Meg Baird is a singer-songwriter who first rose to prominence as part of storied psych-folk outfit Espers, a Philadelphia collective whose three full-lengths crystallized the sound of the more somber and sonically kaleidoscopic elements of the mid-aughts “Freak Folk” scene. Between Espers’ second and third records, Baird released Dear Companion, an understated but deeply affecting solo record consisting primarily of covers and traditional songs. Those who fell immediately under Meg’s spell had to wait an excruciating four years for the follow-up, Seasons on Earth, which arrived on Drag City this Fall. Some songs find Baird joined, variously, by Marc Orleans, Steve Gunn, and Chris Forsyth on guitar. The focus on originals and the inclusion of other musicians expand the sound ever so slightly, though it’s still grounded in Meg’s signature playing style and voice. I spoke with Meg just before she played a show to celebrate the release at Brooklyn’s Union Pool.

VR: Your first solo LP, Dear Companion, was just your voice and guitar. What was the impetus to bring in additional players for this record?

Meg: It happened pretty organically. It was all people that I knew and it was like, “Oh, we should play together,” and then just following through. I didn’t know Marc [Orleans] too well at first but I’ve gotten to know him through D.Charles Speer & The Helix. Steve [Gunn], he actually lived in Philly, so I’ve known him for a long time.

VR: Have the original songs on the album been kicking around for a while?

Meg: Since the last record came out. Some of them are more recent.

VR: The last record was almost four years ago. Is there any reason why there was so much time between records?

Meg: Just the general slide of procrastination and the inevitability of time slipping away.

VR: Was the new record recorded all at once?

Meg: Yeah, in two weeks with Brian McTear at Miner Street. I’ve worked with him a lot; he’s a really great engineer, and I love the studio. He mixed the last Espers record, so it was very natural, really comfortable, and fast.

VR: Between Kurt Vile, Jack Rose, and U.S. Girls, there’s been a lot more attention on Philly artists over the past few years. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to the scene?

Meg: It is a small city. A lot of people that are coming from that scene are people that are working or playing together. It has a pretty traceable history. It’s not just this random thing, like people moving here and starting bands. It even goes back to Siltbreeze records, and bands like Bardo Pond. It’s still building on things that were happening in the ’90s, and it’s coming from a pretty continuous thread. We were just really lucky that there was a moment when a lot of people were doing things, and that always leads to good cross-fertilization. It makes it easier to make music.

VR: Were you there for the ’90s?

Meg: I was moving there not when it was just happening, but when it had been established. There was also Strapping Fieldhands and the Philadelphia Record Exchange, where a lot of people worked. We’d hang out there on a Friday night.

VR: Is it easy to see a connection between that sort of creative environment and the trajectory of your own career?

Meg: Yeah. I also play drums in a band called Watery Love [with Richard Charles and Mix Milgram]. We were already friends; I guess they thought it would be funny for me to be the drummer. [Laughs]. Mike from Bardo Pond recorded it. And it just made sense; he had the studio space, and he was happy to do it.

VR: What is the current status of Espers?

Meg: It’s still a band, we just don’t have any plans. We’re a slow moving vehicle, and there’s been a lot of scattering and life changes. There’s a lot of people [in the group], people have moved– just normal things that happen over any five-to-ten year period.

VR: I wanted to ask you about LeavesFrom Off The Tree, a record you did a few years ago with Sharon Kraus and Helena Espvall on Bo’ Weavil. How did that come about?

Meg: Sharon was living in Philly for a year, and she missed her singing sessions. She had a good pub in Oxford where she could sing. She knew that I had interest in that too, and had a tiny repertoire and was happy to help. It just came about from us getting together, and she had met some other people in Philadelphia. Before she left to go back to the UK, she thought it would be great if we could record, and we got Helena, too.

VR: I wanted to ask about the intersection between traditional folk forms in your music versus the more psychedelic influences on Espers. How do you see those traditions relating to one other?

Meg: I think they all kind of bleed together for me. When they don’t is when you have to respect traditions, and some people have more specific ideas about where their tradition stops and starts. It’s not like, “It’s all the same,” I know it isn’t, but in what I’m doing I don’t see a lot of difference. I try and be mindful, especially with traditional music, about why some people are very strict. I’m very aware of it and respectful of it, but I don’t quite see it that way myself.

VR: On the last record, you had a lot of covers and this one has reversed the ratio of original to cover material. Was there a reason for that change?

Meg: On the Dear Companion record, I wasn’t sure if I was gonna do a solo record. It just seemed like that would be a fun thing to do, like a classic type of singer record with originals and traditional songs. There wasn’t a lot of time and energy I could put into it; it seemed like it would actually happen if I did it that way rather than, “I have to write an album’s worth of material before I can record it.” I could jump right into it and do it that way.

VR: You mean, it was easier to think about songs you were already familiar with?

Meg: Yeah, it wasn’t like, “Oh I have all these songs I need to record.” I didn’t have that many; I’d been writing for Espers. Also in terms of seeing differences between certain types of songs, there are certain songs that really don’t seem like they would work for singing unaccompanied in venues and bars, but that would sound great in a nice church somewhere; I do try and pay attention to that kind of stuff. With some things, too, you feel like,“that’s more for the home.” Stuff that doesn’t feel right performing. I have that line; it’s sort of my personal philosophy.

