Prins Thomas interview

In the depths of those chasmic doldrums that winter can bring, I one day received a big sunbeam in the form of an email from a Thomas Hermansen announcing that he had just finished his very first solo album. And since he recalled the good questions I had sent his way when interviewing him and his musical cohort Hans-Peter Lindstrøm back when music website Paper Thin Walls was still extant, would I be into sending him some more questions and scribing the bio for his debut?

Prins Thomas's first album? How had the man gone nearly a decade without dropping such a document on us? I was honored and now that the album is out now, so I'm posting our email exchange below: 

What sort of music did you grow up on as a kid?

My parents split up when I was 4 and most of my musical memories are from after that. I lived with my mother and stepfather. My stepfather used to play all kinds of music from Cramps and Clash to Ry Cooder, John Martyn, jazz, classical music. There where always music magazines and books lying around which also introduced me to learning English so I could read about the artists. I think already at 7 or 8, I was starting to save my weekly allowances for records. I can't remember buying a toy or any candy, but loads of records. 

When visiting my dad (who lived 4 hours away), we used to play tapes while drumming on the dashboard or using the seat belt as a bass. I remember stuff like Santana/Buddy Miles live, Return to Forever, Pink Floyd, Beach Boys...basically loads of jammy and/or harmonic stuff.

Did your parents own many records?

I thought it was many when growing up, now with records spread over the studio downtown, I have way too many at home.

Did you play an instrument as a child? Piano lessons? Bang on pots and pans?

I can't remember exactly but I think this was the rough order, buying records then starting to dj in my bedroom around 84-85 (then local youth club around 87), at the same time I was playing first the flute, then clarinet in a marching band. I also met Pål Nyhus (DJ Strangefruit from Mungolian Jetset) who took me under his wings. I think I was 11 and he 16. He invited me to his house, tried to teach me the basics of Technics 1200s (I had belt-driven turntables...). At the time I was playing a mixture of the pop music at the time (12 inch mixes), electro, hip hop and some of the house stuff that spread overseas, all sprinkled with the pop, rock, jazz etc. I discovered at home. Anyway, the marching band interest didn't last very long but took up the cello as my mother promised me a bass if I toughed it out for 3 years. I didn't...

What made you want to make music as well? 

I already knew at my 7th birthday, miming to The Beatles in front of the prettiest girl in school -- which made quite an impression-- that I wanted to do something with music. Music just made me really happy. School was really tough and I didn't have many friends my first 6 years at school. With music I found something I could master while feeling some kind of satisfaction. I guess it also made me one of the cool guys when I started in 7th grade.

When visiting my dad (getting older now so I took the train by myself), I used to stop off in Oslo  to change trains and spent the one hour wait inbetween trains at the nearest record store. On these trips, I found some of the crossover house stuff that had gone into the charts (JM Silk, Farley Jackmaster Funk, Todd Terry) besides more obscure stuff (here anyway) like Phuture and early Masters At Work. I still hadn't heard this stuff in proper clubs and under the influence (I was still only 13) so as far as I knew, this was just a continuation of the Shep Pettibone, Arthur Baker, François Kevorkian, Latin Rascals, etc., mixes I had but with a bigger and more booming beat.

Anyway, through mixtapes and my good friend Strangefruit word spread and soon I was playing regular gigs in Oslo and I also started playing often in Bergen and got introduced to disco pioneers Bjørn Torske and Erot. In Oslo, I had a bimonthly residency with Strangefruit and Rune Lindbæk called Soda Club. Loads of memorable nights and great varied music. This was a really good time for nightlife in Oslo and a year later I moved here.

There was loads of clubs here and people like Idjut Boys, Maurice Fulton were visiting often. I remember on one night I had brought DJ Harvey over to play and we we're going to dinner with 5 other international guests playing competing clubs the same night. Which says a lot when there's roughly only 35000 people going out in total on a Saturday night in Oslo...

How did you meet Todd Terje and Hans-Peter?

Through regular nights playing around Oslo and digging in record stores I met Hans-Peter then later Terje. Hans-Peter was studying at the university in Oslo (originally from Stavanger in the south) and he was just starting to dj around clubs here and making electronic music. We were both into disco and kind of bonded over that but found out quickly we had lots more in common. Hans-Peter was a highly skilled musician already and I was offering tips on arrangements. I had just gotten my first computer and was eager to learn so Hans-Peter asked me to do a remix for him ("Music" by Lindstrøm & Christabelle). Getting great response from Idjuts and Harvey gave me a flying start and from there I've knocked out too many to mention.

When you and HP teamed up to make music together, were you surprised at the international reception to it?

L&PT has been just a project we did for fun, a possibility to collaborate and get new ideas. Our profiles where both pretty low before our first album (aside from his "I Feel Space" single) and we didn't really expect it to get the kind of broad reception that it got. What was supposed to be a little side project took overhand and after a couple of years with intense travelling, interviews, regular radioshows in Japan and a ton of remixes, we both felt the urge to step down a little bit. It got tiring focussing too much on one thing and both felt the need to realize seperate projects. Whenever there's free time on our hands we get together and do stuff. Of course with album projects on each side there's more time inbetween our jams but we've been talking about ideas for future albums.

There's also some ideas left from the last album sessions that might come out as 12s at some later point. We've also done a couple of remixes that eventually will come out.

No offense, but this album has been a looooong time coming. Why did it take so long to come together after all of the singles and remixes (which you are so prolific on)? What is different about album-making versus track-making?

Actually, the album came together quite quickly. I had a couple of ideas floating around from a couple of years ago but the week after I mixed down me and HP's last album ("II"), I just had a good run in the studio and was feeling really inspired. I haven't really thought about doing a proper solo album before, finding the time for solo 12"s in-between has been hard enough. I think I can probably count 50 remixes for each new 12" I do (ha ha ha). It's also taken some time for me to get the studio set up I wanted to be able to record my own music from scratch and the 2 L&PT albums has been really good for training myself on the drums. The scary thing is how inspiring it is to finally put out a bunch of my own stuff, I've got tons of new stuff in the pipeline already + a couple of more dancey non-album singles lined up too.

