Archive for the ‘ENGLISH’ Category
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
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…)
Tags: Brendon Anderegg, John Norman, Koen Holtkamp, Le Poisson Rouge, Martin Brandlmayr, Mountains, Radian, Stefan Németh, Tape, Thrill Jockey, Tim Hecker, Tomas Hallonsten, Unsound Festival
Posted in Portraits, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, February 15th, 2010
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…)
Tags: Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Biomusicosophy, Chocolate Bobka, Hypnagogic Pop, lo-fi, politics, Tiny Mix Tapes
Posted in ENGLISH, Horizons, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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?
(more…)
Tags: Beat Unternährer, Hinterzimmer Records, Julian Sartorius, Mago Fluek, Retro Mäder, Rhys Chatham, The Bern Project, War in Heaven
Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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.
(more…)
Tags: Bill Nace, Brian Sullivan, Carlos Giffoni, Chris Corsano, Coco66, Death Unit, Dog Lady, John Olson, Mike Collino, Nate Young, Northampton Wools, Regression, Spykes, Thurston Moore, Trevor Tremaine, Wolf Eyes
Posted in Portraits, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Ad For “The Whitehaus Family Record Family Record,” coming soon on The Whitehaus Family Record
As we shift from the decade of America’s horse into the year we make contact, the Googleplex blogosphere seems to be rendering record labels pretty much obsolete as distribution networks. They are, however, becoming are increasingly important as aesthetic umbrellas, harboring like-minded projects as the latter blow their loads into the soil and sprout great froot. Of course, this only really applies to labels that can be considered “indie” or “DIY” in some way; the fact that a record is on Warner Bros. tells you nothing about it, whereas when you hear that a record was dropped by Southern Lord, Load, or Not Not Fun, you can usually make a pretty accurate guess as to what it will sound like.
(more…)
Tags: Light-Lightning, Look into Look Unto, Manners, Many Mansions, Return to Source, The Whitehaus Family Record, Truman Peyote
Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Lazy internet journalist types would have you believe that Melbourne’s The Twerps are the Australian Real Estate. This comparison may make sense in the hallowed halls of MP3 hype, but it doesn’t hold much water upon closer aural inspection. If dudes playing guitars and singing earnestly makes them Real Estate soundalikes, then we’re in trouble. Regardless of your entry point to The Twerps’ world, the group recently released their debut recordings on the lovely Night People label (in the perennially beloved cassette format) and Australia’s Chapter Music (in the increasingly popular 7” + Bonus CD format). The Twerps cover a lot of ground here in 25 minutes and 9 tracks, from the tossed-off spoken word of “Dance Alone” to “Drunk On Me,” an acoustic ballad which nails woozy high school relationship drama with uncanny precision.
(more…)
Tags: Chapter Music, Kiwi Pop, Night People, Real Estate, The Mantles, The Twerps
Posted in Reviews, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
![Killing Time EP Cover[1]](http://www.visitation-rites.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Killing-Time-EP-Cover11-1024x1024.jpg "Killing Time EP Cover[1]")
With their/his new EP Killing Time, Moon Duo, a solo project from Wooden Shjips singer-guitarist Ripley Johnson, manages to overcome a slightly lousy band name and a potential first impression as a larky side project to emerge as the best thing yet to scamper out from Ripley and his Shjipmates’ collective womb. What we get is a 20-minute sl(ice)ab of reverb-y echo-y goodness, somewhere between Psychocandy-era JAMC playing NEU! covers on a hazy beach and a fetal Spacemen 3 jamming off on a Suicide tip in a gymnasium.
(more…)
Tags: Dead West, Killing Time, Moon Duo, Ripley Johnson, Sacred Bones, Wooden Shjips
Posted in ENGLISH, Reviews, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Describing Julian Lynch’s music is difficult, period. But it is even harder to describe his music without falling back on certain buzzwords, terms that have been so overused by music journalists over the past year that they seem to designate everything and nothing at all. We might say, for example, that Julian makes blissed-out 21st-century psychedelia, waltzing lackadaisically through the bottomless archive of musical references (Western and non-) that the internet puts at our fingertips.
(more…)
Tags: Julian Lynch, Olde English Spelling Bee, Orange You Glad, Underwater Peoples
Posted in ENGLISH, Portraits, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
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…)
Tags: Black Beach, Excepter, Harrison Owen, John Fell Ryan
Posted in Horizons, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Still from A Serious Man, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009.
An Open-Ended Question From An Open-Ended Film:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Larry Gopnick, the “Serious Man” in the Coen Brothers’ new film by the same name. The time is the 1960’s, and you are a family man and tenure-track physics professor living in an affluent Jewish neighborhood in the suburbs of Minneapolis. You, the Serious Man, believe that you are doing everything right until pretty much everything in your life starts going egregiously wrong: your wife decides to leave you for a family friend, your brother runs into trouble with the law, your 13-year-old son starts stealing from you to buy weed, and a student offers you an exorbitant amount of money for a passing grade (while threatening to sue you) the same week you are up for tenure.
(more…)
Tags: A Serious Man, Jefferson Airplane, The Coen Brothers
Posted in Horizons, Uncategorized | No Comments »
