Posts Tagged ‘Thurston Moore’

Portraits: Death Unit, Northampton Wools, Regression, Spykes, and Dog Lady at Coco66

Monday, February 1st, 2010

IMG00028-20100130-0018Death 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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Sightings: “I Need That Record!” A Documentary by Brendan Toller

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

ineedthatrecord_jpg_595x325_crop_upscale_q85-1 With collector paradises like Mystery Train (pictured above) and the Ecstatic Yod around, what better place than Western Massachusetts to make a movie about running an independent record store in the age of web piracy and internet mail-order? Visitation Rites was delighted to learn about guerrilla filmmaker Brendan Toller’s I Need That Record! documentary yesterday, which began as a 2008 DIV-III project at Hampshire College and has been globetrotting the festival circuit even since. The film is subtitled “The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store,” and takes a courageous stab at explaining why over 3,000 mom and pop music shops have been forced to close their doors over the past decade. Featuring interviews with Thurston Moore, Ian Mckaye, Noam Chomsky, Mike Watt, Lenny Kaye, Chris Frantz, Glen Branca, Patterson Hood, Pat Carney, Legs Mcneil, Bob Gruen, and BP Helium, along with some pretty fantastic and curmudgeonly-looking record store clerks, as we can see in the trailer below:
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