Effi Briest Interview

Working in the visual arts can be a lonely experience. After completing an undergraduate degree at SVA, future Effi Briest songwriter and drummer Corinne Jones toiled away as a painter. The inherent creative confinement sparked an urge to push her art in a different direction, to connect with people and filter her impulses into a collaborative force. “It was so isolating, that way of working, and I needed to do something else, have another outlet,” she recalls over drinks at Soft Spot in Williamsburg. “So I just asked a lot of friends if they wanted to get together and make some noise with me.”

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The New Era of Pop Exclusitvity

Everyone hates an exclusive club, unless they’re asked to join or can somehow force themselves in. For a long time, the Internet has operated in direct opposition to such exclusivity-—it’s a free-for-all, where user generated content is king, and anyone with a half-realized idea can easily foist themselves onto the public for five seconds and then shrink back into anonymity. This way of working hasn’t been kind to the music industry, which once thrived on the removed other-ness of pop idols. Those kids in the '70s who spoke in awe-struck tones about David Bowie coming from another planet now seem impossibly naïve, their wide-eyed wonder replaced with an all-knowing savvy, because we’ve all been drawn so much closer to the people whose art has inspired us. We can even interact with many of them directly via MySpace, Twitter, Facebook or [insert name of preferred social networking tool here].

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Alex Chilton R.I.P.

The sudden death of Alex Chilton on Thursday (March 18) has sparked an outpouring of grief from the music community, with many friends, acquaintances and fans paying warm tribute to a man who has touched most of our lives at some point. Chilton was certainly a difficult man and a willful contrarian, but he didn’t need to speak to us through interviews or conversation—his deeply personal, sad, touching and sometimes funny songs did all the work for him.

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Rob Swift - The Architect: Review

In the hands of Queens native Rob Swift, the master turntablist who has collaborated with everyone from Blue Man Group to Mike Patton, hip-hop is a pliable tool, a genre to be warped and moulded and parlayed into a musical force shorn of recognisable boundaries. He first tumbled into Patton’s orbit as a member of the X- Ecutioners, who went into battle with the singer on General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners in 2005, and has since toured with Peeping Tom. The Architect firms up that relationship by becoming Swift’s first solo release on Patton’s Ipecac label, which gives him a chance to pull deep from his bottomless pit of beats and move away from his jazz-y roots, instead forcing a symbiotic relationship between the worlds of hip-hop and classical music.

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Led Er Est - Dust on Common: Review

Listening to this album by Led Er Est, the synth-happy New York trio of Shawn NoEQ, Samuel Kklovenhoof and the disappointingly named Owen Stokes, it’s clear that ‘cold wave’ is something of a misnomer as a rote descriptor to attach to their music. Dust On Common is anything but cold. It’s full of the warm rush of analog keyboard, the very-human vocal stylings of Kklovenhoof, and a giddy love of song structure. If Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd label and club, which are releasing this record, have any burgeoning stars in their midsts, it’s in the shape of Led Er Est, who manage to filter their avant impulses (Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire) through a clear and demonstrable affinity for the destroyed-love pop of Soft Cell and the Human League.

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Loscil - Endless Falls: Review

Scott Morgan is one of those rare musicians who fully grasps the notion that it’s as much about what you don’t play as what you do. This is his fifth album as Loscil, which continues to plunder the same vein of chilly ambient electronica as his previous efforts. This is music designed to be played loud, preferably with ears hermetically sealed in high quality headphones, so listeners can really submerge themselves in all the subtle textures and nuances of Morgan’s recordings. Like much of Loscil’s output, it’s often difficult to detect a human hand at work on Endless Falls. This is the sound of isolated machine noise hollowed out and whittled down to its fragile essence, a set of songs left teetering on the brink of actually existing at all, a sort of ghostly paean to the beauty found on the cusp of complete silence.

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