We’ve been hiding & kind of quiet for the last few months choosing to spend the summer mostly locked away writing, self-producing some songs and occasionally collaborating with Jacques Renault at his home studio and getting help from The Rapture’s Vito Roccoforte. We ended up with a stack of tracks and used those self-produced recordings as the basis for working on finished mixes and additional production with Eric Broucek in his Brooklyn studio, Chris Zane and Alex Aldi at Gigantic in Manhattan and now, here in London with Richard X.

We’re halfway through two-weeks of recording in London with Richard and this means that we’re roughly halfway through making our debut record!

We’re really excited to announce that we’ve signed to Warp Records!
From Flying Lotus to Grizzly Bear to Gang Gang Dance to Broadcast, Warp have released some of our favorite records in the last few years and we feel ridiculously lucky to be keeping this kind of company.
Since our last shows in May, we’ve been living in the bunker, writing, writing, writing. We can’t wait to share all the things we’ve been up to but of course we’re going to have to be patient while we see everything through.
We’ll have more updates soon.

It’s a beautiful June evening in Brooklyn and word just broke about Michael Jackson’s passing. I saw the report and had to run across the street to top-up my phone and text Eleanore the news. The Spanish radio station at the bodega was telling the story, three cars went by with MJ songs playing.
“What!? How?!” Eleanore wrote back.
“Heart attack.”
We’ve been locked away writing songs for the past month. It’s a strange process, sometimes really difficult and challenging going deep into words and sounds and it’s funny the games you invent to try and unlock the ‘secrets’. MJ had the key, and there’s been more than a few times recently that we’ve both sat around listening to his records trying to dissect what It was.

I’ve always thought that just humming the bass line to ‘I want you back’ will put a smile on your face. That bouncing line descending around that high vocal is one of my very favorite moments in music. Like Stevie Wonder, doors were first unlocked for MJ at Motown. There, at the feet of some of the most talented songwriters and musicians the pop world has ever seen, the young boy learned. His childhood might have been lost in a sequined whirlwind of James Brown moves sliding across the stage from one side of America to the other but, along the way, MJ was absorbing. By the time he went solo, he was ready to unlock the kingdom.

Both ‘Off The Wall’ and ‘Thriller’ are still so mind blowing it’s almost supernatural. “It’s magic,” Eleanore said one night as the first woo broke open the tight clap and boom of ‘Don’t Stop.’ And it is, something of alchemy and conjuring a whole universe in sound. Both records are the product of two absolute geniuses. MJ and Quincy Jones were touching something that truly comes around once in a lifetime. The production is so staggeringly complete. Every space and frequency filled with instruments and parts that combine to perfectly frame the rhythm and melodies. Quincy knew exactly how to bring it all together but the brilliance, the inspiration, and magic was all there in Michael evidenced by the svelte production on his home taped demo version for ‘Don’t Stop’.

MJ’s later life was of course plagued by controversy as his eccentric behavior began to overwhelm his gifts. Now, in his passing, let’s hope that madness can recede and instead we can remember how incredible his music really was.

So, here I am. Back in London for a few days on my third week in a month long tour of DJ booths, airports, hotels and the skies between. It began in Paris then Paris became London and, just as suddenly, London became Berlin…

It’s typical of berlin that I would bump into friends Heidi and Rolf at the airport. We all share a cab to another mutual friend Robin’s flat to hear stories of what I missed over the Berlin weekend. Yikes. The Berlin weekend. But really, Berlin doesn’t stop for the mid-week. It’s Tuesday and I head off to the infamous Cookies and do a set with Robin David Gilmour Girls and James ‘Fucking’ Friedman and when that gig ends, I head back to the airport and onto a flight back to London so I can catch a 24 hour flight to Australia. 24 hours. Yikes. I can’t sleep. There’s a fat man leaning way back and the seat’s cramped and I can’t sleep. I wobble off the plane in rare form. But the weather is perfect. It’s winter and the weather is perfect! I forget the fat man and I start dreaming up ways to get myself back for their summer. I’ll go sailing. I’ll escape New York and the ice and wind and dark and go sailing in Australia!

Five shows. Four cities. But I get a needed break after the first two and I’m able to spend the bulk of my time with friends in Sydney where I even manage to see some sights and make some music in between a few interviews and radio appearances. And Australians actually seem to listen to the radio! No one I know listens to the radio in America. Here, even when I arrive at the hotels they know who I am. That doesn’t happen in America.

The next two shows throw me to Brisbane and back. Maybe I’m just suffering a few minor psychological derailments I think finding myself on another long, long, long flight between hemispheres and then, now, here I am. Back in the present.

