Todd Pendu’s massive gathering of underground musicians and artists, the NY Eye & Ear Fest, is preparing for its third installment at the newly christened Knitting Factory space in Williamsburg. Last year’s Eye and Ear Fest was held in July, and before that in December. Perhaps seeing a hole in the city’s calendar due to the dispiriting departure of the No Fun Fest, the event is set for May 22 and 23 and promises over 12 hours of music each day. But that’s only part of the attraction, which also includes a massive record fair with vendors and labels (including VR favorites like Abandon Ship and ESP Disk) selling the usual tapes and LPs alongside art prints, comics, zines and more.
It’s no small feat to keep the public’s interest over three consecutive large-scale events, although this particular festival’s audience tends to be less fickle and hype-oriented than your average Brooklyn indie rock enthusiast. Those with the stamina will be rewarded by what amounts to a nearly comprehensive overview of the current New York underground, including headlining performances from mainstays like Blank Dogs and Xeno & Oaklander along with a slew of up-and-coming acts like Effing and Hunters. One of NY Eye & Ear Fest’s greatest attractions is the sheer diversity of acts on display. No matter your taste for the subterreanean, they’ve got you covered, from dark disco – à la Pendu’s weekly dance parties at Glasslands – to sloppy, snotty rock and everything in-between.
The official NY Eye & Ear Fest site has done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting you acquainted with all the music on display, offering sound samples of every group and a mixtape for each day of the fest for your perusal. Visitation Rites will be on site for the entirety of the event and will have extensive coverage in the days following. This will be the premiere underground music event of the season in New York. Don’t miss it for the world.
NY Eye & Ear Fest takes place May 22 and 23 at the Knitting Factory, Brooklyn. Tickets are on-sale now for $17/day or $30/weekend pass (less than $1.00 a band!) For further information on Todd Pendu and background on the festival please see the interviewVR head honcho Emilie Friedlander conducted with Todd Pendu for Arthur Magazine last year. (more…)
When you churn out heartbreaking pop gems about as effortlessly as you pour your morning cereal, drowning each and every one of your creations in an electrical storm’s worth of static somehow feels like an act of humility. I can never tell exactly what Philadelphia’s Megan Remy is singing about in her songs — or whether she is singing as “Megan Remy,” or some other creature entirely — but I never fail to feel touched by the distance she inserts between us, as though I were listening to someone sing to me in Yodel language from the bottom of a desert canyon. In “Lunar Life,” the title track of the U.S. Girls 7″ that drops on Atelier Ciseaux on the 15th of this month, she stretches this distance as far as the moon, narrating a microscopic high school slow dance for the handful of organic molecules that reside there. I’m pretty sure she’s really singing for the lone microbe left crying outside in the parking lot — but given the sheer dimensions of the equation, she might as well be singing to us.
U.S. Girls, “Lunar Life” (Lunar Life 7 inch, Atelier Ciseaux)
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The sixth edition of Fingered Media’s biannual DVDzine sat pretty on my coffee table in its purple canvas pouch for a good two weeks before I got around to watching it — mostly because I knew that I couldn’t get away with letting it play in one window while juggling emails, Gchat, Facebook, and Twitter elsewhere. Having successfully set aside an hour or so yesterday evening to watch it from start to finish, I am reminded that devoting your complete an undivided attention to something — here, a spotlight on the art and music of a particular generation in a particular time and place — can leave you feeling much fuller than scattering your attention between one here and now and a hundred theres and thens, as people of this century are wont to do. Following previous sojourns into the cultural nether-regions of Los Angeles, Montreal, Mexico, and the Bay area (among other North American vicinities), videomaker Harrison Owen (and Fingered media main-man) turns his anthropological mind’s eye on Philadelphia, whisking us through galleries, DIY concert venues, image portfolios, and even the interior of one artist’s own home (Megan Remy of U.S. Girls).
Co-curated by artist Damien Weinkrantz, DVDZine #6 is much more show than tell. Rather than talk us through every step of the journey, Owen focuses on evocative combinations of sound and image — using a swampy electro-acoustic vignette by Mincemeat or Tenspeed, for example, as the “score” for a montage of fantastical monsters by Christopher Klein. Ultimately, this approach can only leave us with a sense of the extent to which the two seem to go hand in hand in this particular cross-section of the Philadelphia underground, with harsh noise and puffed-up cartoon satire swinging jubilantly on the same high voltage wire.
