Archive for the ‘Portraits’ Category
Friday, June 4th, 2010
Greg Fox is an incredibly busy Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist who participates in the groups Teeth Mountain, Guardian Alien, Liturgy, and his solo project GDFX (among others), and runs the Infinite Limbs record label. Guardian Alien performed at the second day of NY Eye & Ear, and their mesmerizing set of processed vocals, explosive percussion, and expert Japan Banjo playing had me itching to pick Greg’s brain on a number of issues. Topics discussed include Blues Control, the amoral New York Post, and Fox’s upcoming July 4th blowout at Shea Stadium.
Max Burke: Tell me about the genesis of the GDFX project – how it came to be, and where it is currently.
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Tags: Bonnaroo, GDFX, Greg Fox, Guardian Alien, Infinite Limbs, Little Fury Things, Manny's Music, Market Hotel, NY Eye & Ear, Shea Stadium
Posted in Portraits, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
Source of Yellow are a (mostly) Brooklyn-based trio who play a tightly focused strain of experimental music with a concentration and passion atypical of many improv units. The group consists of Nawi Avila, Nick Hasty, and Peter Kerlin. As the opening group on day two of the NY Eye & Ear Fest, they effectively roused me from my early afternoon stupor with a blistering set that barely topped 15 minutes. The group has just self-released their debut on vinyl and I got to speak with them about the challenges and rewards of putting out your own record, the pleasures of Charleton Heston’s The Omega Man, and their own personal low-end theory.
Max Burke: How long have you guys been together?
Peter Kerlin: Two years. Nawi and I had been in another band called The Holy Childhood and then I stopped playing music for a while and then I met Nick in this graduate program we were in; he was a student of mine, and we started playing. Nawi and I were fantasizing about having a band that would be all low-end — Nawi playing baritone sax, me playing bass…
Nawi Avila: …low-end in competing waves.
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Tags: Avant Ghetto, Brian Osborne, Discriminate Music, Josh Druckman, Latalan Hardi Trio, Nawi Avila, Nick Hasty, Outlier Inn, Peter Kerlin, Slow Stoch, Source of Yellow, The Holy Childhood, The Seaside Lounge, Zebulon
Posted in Portraits, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Friday, April 30th, 2010
I would describe the experience of doing an interview with Cameron Stallones of Sun Araw as both thrilling and nerve-racking. Thrilling in that you’re likely to end up with something really thought-provoking and surprising. Nerve-racking because considering how much care Stallones puts into his output, I knew that I really had to bring my A-game. After several hours of bleeding over questions, several spirited email exchanges, and much anticipation, I am at last able to present to you the interview you see here, along with the track “The Stakeout: Reprise” off of ON PATROL, Sun Araw’s latest album. I don’t know about you, but I think this song could be the soundtrack to the buddy cop movie that exists somewhere in my subconscious.
Samantha Cornwell: I know that you do all of your own album art work for Sun Araw, and seem to have a pretty clear vision of how you want your music to be represented visually. How do you feel this aesthetic unity effects the Sun Araw experience and sets it apart from other musical projects that you are familiar with? Have you applied a similar rigor to previous musical projects of your own?
Cameron Stallones: I want the zones to flow all the way through, start to finish, eyes to ears, brainpan to inner visions. That’s really powerful and important to me. I just can’t help but get stoked about the object-creation side of it anyhow, such a heavy scene! Not to mention the ability to physically realize for others the inner-zones that you’ve been dwelling in so long while recording. Thankfully, in most of the other bands I’ve been in, people have been down and had similar goals. In Magic Lantern the artwork is always a collab, but those dudes like getting down into it, making something really thorough. I guess those are complicated ways of saying I can be super picky, though. But a lot of the bands I idolize are those that were super singular in their aesthetic visions as well as their music. I just see it as preparing the way for the jams, folding them in love.
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Tags: Cameron Stallones, Heavy Deeds, On Patrol, Sun Araw, The Stakeout: Reprise
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Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
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.
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Tags: Back To The Future The Ride, Brian Miller, Crystal Kisses at Reindeer Lake, Deathbomb Arc, FNMTV, Foot Village, Gang Wizard, Gifts Nobody Wants, God Has Given His Daughter, John Perry Barlow, Mtv, Pronoia Sunsets, Sanity
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Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
Aerial view of Dallas, TX, Joe Knight’s hometown
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.
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Tags: Joe Knight, Olde English Spelling Bee, Rangers, Suburban Tours
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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
Posted in Portraits, Uncategorized | 4 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.
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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
Posted in Horizons, Portraits, Uncategorized | No Comments »
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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