Along with its fetching new face, Tiny Mix Tapes recently introduced a weekly debate feature in which writers drop a loaded question and readers respond with their two cents, the goal being to foster a public dialogue about music on the site itself. Editor Mr. P knows that Biomusicosophy’s Elliott Sharp and I always get all riled up whenever music and politics are mentioned in the same breath, so he asked us craft the magazine’s second debate question, which concerns last week’s exchange between The Guardian’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Chocolate Bobka’s McGregor on the politics of “blog rock,” or American lo-fi.
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Archive for February, 2010
Horizons: What, if any, are the political values of “lo-fi” indie music?
Monday, February 15th, 2010VR Vimeo: Pocahaunted, Live at Synchronicity Space in Los Angeles
Monday, February 15th, 2010
Pocahaunted- “UFO” – Live at Synchronicity, Feb 12, 2010 – Los Angeles, CA from Samantha Cornwell on Vimeo.
These days it seems like I can’t get through a weekend without going to a show at the intersection of Melrose and Heliotrope. This time around I was going to Synchronicity Space, an art gallery and DIY venue. The bill for the night included Pocahaunted and Moon Duo, two bands I was really excited to capture on tape.
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Reviews: Doing the Dishes with Rhys Chatham’s “The Bern Project”
Friday, February 12th, 2010
One of my all-time favorite Dave Hickey moments in when the rock star art critic describes his first encounter with Andy Warhol, over the course of a remembered “Underground Flick Nite” during his college years in Austin, TX. He and his leftist radical friends had gathered at the Y on the Drag in the hopes of watching burning cars and group sex, but when Warhol’s movie finally came on the big screen, they realized they were all in for a big snooze. What Warhol called “a movie” was in fact nothing but a stationary shot of a guy getting his hair cut: why, Hickey asked, where they sitting there nodding off to the “clip clip clip” of barber shears when people in Third World countries were starving and market capitalism was still waiting to be overthrown?
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VR Vimeo: Best Coast Sings a New Song, Turns over a New Leaf, at “No Cancer” Benefit in LA
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
“Far Away” – Best Coast, Feb 7, 2010 – “No Cancer” benefit – The Strange – Los Angeles, CA from Samantha Cornwell on Vimeo.
This past Sunday, I made my way over to the intersection of Melrose and Heliotrope, a punk pocket that is semi-officially known as the “Bicycle District” of Los Angles. I was there to check out the very first show at the brand new performance space known as The Strange (not to be confused with The Smell). The show was called “No Cancer” and was a benefit concert for a woman named Irene Garcia, presumably the mother of a friend of the organizers. The bill was stacked with a who’s who of LA-based lo-fi artists: No Age, Abe Vigoda, and Nodzzz to name a few. I, however, was there to see Best Coast, who just kicked off a tour of the West Coast with the Vivian Girls. With my video camera tucked under my arm, I headed to the show in the hope of making a live video to be eventually posted on Visitation Rites. I hadn’t ever made a live video before, but I figured there was no time like the present!
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Sightings: TMT Decade List Unveiled This Week
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
News flash! We are currently on Day Three of Tiny Mix Tape’s “Favorite 100 Albums of 2000-2009″ feature,” which editor Mr. P and his smurfs are unveiling in suspenseful little increments of 20 albums per day. I won’t post my own submission to the list here, but let me just say that recalling the albums that defined the earlier part of the last decade for me was one heck of a head-scratch down memory lane. There was a time, for instance, when my favorite thing to do on Friday afternoons was listen to Is This It? on repeat at my friend Antonia’s parents’ house and then walk past this storefront on East 7th Street where Julian and Fabrizio could invariably be spotted chomping on pizzas and playing Super Mario. Ah, youth!
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Sightings: “I” by Matt Anderson and David Black, Soundtrack by D.A.
Monday, February 8th, 2010
D.A. – I from OESB // FUTURE SOUND on Vimeo.
D.A. is a synth duo that formed in Texas (where they reportedly produced ambient music for isolation tanks), and recently relocated to Los Angeles. Their name stands for “Dallas Acid” on occasion, but is also the initials of the two bandmates, Michael Dials and Xian Aegon. Although not associated with or even really aware of the synth revival led by VR favorites like Emeralds and Infinity Window, they certainly fill an aesthetic gap within that like-minded group. Their sound is as much Southwestern as it is Sci-Fi and suggests landscapes and endless horizons, as opposed to the more introspective vision of Northeast operators or the stoned brain-fry of Midwestern basement rats.
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Sightings: Run DMT, “Bong Voyage” MP3 Release
Friday, February 5th, 2010
A dirty project.
Artism.
Baltimore, MD.
Bloglust.
Collage gradual.
Grape speed.
I should do a split with her.
If you’re interested in experiments with intersection.
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VR Vimeo: “Hail Fire” (La Otracina), by Video-Artist-in-Residence Samantha Cornwell
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
“Hail Fire” – La Otracina from Samantha Cornwell on Vimeo.
Cornwell on Cornwell (on La Otracina):
“When I was approached by La Otracina’s Adam Kriney about making a video, he very generously told me to pick any song I’d like to work with. Naturally, this made me feel like a kid in a candy store. I was attracted to the track “Hail Fire” because it had this really engrossing atmospheric quality that stood out to me. I also found that the song structure was kind of unusual, which I felt would present an interesting challenge in terms of editing.
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Portraits: Death Unit, Northampton Wools, Regression, Spykes, and Dog Lady at Coco66
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Death Unit at Coco66 in Greenpoint, January 29, 2010
At the midpoint of the last decade, it seemed possible that noise music was ready to reach an audience beyond a core group of hardcore scene aficionados, record collector nerds, other musicians, fringe Euro art enthusiasts, and Midwestern basement hangers-on. Wolf Eyes toured with Sonic Youth and released the epochal Burned Mind after signing with Sub Pop. Carlos Giffoni inaugurated his first No Fun Fest with a mind-boggling line-up of artists from all corners of the scene. Giffoni’s own No Fun Productions tracked the development of noise from 2005 onwards with a carefully curated selection of just over fifty releases in five years, a surprisingly lean number of offerings from a scene known for its sometimes comical prolificacy. Lightning Bolt was gaining some overground attention with a brand of hyper-charged punk that merged noise and thrash metal with the strong aesthetic appeal of the legendary Fort Thunder collective.
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