a guy thing?

I get all tangled up and it’s hard for me to bring up things. I don’t want to cause trouble.

There’s a noticeable dubstep influence on the album, which is interesting as to this point, I didn’t think of it as a vehicle for singer-songwriter mode of expression.

Lately, when I pick up an acoustic guitar and try to write a song, it doesn’t flow right, as it did in the middle of the decade. Even on “In the Flowers,” which I wrote on an acoustic guitar but after awhile, I can’t express things in a unique way (with it). I’m sure the time will come when I pick up the guitar and feel it, but the songs started flowing a bit easier using sequencers. For Merriweather, I would play samples and go “Oh, I can write with that.” Dubstep, techno, and house, the more repetitive-ness of that music I wanted to strengthen them and make them more for songwriting. That’s why it took awhile how to figure it out, to be satisfied with them as songs. It can’t just be an electronic loop, that’s not enough of a song for me. I play a lot of keyboards on the record. The first song, I wrote the song before the beat, but it comes from a keyboard line.

That song in particular has a soul influence to it that I wasn’t expecting. Like an old-fashioned belter.

To me, that is a natural way of emoting. That’s something I’ve been working on a long time. When I tried that in the past, or modern ways of emoting that way, like screamo, or when raising the voice comes into the context of modern music, it feels “emo” or “hardcore.” There were a lot of soul singers who screamed their head off and it wasn’t considered “emo” back then.

Were you thinking of Otis Redding with it then?

Totally. Him and Bobby Womack, they had amazing voices. Not that I can there, but it’s something I’d like to work up to. To me, it’s translated more through John Lennon and even Kurt Cobain, they had that emotion and could emote in that way. You can feel what’s going through them.

With a lot of my songs, it’s about taking a number of things that are happening in my life and then combining them and finding a way that’s more picturesque. It’s not just a singer-songwriter. It is honest but it’s not obvious. To me, that makes me uncomfortable. There’s times on Feels, that it’s written with Kristen in mind. I want to make it a little bit more topical. Animal Collective would never make a record this electronic. Maybe MPP feels electronic, but it’s still live drums.

Was it tough not having them to bounce ideas off of?

Definitely. With them things move so much faster. That’s another reason it took so much longer. Because I’ve been doing it so long, I do have a better sense personally of what’s good. Stuff that lingers in my mind that I can hold onto, to me that’s a sign that it’s worth keeping. Ideas that I don’t get a handle on don’t linger. I was so nervous committing to it.

What made you commit?

Finally having a vision for it that it could become, seeing an overall view for Down There.

Is it a psychological direction, Down There?

Yeah (laughs).

In listening to it, it works best at night, and in open space. On headphones, it didn’t have the same effect. It comes across better for me in those conditions.

I imagine it to be a nighttime record. I think people tend to have expectations for stuff, thinking “this artist is going to do this thing.” They try to make weird competitions between Noah and I, but I don’t feel that pressure at all. Ever since we were young, what I do is different from what Noah does, which is what I appreciate. He has this unique sound and I wouldn’t want to do that. I’m not so concerned that it’s going to be this huge thing. It’s personal to me. I don’t want to promote it. People just make things like that up. That’s the weird part of being in Animal Collective. It doesn’t effect the way I approach playing, but it is weird to feel like that.

All the interviews I read of you are about Noah and what the new Animal Collective is going to sound like.

Usually, we’re good about deflecting that. ODDSAC press was about not talking about MPP. It was a collaboration with Danny. People don’t want to get information right. People will ask me about Noah’s record and when it’s coming out. And Noah hasn’t finished his record! People create all this stuff around you.

You mentioned somewhere else that there were ghosts in the record. What is something you would do to achieve that effect?

