Tomorrow at 5 p.m. ET music bloggers and writers convene at Newtown Radio in Bushwick, Brooklyn to discuss blogger ethics and by extension, the future of music writing.
We encourage you to listen and call in with questions and comments! 347-725-4163.
Below is a basic outline of the discussion put together by myself and Friedlander of Visitation Rites. Questions we want to address come after a summary of why we are talking about this. (more…)
@MaxBurke just hacked the VR twitter! Greetings from the NY Eye and Ear Fest. View from the record fair/ chill zone.
3:55 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak (more…)
Simeon Coxe III as the Silver Apples, live at The Joshua Light Show Fest, May 18, 2010
In contrast to the younger, hip-looking crowd at the night’s previous Woods/MV EE show, the audience for the Oneida/Silver Apples bill was a bit older, with the air of serious-minded music fans. Due in large part to Mr. Silver Apples himself (Simeon Coxe), the theater was sold out for the evening. Oneida took the stage to expectant applause from the audience as wunderkind drummer Kid Millions sat behind his kit and kicked off his signature percussive assault in rare form. Drawing heavily on their single-track monster Preteen Weaponry from 2008 — while leaving plenty of room for improvised digressions and the organized chaos that defines their sound — the five-piece group were complemented by a light show that felt more frantic than the previous night’s. The strobe effect was generously deployed, and Oneida — minus regular member Bobby Matador, but with the rare addition of founding former member Papa Crazee — didn’t hesitate to respond by laying down a weighty wall of sound, complimented by a droning rhythm section.
The set proceeded through a series of distinct movements, with the light show responding to each shift in tone. First up was a hellish underworld, with cascading sheets of feedback and Millions’ propulsive drumming setting the scene as the screen flickered with dark reds and oranges. Gradually, Oneida ascended to an earthier plane, settling into a more brooding, downbeat mode as the harsh colors gave way to a lush green. Instead of cascading in all directions, the jam became more focused, steadily gaining momentum. Oneida’s career-long engagement with the possibilities of repetition in its various guises took center stage as loops of feedback ebbed and flowed, stretching and contracting time. Audience members’ heads bobbed in unison as the band locked into a psychic groove of monumental proportions. (more…)
Woods, live at the Joshua Light Show Festival, Abrons Art Center, May 13, 2010
Joshua White is a New York artist who began his career creating liquid light shows for Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in the late 1960s and early 70s. The Joshua Light show was in residence at the Fillmore and provided visuals for all the major artists associated with the classic psychedelic and heavy rock scene of the era, from Hendrix to Joplin.
After the scene faded, White moved into professional television production. Although his trippy visuals were forever immortalized in the memories of clued-in boomers and the freaky party scene from Midnight Cowboy, White would not revisit his light show past for nearly 40 years. In 2004, he teamed with artist Gary Panter to recreate some of the light shows for a one-off at Anthology Film Archives. Renewed interest in the classic light shows has peaked in recent years, and White has been performing regularly with his ensemble of visual alchemists and artists to accompany acts like Yo La Tengo, as well as various iterations of the Darmstadt New Music series and one-offs at the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center.
The Joshua Light Show Festival, which premiered last week in New York, is a festival of contemporary psychedelic music, curated by Nick Hallett and paired with the light show’s distinctive visual component. The festival ran for over consecutive nights (the opening night with Steve Moore and itsnotyouitsme, and closing night with Dean & Britta and Spectrum) at the Abrons Art Center, a community center at the Henry Street Settlement, which has its own history as an incubator of avant-garde practice, including big name past associates like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and Martha Graham. (more…)
Following a mysterious cop raid two weeks ago and the announcement — earth-shattering for some — that Market Hotel would be closing its doors until further notice, some 60 Brooklynites gathered in the venue’s signature triangle-shaped ballroom this evening to discuss the future of the borough’s flagship DIY concert space. For those of you who have never been to Market Hotel, it was the kind of place where you would pack in along with 500 other people to see a band that in any other town might be lucky to draw 75. For those of you who do remember sweating straight through your clothes and chatting outside the bathroom with a tall boy of Coors’ banquet and an arm around a friend, you probably learned a few cool new things about Market if you attended.
