Back To The Future The Ride, s/t free mini-l.p. on Deathbomb Arc
It seems an almost weekly occurrence in the music world: a luminary of the punk/avant-garde/whatever scene invents a pseudonym and starts a meditative side project that can be lazily tagged “drone” or “synth” or “ambient.” It’s easy to become quite jaded with all of this cerebral material. Just a few years ago, going noise was the most cynical move in the book; most of the strivers figured out there wasn’t any money in it and moved along. Next-wave artists who have channeled the kind of introspection that five years ago would almost certainly have been plowed into contact mics and redundant delay pedals have started picking up vintage keyboards and “going deep” on a seemingly endless stream of cassette labels and collector-baiting ultra-limited vinyl editions, while many noise veterans have hitched their wagon to the inexplicable but lucrative goth dance craze.
Entering the fray is Brian Miller, Los Angeles underground scene stalwart, Deathbomb Arc label-runner, and founder of the late, lamented forward- thinking punk collective Rose for Bohdan. He used to run around with legendary improv unit Gang Wizard, and currently heads up the stunning four-drummer revue Foot Village. Bottom line: he’s been making Los Angeles cool for well over a decade. Oh yeah, his cat has a blog too. I’ve known Brian for a long time. Full disclaimer: I used to intern at Deathbomb Arc in the mid-00’s, which at that point he was still running out of his parent’s Burbank garage – an effortlessly punk setup. When I heard he was doing a new project, and already had three releases planned, I was excited but a bit skeptical. The solo drone/ambient project under an ironic moniker schtick seemed a bit too trite for Miller, a musical lifer who has toured all over the world and seen many a hyped scene come and go. (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.
One of the things I was really looking forward to at SXSW was sitting down for a chat with some of the artists I had been following for a long time but had only had the opportunity of corresponding with over the internet. Rangers‘ Joe Knight, who released a stunning record of “pop songs” on Olde English Spelling Bee earlier this year, was high on my list. Sadly, the interview I had planned to conduct out with him out there never came to be. It was such a hectic week for both of us that somehow we only managed to say a quick hello as he and the other members of the SXSW Rangers “band” — which had convened for the first time in Austin that week — were lugging their gear out of the backyard where the Micro-Pixel-Rites showcase was hosted. Fortunately, we were able to catch up on the information super highway when we both got home.
Last week was a big week for Rangers, marking not only your first appearance at SXSW, but also some of your first live appearances period. How would you describe the whole SXSW experience? Anything weird or unusual happen?
Dunno. It was a lot of fun. I guess it was random how it came about. I’m from Texas and have been to SXSW a bunch and I was tentativley planning to go just for fun and to catch up with some friends from back home. Then I started to get some offers to play shows, so I started to throw the idea around with my friend Peter and we were trying to think of the best way to swing it. We had some friends who were down to go and ready to practice; we practiced a bit and that was that. We had a great time. (more…)
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…)
British art-prankster Bill Drummond (later of the KLF) once suggested that the success of Liverpudlian post-punkers Echo & the Bunnymen was due the alignment of an interstellar ley line that passed through the location of long-gone legendary Cavern Club – as well as Iceland and Papua New Guinea. Drummund allegedly went as far as to send the Bunnymen to perform in Iceland while waiting back in Liverpool for whatever cosmic energies would flow along the ley line.
In my own personal cosmology, there surely runs a powerful primordial braid between my home of Providence, Rhode Island and Osaka Japan. Having cut my teeth on bands who owed a heavy aesthetic debt to the Osaka scene –- Lightning Bolt, Arab on Radar, Black Dice –- Osaka became my own personal Ultima Thule. Although broadband has certainly torn down some of the mystique of musical trainspotting via $30 import CD-Rs from Kim’s, bus rides to the once-a-year Boredoms gig in NYC, and the chance acquisition of a copy of an English language zine like “Show-kai,” I made it a point to go check out Friday’s show at Bruar Falls billed as an “All-Girl Brooklyn vs. Osaka” show.
The openers were Brooklyn’s Hard Nips, a relatively straight-ahead guitar rock quartet who could draw favorable comparisons to a stripped down Wipers, although some songs (“Sunstroke”) hinted at glimmers of Fleetwood Mac-esque jams to come. The relatively unembellished vocals from all band members (including a ringer guitarist in drag!) provided a welcome respite from Brooklyn pop’s reverb infatuation of the past few years.
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)
As a child, I had a strong interest in the history and mythology of UFOs and aliens. Despite the many phobias that can afflict a young kid, I was never afraid of ghosts, bogeymen, or monsters — or even the supposedly very real threat of child predators, kidnappers, and serial killers. Instead, I was fascinated and terrified by the prospect of being abducted by aliens and experimented on. Why this terror developed — leading to many sleepless nights and pleadings with my parents to sleep in their room — is not clear to me. Probably a combination of the countless hours I spent watching syndicated episodes of “Unsolved Mysteries” and my youth reading list, which leaned heavily on science fiction. My appetite for material relating to UFOs was as insatiable as it was damaging to my young psyche; and to this day, although I’m a well-adjusted adult, the prospect of alien abduction still stirs deep emotions. (more…)
Mountains, Live at Le Poisson Rouge, Unsound Festival, February 10, 2010.
The first major snowstorm of 2010 in New York City occasioned one of the most noteworthy nights of the Unsound Festival. The festival, which originated in Poland and is making its stateside debut this year, is a two-week series of concerts, film screenings, talks, and other special events in Manhattan with a focus on experimental dance and electronic music. Tonight’s concert took place at Le Poisson Rouge, a relatively new downtown venue that seeks to bring classical and experimental music to the beer-swilling masses in a club setting. LPR is relatively small with an impressive sound system suited to avant garde musics, which often hinge on subtle gestures and deep listening for success. (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…)
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? (more…)
Back To The Future The Ride, s/t free mini-l.p. on Deathbomb Arc
As a child, I had a strong interest in the history and mythology of UFOs and aliens. Despite the many phobias that can afflict a young kid, I was never afraid of ghosts, bogeymen, or monsters — or even the supposedly very real threat of child predators, kidnappers, and serial killers. Instead, I was fascinated and terrified by the prospect of being abducted by aliens and experimented on. Why this terror developed — leading to many sleepless nights and pleadings with my parents to sleep in their room — is not clear to me. Probably a combination of the countless hours I spent watching syndicated episodes of “Unsolved Mysteries” and my youth reading list, which leaned heavily on science fiction. My appetite for material relating to UFOs was as insatiable as it was damaging to my young psyche; and to this day, although I’m a well-adjusted adult, the prospect of alien abduction still stirs deep emotions.
Mountains, Live at Le Poisson Rouge, Unsound Festival, February 10, 2010.
Along with its fetching new face, 
One of my all-time favorite 
