ATP Founder Barry Hogan: Interview

The summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains may no longer attract the hordes of vacationing New Yorkers who were drawn to the Borscht Belt in the early to mid-1900s, but one man has found a unique use for the still-functioning Kutshers Country Club in Monticello. Barry Hogan founded the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival after he witnessed Scottish indie rockers Belle & Sebastian successfully bring together an impressive pool of musical talent to play at a Pontin’s holiday camp in the south of England in 1999. Fans stayed in chalets, artists played on indoor stages, no corporate sponsorship was allowed, and the bands mingled with fans due to the distinct lack of snooty VIP areas. The ATP organization has subsequently expanded, but those basic tenets have always remained.

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Malcolm McLaren R.I.P.

The music world lost one of its most charismatic figures yesterday (April 8) when former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren passed away. His influence spread far and wide, from work with the New York Dolls to the controversial near-nude pictures of 14-year-old Bow Wow Wow singer Annabella Lwin that decorated the band’s debut LP cover. McLaren also had a notable music career of his own, which principally centered on the 1983 Duck Rock album. The record helped spread the word about hip-hop to some far flung corners of the globe, and that work pinged right back to the United States as his “Buffalo Gals” single became a much-sampled staple. His other single from that album, “Double Dutch," paid warm tribute to a group of high-school age New York skipping champions, and remains a song of unbridled joy—it even pre-dates Vampire Weekend’s pilfering of “African” guitar rhythms by several decades.

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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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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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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

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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The Vaselines - Enter the Vaselines: Album Review

I was apprehensive about seeing The Vaselines when they passed through New York last year on a brief reunion tour. The thought of Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly bringing their filthy, funny and endearing songs to the stage more than 20 years after they were conceived, seemed to run in marked contrast to the youthful nature of the original material. My fears proved unfounded; seeing Kelly singing “It’ll take three to satisfy me/ 'Cause I’m more of a man than you’ll ever be” (from “Rory Rides Me Raw”) was riotously entertaining. Further sharp witticisms and ribald jokes flowed between songs, with both members effortlessly tapping into everything that made this band great in the first place.

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The Horrors - Primary Colours: Album Review

I come from the same small town as the Horrors. It’s a rundown seaside outpost in the south east of England, full of petty violence and hatred. The kind of place that will suck all the dreams out of you unless you find a way to escape. Morrissey’s “Everyday Is Like Sunday” video was shot there, and never has there been a more grimly appropriate interface between song and location. The Horrors are a band whose initial departure from such confines was met with a mixture of bewilderment, adoration and derision. Their debut album, Strange House, was a poorly received attempt at assimilating their ‘60s psych and goth influences, causing them to be swiftly dropped by their label, Loog Records.

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Micachu & the Shapes - Jewellery: Album Review

If there can be a musical space where grime, punk and freak-folk meet, then it’s in Jewellery, the debut album from Micachu & the Shapes. This is a band very much of its time, with little care for genre boundaries or backward referencing. Jewellery is a roughshod collection of 12 songs that sound like they’ve been bound together with sticky tape and cheap glue. Led by 21-year-old Harry Partch fan Mica Levi, the group also contains keyboard player Raisa Khan and drummer (and leader of his own nine-piece drum ‘n’ bass band) Marc Pell. Completing this rag-tag collective is a producer: the microhouse musician of many aliases, Matthew Herbert.

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Gang Gang Dance: Interview

It’s rare to find a band that can capably mix a love of grime, hip-hop, dream-pop, Kate Bush and reggaeton into a cohesive whole. It’s been a long time in the making, but New Yorkers Gang Gang Dance have done so, and they've produced one of the year’s best records in Saint Dymphna. Putting past misfortunes behind them, such as the tragic death of singer Nathan Maddox in 2002, the band is set to reach out to a wider audience. Here, frontwoman Lizzie Bougatsos talks about making the album, leading the Boredoms' 88Boadrum event in New York this summer, and what happened to drummer Tim DeWitt in a Grand Rapids bar in July.

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