VR: In terms of touring and playing live, would you prefer to have a longer-term collaborator or backing band?

Meg: It would be nice, but it hasn’t been that feasible. It’s so hard to schedule people, getting into that tangle of asking someone to commit and not take other offers. It could be a lot to ask of anyone. It’s better to just play with people when they’re available.

VR: The record is dedicated to JackRose. What influence did he have on your playing or this record specifically?

Meg: It’s the first thing that I’ve done since he died. It’s pretty straightforward: I’m in a place where people miss him all the time. There’s a little bit of that feeling of, “He was such a beautiful player; he can’t make another record.” It makes you feel like you have to think about him and feel gratitude that you knew him. I felt like I should acknowledge it, and it’s hard to make a record and not be able to get, like… he could give me a backhanded compliment or tell me he didn’t like it. It was a little daunting to put something out for the first time and not have any of his thoughts.

Meg Baird – The Finder by Wichita Recordings

Words: Max Burke

Seasons on Earth is out now on Drag City.

Everything moves. Vibration runs through everything…

These ideas are central to Ron Rege Jr.’s Cymatic Theremapy performances. In a fusion of science, visual art, and sound, Rege (often with the assistance of Diva Dompe) creates a truly interactive, often magical experience. The set up is relatively simple: a liquid (usually water, or water and corn starch) rests in a plastic bed in the center of a speaker. When Rege’s theremin kicks into gear, the liquid gradually starts to vibrate as the sound waves coarse through it. Over time, these movements become more and more visible, and as the audio reaches its peak, the liquids often take on absurd shapes, giving them the appearance of living organisms.

While it is easy to fantasize that Rege is some sort of Frankenstein-like mad scientist in this equation, he often seems just as startled by the way sound morphs the liquids as we are. These performances, which have taken place mostly at small art galleries and bookstores in the Los Angeles area thus far, feel much more like participatory teach-ins than demonstrations. Participants are often able to pass speakers around as the liquids dance, their minds widening with wonder as they internalize the vibration themselves. While Rege has not reinvented the wheel with these experiments, he has brought to light the undeniable and often wondrous relationship between sound and motion.

Words: Samantha Cornwell

As the year winds down, talk turns to year-end lists and best records, tracks, music videos, etc., etc., ad nauseum. Everyone from major publications to the avid music fan wants to talk about the year in music as an event that can be summarized and critiqued objectively. I feel an obligation to form well-reasoned opinions about records I could care less about even hearing. The new music I spent the most time listening this year was a specific brand of drone and contemporary experimental ambient music. This music appears on established labels such as Type and the vinyl division of the Foxy Digitalis empire, but also smaller outfits that only put out a few releases a year like California’s Emerald Cocoon, Massachusetts’ Barge and the charmingly low-key DNT Records have all made crucial contributions to my personal experience of new music over the past year.

The year began with the final missive of a duo who loomed as large as any over the preceding decade, Yellow Swans. Going Places, Yellow Swans’ final full-length released on Type nearly two years after the group’s disillusion set a very high standard for billowing, psychedelic drone with noise and electronic flourishes. It’s always easy to credit a posthumous release with more meaning than it might deserve in a different context, but Going Places is a near perfect swan song. A distillation of the group’s distinctive approach that combines harsh feedback with beautiful melodies and a judicious use of processed vocals. The record bridges the gap between trailblazing psych-noise veterans of the British school like Skullflower and Ashtray Navigations and the daunting legacy of defunct 00s operators Double Leopards while showing the way forward for some of the fresh-faced (and not so fresh-faced) drone upstarts I would spend the rest of the year listening to.

Richard Skelton

Also arriving on Type at the beginning of the year was Richard Skelton’s Landings. This magisterial record, a tribute to the haunting terrain of Northern England, utilizes traditional string instruments, field recordings, and electronic processes to conjure a deeply felt atmosphere of strong, arch emotions. Landings is a classical record in certain formal aspects, but is immediately accessible to anyone with even a passing interest in drone, ambient, or deep listening music of all kinds. Both Yellow Swans’ and Skelton’s records demand attention and focus. The easy pull of pop music is absent, and in its place is a stark, subjective appeal. This appeal is rooted in the musicians themselves. Yellow Swans is a direct reflection of the chemistry that exists between Pete Swanson and Gabriel Mindel Saloman. Likewise, Landings puts some of Skelton’s innermost thoughts, hopes and longings to music (an artist’s edition of the record features a book of poems and essays by Skelton). Enjoyment of this music presupposes the desire for a genuine personal connection with the artist. I find myself drawn again and again to these records not just because of their sonic qualities, although they are uniformly compelling, but because the force of artistic personality comes through so strongly and creates a galvanizing feeling of affection toward the performers. It’s impossible to enjoy Skelton’s tour of the fraught geographical and psychological landscapes of Northern England without having a personal curiosity about it. When so much of indie rock, once revered for its thoughtfulness and sensitivity, feels like a po-mo put-on filled with recycled riffs, this idiosyncratic and occasionally pretentious music makes for a convincing antidote.