 

 

In the most recent issue of Paste, I contributed a few blurbs to their 50 Greatest Living Directors feature. Got to re-watch the work of Terrence Malick (#43), Chris Marker (#31), Abbas Kiarostami (#18), and Jean-Luc Godard (#2).

heep see (feb/mar)

Pointer Sisters: "Automatic"
Guilty pleasure of the moment (along with Greg Kihn Band's "Jeopardy" and Dolly Parton's "Potential New Boyfriend"), no thanks to thinking back to when Thom from Rub-N-Tug dropped this into a set. In much the same way that Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots" makes me sing "galaxy defenders" on the second line of the chorus, I always think of the 80s show, Automan, at the chorus, who I just presumed this song was always about.

Phil Ochs: Greatest Hits
"50 Phil Ochs Fans Can't Be Wrong" the back cover attests on this misnomer of an album, Ochs' last studio effort. Bitter and resigned, with Ochs clad in a shiny gold Elvis suit, this album still confounds me. Musings on fame, James Dean, Watergate, petrochemical dependence as love song (or vice versa), but against a backdrop of country chords and harmonizing and harpsichord.

Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose: Bridge Carols
In the best way, this reminds me of those spacious ambient moments from The Reminder. At barely a half-hour, it evaporates in the best possible way.

Thomas Fehlmann: Gute Luft
Over fifty now, this sounds like, if not Fehlmann's best work, then at least like the greatest overview of what he does best: pop ambience, shimmering schafel, jazzy breakdowns, gentle psychedelia, and pliant minimal techno, all woven together into a cohesive whole. In some perverse way, I wish that Gute Luft, which is the soundtrack to 24H Berlin, a 24 hour documentary, was itself an entire day's worth of music, as I trust the man to make it all work.

Jim O'Rourke: The Visitor
What once seemed its weakest quality (that aleatoric, sound snippet-ness that I originally mistook for some anti-piracy gimmick that Drag City does), now feels like this suite's greatest attribute. Played this while driving through the strange El Nino rainstorms of San Diego. All the delicate instrumentation would get washed away in the downpours of rain, the wobble of the windshield wipers overpowering it, and I think the player would reset somewhere between the 7 to 27-minute mark, making it feel transparent, ephemeral, yet delectably without end.

Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle
Another California-soundtrack album. Grappling with folks like Owen Pallett and Joanna Newsom of late, I somehow forgot what a touchstone this remains, a record I spun thousands of times a decade ago when I was obsessed with the Beach Boys and Charles Ives, but had forgotten recently. It sounds decidedly different in the California sun.
It reminded me that the very first piece of music-writing that I had published (about Lee Dorsey in Sound Collector Audio Review) used Parks' Discover America as a jumping-off point. A deft and dense merger of pop and orchestra infused with a brand of wit that leaps beyond any categorization. Still hearing more jokes and allusions within it, not to mention Los Angeles neighborhood references I wouldn't have understood back in Texas.

Joanna Newsom: Have One On Me

A pity to have to review this album from a digital stream (especially from a label that doesn't even "do" digital). Had I been allowed to hear it uncompressed, I realize now that I would've argued for the main review slot at Spin and given it a higher score. Or to borrow a line from Anthony Lane's review of The Red Shoes: "(It's) like drinking champagne, whatever the vintage, through a plastic straw."

Now that Have One On Me can unfurl in the morning air, the treasures of this album reveal themselves without hurry. And hurry is this album's antagonist. Imbibed in slower, deeper lengths, leitmotifs start to emerge that truly mesmerize. Rather than rely on previous male collaborators (Albini immediately springs to mind) for their input, I believe that Joanna surrounded herself with folks she trusts (O'Rourke, Noah Georgeson, Ryan Francesconi) to not second-guess her; producing the album herself feels crucial for its sense of warmth and depth.

Ray Mang: "Bulletproof"
When I first spun this collaboration between Mang (a/k/a/ Raj Gupta) and Miss Lady Kier (doing a George Clinton cut), I lamented that it didn't drop in say...2006, when it's anti-war blasts might have resonated a bit deeper on the dancefloors. Maybe Mang was falling off? Then I realized I always have at least three of his 12"s in my bag and that we're still fighting two wars circa 2010.

betape

Very buried in tapes to be transcribed. Stacked next to the machine right now are my recent chats with:

High Places
DJ Harvey
Moon Duo
Bob Blank
Danny Perez
Flying Lotus
and
Jamie Lidell

As if I already wasn't horrified by the sound of my own speaking voice...

heep see (feb)

"We believe in the importance of what we have just said or written, if for no other reason than that it is impossible to take back the sounds or erase the marks, but the temptation to be silent pervades our body, the fascination of silence, to be silent and immobile like the gods, watching and nothing more."
Jose Saramago: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

"I haven't got an America I can go away to like you. Over here we've lost all sense of where we're going. If we draw any comparisons, it's with the past. And we've given up wanting anything, except perhaps to be children again. We're always talking about the first years, our own first years and the first years of our history."
Peter Handke: Short Letter, Long Farewell

"His interest in her grew despite the things she said and he continued to find her very exciting. Had any other girl been so affected, he would have thought her intolerable. Faye' affectations, however, were so completely artificial that he found them charming. Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed...While she often recognized a the falseness of an attitude, she persisted in it because she didn't know how to be simpler or more honest. She was an actress who learned from bad models in a bad school."
Nathaniel West: The Day of the Locust

Joanna

Since Drag City has finally let my captive family go free, I can now state on the internet that I listened to the new Joanna Newsom record and wrote about it here. Now, can I break free from its charms and seeming endlessness? is a whole other question.

betart

Through a confluence of events (like being out of holiday debt), I've had some sweet art pieces enter the house recently. The first is this art print from the Animal Collective Crack Box set from last year, an eye-popping piece of work from illustrator Jon Vermilyea. The box set, lovingly rendered by the Catsup Plate imprint and quite astounding, still never quite did the art justice, so it's nice to have this one up in all of its glory. And unbelievably (considering the Animal Collective fan base), a few of these beauties remain.

