Archive for the ‘Portraits’ 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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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Tags: Julian Lynch, Olde English Spelling Bee, Orange You Glad, Underwater Peoples
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
When I emailed Jan Rew Midelfort and Etienne Pierre Duguay asking for an interview about the weekly Yoga party they started this summer on the roof of the Market Hotel in Bushwick, I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to get away with just sending over a list of questions. Duguay–one of the venue’s resident promoters, as well as the drummer for Real Estate and Predator Vision–responded demanding that I arrive at 7:00 pm sharp the following Wednesday to participate in the Yoga class myself. Midelfort–also a musician, and one of the most talented psychedelic music DJ’s I know–added that I should bring my violin along, because it would be “awesome” if I could perform a continuous drone during the New Age music component of the event, which happens after the sun goes down. I did not have the chance to get in touch with Aurora Halal, the event’s third core organizer, but I’m pretty sure she would have responded with yet another suggestion encouraging me nix the habit of passive spectatorship that journalists tend to fall back on.
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Tags: Aurora Halal, Body Actualized Control, Cosmic Yoga, Etienne Duguay, Hypnagogic Pop, Jan Rew Midelfort, Market Hotel, New Age, Predator Vision, Real Estate
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Friday, August 7th, 2009
Walk into any spot in New York City where guitar nerds tend to linger and you’re bound to hear someone talking about it: minimalist composer (and Visitation Rites astrologist) Rhys Chatham is back in New York for round two of last year’s rained-out performance of A Crimson Grail, and somebody you know–or somebody who knows someone you know–is probably rehearsing for it. Boasting the combined decibel power of 200 electric guitars, 15 basses, and a high hat player, Crimson’s North American premiere presents a monumental orchestral slant on Chatham’s signature cross-fertilization of rock and experimental minimalism–dating back to an ear-opening encounter with the visceral punch of NYC punk in the late 1970s, and culminating in what many now identify as the world’s first incarnation of “noise music.”
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Tags: A Crimson Grail, Drastic Classicism, Karole Armitage, Rhys Chatham
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Monday, June 15th, 2009
Minimalist and pop music have always been closely linked, the vocabulary of the latter coloring the austere principles of the former. Terry Riley and Philip Glass drew inspiration from jazz, just as Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, in their monumental symphonies for electric guitar, did from rock ‘n’ roll. Since 2005, and February, his first opus, Jonathan Kane has been revisiting the history of the blues. What could be more logical? “The blues is an intrinsically minimalist art form,” he shares. “John Lee Hooker [...] often played consisted of one droning chord and a melodic, repetitive riff. Minimalism, yes?”
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Tags: February, Jet Ear Party, Jonathan Kane, Krotopkins, La Monte Young, Rhys Chatham, Sophie Pécaud, Swans, Table of the Elements
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Sunday, June 7th, 2009
Tags: Ausland, Berlin, Chris Abrahams, Clare Cooper, Germ Studies, guzheng, Nicholas Wells, Prenzlauer Berg
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Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
As close to a scene report as contemporary noise can afford, No Fun Fest, with Carlos Giffoni at the helm, each year confronts problems of selection. Over three nights, some 25 acts say their piece, spanning a vast geography of provocation and anomie. But how to organize such a spread?
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Tags: Carlos Giffroni, concerts, No Fun Fest
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Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
Mattin is a musician and performance artist from the Basque Country. He has produced a slew of releases under the names of Deflag Haemorrahge/Haien Kontra, Sakada, Billy Bao, and No More Music. He has also collaborated with many artists, including Drunkdriver, Margarita Garcia, Tim Goldie, Taku Unami and Tony Conrad, to name a few. His work mixes laptop electronics with politics and, in the case of Billy Bao, some harsh, deconstructed rock and roll. In the live setting, Mattin is subversive, sometimes abrasive, and always finding ways to undermind audience expectations and break the boundaries inherent to performance.
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Tags: Alessandro Keegan, Billy Bao, Deflag/Haemmorahge, Drunkdriver, Haien Kontra, Margarida Garcia, Mattin, No Fun Fest, No More Music, Sakada, Taku Unami, Tim Goldie, Tony Conrad
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Friday, May 1st, 2009
If you have ever heard or seen the Reactable in action, it was probably during Bjork’s 2007 tour. Largely influenced by the Moog synthesizers of the ’60s and ’70s, this new instrument is a translucent table with movable colored blocks that produces a range of rhythms, melodies, and sequences. If the Reactable has not received the mainstream recognition it warrants, this may be because it is not its tonal qualities that make it revolutionary for live performance, but its components. While its sound is unlikely to break the mold, the Reactable is a dramatic innovation in both interactive performance and music technology.
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Tags: Bjork, design, electronic, Günter Geiger, Marcus Alonso, Martin Kaltenbrunner, Moog, Nicholas Wells, Reactable, Sergi Jordà, Volta
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