Next up: The sound galaxies of Emeralds and Expo ‘70

Yellow Swans, “New Life” (from Going Places)
New Life by _type

Richard Skelton, “Noon Hill Wood” (from Landings)
Noon Hill Wood by _type
Words: Max Burke

James Blackshaw. Photo by Lynda Smith

Guitarist and composer James Blackshaw is a singular force in underground music. From his earliest releases on standard-bearing labels like Digitalis and Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, to the expansive, stylistically diverse sound of his two most recent full-lengths for Michael Gira’s Young God Records, Blackshaw has simultaneously explored the sonic possibilities of the guitar and the outer reaches of his own considerable compositional talent. The result is a discography defined by Blackshaw’s virtuosic playing, with each record a finely focused exploration of a playing approach or atmosphere. Blackshaw has just release his latest,All Is Falling, and has embarked on a brief North American tour in between stints supporting Swans in Europe.

Blackshaw’s tourmates are the accomplished electronic and processed guitar duo Mountains, old friends who make for a solid double-bill for interested punters. “Generally a lot of people are really interested in both even if they didn’t know one or the other beforehand, it’s a good match. Its been a lot of fun and I enjoy watching their sets night after night which I can’t always say. Even if you like something, it can be hard to watch people play sets ever night. Its been really good, though.”

Recent supporting slots for Swans have found receptive audiences in Europe and the UK, “Swans have quite a diverse fan base but I was concerned that a big chunk of people – if it’s not super loud they’d be like “What the hell is this folky shit?” – you know, this nerd up on stage. But they went really well. Generally speaking, it seemed like a lot of people who went to see Swans ‘got it,’ which is as much as I can ask.” Not all UK shows have gone as well throughout Blackshaw’s career, however. “I think UK audiences cans be really tough. I think I can say that as one of us. For years and years, truthfully, I didn’t massively enjoy playing London for example. Its gotten a lot better, I think people have become more receptive and interested in what I’m dong. I’m from London and I love London and I like Londoners but we’re not always the warmest people.”

After releases from a variety of labels, most notably New York-based guitar guru specialist label Tompkins Square, Blackshaw has found a home on Young God. “I feel very flattered and happy to be on Young God. One of the things I like about it a lot is that the musicians on it and the releases they put out are very mixed and very limited: it’s not a huge roster. I think if Michael puts something out now he has to really really be into it. He releases maybe a couple of albums a year by other people.”

Photo by Fouad Bechwati

“I liked working with Tompkins Square. When I first said I’d do records with Tompkins Square, they hadn’t put out a single record at that point. I didn’t even know how the label would pan out. I think they’ve done some really great stuff.” Tompkins Square is known as a rather orthodox guitar label, an association that Blackshaw sees as problematic on some level. “I’m a guitar player and I write music for guitar, but I don’t want to be ghettoized in that way…like this ’solo guitar scene.’ I’m not being prissy about that, like, ‘Oh, I’m so much more than a guitarist’ or whatever. But my own taste in music doesn’t fall solely and exclusively in that area. Guitar has been the instrument I’ve felt most comfortable with in terms of writing. It’ll always be pretty central, but I feel like all of my releases have never been totally about guitar.”

Ultimately, James’ apprehension about being viewed solely as an acoustic guitar player is an expression of recognizing the limits of guitar and the widening scope of his own compositional ambitions. “It’s an instrument, its like a tool, and it has a pretty limited tonality to it. I think if you’re gonna record a lot of stuff it’s gonna become sort of tiring, so to add other colors is really interesting to me. I really love guitar as a an instrument, its very very close to me but I’ve never understood why people don’t get fetishistic about, for instance, a violin.” The cult of guitar fetishists has never attracted Blackshaw. “It’s like a whole culture, like high-end coffee or something.”

James’s indifference to the guitar cult is reflected in his choice of instrument. “For years I played a $300 guitar. Jack Rose, when he was alive, he was a friend of mine and he would make fun: ‘When’re you gonna get a decent guitar?’ I dunno, it’s a guitar isn’t it? Its got strings on it.” Attention to detail and acoustics when recording always supersedes a fancy instrument. Blackshaw’s current guitar is “a decent guitar but its not super expensive or anything. I don’t have the right ear for it, I can’t tell the difference between my $600 guitar and a couple thousand dollar guitar. A lot of it has to do with recording. All of those early records are on, like, a $300 guitar but I just felt like we recorded it pretty well.”

Each of Blackshaw’s records has a distinct mood, the result of a conscious effort to employ different approaches with each record. “There are certain general ideas about each album that override how they’re made and written. For example, something like The Cloud of Unknowing, which is an album that I like an awful lot [...] I was pretty nervous when I recorded that album. The whole idea of that album is the tonality of the instrument, generating natural drones and overtones while I was playing. The parts are quite simple, but the technique is not necessarily simple. A lot like Charlemagne Palestine, hitting on something for an hour and something emerges, like that on a miniature level for guitar.”

All Is Falling album art

On All Is Falling, Blackshaw decided to employ electric guitar extensively for the first time, the result of a desire to explore another facet of the instrument’s potential and his own approach to composition. “I thought it would be an interesting challenge because I think it made me consider the piece a lot more, as opposed to getting absorbed in the sound of the instrument. Almost like the anti-Cloud of Unknowing, which was just wanting to hear the instrument and hear it sing out. The electric doesn’t sing out as much, you have to be a little more on it and make it more interesting. Considering the arrangements for other instruments more and thinking about the guitar as a part of whole rather than the focal point.”