Another piece that I recently acquired is an edition of a 1970 collage from Swedish pop artist Öyvind Fahlström. Ever since happening upon Fahlström's work at the Centre Pompidou in 2000 and at a massive MACBA retrospective later on in my European travles, I've been obsessed with the man's playful/ serious works, be they comic book cut-ups (from Marvel to R. Crumb) or a game board unpacking the CIA meddling in Southern Cone politics or head-swimming India ink paintings. A truly under-appreciated artist.

 

Perhaps the piece I'm most proud of is this painting by one of my oldest and dearest friends. It somehow combines a disco dancefloor stratosphere with DJ booth and religious icon imagery (the chalice) while executing the work with a color theory (about how CMYK reproduction reduces a truly billion color life experience to only three hues) that totally works. It's an honor to be able to have this piece in the home.

DMCA beta

 

"Was it something I said?"

For some reason, a warning appeared in my email that a two year-old beta blog post had "offending content" and was promptly removed from the web. Still can't figure out what the problem is, but I hope it's this quote from an interview with Miles Davis from 1968, which remains my favorite film criticism ever:

I have a funny feeling all day after I've seen a movie with the same white problems. You know, full of girls with long hair and where everybody's having a lot of fun...you have white people dancing and having a good time, and they don't show any Negroes or what negro feelings are, or any Chinese people, just white girls dancing, with their hair going and going...I figure if the white people keep on showing us their problems on television like they're doing, then we will be able to tell their problems by their facial expressions pretty soon, 'cause they're running out.

And figure I should follow it up with a quote from painter David Hockney, also about the movies (though perhaps less offensive?):

The idea that outer space is over there and we're not part of it is silly. We're already journeying throughout the universe. It's like how I can never get into space movies, because they always seem to me to be about transport and nothing else.

Vince Aletti Talk Tonight

Discophiles, blonde models, and cokeheads, unite!
Saturday evening, I'll be chatting with former Voice critic and New Yorker writer Vince Aletti about his crucial tome The Disco Files1973-1978: New York's Underground, Week by Week (which I unpacked here) and the history of disco as part of the ongoing Unsound Festival. It starts at 6:30 and is at the Wyoming Building (5 East 3rd St.).

Yeasayer Interview

So I recently had a feature on Yeasayer appear on the magazine racks, only to realize that Anand Wilder and Ira Wolf Tuton roles were swapped in my piece. Ooooft. My apologies to Mr. Wilder for the mix-up.
Anyhow, back on a sleety gray day, I climbed into Yeasayer's tour van and chatted with them about a then-recent, woefully argued New York Magazine (non)think piece about how everybody wants to be like Dave Longstreth and why articles about Brooklyn's music scene always miss what truly ties bands like Animal Collective, DP, Yeasayer, MGMT, et al. together. Not that we figured it out either, but so it goes...
You guys had a similar experience, did you not, getting grouped into some bigger Zeitgeist piece about “Brooklyn” for the NY Times, trying to tie it all together. 

Chris: It was Dragons of Zynth, Dirty Projectors, us, MGMT.

So what is the fallacy in grouping everyone together? What is the perceived connection versus the true connection?

Chris: No one has done it eloquently, unfortunately. They are talking about music being made in the same place by people who they perceive as being a giant group of buddies. But it’s never like: “These are the sonic elements or these are the aesthetics that tie these things together.” It’s vague homilies thrown around, but nothing concrete.

It’s always grouped by the most tactile thing critics can grab onto: records, but nothing beyond that.

Ira: That’s just the bane of music-writing. Music-writing has to put this collective together and create this movement. It makes it more interesting to read about.
Chris: It’s not inaccurate because all those people are friendly. But it’s not like we’re of the same mindset when it comes to making stuff. Or perhaps we are and we just don’t know. Maybe that’s up to some writer for them to sum up.

What logically connects everyone then?

Chris: All those people, depending on who we are talking about... it’s at an interesting point in time where you have these musicians who are equally interested in pop hits as they are in really left field stuff. I bet on all those peoples iPods you would find the new Beyoncé single and then…the Suicide record.

Or Ethiopiques.

Chris: Yeah. I think that is mostly because of the way that information is getting around these days. So everyone is embracing pop structure but also trying to shake it up a little bit and do their own thing in their own way and not have any pressure to conform. Obviously, Dirty Projectors don’t have any pressure to conform or fit in or write a hit. They just happen to have catchy parts because they’re amazing songwriters. They don’t have a major pressuring them. Grizzly Bear have Motown style songs, but no one is telling them how to do it.
Ira: I also think that although a lot of people in the music industry perceive that they’re going through “this transition” I think for all of us, the transition has already happened. We started to exist professionally with very different expectations and different understandings of the way our music is going to get out into the ether. We’re reliant on the internet and blogs (all these bands are) but it’s not so much geared towards major record sales.
Chris: (to me) What do you think is a unifying theme to these bands? You think there is one?

For me it’s the omnivorous appetite of listening.

Chris: I’d agree with that.

I was recently in Finland and I found that the bands I was hearing were really only listening to other indie rock bands, which is one stage removed. Whereas I think the most successful and striking bands here don’t necessarily listen to other bands but rather diverse things: African music, dancehall, hip-hop, disco, weird stuff. They’re not listening to what Pitchfork is trumpeting.

Ira: A lot of these bands are still trying to maintain pop sensibilities in some way. I see it as people trying to create a new pop lexicon, no matter how much they sound alike. Being inundated with sources and trying to make sense of it now. There’s a new jump-off point.

There’s a collage aspect as well. Your saturation level is so high that you just grab at whatever is closest at hand and reconstitute it through your own set of lenses.

Chris: It’s internet culture of music. That is the driving technological force. The iPod dictates the music, just as the electric guitar did, or the drumkit did for other generations. If you’re really trying to make music and engage in a dialogue with technology, which I think music always has –whether its turntables or synthesizers or multi-tracking—now we’re dealing with the technology of the internet and MySpace and the iPod shuffle. The longform record-making album is still cool but it's an antiquated art form. I think of the two-hour film at the cinema is antiquated as well, but I still want to do it. The way technology informs music is huge. We’re witnessing over the last decade crazy technological advances that shape a lot of the music.