Subtleties mostly. I always liked weird moments in records. There’s a Silver Jews record, either Starlight Walker or The Natural Bridge --or something like Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Pink Floyd—and that’s not to say that these records were designed for this but all these weird little things happen. But on the Silver Jews’ song, I was listening to it on headphones and I heard someone say “David” in the background and I was alone in my house and I thought someone was there.
But the idea of random artifacts being in there on purpose and making it sound haunted appealed to me. I do that with samples, mixing them in there really low, to where you wonder if there’s something in there or not. Leaving artifacts, making it feel broken, so that there’s something old, something ghostly there.

oneida oral history

2010-10-30T07:27:00.000-07:00

Fascinating oral history of Oneida recording Each One, Teach One at the turn of the 21st century over at Drowned in Sound. Lots of fine memories, but this tale is truly "wish you were there" style:

I feel like we played somewhere like Chattanooga, where there was almost no one at the bar, and there was a carnival in town. So at the bar were these scrappy old carnies, like scary dudes with one tooth and a wild look in their eyes. Not a ton of people, I’m talking 15 dudes from a carnival [laughs]. And maybe two other people, a bartender, three fans, and the band we were touring with. So we went up there and played this song ["Sheets of Easter"] for 15 minutes, and I think it pissed them off but also made them happy. I remember them stomping around the room thinking we were saying “die, die, die,” these crazy old hillbilly carny men going “die, die, die,” doing Monty Python-style goose-stepping walks around the room.

drone-minimalism explained

2010-10-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

Drone-minimalism, as succinctly explained by Keef:

If you're working the right chord, you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you're not playing. It's there. It defies logic. And it's just lying there saying: "Fuck me."

Marnie Stern interview

2010-10-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

Last week, a feature I wrote on "she-shredders" for the Wall Street Journal, which entailed sitting down with guitarist Marnie Stern to discuss a song like "Female Guitarists Are the New Black" and all the other baggage that comes with the territory. She bid me head to the Upper East Side and meet her at an ale house around the corner from her apartment. As she sipped an iced coffee and smoked Parliaments (careful to flick the butts way out onto the street), she talked about her failures in finding a male guitarist that could nail the parts to her new songs. We chatted about this topic and other things as well:

It was different awhile back for women. There weren’t many women doing it. Or at least, they could feel the currents against them. I never felt that. Thankfully, it’s because of Kill Rock Stars, Sleater-Kinney, that whole Riot Grrrl movement, helped make it possible for me to not think about it. So I never have, which is great, I think. I just wanted to become a good player and see good musicians. Take Ex-Models, I like seeing bands like that and feeling that they were so good. See, bands like Ex-Models, Hella, Lightning Bolt, and seeing them and just going home and practice, practice, practice.

It didn’t seem like a boys club?

No, that’s just good music. You can see wanking up there and it’s just garbage. But when it’s the music itself, the energy…that’s the thing. I only get inspired when it’s good music. I’m trying to make good music. I don’t want to just be good to be good, I want to put it in a song. That’s the whole point. When I see those bands that I love. At the same time, I remember going to see Erase Errata and thinking they were amazing and not thinking they were women up there. I thought they were neat. Of course, whatever gender you are plays a role in how you approach the instrument. But it’s not gender, it’s the person. See, it’s a difficult thing to have someone ask “what’s it like to be a girl playing guitar?” Well, I can’t tell you, I’ve never been a boy. I know how my brain works and what my make-up is.

Who were your models to look up to, as a female?

(Silence for ten seconds) Nancy Wilson of Heart. Kim Gordon. Um…see it’s different though. Debbie Harry. My perception when I was younger was rolled up with image. I wouldn’t be able to tell you the difference between Madonna and Debbie Harry.

I feel like women have to engage with the image in order to have success.

So I’m learning. It’s hard when you start thinking about it in that way to dissect it. I get asked this question constantly. Generally, you can tell when a person is good at their instrument. You can tell a lot by their control and movement. What I think is interesting is that women are very good with coordination. Women are very organized. And part of the technical side of playing is brain organization. A lot of women play classical piano and classical guitar, which is fucking insane. That’s even harder than rock guitar. It’s just not amplified. i get asked why women aren’t doing shreddy stuff. It’s a hard thing to ask me. I don’t ask my girlfriends why they don’t like the shreddy sound. It just sound tacky or not beautiful or boring to them.

Your style evokes “Eruption” or “Thunderstruck,” the most masculine rock imaginable.

It’s so bizarre. I know in theory it’s “masculine,” but because I’m me, it’s not masculine to my ears. It’s just fun. I don’t think of it as masculine. It sounds cool and fun and big. These are all masculine things. Maybe I’m really lucky in the way I was raised. Maybe I’m dumb? I never thought about it. Even when I was in 6^th grade and I watched GnR, I just thought it was cool, not masculine. Seeing Patti Smith was the same way. I didn’t think of her as a woman onstage.