The history of Market Hotel, for example, does not begin with the music venue Todd P founded with the So So Glos in February of 2008. In fact, the building was constructed in the mid-1870s, when it housed the offices of a local bank (remember all those boarded-up windows along the sides? Those were designed to keep the whole place flooded with light, pre-electricity style). Among other historical nuggets, it is also rumored that the ballroom was used as one of the location’s in the classic ’80s film Ghost (specifically, as the fleabag abode of the “bad” ghost in said film), though I think I am going to have to go back and watch it again before I can vouch for that 100%. (more…)
Last week, Flavorpill Music Editor Judy Berman asked the ubiquitous Visitation Rites “us” to contribute a few lines to the publication’s official response to Rolling Stone’s “40 Reasons to Get Excited About Music” cover story this month. We too found it a bit sad (if not slightly disturbing) that the latter publication couldn’t think of anything more exciting about music in 2010 than the Black Eyed Peas (reason #1), whose invaluable contribution to our generation’s cultural bequest was honored by a feature article entitled “The Science of Global Pop Domination.” Asked to pen one of Flavorpill’s “40 Better Reasons to Get Excited About Music,” Visitation Rites produced the following flight of techno-optimism:
#5: Anyone can be a critic: “The ’90s may have taught us that ‘anyone can play guitar,’ but now any music lover with a working internet connection and a brain can share his or her enthusiasm with the public and rest assured that at least somebody out there will be listening. Having more music writers out there may mean a higher volume of shoddy criticism, but it also means that those of us who aspire to do more than post MediaFire downloads and paraphrase press releases can do so in dialogue with each other, prodding each other to come up with better and better explanations for why certain music makes us tick — and why it seems to be happening at this moment in history. Arriving at that understanding collectively — as a generation, even — is much more exciting than listening to what some snarky loner type sitting at an editorial desk has to say.”
Among other responses related specifically to the changing face of music writing in the digital era, Sarah Lynn Knowles (aka Sarah Spy) also contributed the following words on the promising (though admittedly controversial) proliferation of several blogger-run labels this year:
26. Blogger-owned labels: “Just within the last two months, we’ve seen Weekly Tape Deck and Gorilla vs Bear’s joint venture Forest Family, My Old Kentucky Blog’s Roaring Colonel Records, Wonder Beard Tapes from White Guys with Beards, Chocolate Bobka blog’s Curatorial Club, and soon-to-debut Trig Club from Yvynyl and Frightened by Bees. I know some have questioned a blogger-turned-label-head’s ability to stay unbiased once they’ve got a financial stake in product-pushing; but I think subjectivity was kind of the point to begin with, and readers will continue trusting tastemakers whose preferences align with theirs, regardless. Overall, I’m eager to see how this plays out — which labels (and others that inevitably sprout up behind them) fade after a one-off release, versus which evolve into something huger.”
For an adamantly alternative viewpoint, please view Christopher Weingarten’s “Music is Math” speech at the 140 Characters Conference today, in which he disparages the “bland middling taste of the internet hive mind.” Weingarten also contributed to the Flavorpill list; among his other highly viral one-liners, we find “crowdsourcing killed indie rock” to be his most memorable.
SXSW 2010 was as blissed-out an exercise in excess as an exercise in excess can be. All in all, the Visitation Rites mobile reporting team (videographer Samantha Cornwell and I) probably caught more sun, saw more live bands, walked more miles, ate more tacos, drank more beer, laughed more, bickered more, took more photos, tweeted more tweets, shot more video, and reunited with more old friends than in all of 2009 combined. After five consecutive days of non-stop partying and documenting, however, we couldn’t help feeling a bit crestfallen when we realized that SXSW wouldn’t last forever. (more…)
JW presents a few links he discovered floating through the æther this week, handpicked for you work-weary office drones as you indulge in your Friday noontime burrito rituals.
Forgive the intrusion, I did not mean to offend your eye, for I am a vile creature, that crawled in here to die.“An animation I made on an Amiga 500 with 1mg memory in early 90’s with friend’s music, recorded to VHS tape.” Music performed by an “unknown & deceased artist.” (Center Core Never More)
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. (more…)
Excepter’s music has always kind of reminded me of New Weird America’s evil twin, absconding from the wilderness to turn tricks in broad daylight on some street corner near 34th street-Penn Station, clad in a leather jacket and fingerless gloves. Like Sunburned’s, their sound comes across as the diegetic byproduct of some Manson Family-style ritual, frightening for the very reason that we really have no idea where that ritual comes from, or what the band’s members are trying to achieve. Even in the pit of industrial North Brooklyn, surrounded by concrete on all sides, they take rocks and sticks and animal-shaped talismans and try to hack their way slowly back to the earth. (more…)
Tomorrow at 5 p.m. ET music bloggers and writers convene at Newtown Radio in Bushwick, Brooklyn to discuss blogger ethics and by extension, the future of music writing.
Following a mysterious cop raid two weeks ago and the announcement — earth-shattering for some — that 
Along with its fetching new face, 
