Free vinyl comp with Excepter, Aa, Talbam! at the door.
4:07 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Just realized I confused Loose Limbs and Twin Stumps – Classic NY Eye & Ear faux pas! Loose Limbs kicking things off for a fortunate few now.
4:18 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Small crowd 4 C. Lavender’s exemplary solo noise, most taking pics. “Overdocumented & Underattended” comes to mind as flippant commentary.
4:45 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Population 1280’s guitar sound is the harshest thing I’ve heard so far today. Making me feel like a weakling. 5:44 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Pop 1280 embraced the hardcore matinee vibe of their 5:30 PM time slot, wrecked it like junior high 1996.
6:06 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

DubKnowDub currently offering total liberation via shopping cart, distortion effects. #nyeye&ear
6:19 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

If you’re suspicious of too much polish on your jams, Human Resources might be your new favorite one-man band. #nyeye&ear
6:53 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Despite technical hiccups early on, Follower are delivering a fierce set of dual vocal, percussion-heavy, tunes.#nyeye&ear
7:34 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Hex Breaker Quintet playing their latest Top 40 single, “Step 1. Scratch skin Step 2. Reveal cosmic light” to a partially seated audience.
8:03 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

@lldeloreans about to play the last show of their current incarnation.
8:20 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Do it! RT: @pendupendu get out to NY EYE & EAR FEST many bands yet to play like Passions, Liturgy, Blank Dogs, +more. KNITTING FACTORY
8:47 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Just drank a beer and talked to some people. Can’t watch music all the time. I’m only human. Might push my luck & eat some food.
10:01 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Konnichiwa audience evenly split between sitters and standers – What side are you on??? #nyeye&ear
10:05 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Just had a nice chat with Adam from legendary avant label ESP-Disk. VR loves ESP-Disk and you should too! 10:22 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Full on headbanger crowd in the first row for Liturgy – well deserved.
10:31 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

This picture is only worth a couple hundred words. #Liturgy #nyeye&earfest
10:43 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Just broke down and got some pizza, my integrity forever compromised. Back to #nyeye&ear shortly for Twin Stumps!
10:55 PM May 22nd via OpenBeak

Twin Stumps feels like Whitehouse meets stoner doom meets a Dali film. Like the microphone cord whiplash antics.
11:27 PM May 22nd via Social Beat

Passions have a great idea: synth pop with live percussion. Dig it.
12:21 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Pendu medicine bags, containing tiny illustrated scrolls
12:25 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Living Days are like The Cure fronted by Karen O. They’ll probably be huge.
12:50 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Heard a rumor I would like Mirror Mirror. The rumors are true.
1:21 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Need to find a word for excitement and exhaustion at the same time heading into hour 10 of #nyeye&ear.
1:40 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Not even the most obvious aspects of Effi Briest’s appeal work for me. #sexdoesntsell.
2:09 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

White Ring’s penultimate set of the night a nice reward for the truly dedicated. Down a deep, dark hole of processed vocals + distortion.
2:43 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Blank Dogs 3 AM: Strictly Hardcore. Signing off for tonight.
3:22 AM May 23rd via OpenBeak

RT @MaxBurke Remember to follow @VisitationRites all day today – I will be live tweeting New York Eye & Ear Fest III all day again!
3:01 PM May 23rd via Social Beat

Back on site for NY Eye & Ear, crowd is sparse for Source of Yellow but they don’t mind – sax inflected jams to kick off day 2!
4:13 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Memorial Gore tried to break the table, nearly succeeded. Unhinged noise classicists good for a 5 PM wake up call.
5:32 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

GDFX set the mood with a blistering, well attended set on the floor – tightly focused excursions into heavy zones…
6:57 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

…Diablo followed suit with a captivating solo exploration of the limits of the electric guitar’s potential for abstract noise.
6:59 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

The man, the myth, the legend Todd Pendu conjuring deeply as Chaos*Majik.
7:13 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

I like Lost as much as the next guy, but Figure Study is straight killing it right now. #nyeyeandear
9:34 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

#therealvisitationrites is filming Laurel Halo, loving every second of it.
10:44 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

@0pn and @carlosgiffoni straight chilling watching the Lost finale right now. #nyeyeandearfest
23:03 PM May 23rd via OpenBeak

Naam was an easy groove. I slid right in, didn’t think twice about it.
12:24 AM May 24th via OpenBeak

Just ate this banana for sustenance and energy. #glamorousbloggerlife #nyeyeandearfest
12:46 AM May 24th via OpenBeak

Blondes were in complete control. Roused me from my near slumber.
1:50 AM May 24th via OpenBeak