Looking outside the guitar exclusively and into a wider range of instruments and more dynamic compositions has resulted in the James Blackshaw Ensemble, an expanded group lineup that have played a handful of dates in Europe and the UK and includes pianist David Coulter and string players Joolie Wood and Fran Bury. The experience of playing in a group allowed James to perform certain pieces more fully and also changed his view of his own compositions. “It’s a different kind of challenge. If I’m playing solo I’m very much in my own universe and I don’t have to worry: I can change things up a little bit, I can speed up and slow down and really exaggerate things. When you play with other people – it doesn’t have to be metronomic: part change, part change, etcetera – but you have to consider other people. I’m aware of what other people are doing, its kind of amazing and scary. Sometimes the best feeling in the world is sitting there and playing something and just listening to other parts that I’ve written and hearing it sounds great. It’s an amazing feeling.”

Unfortunately, practical considerations prevent extended periods of activity for the Ensemble; “I’d love to do a tour or an album, but practically, financially its not the easiest thing.” As for Blackshaw’s other collaboration, two records he produced as a duo with Dutch lute player Jozef van Wissem under the name Brethren of the Free Spirit, that project has run its course and there will be no further material. Although he takes his music very seriously, Blackshaw’s low-key and amusing Twitter presence gives some insight into his non-musical preoccupations, notably an avid interest in video games. “I’ve played video games all my life with little breaks, but I got super into Red Dead Redemption. I still enjoy it, I’ve played it out a bit but its an incredible game.”

James Blackshaw, “Part 7″

Words: Max Burke

“The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll.” Sometimes it’s the most counterintuitive statements that point us to what we’ve been intuiting all along. “Delicacy” is not a word I would ever use to describe what critic Dave Hickey calls the “dominant art form of this American century”– his, the 20th.  But in its playful untruth, its insouciant “fuck you” to anyone who ever said rock was just a question of amplification and cheap chord changes, the title of his 1997 essay is rock-and-roll enough to grab anyone who really cares. The song Hickey sings here isn’t just about rock music; it’s about the relationship between art and politics, and it’s sweeping and ambitious and convoluted enough to recall the quixotic excesses of prog. It jumps from memoir to critical commentary, words like “contingency” to thoughts on why “order sucks”. It touches on everything from experimental film to the abstract expressionists to jazz, and it doesn’t satisfy with a melodic resolution until the last page or so– when Hickey actually starts talking about rock.

But his language is so grounded in the everyday, so free of virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, that Yes and King Crimson would probably be insulted. If “The Delicacy of Rock- and-Roll” locates the political character of art in a certain will to freedom, and tries to show how different types of art embody that will in different ways, Hickey speaks from the place where that freedom begins, and probably also ends– from the heart of the individual subject, recalling a particularly memorable encounter with art in a particular time and place. The essay begins with a story from his college days in Austin, TX.  The young Hickey is attending “Underground Flick Nite” at a local YMCA; he is a member of a left-wing political group that meets there that same day, and he and his comrades are hoping for an evening of explosions and group sex. What they get is anything but earth-shattering: an abstract montage of colors by Stan Brackage, and a film by Andy Warhol, consisting entirely of a static shot of a man getting his hair cut.

Hickey’s tenderly mocking portrait of these would-be revolutionaries makes us smile; perhaps we recognize them in ourselves, in people we have met, from films on the ’68 era. We can sense the boredom of the crowd in the rings of smoke Hickey notices curling upward in the theatre, laugh at the naive urgency of the discussion that follows over beers on the porch (“there has got to be some political application”).  When he explains the “paradigm shift” he experienced while watching the Warhol film, he doesn’t speak as an expert on Marxist theory, but someone who has been slapped in the face. “His film,” Hickey remembers, “had totally recalibrated the perceptions of a roomful of sex-crazed adolescent revolutionaries into a field of tiny increments.” Haircut was so terrifically dull, so restricted within the humdrum confines of modern life, that when its subject lit up a cigarette, it felt as though the entire theater had exploded. It was the small moments of variation and imperfection in Warhol’s film that seemed to offer a way out of all the monotony– and that shocked Hickey into recognizing that a work of art doesn’t need to slash or rend or incinerate the fabric of society in order to discover a bit of freedom within it it. It just needs to look a little closer.

Never 100% liberated from narrative and figuration, Brackage’s abstractions “told us what we already knew as children of the Cold War,” Hickey says: “that no matter how hard we tried, we could not be free [...]. Warhol’s film, on the other hand, told us what we needed to know, that no matter how hard we tried, we could not be ordered– that insofar as we were tiny, raggedy, damaged and disorganized human beings, we probably were free, in some small degree.” Ironically, it is from this high art experience– one of our narrator’s first– that he, already a rock and roll kid, learns why it moves him so much.

“Rock-and-roll works because we’re all a bunch of flakes,” he says, dipping into the vernacular of the world he is now trying to describe, though he’s been skirting its peripheries from the beginning. Classic verse-chorus rock songs may be simple as ABC, 123, but somehow in their simplicity they become repositories for everything that is not simple about the people who create them. Rock music, Hickey writes, “presumes that the four of us — as damaged and anti-social as we are– might possibly get it to-fucking-gether man, and play this simple song.  [...] But we can’t. [...] We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations. [...] Just because we’re breathing, man.” Sometimes it feels like Hickey’s prose, as lovingly crafted as it is, operates according to the same principle.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy is available via Amazon

Why did you start Leaving Records?