I’m now staying with my good friend Ali in his flat just outside of London. For a minute, things are calm. I’ve a few days off again so I can enjoy this town in daylight for once and catch up on a few emails. But in between the friendly hellos there’s business and the emails, happily, are already leading to more shows here in the future. The dates on the calendar are getting cluttered again. Tomorrow, Athens. The next night, Warsaw and then, Bank Holiday weekend in London. I’m given the impression it’s going to be mental. A big party weekend and I’m with Mock & Toof, Gerd Janson, Nightmoves, Reverso 68 and Warm Residents. Meanwhile Holy Ghost!, House of House and Lovefingers will all be playing in the area so I think there will be bouncing around for sure. It’s going to be my last show and night in Europe.


But I only head back to New York for two days and then I’m crossing the equator once again. Brazil! My first trip to South America and I’m looking forward to it. I have no idea what to expect other than the promise of a potentially scary flight over the Amazon. It’s not only the water in the sink that’s swirling one way and then the other. The stamps are adding up and as soon as I get to New York, I have to have pages added to my passport in time for the start of festival season in a couple of weeks when I’m back at it all over again! My friend Gavin shows me his passport. It looks like a brick. It’s a heavy reminder of planes and the lack of sleep and hotels and drinking all of it running you down. Despite it, I think I’ve managed to take care of myself. The swine’s haven’t got to me yet! And this trip was the long one. All the rest of the shows this summer are short hops broken up with enough days off and chances to get back home and to work.

The traveling is fun. It’s exciting of course but I’m so ready to be in my studio working on things. There’s big ideas and remixes waiting and collaborations and maybe, just maybe the chance to actually spend time with friends in the hot muggy light of Brooklyn.

Making a case for actually taking the time to listen to an actual vinyl LP from end to end the gargantuan rich and warm new double album ‘Veckatimest’ from Grizzly Bear just arrived in the mail! Case made, we’re taking that time now.
‘Veckatimest’ is dense, and clever like the kind of record they used to make back when The Beatles were trading blows with The Beach Boys and the likes of “Odessey & Oracle” and “Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society” were falling through the cracks.  12 songs, 3 per side, each like a little pocket symphony complete with choral & string arrangements and touched as much by a late 60’s/early 70’s southern California sunlight as it is by the very English rain of ‘Atom Heart Mother’ era Pink Floyd. It’s a big record with big ideas but one that never cheats to challenge with needy pretension. Instead, the tracks are soothing and lovely proper songs that at times like single ‘Two Weeks’ astound with their pop-fantastic status.

But as well grounded and connected to their lineage as they are, there’s also something very immediately ‘new’ about things. Throughout, the songs maintain an honestly refreshing class while the angst hidden within them exists very much in the ‘Post’–post-punk, post-indie, post all those collective naughties-breakthroughs–in a way that seems to allow them the space to stretch out with confidence. ‘Veckatimest’ breaths and swells, rising from track to track with an assurance and confidence accumulating in the giddy crescendos of ‘I live With You’ and the simple melancholic elegance of ‘Foreground’. That song’s final unexpected and fleeting rise of choral harmony to conclude the record could sum-up so much of what’s right about the orchestration. Never once does the quote un-quote sophisticated production overwhelm the tracks or draw attention to itself for the sake of it. It might be a youth choir, but it’s so seemingly graceful and natural it’s hard to think of it as any more indulgent than the act of plugging a guitar into an amp. Conversely, it’s more than satisfying to hear a clever band getting by on ideas and real musicianship that moves well beyond trading on delay pedals, swaths of reverb, and lo-fi grit. And finally, everything about the LP, from the songs and sounds to the cover art, tinted paper of the inner sleeve and full color photo booklet, are of a similar, effortlessly-beautiful quality. It’s a quality you would hope still earns a place in this physical world. 

 
Representing NYC is an ambitious new initiative from Sam Hillmer that tries to empower the youth of East-New York by building stronger ties between them and the producers and indie-artists now beginning to live in their community. Hiller plays saxophone with Z’s, a New York band self described as No-wave/Brutal-prog/post-minimalist, but he’s also a teacher working in the New York Public School system and that experience lead him to create Representing NYC. Backed by several youth organizations, Hiller hopes this alliance of local kids and artists will “create connections in the rapidly changing neighborhoods of east Brooklyn, and give youth a much-needed opportunity to represent their New York.”
The first RNYC release, “Da’ Bratz From Da’ Ville” pairs Brownsville 8th graders Tamera and Ameena, aka ‘Angel’ and ‘Sophia’, aka The Fly Girlz, with Excepter’s Nathan Corbin AKA ‘Zebrablood’. The result is a super cool LP sliding between a spooky experimental noise pop and an urban Alan Lomax field recording, somewhat like what a Gang Gang Dance remix of ‘Buffalo Girls” might sound like: grizzled synths and crushed beats swirling around impetuous young voices perfect for a sticky urban spring. But, it would be impossible to think of this record without also thinking about the larger context it appears in.