Those of us for whom Philadelphia represents nothing more than a destination on a MySpace calendar will get a sense of what it might actually be like to live and breathe and sweat inside this sweltering backyard neon fantasia. We hang with Megan Remy on her front porch as she reminisces about being paid $100 a night to cook dinner for a rich glassblower, then catch a glimpse of a Kung-Fu Necktie poster on the ground as she gives us a tour of her bedroom recording studio. We behold the slant of the light at a musty basement show, and marvel at how strangely familiar it all seems. What’s the use of meta-narratives, anyway? Philadephia feels so vivid here we can almost smell it through the screen. (more…)
I first became aware of Oakland’s Psychic Handbook (Alejandro Archuleta) back in early February. It was at a show at Synchronicity Space in Los Angeles, where I had ventured with the intention of shooting live videos of Moon Duo and Pocahaunted (which, at that time, featured Cameron Stallones of Sun Araw). This was only my second live video venture, so I was quite apprehensive and insisted on getting there very early. Naturally, none of the bands were even close to playing, and the only people around were myself, my boyfriend Matt, and the lovely people who run Synchronicity space. I set up my tripod in an empty corner near the stage, and waited for the music to commence. (more…)
One of the first times I met Universe’s Hunter John in the flesh, he generously volunteered to drive me and my bandmates to a gig we were playing on the other side of town. Because we couldn’t think of any better way to return the favor, we decided to pretend he was in the band so he could partake in the half-off steak dinner plus drink tickets offer that had had our mouths watering since we agreed to play the show. We got a little paranoid that the promoter wouldn’t believe us, so we asked Hunter to climb up on stage with a synthesizer and perform a continuous drone throughout the first song of our set — at the end of which I was unfortunately obliged to kick him in the shins, because the song had ended and he didn’t seem to notice.
Now that I’ve heard some of Hunter Johs’s records, I kind of wish that we had dropped out for a bit and let him drone on. Gazing, Gazing, his second MP3 lp, is sweeping and cavernous and varied enough to constitute an entire universe unto itself — albeit a half-synthetic one, built partly upon the human voice, partly upon the primeval technological prostheses of the drum machine and the analogue synth. Sure, synthesizer tomorrowlands are nothing new to this here universe; but what if we all closed our eyes and imagined we were hearing one for the first time? “I,” one of the album’s opening tracks, captures the blurry-eyed feeling of being born into the impossible silicon wonderland that Hunter has dreamed up, blinking against a line of 2-dimensional palm trees and watching them change from blue to magenta as they sway in the ambient bit-torrent. It is a birth in every sense of the word: the dawn of a new “I,” standing on the rubble (both physical and virtual) of all the “I”s that came before.
Universe, “I” (Gazing, Gazing)
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After months of meticulous astrological analysis and deep-space observation, our in-house Kaleidoscope experts have asked me to issue a public warning to all those residing in the greater New York area, Northern New Jersey, and Southern Connecticut. Due to a fortuitous shift in planetary alignment, we have every reason to believe that a vintage aerocar embossed with the words “Silver Apples” — and housing one of the world’s first musico-astro-pilots — will be performing an impromptu crash landing on the roof of Coco66 in Greenpoint on Sunday, May 16. To ensure that the craft arrives safely at its destination — and does not accidentally fall straight into the nearby Newtown Creek — we have asked some of our generation’s finest cosmonauts — Burning Star Core and Love Like Deloreans — to convene beforehand and project some inviting improvisatory soundwaves into the stratosphere. DJs Frank (Keepaway) and Bryce (Behavior, 45sON33) will be injecting some slow and screwy dynamism in the gaps, and Wierd Records‘ very own DJ Frankie Teardrop will be hosting his Exotic Birds party in the front room. If you have never witnessed a New York City rooftop landing before, please be sure to dress appropriately. Full details on the poster below.* (more…)
Every day can’t be Hannukah. For pretty much the entirety of this colossal Underwater Visitations episode — 3 hours long, and with an in-studio by Ducktails to boot — the “Visitations” part of the equation was just a few blocks away, trapped inside a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that involved being unfairly compensated by taxpayer dollars to sharpen some pencils and fill out my name and address on about fifteen identical forms. Luckily, I managed to convince one of my superiors to let me slip out for a bit, and I rolled up in just in time to hear Matt Mondanile layer multicolored streamers of sound over the most lovely of bongo polyrhythms — not to mention throw in one of his signature 90’s cover jams, this time from the Slanted and Enchanted era. Among parts of the episode that I MISSED, DJ Bryce Hackford of Behavior slow schooled his way through his impressive collection of “tropical” vinyl, Real Estate’s Etienne Pierre Duguay swung by with some friends to talk about the Market Hotel Project, and DJ Ari — the “Underwater” side of UV — unearthed a common musical lineage in Bruce Springsteen, ESG, and Steve Reich. Maybe not Hannuka, but definitely a full house.
“Underwater Visitations Episode #2: The Ducktails Episode, with DJ Bryce Hackford and Some Visitors from Market Hotel”
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Todd Pendu’s massive gathering of underground musicians and artists, the NY Eye & Ear Fest, is preparing for its third installment at the newly christened Knitting Factory space in Williamsburg. Last year’s Eye and Ear Fest was held in July, and before that in December. Perhaps seeing a hole in the city’s calendar due to the dispiriting departure of the No Fun Fest, the event is set for May 22 and 23 and promises over 12 hours of music each day. But that’s only part of the attraction, which also includes a massive record fair with vendors and labels (including VR favorites like Abandon Ship and ESP Disk) selling the usual tapes and LPs alongside art prints, comics, zines and more.