While I was working at dublab (for non-profit internet radio posse out of Los Angeles), there were daily encounters of untapped musicians from many scenes. I presented the label idea to my favorite artist Jesselisa, and she agreed to head all visual direction. We had been entirely dialed-in to the Los Angeles music and art scene at Florida State University, being head-on immersed in a wonderful art department and college radio station.

It was something that we started in our living room, cutting and pasting away at our new homie dak’s debut release. The silk screening, the tape-dubbing, it was all done as an art project. It wasn’t long until we realized the project was one we could let others see and hear through the pipelines of dublab, sort of re-injecting all of the amazing music we had come across through that very same community of world-wide listenership and art.

Nothing would have happened without the other, having complete confidence in Jesselisa’s craft and design being visual director of the label, and her having trust in my curation of unheard music, we began… It’s so valuable working closely with our artists to develop their first records, to develop the album art, it’s all an intensely personal experience for us, everything is seeming made together. we learned a lot from dublab, they exposed us to a lot of the artists we have and are currently working with.

Would you say there is a specific “sound” that could be associated with your releases? If so, tell me a bit about that.

The sound is a reflection of the Los Angeles music scene, and what’s happening here artistically as a whole. Jesse and I have similar interests but are always challenging one another, dragging each other out to random venues, exposing and being inspired by the many scenes in LA. It’s amazing.

It seems like there are lots of smaller, specific labels emerging these days. How do you feel this has effected the way music is distributed, and where do you see Leaving Records in all of it?

Nowadays, all someone needs to start a label is some confidence and and wi-fi. Back in early tape-culture days within punk and experimental music, accessibility was through obscure small-scale media like ‘zines, weirdo label subscription series, and shows. We utilize the internet everyday, but we feel it is important to practice a certain distance from technology.

Although the internet is becoming increasingly saturated, one of our main goals is to retain a human quality in our aesthetic whether it’s releasing the music on physical format, or directly involving organic sonic matter in the music, in someway we’re always hoping to achieve an organic sensibility. In many ways, we feel this effects how our output is received by the new music community of our generation.

What is something going on in music currently that really excites you?

Tapes.

Back to the above, we have always been totally inspired by DIY recording media, tapes have always been the answer to that, and of course this was before computers. Manufacturing, duplication, and selling tapes are relatively easy given the cost, but still a format that the average music-listener would disregard. What excites us is how the new label can translate tape culture directly to the music. A lot of artists on LR record and experiment with cassettes, so we naturally thought of releasing their work on this format.

In no way are we adverse to the vinyl format, tapes were the easiest and most effective way to start our label with physical product. We’re currently working the finishing touches to our first vinyl project from a mysterious rap+producer combo titled Usual (silk-screened, hand packaged one-sided 12″ vinyl at 45 rpm!).

One of the most inspiring discoveries we are finding over the course of our activity has been the wild, effective experimentation with recording audio (dak’s mastering “standthis” audio to VHS, Oscar’s micro-recording with only an SP303, etc.). Much influence has been passed back and forth between artists, and is endlessly exciting to see where this will creatively lead our roster in the future.

What is an older jam that you often revisit?

There are two!

Julia Holter live Arthur Russel tribute

Bootlegged at a part-time-punks / Arthur Russel show on a cassette recorder that I only had for the weekend, then lost, it was the best recorder I ever had. Julia finished her set with a beautiful ballad, never to be witnessed again.

Ras G – Brotha There

Classic hip-hop instrumentals bent sideways on a lean towards future free-jazz, organic melodies, and cray-cray crunch.

… and that is the story, or at least one version of it. Below are two tracks from the Leaving Records collection. The first is a track from organic sampler Oscar McClure called Seaweed. The second is an electronic song of worship by yuk called greenflash(ritual).

Oscar McClure, “Seaweed”

yuk, “greenflash(ritual)”

Interview by Samantha Cornwell

Ask any 20-something indie rock lover in New York what they’re doing this weekend, and they’re bound to rattle off names of North Brooklyn concert venues that aren’t technically supposed to exist: Monster Island Basement, Secret Project Robot, Death by Audio, Silent Barn, Shea Stadium, Party Expo. Check the show recommendations in The Village Voice, The Times, and even The New Yorker, and you will discover these cartoonish monikers sprinkled alongside trusty Manhattan standbys like Bowery Ballroom and Webster Hall.

Semi-legal concert spaces in Williamsburg and Bushwick are evolving from niche attractions to popular above-ground destinations. And yet they seem to have everything working against them, aside from their underground cachét: no budget, no liquor licenses, NOISE, far-flung geographical locations, and the passionate belief that quality live music should be accessible to everyone — even those too young to drink. So how are New York’s DIY venues staying open, despite all the economic and legal obstacles?

Truth be told, not all of these venues do stay open. Market Hotel, a dilapidated old bank building in Bushwick that once attracted up to 600 concert-goers at a time, closed its doors to the public last April after being raided by cops two nights in a row. Over on the Williamsburg waterfront, Paris London West Nile shut down this summer when its landlords increased the rent; neighboring venue Glasslands, meanwhile, became so popular that its owners decided to purchase a liquor license, weed out minors at the door, and go legit.