In terms of you approaching the pop lexicon then, how do you think of it?

Chris: I can get super-psyched about a Fabolous song (sings one) and think that’s a great melody but I don’t necessarily want to make hip-hop. But then I can relate that Fabolous melody to a weird melody in a dancehall song (a Mavado song) and then take it even further and relate it to weird 60s stuff like the Zombies and it’s based on that sort of idea. When we’re recording music, we’re listening to almost anything. “Put on James Taylor!” “Oh, no!” “But I like it.” And then put on this, put on Chaka Khan. It’s about all that culture coming to an apex and how can you put it together.

Ira: There’s a lot of music today, especially dancehall and R&B, there’s some real forward production. There’s this Ne-Yo thing, where is voiceover is whatever, but the production is very forward thinking. The same with dancehall stuff that’s going on right now. Those forms of music get written off as not as progressive whereas what we’re doing gets written as being really progressive just because we’re supposed to just be white guys banging on guitars. What people hear when they hear us…the genre-fication of dancehall.

It’s tough to keep up and keep processing that stuff.

Ira: I find those sources and those production techniques, those genres are really embracing what we were discussing earlier, the advances of recording techniques and exploring electronic tones and accepting the digitalization of music.

Chris: They don’t play with song structure as much as we do, although we get mis-labeled as being more proggy than we actually are. Underneath all the bullshit, we’re still verse-chorus verse-chorus.

Ira: I took the “prog” label that our songs should be shorter.

Chris: We’re not in 7/4.

What changed in your approach to making Odd Blood?

Ira: That’s what it was. Making everything more concise and shorter. Making our transitions tighter, tightening up our arrangements, having our tones be more pointed.

Chris: Listening to different stuff and wanting to explore more territory. We were thinking about it. Wow, Tusk. Everyone was listening to that record. A lot of chimeringue stuff, African stuff. Nigeria! Zimbabwe! South African psychedelia. And then the early 2000s stuff, band after band after band that was ripping off Joy Division. Anglophile 70s obsessiveness. We went “Kinda want to write some pretty music now.” That was cool, but we want harmonies. I remember seeing Grizzly Bear and loving their harmonies. DP and the way Dave’s playing guitars. Or seeing SpankRock and loving his beats and his performance. We still felt like we could occupy some niche.

Ira: We recorded that first album waaaaay before it first came out.

Chris: Todd P. wasn’t booking us. It wasn’t like noisy rock for warehouse spots. Dan Deacon didn’t like us, so we couldn’t play warehouse shows in Baltimore. We had nowhere to play. We can’t keep playing Death by Audio. Because they never asked us. No one was beating on our door. On the new record, we were finding new things to be excited about and didn’t need to harp on the same ideas. A lot of bands perfect their thing. On the new record, I thought about my favorite stuff: trip-hop, DJ Shadow, Portishead, dancehall, Vybez Cartel. Let’s get excited again and still do pop and singing and push every sound into a weird direction.

Ira: We’d get the same questions about influences and say: Cyndi Lauper, Black Moon. Just embracing the short form.

Lyrically, what were you thinking about?

Chris: “Ambling Alp” is about a boxer. It’s a jock jam, machismo 40s boxing culture. My grandfather was a boxer and I was intrigued by boxing names. I’d watch documentaries about Joe Louis, historical champions. One song is about Ira being annoyed by family reunions. It’s about uncomfortable social context, intersocial politics thrown into a jarring beat. We made more of a body record. We wanted to activate subs. It’ll bang the shit out of subs in your car. Let’s run everything through a sub-generator. Let’s put more bass!

Ira: I was so psyched when I took home our first master. My stereo works well, but every time, it couldn’t get past the first bass drop. It’d just start skipping.

Chris: The first song is about ‘shadow life,’ a scientific theory about life that is evolving that is totally foreign to how we understand life to evolve on earth, with oxygen and water. There’s life they found in arsenic pools, weird bacteria in poisonous lakes. Or The Brood. A lot of stuff is influenced by movies.

Did you see Where the Wild Things Are?

Chris: I didn’t like it. I thought the soundtrack was horrendous, painful. It was like walking into Urban Outfitters. It was beautifully shot. I was bored. I thought it was adventurous, but it was numbingly childlike. I was surprised they let him make that. That was the first time I went to an auteur vision and thought “Maybe the studio should’ve stepped in.”

What would Odd Blood be as a movie?

Chris: It’d be the sequel to Blade Runner.

Really? It seems brighter than that.

Ira: Rutger Hauer is dead.

Chris: And Harrison Ford lives happily ever after with Sean Young! Sounds bright to me.

True. How different is the studio experience this time around? 

Ira: It was very different.

Chris: The first was in my basement, moldy and gross. This time we recorded in upstate New York, rented a house and just built a temporary studio. The Black Crowes were doing around the corner from us. Beach House recorded up there. The house belonged to the drummer for Peter Gabriel. He was also the drummer for Tears for Fears.

Ira: We just kept discovering gold and platinum records throughout the house.

Chris: In the basement he had all his old 70s-80s gears, great Prophecy synths, all his drums and mics.

Is it more live?

Chris: We’re always post. Play and jam it out. Tweak and decay that shit. 

Ira: Pile it up and strip it away.

Chris: It's like...you're building a house and knocking it down over and over again until it's the right house. Maybe that's a problem?

tim sweeney interview

As WNYU's Beats in Space program neared its 500th episode, I got the chance to hang out with Tim Sweeney a few nights, once when Neurotic Drum Band spun a set (in-between showing me photos of their kids on their iPhones) and again when the legendary Juan Atkins was in the studio (he didn't show me his mobile device). In-between, we chatted at a Japanese restaurant about a few things, including the self-perpetuating ghost of New York nightlife around the world and how he chose the name for his influential radio show:

So Tim, tell me about New York nightlife.

Whenever I travel, wherever I go, people ask about New York nightlife scene. "The legendary nightlife." Where they should go? What clubs? I’m always telling them the same thing: your city has more going on than ours does.

Is it odd to you, that NYC is in that state?

