Military Madness: How the Army Courted the Music World

Anyone browsing the U.K. arm of MTV’s website may find themselves raising an eyebrow when they see this page. Yes, MTV is using its considerable weight to bolster Army recruitment figures, presumably realizing the age range that the network attracts makes for ideal cannon fodder. Naturally, the advertising campaign features very little about the prominent hazards of the job-—U.K. troops are still being deployed to Afghanistan, but it would be unthinkable to mention something related to that on the MTV page-—instead choosing to focus on other aspects of military life. Predominant among these are ways in which the Army can indefinitely enhance civilian life.

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Nite Jewel - Good Evening: Review

Forget chillwave and glo-fi and nostalgia for a version of the Eighties that didn’t exist. Nite Jewel’s Good Evening is a great Los Angeles album. It’s impossible to imagine this music being made anywhere else. It’s as L.A. as John Lautner’s Chemosphere, the Venice Beach boardwalk and Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue. If you drive through Malibu Canyon at 3am, a rolling haze known as the 'marine layer' prevents you from seeing anything more than a couple of feet ahead. This meeting of cool air from the ocean and warm air from inland smudges the world just out of focus, inducing a paralyzing mixture of terror, bewilderment and awe-struck wonder amid the pluming nebula.

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DiS Staffers '09 Mixtapes

Best Of '09 by Nickneyland on Mixcloud

Memories of 2009: Watching high school kids on E puking on each other while Animal Collective played in a giant park; seeing Yojiro from the Boredoms getting carried aloft over a crowd while playing his drum kit at ATP; being blown away by Ponytail and wondering why they're not huge yet; TV on the Radio making the rain stop in Central Park (nYc); being at a Grizzly Bear show with Jay-Z and Beyonce; watching Deerhunter, Dan Deacon and No Age collaborate together in a bowling alley while Avey Tare ate a plate of chips; Pissed Jeans almost getting into a fight onstage; watching the Beets get busted by the NYPD; Rhys Chatham leading 200 guitarists at Lincoln Center and it being surprisingly quiet and tranquil; Nick Cave playing the piano with the Dirty Three; and new bands like Jeff the Brotherhood, Javelin, Sleigh Bells and Sisters making 2010 feel like it’s filled with potential.

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Trans Am - What Day Is It Tonight?: Review

The members of Trans Am appear to motivate themselves in much the same way as the owner of a donkey might keep a carrot perma-dangling just out of reach. Except, in their case, they have a gigantic jar of Ritalin swinging on a string in front of them. It’s the only way to explain their agile take on rock, which has the ability to match eternally cool reference points (Can, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra) with the worst Seventies excesses (Yes, Styx, Boston). As a result, their output has veered all over the place, and What Day is it Tonight? attempts to pull some of those strands together in a live album culled from many different tours spanning 1993-2008.

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Growing Interview

High school gym classes across North America are responsible for sharpening the musical tastes of hundreds of bands. Take Kevin Doria, for example. He makes up one-third of Growing, a band that has traveled the long road from propulsive drone rockers in Olympia to blissed-out experimentalists in New York. “I ended up meeting these punk kids through physical education,” he explains. “The dudes who didn’t want to run, we just kept talking. I was really into metal and they thought that was lame, so I’d ask them, ‘What have you got? Give me a tape.’ You’d get everything from Pennywise and Guttermouth to the Grabbers, but also mixed up with Fugazi and Minor Threat and all this other stuff that was smart and intellectual and really good.”



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Glass Ghost - Idol Omen: Review

There’s a strange kind of jubilation in hitting rock bottom. It’s a feeling the members of the Brooklyn-based Glass Ghost, Eliot Krimsky and Mike Johnson, understand implicitly. These two have been around the block a few times, having spent a generous portion of time peddling meticulously crafted melancholic dream-funk in the underrated Flying. Here, on their debut album as Glass Ghost, Idol Omen, they take things down a notch or two, but never forget that there’s beauty and humour in the doldrums. It’s possible to laugh and cry and even want to dance as you scrape your face off the barroom floor.

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The Struggle to Stream: Spotify Delays U.S. Launch

Any music fan outside a handful of European countries has faced a familiar frustration when browsing certain websites during 2009. The streaming music website Spotify has popped up everywhere, with many sites collating playlists to help supplement articles and generally waxing lyrical about this wonderful new discovery. The only problem? All those audio wonders are unavailable unless you live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, France or Spain—-the set of countries where Spotify is, at the time of writing, freely available.