The fate of any individual underground venue hinges on a variety of geographical and budgetary incidentals, but the ones that do survive hold a surprising number of these incidentals in common. Some might even call it a DIY “business model” deriving from a set of practices established by longtime independent music promoter Todd P, founder of Market Hotel and many other semi-legal establishments that have come and gone over the years.

Location is paramount to a venue’s success, and but within extraordinarily specific parameters. All of the spots that remain open for more than a year are located either in extremely low-density areas (along the waterfront, in the East Williamsburg Industrial Park) or along high-traffic commercial thoroughfares that boast a great deal of noise pollution to begin with (by the above-ground JMZ line in Bushwick, Wyckoff Avenue in Ridgewood, Queens). Venues must nevertheless be within convenient walking distance of the subway, and have a capacity similar to that of competing commercial nightclubs. They must also be in neighborhoods were the rent is still cheap.

But unlike their legal competitors, no single existing DIY venue relies exclusively on door and bar sales to pay the bills. In fact, the majority of them double up as live/work spaces. Ranging from two to eight per space, residents pay low rent in exchange for studio space and opportunities to subsidize their income by working in-house events. Some venues, like Shea Stadium, generate additional income as recording studios; Monster Island Basement and Secret Project Robot are part of a collectively run commercial complex that includes no fewer than two art galleries, a surf shop, a dojo, a screen-printing studio, a recording studio, art studio rentals, and rehearsal spaces.

Keeping costs low enables DIY spaces to compete with professional venues by paying larger acts more money. It also allows promoters to take more creative risks, nurturing artists that are too challenging to have obvious commercial appeal and scouting marketable young talent before other professional venues take notice. When popular indie bands like Woods and Real Estate swing through town, they return to the venues that supported them from the get-go– and thank them by playing sold-out shows.

As private homes and work spaces, DIY venues exist within a precarious legal loophole that enables them to operate under the auspices of the private party. Though they collect money at the door and sell alcohol at the bar, these costs are typically presented as “donations”. Naturally, even minors have the right to attend “private parties” where alcohol is being consumed — as long as the minors do not drink, which is why every DIY venue enlists a worker or volunteer to check IDs and mark off the hands of spectators under 21. As long as the crowds do not get to large for their own good, and evenings progress without noise complaints, the NYPD have no pretext for interrupting the fun. As for whether the neighborhood cops are aware of what is truly going on inside these musty basements and leaky warehouses, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” generally prevails over curiosity.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Special thanks to Todd P, Ric Leichtung of Market Hotel and International Tapes, Etienne Pierre Duguay of Market Hotel and Vibes Management, & Adam Reich of Shea Stadium

In his choice of subject matter alone, Director David Fincher gambles on two basic assumptions, both asking that we suspend disbelief. First, he presumes that it is possible to recreate the past foibles and feuds of public figures — individuals who are still very much alive — and somehow resist the dual pitfalls of biased storytelling and historical inaccuracy. (According to Zuckerberg and other witnesses, he failed.) Second, The Social Network departs from the premise that it is possible — even desirable — to take stock in a massive social and cultural transformation when that transformation, to date, is still in its infancy. Mark Zuckerberg’s accidental brainchild may have a whopping 500 million friends and counting, but its ultimate impact on the quotidian of its subscribers — like the Facebook interface itself — remains as open to determination as it was in 2003, when the idea took seed.

Errors and distortions in the historical particulars of The Social Network are as inevitable and forgivable as in any biopic — especially where the story’s real-life protagonists do not necessarily concur. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who combined testimonies from court depositions and the research of The Accidental Billionaires author Ben Mezrich, structured the narrative as a non-linear back-and-forth between the conflicting recollections of Zuckerman (played by Jesse Eisenberg), founding partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), and Harvard athletes Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both played by Arnie Hammer). The film’s script is “honest” in that it rides on the assumption that the real truth behind Facebook’s origins will never — and can never — be known. And if all truth is relative, who is to say that there is anything wrong with subjecting the facts to the requirements of narrative arc, characterization, and good old-fashioned entertainment? Sorkin, whose past accomplishments include credits on “The West Wing” and A Few Good Men, spoke frankly to this effect to New York Magazine: “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.”

But is precisely in its attempt to tell a distinctly generational story that The Social Network becomes, if not entirely dishonest, then content to fall short of the challenges of such an undertaking. Even as we bounce eagerly from one narrative perspective to the next, we cannot help noticing that Fincher and Sorkin seem to be belaboring the minute details of a story that nobody seems to agree upon anyway — even, in the court room sequences, descending into over-scripted battles between immobile talking heads.

The Social Network is positively overflowing with research — but curiously very little when it comes to the specific cultural and social landscape in which this rags-to-riches tale takes place. By 2003, As Slate’s Nathan Heller points out, the Harvard of final clubs and cocktails with Prince Albert of Monaco that we encounter in the film survived as little more than a nostalgic nod to tradition. Despite the presence of scholarship brainiacs like Zuckerman, campus life remains mysteriously frozen in a world of static social hierarchies and old-world WASP aesthetics — as though nothing had changed at the university since financial aid and affirmative action, and social and professional mobility were still entirely contingent upon bloodlines and blond hair.