Yeah. It feels so weird. When people are asking me, it’s because there’s a lot of music stuff going on, but club life is not here. People really do have their impression of what New York is, what it looks like. They’ve already seen it from TV. They are expecting Paradise Garage or Twilo or some huge amazing parties. And they get here and they can’t find it.

Did you get your chops from DJing in bars? Or more from the radio show?

That’s how I met the DFA guys, I was doing nights at Plant Bar every week in the early 2000s. I did my own party at APT every Friday. Once I started getting more gigs abroad, now I focus on that. I would like to play here, but I don’t know where to play now. I’ve been trying to think of where to do my tenth anniversary party. I’ve planned it everywhere else but here in New York, I don’t know. Nothing feels perfect.

What made you want to DJ?

I learned to DJ back in high school. My older brother got me into it. He was three years older and started listening to electronic music.

Who struck you the most?

Probably Aphex Twin, early Warp, those Artificial Intelligence compilations on Warp, the Black Dog Bytes album. I can still listen to that. Those were gateways.

I went to NYU to study music, I was a music technology major. The show was right away. I had actually between 10^th-11^th grade, I came to NYC one summer and ended up DJing on WNYU and knew about it, how it worked. After that, when I knew I was going there, I emailed the DJ station and asked to start a show. It’s all student-run, so it takes awhile, but I got the show running right away. When I started, it was 800 AM, it basically only broadcasted to the dormitories.

Was Beats in Space the original name?

Yeah. I would probably change it now. I was into space (laughs).

I think of the Muppets.

I think that’s a better story.

Print the myth.

Just print the myth. That sounds better that way. Now it’s ten years, so there’s no changing it.

What was your vision of BiS when you started?

It was basically the same thing. I had a lot less guests. Even now, people don’t really hang out there. Mostly it’s just me in there. Now I have an intern, so it’s a little different. It’s always been this place for me to go and do my thing, by myself and just play music and hopefully have people like it. And then have guests on the show.

Who was your first guest?

My first guest was DJ Food from Ninja Tune. I saw they were playing NYC and I emailed the label and I say: “Hey, I do a radio show on a New York station. Do you want to come in and be a guest?” There’s really no other radio station in the US that is so free-form in that regard. Most people are up for it. We don’t subscribe to Arbitron so I never know how many listeners there are. It’s always amazing to get calls from taxi drivers, people in prison, Morgan Geist. I love the live radio aspect of it but the response is way bigger online around the world, with people listening, that it is in New York. More people listen online than live. On the BBC, there are shows that have that kind of audience listening live, but not here.

Do you have a model in mind for the show?

I admire Electrified Mojo in Detroit. You’re not limited soundwise. It is a person behind it and he plays whatever he wants, turning people onto what you’re into. It can be weird or more mainstream, you’re just pushing good music. When I worked for Steinski, he had tapes of shows on WFMU. He spent hours putting together these radio shows, cut’n’paste style. It was really interesting just listening to these tapes. He had an early answering machine and would give out the number and have people call in to leave their answers.

What did your old Plant Bar/ BiS sets used to consist of?

I used to play a lot of trip-hop. And one day Luke said, “oh, you should meet our producer. We call him Trip-hop Tim.” Tim Goldsworthy. I was a big fan of Mo’ Wax and UNKLE so I knew Tim’s work well. And one night meeting Tim and I just said I was a big fan and asked if they needed help in the studio. Tim just said “yeah.” Galkin hadn’t even officially started there yet. Those first two records, the Le Tigre remix. I convinced James to play some bassline on “Losing My Edge.” That’s my claim to fame.

As the show grew, when did it reach a tipping point for you? When did it feel big?

The time I felt most like “wow, people are out there” was when I premiered this Carl Craig remix for DFA on the show and no one had heard it. I talked over it and the response was so crazy. People were making mp3s of it even with talking over it.

Election night was great. Doug Lee and Justin Vandervolgen and Lovefingers came in. All three of them were super-wasted, all coming from a celebratory tequila party. Luckily, they recorded their mix beforehand. Live, it would’ve been a disaster. We were doing a play-by-play, checking the exit polls and we would put on the mic and start cheering. It was really fun.

Brennan Green and Mike Simonetti have been on the show the most. Lovefingers is up there, Horse Meat Disco, Optimo, all those guys have been on multiple times.

Who are you dying to get on the show?

A lot of the Detroit guys; they’re always so tough. Juan Atkins I hope will happen. I’d love to get Jeff Mills to do an old-school set, I’d love to get Derrick May on. At some point, I’d like to have David Mancuso on. For him I would do it there, but I don’t like doing live shows. I had DJ Nori on with an excerpt from his 30-hour mix. I want it to be special for the radio. I want guests to have the radio show in their mind when they do the mix, because it changes the trajectory; it’s not for a club. But the Loft is amazing. How people dance there, it’s amazing. Seeing people expressing themselves like that, so appreciative of the music…it’s amazing. When you see that, you get a glimpse of what New York was once like.

Did you ever think you’d get to 500 shows?

I loved doing radio from the beginning. I didn’t see myself stopping once school was over. One way or another, I was going to keep doing radio. I like doing it. There’s always a little bit of tension, as it is a student-run station. I still have to take continuing education classes to be a student. I pay to do the radio show. My fourth degree is going really well, coming up on the fifth one. 

But there aren’t many options out there. There’s WFMU, you have to start out on the Sunday night graveyard for six months and then maybe they give you something. But you aren’t set there either. WNYU is that really works for me. If I get kicked off, I don’t know what I’d do. I can do it online, but I like being in New York doing a live radio show. The idea that a guy in a taxi or someone from Riker’s Island is going to call you up exhilarates. 

balboata

"In America, hardly anybody goes walking. They drive around in cars or they sit outside the house in rocking chairs. If you go walking in the country, people look at you." So speaks one of Peter Handke's characters in Short Letter, Long Farewell, a book I have tucked into my bag as we walk around San Diego in one of the few instances of sun. San Diego feels strangely halted in its architecture, especially around North Park. All the buildings could serve as backdrop for Back to the Future. Being a pedestrian becomes a running joke as well (er, walking joke), as cars never look for you crossing and you meet no one on the sidewalks.