No Fun Acid = no disappointment. @carlosgiffoni ’s take on primitive techno is an absolute pleasure. #nyeyeandear
2:22 AM May 24th via OpenBeak

Xeno & Oaklander playing out #nyeyeandearfest to a captive audience.
2:55 AM May 24th via OpenBeak

And that will it do it for @MaxBurke. We now return to your regularly scheduled tweeting. Hope you enjoyed #nyeyeandearfest tweetathon.
2:57 AM May 24th via OpenBeak

Words: Max Burke
Blackberry Photos: Max Burke

The B-side of the tape continues in roughly the same vein, but Mesner ditches the soul sample and goes for an atonal backing track that makes the spoken word selections sound even creepier. Individual reactions to this one will will vary deeply. I’m sure that many listeners will find the ludicrous ramblings of a clearly disturbed individual hilarious, or even sad, but to me Good and Bad UFOs is an uncanny triumph that slots nicely on the spectrum of American weirdness — somewhere between “Coast to Coast AM”, Craig Baldwin’s experimental film collage narratives, and my own youthful experience of UFO paranoia. Another truly “out” missive from the fertile hotbed of the current cassette underground.

Doug Mesner, Side A of Good and Bad UFOs (As Above So Below Tapes, 2009)

Words: Max Burke

Good and Bad UFOS was released in 2009 by As Above So Below Tapes. Purchase the cassette via their MySpace, and be sure to check out the rest of their catalogue, which includes rare releases by Rangers and Sir Plastic Crimewave.

Now Andy Warhol was not a minimalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that Hickey’s anecdote goes a long way toward capturing that movement’s psychological effects. Basically, you take something that is really simple (1=1), repeat it over and over again (1+1=2), and realize that you were wrong about it in the first place, because everything that seems simple is actually extraordinarily complex (1+1+1+1=?). Composer Rhys Chatham has almost always worked inside this equation, though he is perhaps best known for taking this “field of tiny increments” and blowing it up to the monumental proportions of rock and roll. “Guitar Trio” (1977) his first major composition, plugged repetition à la Morton Subotnik and La Monte Young into the squall of an electric guitar. And since he relocated from New York to Paris twenty years ago, Chatham’s signature wall of sound seems to be getting bigger and bigger: “Crimson Grail,” which made its American debut at Lincoln Center in New York last August, boasted the combined decibel power of 200 electric guitars, and 15 basses–and 400 guitars and 30 basses when he mounted the piece at the Sacré Couer in Paris, two years prior.

It is sad, I know, but when you are a music blogger, sometimes you simply don’t have the luxury of planting yourself on a bean cushion, closing your eyes, and dreamily contemplating an entire album from start to finish–even if you have been waiting for that album to show up in your mailbox for months. Life just gets way too busy. And that is why when I received The Bern Project a few days ago from Hinterzimmer Records in Switzerland, I vowed that I would allow myself to give Rhys’ new album a spin only if I took a crack at the mountain of dirty dishes in my kitchen sink while listening to it. So I cranked my stereo up to full volume, turned on the tap, and prayed that the mechanical nature of the activity would allow me to devote my full attention to the listening at hand.

To speak only in terms of its one-sheet, The Bern Project has all the trappings of a minor Guitar Trio side project; following a performance of the piece in 2008, Chatham returned to the Swiss capital to record some material with percussionist Julian Sartorius (“one of the most sought-after improv drummers in Switzerland”), bassist Mago Fluek (a key player in Bern’s garage rock scene), and trombonist Beat Unternährer. Labelman Retro Mäder recorded the sessions on a multi-track, selected the best takes, and joined in the creative process by combining elements from different improvisations to form original tracks (though this is not the case with all the pieces that made it into the final master). As I lathered up my sponge and settled into the album’s opening drone–a twelve-minute trumpet solo (Chatham) alternating between the bass of elephant flatulence and the treble of a thousand buzzing bees–I seriously wasn’t expecting anything all that punked out. Even if the infinity of flickering overtones that was slowly washing over the room wasn’t all that far off from what I had heard him extract from his famous “guitar armies.”

But listening to minimalist music is all about allowing things to creep up on you; and “War in Heaven” certainly did just that. Just as I was plunging my coffee pot into the bath of hot water, Sartorious chimed in with a loud resounding thump. And then another one. Before I knew it, the drone–with all its dancing harmonics–was being molded into something like a melody. A bass line was telling us where each phrase began and ended, and a pan-flute was covering the whole thing in a breathy gauze. Thump thump. Suddenly Sartorious exploded into a full-on Kraut beat–fills and all–and the trombone multiplied into several.