We encounter a lie similar to the one George Orwell describes in his 1939 essay on Boys’ Weeklies, fiction magazines that upheld the romantic past of the British public school (read: private high school) as an unchanging reality when the majority of its subscribers were living on rations: “The Year is 1910 — Or 1940, but it is all the same [...] There is a cozy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound [...] Everything is safe and solid and unquestionable.” Fincher’s Harvard is equally untrue, but with a few cursory differences: our hero is a computer programmer and there are half-naked girls dropping ecstasy and dancing to electronic music between these wood-paneled walls. We are not in 1910, or 1940, but in a hybrid between the digital era and the early years of the last great social revolution in memory, one which eroded the stodgy social conventions of Ivy League, or at least made them terribly unfashionable: rock n’ roll.

Instead of presenting a story of our time, Fincher and Sorkin deliver a classic rock n’ roll tragedy — a cautionary tale of a young, misunderstood genius who blasts open the social fabric of his generation when a hair-brain idea of his manages to strike a chord with a critical mass of young people. Hopelessly impractical — like any true artist — he gets swept away by promises of fame, money, and sex made by people looking to capitalize on his genius (here, Napster founder Sean Parker), and “sells out” to the big guys. As in any textbook rock and roll story, cash and two-dimensional college girls seem to be the only thing at stake here, criminally overshadowing even the slightest inkling that Zuckberg may have been onto something much wider in scope than a campus popularity contest.

After losing his closest collaborators (read: bandmates) to money-driven legal disputes, Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire alive — but even more alone than he was at the outset. The final shot of The Social Network — followed, not surprisingly, by The Beatles’ “Baby You’re A Rich Man” in the exit music — is the film’s most poignant. Jessie Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg signs onto the site he created and submits a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, Erica Albright, whose decision to break up with him at the beginning of the film is the implied motivation for his entire career

Peter Travers captures the sentiment of this moment, and the thesis of the entire film, all too well: The Social Network “uses the tangled roots of Facebook [...] to show how technology is winning the battle against actual human contact, creating a nation of narcissists shaping their own reality like a Facebook page.” The trouble is, like Travers — but unlike Facebook itself — Fincher’s film stops there.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

From Harmonia to Neu!, early Kraftwerk to his solo recordings, Michael Rother is a living legend in the world of experimental music. After Harmonia, his project with Cluster’s Hans Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius, made its final live appearance last year, Rother resurrected the music of Neu! in a living tribute called “Hallogallo 2010”. Formerly a duo with the late Klaus Dinger, the group now consists of Rother on guitar and electronics, bassist Aaron Mullan (longtime Sonic Youth sound engineer and guitarist/vocalist in the band Tall Firs) and Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, who has also recently appeared in Pete Nolan’s Spectre Folk project.

Live, the Hallogallo experience is a combination of grooving uplift — provided by Mullan and Shelley’s expert rhythm work — and maximalist processed guitar maneuvers by Mr. Rother. Rother has a long association and appreciation for All Tomorrow’s Parties, and has participated in ATP events on three continents. “I like the ATP family. I’m friends with quite a few of the organizers and it’s great to see their faces again everywhere. I’ve seen them in the UK, America, and Australia. They have a good selection of music and [the festival] has a very pleasant feel.”

Although music is at the heart of ATP, the event is distinguished by its diverse selection of extracurricular activities. “I was too late to baseball, I haven’t played cards yet, but we played tennis yesterday,” explains Aaron Mullan. “Hard court, it’s good. Not too many people [at ATP] are actually good at sports.” Despite his renowned sound-mixing abilities and longtime association with Sonic Youth, Mullan is such a modest guy that we wonder how he was drafted into Rother’s Neu!-reviving supergroup.

“I met Aaron when he did the sound for Harmonia at ATP in Camber Sands in 2008, and he did a remarkably bad job at that,” Rother recalls, to laughter all around. “We did recordings with Steve in September 2008 after ATP [where Harmonia performed]. So we’d been talking about what to do with the recordings and Aaron did some mixes and we actually released a single with two short tracks.” That single, released on Steve Shelley’s brand-new Vampire Blues imprint, quickly disappeared from Hallogallo’s merch table at ATP. New copies from the pressing plant are due imminently, but Rother laments that he probably should have bought a few more while they were available.

The origins of Hallogallo are rather straightforward, and refreshingly devoid of the hyperbolic self-importance of recent big-name experimental and indie reunions. “I was working on the Neu! vinyl box set last summer, and after finishing that more or less, I got busy doing interviews, and still had a lot of things to take care of with Neu!. I thought of doing live shows again since Harmonia stopped working together as a live band last year; that’s actually the reason I was available to concentrate on Neu!, and so I think it was more or less a natural decision to see whether we could do shows together. I had an offer for a first show in Hamburg, and since then things have been developing dynamically.”

Michael Rother and Aaron Mullan. Photo by Tim Bugbee

Hallogallo 2010 remains an ongoing focus for Rother, as the group has been playing as many shows as they can. “There’s offers for more shows and that has to do with these excellent reviews we’ve been getting… [There's] so much enthusiasm, and promoters from all over are keeping an eye on what’s happening.” The prospect of new material is still undecided: “Well, since we’re all busy, so busy that I’m happy that we can present this music as it is now, there hasn’t been any room for concentrating in the studio and creating new stuff. Though that would be nice to do, of course.”