In the 90s there’s female bands, bands with female bassists. But the exception never quite became the rule.

I’m sure a lot of it is a response to the trend in music. I can imagine if the trend in music was big 70s or 80s rock, I would be revolted. There are certain aspects of image that women did have to portray that is so absurd and unattractive. For women, the association with that is off-putting.

You have to wear fishnets.

Right. Everything is referential to what you know and listen to and like in your life. I guess that’s called “post-modern.” One person who’s never listened to experimental noise bands can hear this record of mine and think it’s crazy. And people from that world would think it’s really straight-forward. People will only hear Van Halen and not know that I’m referencing these newer bands. When my mom hears the songs, she likes this record a lot more. It’s more catchy, I remember them, she says.

Why is it just your name for the third album?

I like the songs a lot. It felt much more personal to me and I felt like this record was very reflective of who I am as a person, good or bad. Even when I was doing interviews a few months ago, I was just a mess and really forthcoming in interviews. When you start to heal and you look back, you go “woah.” I would like to come out of that little group of “guitar player.” I don’t know if I want to be considered a Joanna Newsom, but someone who is good at their instrument yet transcends it with song. When people listen, they hear a lot of guitar. Zach’s drums are everywhere so it sounds busier than it is.

But Joanna doesn’t arise from a lineage of iconic male harpists.

Yeah.

So, the roots of a song like “Female Guitarists are the New Black”…

That was just “Come on.” It’s just…this constant thing. It puts a lot of pressure on me to be seen as this very good guitar player because when I compare myself to all the guitar players I know, I’m alright, but I am not amazing by any means. I’m just trying to write songs. I want to do interesting stuff but it puts this pressure on me to where I feel like the Emperor’s new clothes. I know that I can play really well but not at the level of…and then it goes back to this whole female thing of how there aren’t that many female musicians to compare it to and that’s why it remains a talking point. This is where the uncomfortable-ness of it comes up. Is it just because I’m a woman that people say I’m a really good guitar player? Because there aren’t that many to compare me to? That bums me out. I would like to be good, period.

It’s like that bit in Mad Men where Freddy compares Peggy to “a dog playing the piano.” There’s a complacency and misperception about women’s capabilities. Both then and now.

It’s great and what am I complaining about? It’s great but it just seems to me to always be the focus. I’m just worried that the songs themselves are…wait a minute. Just for fuck’s sake let’s say I played guitar on the new record but so did someone else. Two guitar players like Deerhoof. Would it get the same kind of scrutiny? What do you think?

I’m sure my writing outlets wouldn’t go for it…

Yeah.

What’s it like on tour? Do you get coddled?

I’ve never been made to feel…that’s not true. Sometimes I’ll get to a venue and the soundguy will say: “Are you acoustic? Do you need a stool?” thinking I’m singer-songwriter. That’s when its funny, like when I do the soundcheck.

Do you still have to prove yourself?

No, but it’s because of who I am as a person, because I’m writing these songs and I’m just trying to show who I am as an individual. When we talk about these other things, where people make these assumptions and then I get pissed and feel I need to be doing more to get other women to play guitar. It’s selfish to say it doesn’t affect me who cares?

What do you think of Rock Camp for Girls?

Of course that’s great. But again, I think it’s great to get any kids to be doing music. I’m also naïve. I can’t imagine that a girl would feel that she couldn’t feel she could pick up an instrument and it would not be alright. I can think of people in the past ten years but even those people are in the underground scene. Kaki King is known as a great female guitar player, but again, the focus is on the female, the novelty of it. Shit! Yeah, you’re right. But what a little cloud I live in. the friends that I have who are creative as writers, painters, I’ve never heard instances for them of gender being an issue.

In pop, female presence is a non-question but hard rock remains off-limits.

But if I see a group of females doing hard rock but not being interesting, I could care less who they were.

Like Lez Zeppelin: it’s Led Zeppelin, but dude it’s chicks! It revels in the novelty of femininity and holds it back.

I’m always looking for something I can use myself, a certain style, a new sound. I’m looking always for an essence to use. It’s almost a job. This is what I do everyday. What we were saying about the macho thing is maybe I have a lot of that in me. Weird guitar shrill sounds good to me. Things that to a lot of people, not just women, that make you want to cover your ears, I really actually enjoy that noise. I don’t know why for me I gravitated towards loving that kind of stuff.