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Blakroc - Blakroc: Review

Rap and rock don’t always make easy bedfellows, and the combination of the two genres has mostly produced a case of ever-diminishing returns over the years. It all started so well, with Run DMC and the Beastie Boys successfully melding giant riffs with ingenious rhymes. But in 2009, the most talked-about rap/rock alliance is Lil Wayne’s Rebirth, which has been delayed and rescheduled by a record company who appear to have got cold feet over the whole idea.

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Kickstarter, Topspin and the New Transparency

We’ve been blogging about the annual CMJ Music Marathon on Culture Now for the last few weeks, which featured performances from some of the best up-and-coming artists around the world. People who flocked to the shows probably didn’t pay too much attention to how each act got there, or how much money they made from the event. The truth is, most of the artists probably lost money to appear at CMJ, and those losses only increase significantly when further demands, such as national and foreign tours, become a necessary part of the promotional grind during the early stages of a band’s career.

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Crystal Stilts, Grass Widow and The Beets at The Brooklyn Museum

The ornate Rubin Pavilion at the Brooklyn Museum wasn’t designed to host a bunch of scruffy indie rockers, but that’s exactly what it got for a special Todd-P-curated show on Saturday. A marching band, a group of choreographed flag wavers and an impressive baton twirler all performed in between sets, while museum workers flitted around and nervously eyed the Rodin sculptures roped off near the stage.

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Woods Interview

Woods aren’t just a band, they’re a thriving industry. Singer Jeremy Earl runs the semi-legendary Woodsist (Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Wavves) and Fuck It Tapes labels. Guitarist Jarvis Taveniere has played with Wooden Wand, and tape manipulator G. Lucas Crane indulges in a side project named Nonhorse (“It’s like being swallowed by a vortex,” he says). Woodsist recently joined forces with the Captured Tracks label to present a celebratory two-day festival in Brooklyn, which featured performances from bands who have appeared on both labels.

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Daniel Johnston - Is and Always Was: Review

Writing about Daniel Johnston tends to fall into two categories, especially since the 2005 release of Jeff Feuerzeig’s outstanding documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. First, there’s the 'it’s great to see him doing so well' camp, who undoubtedly mean well, but can’t help coming off as slightly patronising in their approach to his actual work. Then there’s the 'it’s not as good as it used to be' camp, who miss the tape hiss and red-raw production values of Daniel’s earliest recordings, ignoring the fact that he always had Beatles-sized ambition burning brightly in his eyes. That’s not to demean those early recordings — they are every bit as stunning, moving and emotionally redolent as the reams of text written about him suggest — but it would be churlish to expect Daniel to return there, especially as the elevation in his profile has given him another crack at delivering the songs as he always imagined them in his head.

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The CMJ Music Marathon 2009: Best of the Panels

There are two sides to the annual CMJ Music Marathon, which exerts a vice-like grip on the music industry in New York in October. At night, there are fallen-down-drunk bodies strewn throughout the streets, as industry workers stumble out of venues after a selection of their bands play showcases all across the city. Free and cheap beer helps add to the madness, and corporate sponsors proliferate throughout-—it’s not unusual to see a group of people playing a demo version of Rock Band while an actual rock band plays in the same venue. Fortunately, the real-life musicians were just about winning the battle for attention at CMJ ’09.

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CMJ Days 4 & 5: The Drowned in Sound Review

It’s a beautiful Friday afternoon in Brooklyn, and a few world-weary souls have headed over to the Knitting Factory for the Village Voice showcase. New Thrill Jockey signings Javelin play to a barely mobile crowd, even offering to do a Q&A if anyone gets bored. Thankfully, there’s no need, as their shrill vocals and glitchy electronica brighten up the small audience. Javelin are likely to make a far greater impact when they get a chance to play at a decent time to a bigger crowd.

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CMJ Days 1, 2 & 3: The Drowned in Sound Review

Our first stop is at Le Poisson Rouge to see Bradford Cox in his Atlas Sound guise. Cox straps on an acoustic guitar, occasional harmonica, and a plaid shirt, and is backed by fellow Atlanta residents The Selmanaires. Is Bradford trying out a few Neil Young moves? There’s certainly a huge Crazy Horse-style guitar solo that rips right through one of the songs in this Logos-centric set, although the downbeat tone positions him closer to Tonight’s the Night than Ragged Glory. It’s a shift away from Cox’s recorded work under the Atlas Sound moniker, which might be a surprise to anyone expecting straightforward replication, but actually provides a neat counterpoint to the recorded versions of these songs. ‘Shelia’ is one of the best pop songs of 2009, and positively burns a hole through the venue when it emerges mid-set.

