The muse of that isolated winter is gone, replaced by a muse that’s on the run, loose in a wide world. Bon Iver, the band that had its phoenix-like beginning with the muted and hushed For Emma, Forever Ago, is now fully awakened. His recuperation complete, Justin Vernon is free to explore, reaching for a host of new sounds to adorn the band’s second record, Bon Iver. (More…)
“Two great tastes, one great flavor,” joked my boss, as we overheard the strains of a booty jam sampling a piece of 1950s Arab orchestral music. Sitting in his car on the way to a recording session, we turned the volume up. Nodding his head in approval at the mix of squishy beats and vintage strings, he declared, “It’s so fucking obvious! Byrne and Eno were doing this twenty years ago.” Well, not exactly. But he was close. (More…)
I wasn’t going to write about the debut album from Cults. The very idea of the band annoyed me. I’m tired of male-female duos like the The White Stripes, Fiery Furnaces, and Mates of State. I’m tired of records that sound like they’re being played over an AM radio. And I’m especially tired of bands from Brooklyn, which actually make me long for the days when Seattle was all the rage. (More…)
Punk bands never die. They just turn into H&M t-shirts. Or, in the case of the field recording below, supermarket sound system fixtures in southern European immigrant neighborhoods. If Joe Strummer were still alive, he’d delight in the specificity of the product placement. (More…)
The Christal Methodists began working together during the late 1980s. Formed at Portland, Oregon’s Reed College, the group went through several lineup changes (and one band name) before it released its first cassette under the Methodist moniker on its own Goy Division label, in September 1994. (More…)
It was my friend Jerlyn who got me into hardcore punk. We went to high school together. At the time, I was a wayward ex-raver looking for something — anything —with a drop of integrity. I was around sixteen when I went to my first hardcore show.
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Fifty years into his career, Bob Dylan is still making waves. Sometimes, just by showing up. Such is the case with his upcoming concert in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv, on June 20th. Cultural boycott, anyone? As always, Dylan is doing what he wants to, regardless of public opinion. (More…)
For ten years, San Francisco’s Asphodel label was America’s premiere experimental music imprint. Trafficking in everything from turntablist 12″s by the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, Mixmaster Mike’s legendary Anti-Theft Device LP, DJ Spooky’s best full-length, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, musique concrète by Iannis Xenakis (Persepolis,) minimal techno dub from Berlin masters Rhythm and Sound, and symphonies made out of midi-controlled dot matrix printers, Asphodel was it. (More…)
The day before the official release of the Fleet Foxes’ sophomore album Helplessness Blues, I was intently listening to NPR’s label-sanctioned stream when my twelve-year-old daughter broke in: “I really like this.” (More…)
Most mornings I wake up in my personal panopticon and set myself to making quiet guitar, tape or music box pieces over coffee. This collection includes some such pieces encompassing the past year or so.
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Heavy Metal is often seen as a quintessentially white, Western, music. That is indeed the case much of the time. Metal emerged out of white, blue collar mutilations of the blues in working class heartlands such as the West Midlands. Metal imagery is often festooned with such ur-symbols of whiteness such as Viking warriors and corpse-painted pagans amid the snowy forests of Scandinavia. (More…)