What made the album more personal for you?

The whole thing. All of a sudden…I didn’t have a personal life for a decade. I was just doing music and was pretty guarded. And then all of a sudden I had a personal life and it crashed down on me. A guy I had loved a decade ago committed suicide. Things over a two year period were all disappointing. Major disappointments, heart-crushing blows. I hadn’t expected that. I thought I would wait to date somebody and then when I did, it would all work out. So it came crashing down and it made it’s way in. I was so shocked.

That’s what your art is for, to take that blow.

Of course, so when the mood was reflective and sad, I was adjusting the music to reflect that. I was experimenting with reverb and it gave the album a softer thing. The first two albums are motivational and this is about sorrow and sadness and disappointment, telling myself it’s going to be alright. The part of me that feels embarrassed is the part that feels like I’m a sap, a sucker. Being myself, that opens you up for more.

Why did you pick up the guitar in the first place?

It’s the most bizarre thing. I was working as a proofreader at Columbia House, 12 CDs for a penny. I said I don’t like this, I’m going to do music. My friends and family didn’t understand. I didn’t listen to music really. I don’t understand it. There must have been something, but looking back, there was no impetus. Later I listened to PJ Harvey and weirder people. It was something I thought about but I didn’t was a possibility. You go get a job and get married and live a normal life. “You’re going to throw away your whole life?” Now that I have reviews and a record deal, hell no; That’s huge Mom points. Now she says: “I’m living through you, live your dream.”

polk salad beta

2010-10-21T08:58:00.000-07:00

To kick off CMJ 2010, my pal Rotter scored huge and got us in to see the legendary Swamp Fox, Tony Joe White. It is a known quantity that I love the man, so it's always a thrill to see him turn concrete into swamp. In an hour-long set, we got one instance of polk (which the locavores still aren't chomp-chomping on) and three instances of silk stockings in song. Which is three times more than I'll hear all CMJ-long.

Shredding the Definition of the Guitar Hero

2010-10-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

Today, my first feature for the Wall Street Journal appeared in print and it's about three of my favorite guitarists right now: Marnie Stern, Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, and Sarah Lipstate of Noveller. You can read the piece here. These interviews were enlightening for me, in terms of who inspired them over the years (Nancy Wilson, Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch respectively) and the sorts of scrutiny (and media attention) they ultimately get for being women. Discussing gender is not very easy for me (white male), so it was a great challenge to strike the right tone in the piece.

last week's jams

2010-10-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

A sampling of drunken exchanges with the DJ

2010-10-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

"Hi. Can you plug in my iPhone so that we can hear Leo Sayer's 'I Feel Like Dancing'?"

"Buuut, we're playing a song right this very instant that's about feeling like dancing."

***

"You remember that Falco song, 'Der Kommissar'?"

"(Pauses in deep contemplation) Yes. I do remember it."

***

"Can you play Chromeo?"

"We've played nothing but talk box songs for the last hour."

"Yeah, but I'm trying to impress this girl."

***

"Cool, you about to play that CJ & Co. Devil's Gun record?"

"Fuck yes I am!"

***

"You know, if you played the Beach Boys right now, everyone in this bar would start singing."

"That's exactly what we don't want."

dorf on golf channel

2010-10-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

I wrote a feature for Resident Advisor about one of New York's most idiosyncratic dance music labels of the moment, Golf Channel. They released that monstrous Mark E edit of Janet Jackson a few years back and have continue to deliver the goods since then. Like this track. But the piece also doubles as a history of New York's sweetest, seediest dance party of the past decade, No Ordinary Monkey.

Nine 11 Thesaurus

2010-09-27T06:46:00.000-07:00

Nearly a year in the works, the big feature I wrote about Nine 11 Thesaurus, a rap group that springs from an after-school program for disadvantaged youth in Bushwick, ran this week in the Village Voice.

two lines left...

2010-09-26T11:50:00.000-07:00

How to spell New York.

Two lines left out of my recent Esscort Q & A about their new single "Cocaine Blues" at the Voice:

Eugene: The DJ perspective is very important, its where a lot of our tastes have been formed. They may not be the deepest cuts, but you won't find us without a stack of August Darnell, Gino Soccio and Nile Rodgers productions. I guess if you had to round out the Mt. Rushmore of disco producers you might have to put Quincy on there, too.