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4hero - Extensions: Review

Anyone who has a natural compulsion to run to the hills when the words 'nu jazz' are uttered may want to flee with some haste at this point. Extensions consists of delicate reworking of various tracks by 4hero, a.k.a North London drum and bass pioneers Dego McFarlane and Mark Mac, which have been recorded by a selection of artists who populate the nu jazz genre. Needless to say, the fractured rave-gone-wrong darkcore tune ‘Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare’ does not get a look in, although the concept of a slick and soulful rendition of that particular song would be an intriguing proposition. But listeners who have followed 4hero’s career since those early days won’t be surprised at the choice of tracks here—a jazz influence was creeping into their music as far back as the 1993 EP, Journey From the Light.

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The CMJ Music Marathon 2009: Tips, Hints, and Previews

The storied history of the annual CMJ Music Festival in New York City includes many legendary performances and panels. Who can forget Factory Records head honcho Tony Wilson and his infamous “wake up America, you’re dead!” conference from 1990? Or appearances by Nirvana, R.E.M., the White Stripes, Eminem, and countless others? It’s certainly not easy to obtain entrance to the festival—-the price is steep, the lines are long, and a badge doesn’t guarantee entry at the packed-out shows. But people come back undeterred year after year, and the 2009 incarnation of the Music Marathon will be no exception.

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The Future of Music Coalition Considers Journalism

The annual summit held by the Future of Music Coalition occurred in Washington D.C. this past week, allowing a number of music industry figureheads to get together to discuss pertinent problems in the business. Topics such as royalty rates and net neutrality dominated proceedings, but there was also a sizable chunk of debate about the future of music writing. You just know the art of writing about music is in trouble when the Coalition decides to name a panel Critical Condition: The Future of Music Journalism, although there were a few thoughts and debates on future innovations in the field.

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Kurt Vile - Childish Prodigy: Review

Who is Kurt Vile? There are no easy answers on Childish Prodigy, his first album for Matador, and his third full-length solo release in a little over a year (in addition to his role as guitarist in The War On Drugs). At times Vile’s constant need to dream up new versions of himself makes him seem like an indie-rock Walter Mitty. Anyone looking for his modus operandi won’t find it here, and it’s unlikely that he has one — rather than assimilate a set of influences into an overall sound, he prefers to lurch from one style to another over a set of songs, presumably crossing off genres on a beer stained notepad as he goes along. Blues-rock? Check. Lo-fi? Check. Shoegazery noise? Check.

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Back to the Future: How the ‘90s Infiltrated the ‘00s.

The alternative music scene has often looked to the past for inspiration. In the ‘80s, the Jesus & Mary Chain and Echo and the Bunnymen respectively paid tribute to the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and that lineage continues to flourish to this day. A cursory listen to Brooklyn bands like Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls offers two examples of bands strung somewhere in-between the territory mapped out in the ‘60s and the ‘80s, with influences amalgamated through obsessive listening to both leaders and followers. An entire decade stretched out before those ‘80s bands began plundering the past and, for a while, a 10-year stretch of silence seemed to be the normative passage of time before old sounds became fresh again and aging rockers began eyeballing a big bag of reunion swag.

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Kraftwerk and the March of Progress

The earliest Kraftwerk records weren't exactly made in a void—-Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2 bear some obvious rock hallmarks that depreciated significantly as their career unfolded. Those albums are loosely connected to similarly minded experimentalists in the then-burgeoning krautrock scene, who were, like Kraftwerk, enamored with the nihilistic proto-punk of the Stooges and the MC5. That those two bands hailed from Detroit, a city that toiled away to the ingrained rhythms of industrial machinery from the then-thriving auto industry, was telling. The march to work, soundtracked by the precision-tooled cadence of pistons and parts being methodically slotted into place, has often been summoned up as a common metaphorical motif to describe Kraftwerk's steely stomp through music history.