We do take a car for a trip to Balboa Park and its Old Cactus Garden. There's already been a year's worth of rain in one afternoon, and the cacti respond with big alien blooms. Bulbous-trunked trees that sharpen to a point fifty feet up; tall, twisted gangly things with Phyllis Diller fronds, all orange and gold; blue flowers and stubby cacti. It makes perfect sense when a friend informs us that this is the region that Dr. Seuss grew up in. Suddenly, those uncanny landscapes of his seem not otherworldly at all, but rather, the markers of home. Sun on us, the moment conjures another quote from the Handke book, wherein the unnamed narrator suddenly tracks down famed western director John Ford.

"When the sun shines through and plays in the leaves, I forget that," said John Ford. "I also forget myself and my existence. Then I wish that nothing would ever change, that the leaves would go on moving forever, that the oranges would never be picked and everything would stay just the way it is."

betablical

Since I found myself within spitting distance of the Museum of Creation and Earth History in San Diego the weekend that the Chargers lost to the Jets and the entire city of San Diego collectively wept as rain began to fall, it became a running joke to say that "Baby Jesus is crying because LT and the Chargers lost." Local newscasts didn't take entirely different routes from such conclusions (making me realize that Will Ferrell's turn in Anchorman wasn't quite fiction either).

For almost the entire duration of my California stay, that "Baby Jesus" joke came back to haunt me tenfold, as another iteration of "El Niño" dumped rain, hail, mudslides, thunder, and tornado warnings on my head for over a week. And even when I ducked into museums or burger joints, I got confronted by the Bible. A delicious bite of an In-n-Out burger reveals a Revelations citation, a slurp of a chocolate shake gets me some Proverbs.

Head to the Hammer Museum and there's an exhibit of all of R. Crumb's original drawing for his recent Genesis Illustrated book lining the gallery walls. As a failed Catholic, I can't say that I know the Old Testament all that well. And as one tour guide put it to a group of septuagenarians tongue-clucking to these panels: "Most churchgoers might be able to hum a few bars, but few know the whole song."

In the exhibit's introduction, Crumb's perceives that when the church began to consolidate the myriad stories that make up the "Good Book," an agenda of patriarchy erased any notions of matriarchal society. It's not hard for me to believe that at one point in such creationist myths, it would've made a lot more sense for the woman figure to be molded first, to have the man emerge from her. Since that's how the story goes thousands of times each and every day.

If the Crumb book revealed anything, it's how contorted and disturbing the first books actually are. Count at least two instances of husbands passing off their wives as sisters so that they can marry richer pharaohs (and unleash God's plagues upon them). But there's also a sequence wherein two daughters of Abraham get him drunk on consecutive nights so as to impregnate themselves. So where is the museum for that?

RIP

Rough couple of days all around:

Robert Charles Guidry a/k/a Bobby Charles

(February 21, 1938 – January 14, 2010)

Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr. a/k/a Jay Reatard

(May 1, 1980 – January 13, 2010)

Vivian Jackson a/k/a Yabby You a/k/a Jesus Dread

(August, 14 1946 – January 12, 2010)

Theodore DeReese "Teddy" Pendergrass

(March 26, 1950—January 13, 2010)

post no beta

I got smashed in the head by one of these construction barricade walls while walking home on Friday afternoon. Ambulance ride, emergency room visit, calls to attorneys, brain hurting...

2010

Things I'm already enjoying in the new decade:

Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté: Ali and Toumani
Beach House: Teen Dream
Lindstrøm & Christabelle: Real Life Is No Cool
Hot Chip: "One Life Stand" (single, not the album)
Prins Thomas: s/t
Four Tet: There is Love in You
Nneka: Concrete Jungle
The Crystal Ark: "The City Never Sleeps"
Yeasayer: Odd Blood
Bison (supergroup featuring Holger Czukay and Paul 'Mudd' Murphy): "Way to LA"
Peter Gordon and Love of Live Orchestra: "Beginning of the Heartbreak"

P(B)&J Ballot for 2009

Didn't there used to be automated emails sending your Pazz & Jop ballot back your way? Which was helpful, as I almost instantly forget what my list is, infusing it with "Oh shit! I forgot to mention that track!" outbursts right after I click 'Submit.' Anyway, here's what made it, and what I loved/ played to death but didn't place...

2009 ALBUMS:

1. Animal Collective/ Merriweather Post Pavilion/ Domino
2. Meanderthals/ Desire Lines/ Smalltown Supersound
3. Mulatu Astatke & the Heliocentrics/ Inspiration Information/ Strut
4. Dr. Dunks a/k/a Eric Duncan/ How We Do in NYC/ aNYthing
5. Dirty Projectors/ Bitte Orca/ Domino
6. James Blackshaw/ The Glass Bead Game/ Young God
7. Fever Ray/ Fever Ray/ Mute
8. Ernst Reijseger/ Tell Me Anything/ Winter & Winter
9. Phoenix/ Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix/ Glass Note
10. Death/...For the Whole World to See/ Drag City

2009 SINGLES:

1. Animal Collective, "My Girls"
2. House of House, "Rushing to Paradise (Walkin' These Streets)"
3. Culoe de Song, "The Bright Forest"
4. DJ Kaos, "Love the Night Away (Tiedye Mix)"
5. Dirty Projectors, "Stillness Is the Move"
6. Walter Jones, "I'll Keep on Loving You"
7. Horse Meat Disco, "Eyeko Syko"
8. Jenny Wilson, "The Wooden Chair (Peter Visti Mix)"
9. Song of Sound, "Life Under Bridges"
10. Mendes &Alcada, "Coaster (Idjust Boys Version 2)"