Mullan has also worked as the house engineer at various ATP festivals in the US and UK, namely for “orphaned” bands who don’t have sound technicians of their own– “the poor bands,” Rother recalls. For Hallogallo’s mix, Mullan works one-on-one with the sound technician, explaining what he wants beforehand. Although Mullan is an accomplished musician in his own right, he doesn’t see much of a separation between the roles: “It all involves technology and sound. What else? You’re on stage [motions to Rother]; you have a guitar you have a mixing board too.” “It’s true, Rother exclaims, “but we have different hats. I have a label [Random Records], it takes care of my own stuff. Sometimes you have to take care of business and organization and the fun part is when you are actually playing music.”

So why has Rother’s music, celebrated only among the most dedicated experimental music fans in the ’80s and ’90s, enjoyed such a great resurgence in recent years? Rother is grateful for the attention but unwilling to jump to any conclusions. “I guess all of you could give me better answers than I can because I’m always surprised. My heart is with the music, it has been all the time. With Harmonia in the ’70s, when nobody wanted to hear Harmonia, I loved Harmonia just as much as I loved and believed in Neu!. So I got used to not having a great audience for what I love, just having to accept that. The ’80s, even the ’90s, were quite quiet for our music. I don’t really have an [explanation] for what is happening now.” Maybe it has to do with other musicians — the next generation, or next two generations — picking up the ideas and citing us.”

Hallogallo 2010 at ATP. Photo by Tim Bugbee

Rother acknowledges the impact of Julian Cope’s 1995 opus Krautrocksampler, a subjective survey of German music from the ’70s that also celebrated groups like Faust, and Ash Ra Tempel. Most importantly, the book impressed German journalists. “They tried to ignore us, but then they had a reason to write about us,” Rother remembers. Regarding the reception of Hallogallo 2010, and Rother’s musical legacy in general for German audiences, Rother is optimistic but circumspect. “I think Germany is still behind; it’s still catching up, slowly catching up. I know this year there were some big German magazines doing stories about Neu! and the Neu! vinyl box set and Hallogallo 2010. But you just look at the people who are excited to see us; there’s much more expectation in America and in England.”

A recent show in Mexico City was unexpectedly galvanizing, says Mullan. “I’d been to Mexico a few times, but the people there are just so excited. There were girls on shoulders in the first three rows and it just seemed so… unlike anything I thought would happen at our concerts!” According to Rother, Hallogallo’s free show at New York’s Lincoln Center brought in nearly 5,000 people.

Although the influence of Rother’s music has spread far and wide, he remains refreshingly naïve about contemporary bands. “I always feel bad because I know so little about other musicians [...]. I have to be honest, I don’t listen to music that much. And if I listen to music, it’s not contemporary pop or rock music, it’s everything from Bach to music from the early 20th century.” Rother doesn’t limit himself to classical music, however, and is quick to compliment some British rockers who were underrated in their own rite. “If I listen to The Kinks, I get excited.” He does concede, however that he is interested in checking out Dungen and T-Model Ford later in the day at ATP.

As for Sleep, Friday night’s headliner, Rother “was quite impressed. This idea of a wall of sound… There’s no mistaking the kind of music that will always appeal to me. [It's like], this is ‘The Music’.” Rother’s beatific smile during live performances, the uplifting, positive momentum of his music, leaves no doubt as to the positive feeling one is left with after witnessing a Hallogallo performance. Rother, however, feels no particular religious inclination. “ I left the Church. I was Catholic as a child but I left the Church and I don’t know about religions. I’m skeptical about organization, about clerical structures.”

Michael Rother. Photo by Tim Bugbee

Rother knew that performing Neu!’s music without a live drummer would be pointless, and is quick to compliment Shelley’s drumming prowess outside of Hallogallo. Referring to the previous night’s closing set by Sonic Youth, Rother recalls: “I’d seen them before so I knew what to expect more or less, but the way he beats the drums, it’s great. It helps, of course, to transport the idea of my music, that physical experience.” Mullan is less reflective about his playing, stating plainly (and perhaps rather facetiously) that playing bass is like playing guitar, except “they’re bigger strings, and you hit them less often.”

Despite his status as an elder statesman of experimental music, Rother’s musical ambitions remain exceptionally simple and human. “My hope, my wish, is to transmit positive energy. The joy I feel playing that music, creating that noise, that’s what I want to reach the audience. And if they have a similar experience to mine, then everything’s done well [...]. I also like creating a wave that goes on forever. If you listen to tracks like ‘Hallogallo,’ that’s the idea: endless music.”

Words: Max Burke
Photos: Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography

I am getting old – Green Gerry – Odd Tymes from Green Gerry on Vimeo.

Maybe it’s because I never thought it would happen, but the pairing of Green Gerry’s cockeyed folk with the dazzling precision of a military spectacle keeps blasting me with a combination of awe and seasickness. In fact, clicking play on this video for “I Am Getting Old” felt kind of akin to discovering an intricate mosaic of spores on a slice of leftover grilled eggplant. Who in their right mind would find this dying sigh of a love song to be a fitting soundtrack for a kaleidoscope of uniformed motorcyclists? Not to mention that unforgettable gaggle of admiring military brunettes, applauding in deadening unison before videomulching away? I suppose Green Gerry’s music is not in its right mind, but that’s kind of what I like about it.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Odd Tymes is available for download via bandcamp.