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Rain Machine - Rain Machine: Review

It’s difficult to extract yourself from a great machine once you’ve become an integral cog in its everyday workings. A case in point: Kyp Malone, the heavily bearded, high-haired lover of the soaring falsetto, was a late addition to the ranks of TV on the Radio, who are now unthinkable without him. Rain Machine is his first solo venture, and this release is a carefully curated selection of songs that have lit up dark corners of small clubs during downtime from his relentless schedule. Malone is often successful at disconnecting from his main power source, although the specter of that other band is always hanging on the shoulder of this album, which has been birthed from a deep pool of emotions. Rain Machine will make you laugh, cry and pause for thought.

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The Battle For Your Eyes

It’s been a long time since anyone instinctively turned on their TV set for a music video fix. Waiting patiently in the hope that something good might appear has been made redundant in the age of ultra-fast streaming online video, and MTV knows it; the network has steadily reduced its music video content to such an extent that it’s a surprise to find they haven’t shunted the annual VMAs ceremony to one of their smaller outposts. YouTube is now the place where most people get their music video kicks, and statistics compiled by TubeMogul indicate that these short promotional clips are dominating viewing habits on the site. TubeMogul estimates that 76.5% off all views in the Top 25 uploads on YouTube have been provided by major music companies.

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ATP New York 2009: Review

It’s perpetually 1972 at Kutsher’s Country Club, the utterly perfect location for the New York incarnation of ATP. The event may attract several generations of indie rock fan, but for the people who run the resort this is no different to a local wedding or bar-mitzvah. So Jim Jarmusch and David Cross stalk the corridors while high haired ladies staff the cosmetics counter and a lovely old man performs Patsy Cline covers on his organ. Imagine Steve Albini walking into the department store in Are You Being Served? while Mrs. Slocombe carries on regardless, and you’re somewhere close to picturing the bizarro world of ATP New York.

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ATP and the New Festival Experience

The music world has ushered in some radical innovations this decade. The preeminence of iTunes, the iPod, and MP3 files has caused us to fundamentally alter the way we listen to music. But this has also been the decade when the music festival grew up and branched out into previously uncharted territories. A typical scene from a ‘90s festival featured concertgoers caked in mud, sword-swallowers and jugglers, and unhappy camping experiences for all concerned. The lineups had certainly improved, with forward-thinking festivals such as Reading in the U.K. and Lollapalooza in the U.S. mostly shedding the hippie jam-band ethos that had prevailed, instead bringing in alternative rock and indie acts to entertain the masses.

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Euros Childs - Son of Euro Child: Review

There’s something to be said for Euros Childs’ bloody-minded determination to foist his music on the world. To the casual listener he may appear laid back, in-thrall to the easy life, happy to let his unorthodox words and somber pop tunes land in the laps of a small band of devotees. The reality is quite different. This is Childs’ fifth album in three years, released for free on his website after various dalliances with major record companies and high profile indie labels came to an end. A lack of commercial success and dwindling resources have been swept aside, with the former Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci frontman picking up keyboards from car boot sales to get the job done.

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Rock Music and the Battle to Go Green

In 2007, a series of concerts took place across the world under the Live Earth banner. The aim of the shows was to alert people to the damage being wreaked on the planet by climate change, a hot-button topic that was facing resistance and scorn from the George W. Bush administration. Madonna, Genesis, Bon Jovi and Spinal Tap were among the eclectic lineup of performers who played on the day, sparking many jokes that hairspray bills and expensive lighting were causing irreparable damage to the environment despite the good intentions of everyone involved. The organizers refuted these claims, saying the events were carbon neutral and promising to purchase carbon credits to offset any damage done.

Red full article here.

Everybody Needs a 404

In 1996, Fatboy Slim released his single “Everybody Needs a 303,” and the genre that would become known as Big Beat was born. The song paid tribute to the Roland TB-303, a bass synthesizer/sequencer that had long been a key component in the hardware arsenal of many influential electronic music composers. The instrument initially helped define house music as Chicago musicians picked up and manipulated the 303, and its squelchy synth patterns became ubiquitous when the acid house boom took hold in the early ‘90s.

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Brendan Benson - My Old, Familiar Friend: Review

The annals of power pop make for intimidating reading to anyone who fancies chancing their arm at some candy-flossed vocal harmonies and sing-along-a choruses. How do you match up to ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ or ‘My Sharona’ or ‘Surrender’? And that's not accounting for early trailblazers like Big Star, Badfinger and the Raspberries. It’s a wonder that anyone bothered to continue with the genre by the time 1980 rolled around. With the bar set at an impossibly high standard, power pop seemed sewn up, the masterclass was over, the only way was down.