And guess what? Doing the dishes–something I had been putting off for almost a week–suddenly became interesting. Extraordinarily so. The bubbles were flashing in brilliant rainbows, spoons were swimming in synchronized formations, and I was dancing though the mundane motions of my chore like I haven’t danced since college. A drone really COULD be the stuff rock and roll. And if Guitar Trio had shown the world that the Ramones were closet minimalists, this stuff was showing me that Klaus Dinger and Kosmick coterie were actually minimalists, too. Funk–cool and sexy as ever–was dancing its way right out the womb, into to the tomb, and off to oblivion.

Rather than bore you with a track-by-track description of “The Bern Project,” let me just say that each of its chapters packs just as potent a slow-burn. Do not let the academic pedigree scare you off. Just go out and buy this record for yourself, put it in your CD player (if you still have one), and make sure you crank it up loud enough for your landlord to grow a bit worried about all the “fun” you seem to be having. Clip Clip.

Rhys Chatham, “War in Heaven” (The Bern Project, Hinterzimmer Records, 2010)

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Purchase “The Bern Project” from Hinterzimmer records here. For those of you Guitar Trio fanatics out there, the record comes equipped with a bonus recording of the piece’s performance in Bern in 2008.

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.

So this brings us back around to the lecture at hand: I’ve got a trio of records here from various points in the last year or so on a tiny Massachusetts label, presumably run out of somebody’s apartment and/or performance space, called The Whitehaus Family Record. By throwing down the Family gauntlet in the title, one can safely infer that there is some prevailing camaraderie and cross-pollination amongst the people at play, and that theorem metes itself out in the actual product at hand.

The most recent of these records–and, sadly, the one that did the least for me–is the brief, quiet, unassuming, semi-experimental Sleepytime Tea folk of Look Into Look Unto by the aptly named Manners. Each track features some low, barely intelligible whispery dude vocals with the occasional faint backup singing of a second member of either gender, accompanied by a spare smattering of acoustic guitar, some bass plugging, and the occasional violin, lap steel, or Sine Wave Generator flourish. As the 8 tracks burn by in a tidy 21 minutes, songs float by in hazy fragments that rarely cohere into a full-fledged song. Look Into Look Unto does succeed in establishing a mood and sticking to it; it’s just that that mood is naptime.

To be honest, I rarely listen to music that sounds like this of my own volition, so coming up with comparisons to sound-alike artists is not as easy as it is for the next two acts, who make it rrrrrreeeeaally easy. My GF says they sound kinda like the Microphones, so I guess if you like those guys, you might like this. It’s not that it’s bad per se; it could just use a little more polish and dynamics to differentiate it from every other super mellow quiet folk album being coffee-shitted out in the plain view of baristas across this great land of ours.

The next most recent missive I have from these here Whitehaus folx is Light-Lightning, featuring the more festive and notable An(Co)tics of Truman Peyote. Whereas I struggled to define signposts for Manners’ barely-there folksiness, Truman Peyote come barreling out of the gate with a cringeworthy message board handle of a name and an opening track that would sound perfectly cozy on any post-Strawberry Jam Animal Collective emission. While the music contained over the rest of the album is fairly Peacebonery, it’s really the yelpy vocal interplay that pushes the lemmings over the cliff and into the Collection. Be forewarned, however that only a few of the 10 tracks on Light-Lightning feature those AnCo vocal tics; Truman Peyote hand the rest of the record over to electro-folk noodlery that bears more of a resemblance to the semi-experimental beat-folk of some of Anticon’s more indie-leaning projects (cLOUDDEAD, Why?), or the indie folktronica of someone like Four Tet. In fact, if we lived in a world where the name Panda Bear only referred to furry fellers who refuse to fuck, I’d probably be forced to compare the vocal interplay to them Anticon boyz, but you can’t spell Anticon without the AnCo, so I guess it was fated by the Godz from both sides to begin with. In spite of the overwhelming surface similarity to the newly christened Princes of Pazznjop, Light-Lightening is a promising release from an artist who should only get better as they strike out more on their own as they get increasingly irritated with being compared to Animal Collective in every single review of this record on the internet.

Finally, we come to the class of this batch, the nearly year-old Return to Source CD-R by a stoned dude with a beard who records under the name Many Mansions. Like labelbros Truman Peyote, Many Mansions wears a somewhat smaller but still significant AnCobatross round his neck. Fortunately, his is a much more consistent effort, transcending that somewhat limiting and easy comparison with looped soundscapes recalling High Places or Creature Comforts-era Black Dice and occasional ventures into Graceland call-and-response territory. Along the way, he also finds room for some New Age mellifluousness that reminds me of a more stonery and woodlanded Andreas Vollenweider.