This song makes me think back to the halcyon days of Cokie's, the notorious Williamsburg cocaine bar.

Dan: As for Cokie's, my superintendent just broke into my apartment roaring drunk with a half-finished bottle of Jagermeister. (I'm not making this up.) He's muttering something about bags of baby laxative and cheap whiskey. It's a shame Cokie's closed: they could have included it in the amenity brochures for prospective condo buyers.

Je T'aime...

2010-09-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

Out now is Light in the Attic's handsome and heavy remaster/ reissue of Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg's first collaborative album, often entitled Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus after its controversial softcore single. I was honored to interview Ms. B about it and write the liner notes for it. Buy it here.

jams by andy beta

2010-09-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

It's a total thrill and honor to be spinning a few hours' worth of jams for my girl Jess Rotter's art opening on Wednesday evening at the purt-sweet Nightwood pop-up shop in downtown Brooklyn. That there will be heaps of limited vinyl for sale from the folks at Mexican Summer and Sacred Bones, as well as 'zines by the likes of I Heart only adds to the fun. My record bag will include everything from Matthew Young's Traveler's Advisory and Waylon Jennings to Thin Lizzy to Flying Saucer Attack, a spacious mix of dust, denim, and fuzz. And check out these sweet Gene Clark shirts Jess recently made:

heep see

2010-09-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Islaja: Keraaminen Pää
The two times I've happened upon Finnish musician Islaja (in Greenpoint and Beijing, of all places) she's enacted her singular music with a sampler, so it was a bit curious to read Pitchfork's wrongheaded review which presumes that Merja Kokkonen hails from "a stretch of old growth forest...or maybe Middle Earth," lamenting that with her electronics Keraaminen Pää sounds "modern, mechanical, and familiar." Some recent reviews of Finnish music all dabble in speculation on the country, but considering that Islaja's success comes from outside of her homeland, I can't help but think of her as a wandering musician without territories (see also above locales). Lord knows her music makes few man-made distinctions: dirges, wobbling electronics, that icy vocalization, the throbs and meandering progressions. A song about a werewolf that undergoes such changes itself. That the album was made in Finland, Benin, Berlin, and Hong Kong suggests wide peregrinations as well. Most telling is her sampling of a fellow musical gypsy, Ghédalia Tazartès, which suggests she won't be settling into something familiar (least of all in an enchanted forest) anytime soon.

Noveller: Desert Fires

Brooklyn guitarist Sarah Lisptate sent her new album to me out of the blue. Turns out she also spent time in Austin, Texas before coming up north. And in a way her approach to the guitar I feel a kindred pull (from a decade previous), emphasizing texture and weather-pattern drifts, abstraction above traction. It's telling that Lipstate also does experimental film and since it arrived around the same time as my copy of Michaelangelo Antonioni's stunning modern-life meditation, Red Desert, I conflate the two works. (Also, Red Desert came during the time of the Deephorizon oil spill, giving it even muckier resonance.) Picturing that black sea, the bogs the hue of pus, the slate-ash skies, that deathly green of walls, I hear Noveller's music in Antonioni's color palettes, the suspension of feedback lingers with me as long as those images, too.

Hildur Gudnadóttir: Mount A
Originally a Mum member (also a member of Storsveit Nix Noltes), and originally a limited release under the name "lost in the hildurness," Gudnadottir has her first solo outing cleared again so that it might get a bit more attention. Credited with cello, viola da gamba, gamelan, zither, and more, it's rare to have a female composer represented on the esteemed Touch imprint (but not as rare as it not having the photography of Jon Wozencraft adorn it) and rather than make grand gestures, the album is infused instead with small moments that have taken a few spins to grow. Sawed-string miniatures, neo-classical meditations, shimmering suspended drones, it's been a morning soundtrack for a few weeks now, with expansive closer "You" a highlight.

joséta

2010-09-09T14:32:00.000-07:00

JUNIP - Always (Official Video) from City Slang on Vimeo.

As a judge for this year's World Air Guitar Championships, I sat at the judges' table with none other than José Gonzalez, who got up at some point at the halfway point to do his own air guitar theatrics with his band, Junip. I'm barely done unpacking my Moomin mugs yet the Junip video is already done and up.