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The Selling of a 21st Century Pop Star

Hundreds of used copies of Lady Gaga’s The Fame are freely available at knockdown prices on Amazon and EBay. It’s not surprising; journalists were flooded with copies of the CD prior to its release in August 2008. Sometimes, multiple copies of the disc would even arrive in the same week. Her name wasn’t as recognizable back then, her ubiquity still agonizingly out of reach. Fast forward a year and it’s difficult to imagine Gaga having many aspirations left, although her bolshy, Madonna-esque outlook on life would never allow her to admit to that. For Lady Gaga, this is just the beginning.

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Squarepusher - Solo Electric Bass 1: Review

Tom Jenkinson’s process of disentangling himself from the world takes another step forward on Solo Electric Bass 1, his latest outing as Squarepusher. The performance is exactly as the title suggests — Jenkinson, alone with his bass, playing in a club in Paris, committed to tape in September 2007. It’s a lonely album, recorded at low volume, with playing that crawls to a whisper and then bloats into a puffy slap bass fracas. Music recorded in solitude often has a particular quality, a feeling that the rest of the universe has been quarantined so the creator can chase perfection around a studio. Here, Jenkinson takes his most introspective music to date out into the open, allowing an enraptured audience to whoop, cheer and applaud as he quietly retreats into his own indulgence.

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Clint Mansell - Moon (sountrack): Album Review

There are two Clint Mansells. The first Clint is a gurning idiot who spearheaded the odious grebo movement as part of Pop Will Eat Itself. The pinnacle of Clint #1’s success involved shoehorning pop culture references into songs with a sledgehammer-like subtlety (“Alan Moore knows the score!”). The Poppies officially broke up in 1996 and Clint #1 disappeared off the face of the Earth. Clint #2 surfaced two years later with the surprisingly mature soundtrack for Darren Aronofsky’s first movie, Pi. Stourbridge, jester hats and high ponytails suddenly seemed a world away. Clint #1’s lyrical sledgehammer had been tucked away in a cupboard with a pair of tatty Dr. Martens boots.

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Chris Brown and the Death of the Music Video

So video didn’t kill the radio star after all. For a while back there, it even seemed like the two mediums were happy to co-exist. Radio proved to be a remarkably resilient beast, while video became an artform in its own right via innovative work from directors such as Russell Mulcahy, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry. Certain posthumous commentaries on Michael Jackson’s career recalled the halcyon days of MTV, and how he became the first African American artist to gain heavy rotation on the network. Jackson did more than that-—his “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” videos helped establish MTV as a powerful force in the American pop culture landscape.

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Deerhunter/No Age/Dan Deacon: Live Review

The ‘round robin’ format is gaining real traction in the United States. The set up is simple: take three (or more) bands, squeeze them on stage together, and have them take turns playing songs. Members from other bands can dip in and out as they see fit, fostering a collaborative atmosphere that falls somewhere between Concert For Bangladesh-style indulgence and genuine inspiration. Dan Deacon has tried a few of these tours already, but when it was announced that he was going to test out the format with Deerhunter and No Age on board, complete with a huge free outdoor show in Brooklyn, it felt like the round robin concept had really arrived.

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The Artist As a Business Start-Up

Radiohead’s manager, Brian Message, appears to be on a mission to restructure the music industry. His ideas on how music should be presented and sold have already caused a mixture of glee and controversy among his peers. The pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows set a fascinating precedent for the selling of music by major artists, and Message has also voiced his support for Joel Tenenbaum—-the man facing a court case against the RIAA for illegally downloading music files.

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The New T-Shirt Revolution

Most music fans have shelled out hard earned cash for a band T-shirt at some point. Sometimes, a simple band logo will suffice. At others, a tour T-shirt with a great list of dates on the back can work as a great souvenir. The recent(ish) trend for retro designs proves that the lowly band T-shirt is far from dead, and has even sparked a bizarre trend for people sporting clothing bearing the name of artists whose work isn’t familiar to them. How else to explain the abundance of Motorhead T-shirts draped over the skeletal frames of catwalk models a few years back? Lemmy must have had a good laugh about that one (a laugh that took him all the way to the bank).