Apart from the truly heinous and way-too-on-the-nose opening lyrics of “Oneness” (“I think I’ll smoke some weed and take some LSD and walk in the woods and maybe climb a tree”), Return to Source moves along at a brisk clip through its various stages of blissy sonics, giving each track enough breathing room to evolve and breathe without ever overstaying its welcome or going into extended disco-edit rave-up territory. Actually, an album of 9-minute workouts of genre fuckery from this guy doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all, which is as good a compliment as I can pay almost anybody in this era of increasingly short attention spans and an overwhelming glut of listening options. If they keep releasing records as good as Return to Source, the Whitehaus Family Record may yet grow to be a true force to be reckoned with; as it is they are definitely worth keeping a Magic Eye on at your next shroom party. Just make sure that you fix your toilet door beforehand.

Words: Matt Kruglinski

The Twerps, “Good Advice” (S/T EP, Chapter Music/Night People)

Words: Max Burke

Purchase the single + MP3 download from Chapter Music here and the cassette from Night People here.

Moon Duo functions in quite the opposite way. The longest song on Killing Time peters out just shy of the six minute mark; this is around where the Shjips usually start warming up, but it works perfectly here. From the shimmery acid Spector throb of the title track, to the lovely sun-and-weed-bayked Moe-Tuckerik chug-a-lug of closer “Ripples,” Killing Time is the type of record you can throw on just about any old time. It’s loaded with catchy, tightly meandering jams that never overstay their welcome. Finishing up in 3” CDR time, the EP is just long enough to leave you satisfied, but just short enough to leave you wanting more. It’s gonna get a lot of burn around these parts so you should try to pick it up on vinyl before it sells out or something of that nature.

Moon Duo, “Dead West” (Killing Time EP, Sacred Bones)

Words: Matt Kruglinksi

Purchase the record here.

And it would almost work if not for Leone’s nasal and sometimes grating vocals and his reliance on meta-cute lyrical ploys: there’s a song about Nellie McKay, the last track is titled “The End,” and there’s talk of wanting to “marry this song.” Still, it’s a testament to his musical abilities and wealth of ideas that Abstract Expression is never boring. At their best, his tracks sound like Yes covering Macca’s “Temporary Secretary”; at their worst, they sound like the Mungolian Jet Set (with whom Leone has collaborated in the past) remixing Atom and his Package. If he let his tracks breathe a little bit more and maybe worked with another vocalist–or at least toned down the cutesy lyrical content–he could really make something we could all get behind. But I don’t think critical consensus matters much to Mr. Leone. He’s probably perfectly content to have made the type of compelling curiosity that is destined to be viewed as an under-appreciated classic by some, an indulgent misfire by others. I stand conflicted.

Spike-s, his new 7 inch out on Norwegian label Pica Disk, is less a showcase of the tools he keeps hidden in his gigbag than of his ability to set them in motion. Somewhere between his more “mental” output (read: rapid-fire and twisted) and the ambience of Charlie Charlie (his collaboration with wife Erell Latimier), Side A registers like a mouse cantering gleefully on his wheel, sustaining a feeling of euphoric hyperactivity that we may only recall experiencing the last time we witnessed the Corsano-Flower duo in concert. Like Corsano on record, Guthrie’s rapid pummels and skips are set at a physical remove, alternately muted and obscured by what sounds like a single synth drone passed back and forth over an old walky-talky. On Side B, Guthrie takes this simple elemental equation and switches on a musical equivalent of nightvision; instead of the constant drum pulse, we experience an equally resonant empty space, studded with metallic concrète sounds, static-drenched samples, and some pretty sadistic knob-turning.

The hidden link between these two tracks is one that we are likely to sense, but unlikely to concretely identify: the “synth drone” that we hear on the first track is a sample of a melody Guthrie ripped from an lp of traditional folk music from Brittany, which he proceeds to mash up, reloop, and rewire on the second. And who knows how many other secret constellation points Guthrie is plotting in our head? Whether you’re looking for a good noise record, some extremely on-point free-jazz drumming, or even the kind of “new new age” transcendentalism that has become so popular in the last year or so, you will find something in Spike’s to thoroughly enjoy; just remember to listen with your gut instead of your consumer preferences.

Words: Emilie Friedlander
* Interview with Visitation Rites‘ own Sophie Pécaud, Magazine Fragil, December, 2007. Translated from the original French by Emilie Friedlander.

Listen to Side A on YouTube here.

Words: Sophie Pécaud
Translation: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published on Chronicart, September 2009.

Read the rest on Tiny Mix Tapes.

Words: Emilie Friedlander