2010-09-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

Tough night at the (Ma)Sonic Temple with Sunn O))), Boris, and The Cult frontman Ian Astbury.

TV Guide

2010-09-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of the new football season, I was asked to do a little something on facial hair in the NFL for the new issue of TV Guide. Random, I know...

betair guitar

2010-08-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

It is with great honor (and a wicked windmilling motion with my tongue wagging out) that I announce that I have been asked to be a judge in the 2010 World Air Guitar Championships in Oulu, Finland. Rock!

Small Lives

2010-08-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

"The barren desert that I was, I wanted to populate with words; I wanted to weave a veil of writing to hide the hollow sockets of my gaze; I did not succeed; and the stubborn void of the page contaminated the world that it completely evaded."
Pierre Michon Small Lives

2010-08-13T08:35:00.000-07:00

breath out

2010-08-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

And then there's Gary Snyder:

"It is a perfectly simple, ordinary activity to be silent, to pay attention to your own consciousness and your breath, and to temporarily stop listening or looking at things that are coming in from the outside. To let them pass through you as they happen. There's no question that spending time with your own consciousness is instructive. You learn a lot. You can just watch what goes on in your own mind, and some of the beneficial effects are you get bored with some of your own tapes and quit playing them back to yourself."

breath in

2010-08-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Re-reading a book of interviews with Beat writers and poets, I realized many talk about breath and meditation and how it pertains to the writing practice. Here's Allen Ginsburg lecturing an NYU class in the mid-90s:

"So the basic classical practice is paying attention to the breath leaving the nostril and following the breath until it dissolves, not controlling the breath, just any regular old natural breath that comes along will do. What you are adding is your awareness of the breath rather than any control...When you notice you are thinking, label it thinking and take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts. That is the nature of the mind to think thoughts."

Wickerby

2010-08-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

"What technology really does is make our days seem to move too slowly, the nonstop flicker and flight of all our mechanisms stranding us within what, by contrast, becomes an even more static present. We, in other words, devise the illusion of our own discomfort even as we continue to make life easier. We resist our mechanisms even as we go on inventing them."
Charles Siebert Wickerby

Ocean of Sound

2010-07-26T09:36:00.000-07:00

"Imagine the most likely use for the wired city of the future not in cyberpunk or megatripolising world music frameworks then but as a hi-tech campfire, people plugging in to remind themselves of life as it was when they were plugged out, twisting their isolation into something resembling community."
David Toop Ocean of Sound

In Patagonia

2010-07-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

"Now I play Chopin. Yes?" and he replaced the bust of Beethoven with one of Chopin. "Do you wish waltzes or mazurkas?"
"Mazurkas."
"I shall play my best favorite. It is the last music Chopin is writing."
And he played the mazurka that Chopin dictated on his deathbed. The wind whistled in the street and the music ghosted from the piano as leaves over a headstone and you could imagine you were in the presence of a genius.

Bruce Chatwin: In Patagonia

bukka beta

2010-07-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

I wrote a succinct set of liner notes for the first-ever CD reissue of this Bukka White recording on John Fahey's Takoma imprint, out now. This was recorded by Fahey one afternoon upon tracking Bukka down to his room in Memphis and finding that --after not recording for 30 years-- he could still play those relentless, iron-horse blues as he did in the early 1930s. There's a tactile joy in the man's growl on this one.

Shangaata

2010-07-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

Aside from having my lobes re-arranged by the vuvu drones during World Cup matches in Johannesburg, I've also been spending an exorbitant amount of time with this new compilation from Honest Jon's, Shangaan Electro. "Bananas" doesn't quite encapsulate this ludicrous music, but as exhausting/ exhilarating as the comp is, the videos of folks twitching to it is beyond words. A few favorites below:

washington, bc.

2010-07-06T07:37:00.001-07:00

While we will no doubt be veering towards the Rothko exhibit at the National Gallery instead, D.C. is also hosting Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell From the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Revisionist American mythmakers to rival that of Rockwell, a fine article by Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post deftly unpacks this pre-packaging of "America" to Americans. He writes: "Even after all these years, high realist pictures never fail to play the magic trick of making us think that because they look so real, they must show things as they are."

