Posts Tagged ‘G. Lucas Crane’

Sunday Brunch Takeover: The Nonhorse / Sun Araw Episode

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Last week, “Sunday Brunch with Chocolate Bobka” on Newtown Radio was home to a DJ coup d’état. I wish I could say that the Underwater Visitations team staged a veritable DJ hold-up (in the manner of Horsemouth in the film Rockers, Reggae patois and all), but the reality of the situation had nothing to do with musico-political resistance, and everything to do with scheduling conflicts. Though no omelets or mimosas went into making of this episode, Ari and I had a full plate indeed — so much so that we stretched our two-hour repast into three and a half.

Cameron Stallones of Sun Araw delivered an inspirational virtual DJ set from sunny Los Angeles, aptly entitled “Sunburn City: Heads Up High.” Over Gchat, Cameron described the mix to me as the soundtrack to a “lazer lazy day”: “it starts all dewy, and then it gets mad sunburnt.” I’m not so sure what Sunburn city is, but apparently the photo above — which Cameron provided in the way of visual accompaniment — shows all the people who are waiting in line to get there. I probably should have asked him to tell me a little more about the place when he called into the station from the side of the road — not to mention his thoughts on Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Soviet mystic mathematician PD Ouspensky, whom he seemed intent upon discussion before the show– but we did end up having a pretty fascinating discussion on triangles, hairless dogs, and Hubble 3D.

Just when we were about to pack up for the day, G. Lucas Crane of Silent Barn, Woods, and Nonhorse fame rolled up with his mobile tape-manipulation dashboard and spilled about a hundred hand-labeled tapes onto the floor. Shortly thereafter, he dove into a hour-long mash-up of sounds as widely varied as Indian Raga, a “How to Feel Good Without Drugs” self-hypnosis cassette, and a tape he recorded while watching at home and jamming along to it on a synthesizer. The resulting performance — which you can hear at the tail end of the episode below — was frenetic enough to provoke a small seizure. But like any instance of sensory overload – listening to every FM station on the dial at once, for example — if you let the whole thing wash over you in one long continuous wave, you’ll probably end up feeling pretty blissed-out.

“Sunday Brunch with Chocolate Bobka Takeover: The Nonhorse / Sun Araw Episode”

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Download the entire episode here.

Playlist after the jump.
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The Joshua Light Show Fest, Part 1: Introduction + Woods/MV EE

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Woods, live at the Joshua Light Show Festival, Abrons Art Center, May 13, 2010

Joshua White is a New York artist who began his career creating liquid light shows for Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in the late 1960s and early 70s. The Joshua Light show was in residence at the Fillmore and provided visuals for all the major artists associated with the classic psychedelic and heavy rock scene of the era, from Hendrix to Joplin.

After the scene faded, White moved into professional television production. Although his trippy visuals were forever immortalized in the memories of clued-in boomers and the freaky party scene from Midnight Cowboy, White would not revisit his light show past for nearly 40 years. In 2004, he teamed with artist Gary Panter to recreate some of the light shows for a one-off at Anthology Film Archives. Renewed interest in the classic light shows has peaked in recent years, and White has been performing regularly with his ensemble of visual alchemists and artists to accompany acts like Yo La Tengo, as well as various iterations of the Darmstadt New Music series and one-offs at the Whitney Museum and Lincoln Center.

The Joshua Light Show Festival, which premiered last week in New York, is a festival of contemporary psychedelic music, curated by Nick Hallett and paired with the light show’s distinctive visual component. The festival ran for over consecutive nights (the opening night with Steve Moore and itsnotyouitsme, and closing night with Dean & Britta and Spectrum) at the Abrons Art Center, a community center at the Henry Street Settlement, which has its own history as an incubator of avant-garde practice, including big name past associates like John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and Martha Graham.
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