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The Shock of the New

With MySpace caught up in a downward spiral, the question of where new bands should go to promote their wares online is currently a major issue in the music industry. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has made a thoughtful post on the topic, in which he outlines various strategies for upcoming artists who want to make their mark. Reznor believes that free is the way forward, and encourages new bands to forget about record sales. He proposes that bands build a fanbase by giving away music in exchange for an e-mail address, which can later be utilized for marketing purposes (promotion of live dates, merchandise, and even future record sales once an artist’s name is properly established).

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Tiny Vipers - Life on Earth: Album Review

Vincenzo Natali’s 2003 film Nothing takes its two central figures, Andrew and Dave, and positions them in a characterless white void. The big endless nothing appears to stretch on forever, triggering a peculiar kind of claustrophobia in the two men, who slip into various existential crises as they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings. All that remains of their previous world is the house in which they both lived. Tiny Vipers’ Life On Earth is music that barely exists, that sounds like it was recorded after Jesy Fortino (who is Tiny Vipers) fell into a deep chasm and wasn’t particularly bothered about getting out. There’s almost nothing here. No air, no light. Sometimes there’s hardly any music at all.

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Top of the Pops: Do Charts Still Matter?

Are consumers still aware of the singles and albums that currently stand atop the Billboard singles and album charts? Like many other countries in the world, Billboard welcomed legal digital downloads into its chart gathering statistics back in the mid 2000s. Before then, sales of physical copies were merged with statistics from Broadcast Data Systems, who tracked radio airplay. This system worked fine, until now. With traditional radio outlets battling online competitors, it’s become increasingly apparent that Internet streaming services need to be welcomed into the fold.

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Anatomy of a Scoop: The Music Media and Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s sad passing occurred less than 24 hours ago at time of writing, but we all know how this one went down. Speedy gossip website TMZ, who have been the first to publish numerous celebrity gossip/scandal stories in the last few years, got the scoop to end all scoops on June 25. After publishing a story that Michael Jackson had collapsed from an apparent cardiac arrest, they followed it with the real hammer blow: The self-styled King of Pop had died after paramedics failed to revive him on arrival at his home in Holmby Hills, California.

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Freemium Thinking

A few cosmic forces aligned last week. On Monday (June 15), Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, gave a thought-provoking speech on the future of free products. Anderson’s core belief is that any product sucked into the digital realm will ultimately end up being given away for free. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, a 32 year-old mother of four named Jammie Thomas-Rasset was pondering the actions of a jury who had just fined her $1.9 million for music copyright violations. Her decision to illegally share MP3 files by Green Day and Sheryl Crow (among others) via the P2P service Kazaa had caused her long-running battle with the music industry to come to an unfortunate ending.

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Sonic Youth on Jimmy Fallon: Report From the Band Bench

We cover a lot of band performances from late night talk shows here on Prefix. So I thought we should take it to the next level and actually attend one of the shows and report back from there. I scored a couple of tickets for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week, figuring they have the best range of musical guests of all the talk shows. Last night (June 22) I made the trip to 30 Rock, where Fallon’s guests included John Leguizamo, Nick Cannon and Sonic Youth. These were ‘Band Bench’ tickets, meaning I would be ushered onto the bleachers behind the stage when Sonic Youth played, with instructions to “go crazy” from one of Fallon’s producers.

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Tiny Masters of Today - Skeletons: Album Review

Ava made the transition to her teenage years with this record, and it shows. Her oblique lyrics work as allegorical paeans to typical aspects of teenage life—suffocating peer group alienation, a drive to be cool, the possession of a jaded seen-it-all-before outlook. She’ll often just repeat catchphrases (“drop the bomb, man”, “banging at the rhythm of my big bass drum”) that she’s picked up, which don’t ostensibly mean much, but serve as a fond reminder of how such things play an important part at that age: all the cool outsidery kids at school add jargon-filled catchphrases to their dialect. There’s no great lyrical depth at work here, other than a few barbed comments at Ava’s fellow teens, and nor should there be; her self-reflective Billie Holiday opus can wait until she’s at least 16.