That uncanny mindset of our country might be best summed up by this disconcerting quote from Speilberg, also in the piece: "I look back at these paintings as America the way it could have been, the way it someday may again be." So...something that was already delusional we might once again return to? Doesn't that just mean we already are in a state of delusion? While appropo for someone like Lucas, for a man who has seemingly been intent on re-addressing such mythologies with Schindler's List and The Pacific, it sounds off coming from Speilberg.

Rockwell has so whitewashed our psyche that even for my generation, it's hard to imagine a past that doesn't look like those damned pictures. It's become the mindset of political rhetoric as well, a return to a place that never was, even when Rockwell was painting them. Gopnik again:

In the hands of America's Favorite Artist, it stood as a willed repudiation of the new... Rockwell panders, in his very substance of his pictures' making, to his public's fear of change. Rockwell's greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché. The reason we so easily "recognize ourselves" in his paintings is because they reflect the standard image we already know. His stories resonate so strongly because they are the stories we've told ourselves a thousand times."

VAta

2010-07-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

Visiting down in the mid-Atlantic region, our holiday has already been soundtracked by nu-Patriot classics like "The Lady in Red," "I Think We're Alone Now" and "Born in the USA," added to the endless parading of Sousa marches. Almost all got repeated ad nauseum during the festivities on the Great Lawn in the capital. Darius Rucker and more brass bands made the eyes roll so far back in the head, the fireworks couldn't even be glimpsed.

What was fascinating though was when headliner Reba McEntire strutted out and performed Bobbie Gentry's "Fancy," deftly inserting it into the Americana lexicon. The family frowned as I sung all the words to this obscure country song, fortifying those Texas stereotypes. Greil Marcus rightly sussed Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" as a devastating snapshot of our country in The Old, Weird America yet the less well-known "Fancy" resonates at this moment of our consumer culture:

We didn't have money for food or rent
to say the least we was hard-pressed
when Momma spent every last penny we had
to buy me a dancin' dress.

Stuck in my head now, so I'll be humming it while wiping hot dog mustard off my mouth with an American flag napkin.

RIP Rammellzee

2010-06-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

RIP Rammellzee.

A few years ago, I queried at Pitchfork about the man's totemic 12" "Beat Bop": "If "Rapper's Delight" is the Odyssey of hip-hop, is "Beat Bop" its Ulysses?" To which the answer is an unequivocal yes. If you haven't picked up my friend Dave Tompkins's head-swimming How to Wreck a Nice Beach book, do yourself a solid, if only to get observations like this on Rammellzee:

Rapper, diver, sinister masked man, dentist, jeweler, letter defender, quantum engineer, painter. Toy encoder, toy assassin...His childhood distrust of the Catholic Church tops a list of aversions that includes mayonnaise and the word whatever. "He's a genius," says director Jim Jarmusch. "The kind of guy you could talk to for twenty minutes and your whole life could change, if you could only understand him."

kid betillions

2010-06-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

While the living artistic example of Oneida's Kid Millions has always been a revelation/ inspiration to me, I'm still taken aback by the sheer power of his new solo drum album, Man Forever. The Times piece on the project is an enlightening read (as well as a much deserved profile of one of Brooklyn's most profound musicians), with this section being my favorite two-sentence approximation of the man/drum dervish:

But behind the drums his baby face transforms into a kabuki demon, and he becomes a blur of pounding limbs. “He has a very special way of playing drums, as if he were guzzling something very tasty,” Yoshimi, a drummer in the Boredoms, wrote.

joão gilbetã

2010-06-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

With each annual Jazz Fest, I lacerate myself for not spending the exorbitant sum for tickets to see bossa nova maestro João Gilberto perform, his artistic stature undiminished. And when JVC pulled out of sponsorship and shuttered the festival last year, I was certain that my fate was sealed. Now I would never see the man perform. But with the festival's revival this year, I realized that pr string pulling is an art made specifically for such an occasion and was all set for tonight's show at Carnegie Hall. Until this email came through:

NEW YORK, NY, June 21, 2010 – Due to international travel regulations beyond the producer’s and artist’s control, the Joao Gilberto concert scheduled for the CareFusion Jazz Festival New York at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, June 22, at 8:00 pm has been canceled.

Foiled again.