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Group Bombino "Boghassa"; Linkwood Family: "Piece of Mind"; Junkie XL "Cosmic Rave"; Still Going "Untitled Love"; Permanent Vacation "Zucker Hut"; Prins Thomas "Mammut"; Jackpot "Brief Encounter"; Ray Mang "Tattoo Me"; C.O.M.B.I. "P.G.B."; Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas "Tirsdagsjam"; Moxie "Moxie Heart MJ"; The Sexican "Liza"; Capracara "King of the Witches (Rub-n-Tug mix)"; Gerrie van Noord "White Room (BB edit)"; A Mountain of One "Bones (Thomas' Way of the Ancients mix)"; Sandra Nnaké "La Mauvaise Réputation (Blackjoy Instrumental Mix)"; Noir Desir "Le Vent Nous Portera (Rubber Room Rerub)"; Beautiful Swimmers "O Yea"; Soft Rocks "Back to My Roots"; Abel "Round in Circles"

Coati Mundi interview

This fall, I went out west to have some doughnuts and a Styrofoam cup of Orange Bang and hang with Andy Hernandez, a/k/a Coati Mundi, the man who had a hand in such bands as Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. After bowing out of the biz for twenty plus years, he's back, dropping a fun single earlier this year and prepping an album for release on Rong Music early next year. I wrote a feature on the man entitled "It Came From Spanish Harlem." Here are a few more bon mots:

On his performance at PS1:
It was for an older crowd that knows my history. It’s performance art. In another age, the 40s-60s, it was all part of the performance: singing, dancing, music. Louis Jordan and James Brown and all that, you had the music, but it was a package. The music is together, then you can do the other stuff. It doesn’t become a substitute, it adds to it. That’s how it was with Kid Creole, but before us, it was LJ, JB, all these people.

Back to that show at PS1, it was clubgoer kinds of kids. What I told my posse is we’re gonna ignore the audience, we’re just gonna be another piece in the museum. Like people watch art. Sculptures don’t change because people looking at it. Either they like it or they don’t. At least, they’ll appreciate it. At least you put something forth.


Theatricality:
One thing about me, I was always theatrical. If you look at those guys from the 40s, all those great musicians had a lot of theater to them. We were part of that, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, we kept that in. I was always a ham, which came from me just trying to entertain my aunts and uncles. I could never just do something simple. I could never just play the instrument. I could never keep still. If I played a note, I had to dance to that note, I had to make a face. I couldn’t just play the music. I wanted to show off.

Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band:
I was in my early 20s. I was coming out of being a social worker, up in Spanish Harlem, 122nd St. and that whole area. I don’t remember us thinking of vision. We just came together and everybody was into something. Stony and August, the brothers, they were just into a certain style. I don’t remember any of us saying “This is the vision.” It just came together.

We came together as a friend said these guys were looking for a piano player. My main instrument was vibes. Back in the day, few bands were using vibes. My guy was Cal Tjader, latin-jazz, one of my main influences. Cal Tjader was just a classic player. Lionel Hampton is the number one guy. Milt Jackson, and then Cal Tjader. With the piano, I couldn’t get work playing vibes. In order to keep getting gigs, I taught myself piano.

These guys were starting Savannah Band. And I auditioned with a lot of piano players, all better than me, but I had a sense of humor with it. I was willing to do anything on piano, not just stick with the basics. And they were dressed in these antique 1940s clothes they picked up in thrift shops and I dug it. I was with the program and I played enough piano to interpret their music and get it out there. I didn’t have to be McCoy Tyner. We were just kids in our 20s, from the Bronx in Spanish Harlem.

We became a very successful band. We were living high off the hog or whatever the phrase was. Like a lot of successful rock bands, we went bankrupt. August and then decided to do projects together. So I came along as his musical director and arranger and formed Kid Creole and the Coconuts. It was sad at the end, we were still in our twenties and had a taste of success. It was tough psychologically. How can you go back to square one and start all over again? In my case, my sister supported me and took me in and got me back on track, got me out of my depression.

Kid Creole & the Coconuts never having US success:
We never felt that successful. If you can’t make it in your hometown…we would go on tour: France and Japan and play in front of thousands and thousands of people and then come back to my little apartment in Spanish Harlem and it was like a dream. You’d come back and there’s nothing. What is so difficult about it that we can’t get over in the US. We had a good product and we were entertaining. The music wasn’t ‘pop’ Top 40, but it wasn’t that inaccessible. We weren’t from Mars! It was tough and it was tiring. Eventually it got to me after ten years. It was too much.

Did you and August part amicably?

Not at the beginning. No we didn’t. We’re okay now. When you’re younger, you’re more energetic on not liking somebody. The spiritual part of life doesn’t kick in that soon. We’re cool now, but not back then. That’s the way it happens.

On acting:
I had been doing acting on and off in New York and LA. It came during the band. What happened was…I never planned any of it, the band, the acting. So with the acting thing…The producer for Miami Vice saw me playing in Savannah Band and saw how animated I was. He wanted me in Easy Money with Rodney Dangerfield, but I was going off on tour. So he got this Miami Vice thing and he told the casting person to get a hold of me. My first professional thing was Miami Vice, an episode with Bruce Willis. I played a part of a gun-running mob and Bruce Willis was my boss. It was a lot of fun. I had a great time. I wound up doing a few episodes as different characters. They always called me “The Ghost” because they would kill me off and bring me back as another character. That’s how I got into it. I came out to LA because I had family out here and NYC was getting expensive to live in. It was colder. I just got to change it up. I go to NYC cuz it’s still my town.

Any other acting parts?

Who’s That Girl? was the most popular acting thing. Since then, I’ve done little bits and pieces for a lot of different things. Independent films, We Own the Night with Joaquin Phoenix. Choreography for an episode of Heroes.

The new record, Coati Mundi is Dancing for the Cabama Code in the Land of Boo-Hoo:
This new record was really an accident. One of my best friend’s was a singer and his niece married my co-producer, E-Love. He was a big fan of Savannah Band and Kid Creole. He wanted to write with me. I wasn’t really interested in doing a record, but we got together on our spare time. It took a few years, but we were just getting together and doing songs. A guy named Doug Lee was a friend of Johnny’s and he passed it along to Rong.

It’s cool these cats were into my style. That was intriguing for me, cuz I didn’t think they’d be into it. I was into dance stuff, but not into computer-laden, without any personality, stuff. I would go to the clubs but after awhile it became linear to me, it lacked personality and I wouldn’t know one artist from the next. It didn’t mean anything. It was great productions, great sounds, great beats, but…so I sez to E, I want to put my personality into it. I want to attach my personality, my signature to this album. I’m gonna sing what I want to sing, even if it’s stupid things about a dog. No one is telling me what I’m gonna do. And he was with the program. We’ll see how it works out.