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Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker Interview

The Careers Through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP) is a non-profit organization that helps high school seniors gain scholarships to culinary school. The program was set up in New York City by Richard Grausman in 1990 and has subsequently spread across the country. Pressure Cooker was shot by Grausman’s daughter, Jennifer, and her filmmaking partner, Mark Becker. It follows three students, Erica, Dudley and Fatoumata, who attend Philadelphia's Frankford High School under the watchful eye of their Culinary Arts teacher, Wilma Stephenson. Wilma’s blunt teaching methods have made her a formidable figure in the education system, her forceful drive positively compelling her students to exceed expectations. Pressure Cooker is a deeply affecting movie that played to sold out crowds at the IFC in New York City, leaving barely a dry eye in the house as Wilma’s students attempt to gain admittance to the finest culinary schools in the country.

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Wireless Culture: Online vs. Terrestrial Radio

Radio stations have endured mixed fortunes since broadband speeds allowed them to comfortably stream content online, ultimately throwing them into competition with a slew of similar services. A global audience has opened up for many broadcasters—I have friends in England who have become firm fans of certain shows on WNYC and WFMU in the past decade. But threats from streaming media sites like Pandora and Last.fm, who have taken the word “radio” and used it to refer to user generated playlists, have sent tremors through the broadcast radio industry, calling into question the disparity in royalty payments between online and broadcast radio.

Read full article here.

Northside Festival Coverage

Sisters look great—drummer Matt has a huge afro that rocks back and forth as he pummels his drums, and the stack of amps acts like a third member of the band. It certainly causes people up front to question the validity of their decision to stand so close to the stage when singer/guitarist Aaron begins scraping great sheets of noise from his instrument. They lack the thinness that some two-piece bands discover when all the bass frequencies are stripped from their music, and have a great pop-noise thing going on. Imagine a punky My Bloody Valentine with John Bonham on drums. Sisters trigger an instant reflex to dance and sing in half the audience, and some of the widest smiles of the entire festival can be seen when two little grunge kids join the mosh pit at the end. A special moment.

Read Day One here
Read Day Two here
Read Day Three here
Read Day Four here

TV On The Radio/Dirty Projectors in Central Park: Live Review

The last time Dirty Projectors played a big outdoor show in New York was in downtown Manhattan last summer. A huge lightning storm played out in the sky behind the stage, providing the type of backdrop the members of AC/DC have spent their entire careers dreaming about. A remarkable act of synergy occurred just before the plugs were pulled on the show. Singer/guitarist Dave Longstreth jumped into the air and hit the stage at the precise moment that a huge bolt of lightning struck behind him. It may have been the most rock and roll moment of any show, ever.

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The Power of Mashups and Mixtapes

In 2004, Danger Mouse (real name: Brian Burton) released The Grey Album, which took the burgeoning mashup culture to a logical extreme. A mashup is a track comprised of two or more songs, which are seamlessly blended together. The most common trick is to take a vocal from one song and lay it over the instrumental backing of another. Mashups reached considerable popularity in the early 2000s, with artists such as 2 Many DJs seizing on easy-to-use audio editing tools (Wavelab, Soundforge) to bring their bastardized creations to life. The proliferation of free MP3 files available through Napster and elsewhere, coupled with the rise of broadband Internet speeds, suddenly led to a glut of amateur mashups all over the web.

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Hell - Teufelswerk: Album Review

If music is supposed to reflect the times we live in, DJ Hell hasn’t been paying much attention to the cataclysmic events triggered by the global economic crisis. Teufelswerk (German for “Devil’s Work”) is an ambitious collection of luxuriant techno that oozes opulence. Hell runs in direct contrast to the scrimp-and-save dictum that governs most people’s actions in times of hardship. Instead, he has made an album that reeks of money, with high-end production values and guest appearances from Bryan Ferry and P. Diddy. If Hell is aware of our impending meltdown, he appears to be working under the tacit understanding that such times require a piece of art that can free us from all our worries.

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Jeremiah Zagar: Interview

Jeremiah Zagar is a filmmaker with an infectious passion and commitment to his craft. His documentary, In a Dream, was shot over a seven-year period and is culled from 300 hours of footage. The film is based around the relationship between Zagar’s father, Isaiah, and his mother, Julia. Isaiah’s work will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time in Philadelphia. His beautiful mosaics are sprawled across numerous buildings in the city, making him one of the greatest American folk artists of his generation. In a Dream brings Isaiah’s work to life in bright, vivid color. But it also affords him room to ruminate on his personal life, sparking a number of revelations that provide genuine insight into his character. I spoke to Jeremiah about the film in Brooklyn.

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