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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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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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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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.

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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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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 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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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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The Future of Music Writing

Last week, a group of British music critics united on Twitter to discuss the pertinence of their work in an age when their jobs may be sliding into irrelevancy. An unquantifiable, but abundant portion of recorded music is now available to stream or download online, often for free. The days of turning up at a record store and basing purchases on a shaky premise (the name of a producer, or a reliable record label) are over, and have been for quite some time. During the Twitter debate, former Melody Maker scribe Everett True asked: “In the babble of voices that is web 2.0, how is one more voice - however well-informed and succinctly argued - going to stand out?”

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How Twitter is Shaping the Music Industry

The answer to a simple question that lies at the top of every Twitter page ("What are you doing?") is radically altering the way we process information about bands, musicians, and the music industry. The relationship between music and the internet has been guilt edged ever since MP3 files started zipping back and forth across the planet. Illegal downloading and services such as iTunes have led to a hasty shuttering of record stores, and the perennial question of how to make money from recorded music continues to confound.

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