I’m just going with the flow. I try to keep it in balance. If this record never came out, I could care less. I’m an old cat. I’ve had a lot of records out. I’m not a twenty-year-old with my tongue hanging out. If it ain’t right, I couldn’t care less. I’m a bit ornery, old age does that to you. In my 20s, I’d give up my ass a lot. As I get older, the less of a whore I become. In a way, it feels great. I hate to put it this way, but I don’t give a fuck.

Beats in Space article

This week, in celebration of the 500th broadcast of New York underground dance music radio program Beats in Space, I wrote a feature about the show for the Voice. Read it here. The best part was getting to hang in the studio the night that Juan Atkins DJ'd, a true honor to meet the techno legend and watch his alchemy in the moment. Truly an honor. Congratulations, Tim! (Full interview with Sweeney to come in the new year.)

Beta's Favorite Albums of the Decade he's not really seeing elsewhere

Thankfully, I've skipped out on having to quantify and qualify the last ten years of my listening life in the last month or so. Yet in talking to one of my editors about such drudge work, he mentioned a few zealous colleagues who have been pondering such a list since last year! Perhaps I am just blessed to know people who have moved beyond the calendar year of 2002 or who think that Funeral is kinda grating?

Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy heaps of the albums that are getting numerical rankings and silver medallions and plaques this month. Instead, I'm just posting up here are a few of my favorite things from the last decade, some by artists barely known to me, others more-recognizable but represented here by a less-hailed though no less-affecting effort. Regard this as just a list of alphabetaized albums I really did spend a great deal of time listening to and unpacking beyond my role as a music fan/ consumer/ critic/ processor/ ponderer/ devourer. They have all outlived their media cycles and deadlines for me (though there is a ringer tucked in here) and almost all come off of the shelf for the sheer sake of listening to them again:

Tetuzi Akiyama- Don't Forget to Boogie (Idea) 2003
Oren Ambarchi- Grapes From the Estate (Touch) 2004
Animal Collective- Here Comes the Indian (Paw Tracks) 2003
Mulatu Astatke & Heliocentrics- Inspiration Information (Strut) 2009
William Basinski- The River (Raster-Noton) 2002

Anton Batagov- The Wheel of Law (Long Arms) 2002
Black Dice- Creature Comforts (DFA) 2004
James Blackshaw- The Glass Bead Game (Young God) 2009 
Blues Control- "Puff" (Woodsist) 2008
Bonnie "Prince" Billy- Lie Down in the Light (Drag City) 2008

Boredoms- Rebore Vol. 0 (WEA Japan) 2001
Brightblack Morning Light- s/t (Matador) 2006
Cam'Ron- Purple Haze (Roc-A-Fella) 2004
Jonathan Coleclough- Cake (Robot/ Siren) 2002
Toumani Diabaté- The Mande Variations (World Circuit) 2008

John Duncan- Phantom Broadcast (All Questions) 2002
Farben-Textstar (Klang Elektronik) 2002
The Fiery Furnaces- Gallowsbird's Bark (Rough Trade) 2003
Mannie Fresh- The Mind of Mannie Fresh (Cash Money) 2004
Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom- The Days of Mars (DFA) 2005

Double Leopards- Halve Maen (Eclipse) 2003
ES- Sateenkaarisuudelma (K-RAA-K/ Fonal) 2005
Peter Garland- Love Songs (Tzadik) 2005
Goldmund- Corduroy Road (Type) 2005
Group Bombino-Guitars From Agadez (Sublime Frequencies) 2009

DJ Harvey- Sarcastic Study Masters (Sarcastic) 2001
Florian Hecker- Sun Pandamonium (Mego) 2003
Tim Hecker- Harmony in Ultraviolet (Kranky) 2006
Bert Jansch- The Black Swan (Drag City) 2006
Johan Johannsson- Englaborn (Touch) 2002

Kaito- Special Love (Kompakt) 2003
Eyvind Kang- Live Low to the Earth, in the Iron Age (Abduction) 2002
Salif Keita & Kante Manfila- The Lost Album (White Sun) 2006
Lil Wayne- Tha Carter II (Cash Money) 2005
Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas- Reinterpretations (Eskimo) 2007

Loose Fur- Born Again in the USA (Drag City) 2006
Stephan Mathieu- The Sad Mac (Headz) 2004
Meanderthals- Desire Lines (Smalltown Supersound) 2009
Mirror- Visiting Star (Robot) 2000
Juana Molina- Un Dia (Domino) 2008

Mountains- s/t (apestaartje) 2005
Mu- Afro Finger and Gel (Tigersushi) 2003
Takeshi Nishimoto- Monologue (Büro) 2007
Aki Onda- Ancient & Modern (Phonomena) 2003
Optimo- Walkabout (Endless Flight) 2007

Jim O'Rourke- I'm Happy and I'm Singing and a 1,2, 3, 4 (Mego) 2001
Paul Panhuysen- A Magic Square of 5 (Plinkity Plonk) 2004
Phantom Slasher- Gruble (Noid) 2006
Princess Nicotine- Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar (Sublime Frequencies) 2004
Ernst Reijseger- Tell Me Everything (Winter & Winter) 2009

To Rococo Rot & I-Sound- Music is a Hungry Ghost (City Slang) 2001
Tonalamotl: Mo(ve)mentsum (Sedimental) 2003
Ricardo Villalobos- Achso (Cadenza) 2005
Robag Wruhme- Wuzzlebud KK (Musik Krause) 2004
Rub-N-Tug- Campfire (Eskimo) 2005

The Stolen Stars- An Anaphorian Dance Drama (AoA) 2003
Akio Suzuki- Odds and Ends (Hören) 2002
Vetiver- To Find Me Gone (de Cristina) 2006
Brendan Walls & Andrew Chalk- This Growing Clearing (Three Poplars) 2004
World Standard and Wechsel Garland- The Isle (Staubgold) 2004