Like other folk music traditions, the roots of rap are based in part on self-empowerment. At it’s beginning, rap was a reclamation and reinvention of ‘Community’ emerging from out the disintegrating structure of Bronx neighborhoods pushed to the brink by the spiraling decline of New York in the 1970’s. That music, the music of hip-hop’s first wave, was capital EEFF Fun in the face of an abrasive and corroded environment. The music was the sweat and heat of re-imagined disco, Rn’B and minimal break-beats. MC styles usually came in two varieties of sexy laidback braggadocio or up and anthemic party leading gang vocals. The Bronx may have been burning but that fire lit the party and carried down the line in the mazy trails of subway graffiti.

All the while, in the East Village and SOHO, self-empowerment took on a more hedonistic bent in the clannish no-man’s land of the downtown art scenes. No-wave and punk attitudes swelled with the boastful romanticism of a latch key generation still wistful for their A.M. radio. It may just have been Wendy and the Lost Boys playing cowboys and Indians, but their escapist fantasies also percolated with the self-promotional skills of Buffalo Bill and they were savvy enough to marry their bleak ethos to the other more ‘high’-minded art venues, galleries and performance spaces first beginning to open in and around SOHO.


What’s often now overlooked is how openly and immediately those two scenes interacted. A great citywide exchange of ideas and styles was taking place in late 70’s and early 80’s New York. Right from the start, while the godfather DJ’s were cutting up continental fare like Kraftwerk, a certain Krylon attitude was mixing with the ripped mannerisms of the downtown scenes. By the early eighties, Basquiat was all the rage and Liquid Liquid’s mutant disco was coalescing in ‘White Lines’. In The Bronx, in Manhattan, Artists’ eyes and ears were open to the changes and exchanges going on around them. Those participants of that New York were of their place; migrants and recent transplants maybe, but just as often, the children of the boroughs and they all carried with them an affection for their community and a sense of belonging to the people who came from those shared neighborhoods.

Now, more than a decade after New York’s 90’s rebirth, as once forbidden areas grow more Hollywood-like, sunny in disposition and laidback temperament, it’s easy to forget that despite the back-lot perfection of the L.E.S set, the integrated lineage of that New York isn’t as easily adopted as the clipped haircuts, vintage high-tops and Voidoid lean. It’s no secret the neighborhoods have been changing and as long as the change has been going on, the ‘G’ word has been flippantly tossed about like a cuss by the very same middle-class moving in. Gentrification and expansion has brought with it the swelling numbers of aesthetes and intellectuals self-aware enough to be embarrassed enough to see themselves as outsiders, and that’s part of the problem. “It’s their neighborhood, I just live here,” is the oft-tossed cop-out, used to justify a sort of cultural tourism, as if to belong is to co-opt.

Hillmer clearly see things different. He’s approached the kids he works with in the schools with absolute respect. It’s his opinion that he has as much to learn as to teach. “We see New York through the lense of Hip-Hop on the street level, in the lunch-room, on the stoop,” he writes on RNYC’s myspace. Really, it’s a perfect confluence of events. An artist embedded in the neighborhood who has connections, the self-reflexive desire to do good and the ear to recognize the value in what others might wrongly call unsophisticated.

On the debut RNYC LP–hopefully the first of many more–Ameena and Tamera avoid the pitfalls and pressures of their environment by learning to move deeper into it and re-approach their lives from a different angle. “The best thing about Brownsville is, like, to stay out of trouble and have fun. The worst thing about Brownsville is, like, the shooting and the trouble and violence around here,” one of the girls said on a recent WNYC interview. It’s a rough place but these girls voices sound unbroken and the tracks reflect a real hope and strength in the face of extreme chaos. The girls catalogue the hardships of their neighborhood but they also go off on ordinary teen tangents rapping with a totally fresh energy and spark.

And Corbin’s production stays free of pre-conceived ideas of what modern rap music is and also avoids the trappings of what could have been nothing more than old-school revivalism. Instead he approaches it on his own, indie/noise, terms and this, sometimes abrasive, production leads to something utterly unique. On that same WNYC interview, the girls admit that at first they didn’t know what to think of some of the sounds their collaborator made for them. It’s certainly hard to imagine them or any of their peers quite knowing what to do at a Z’s or Excepter show. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine most of Z’s and Excepter’s peers knowing quite how to move beyond their familiar and comfortable loft party affectations. Representing NYC is a mutual push into unexpected territories. It’s a gentle shoving in hopes of engendering even more ambitious experiments somewhere down the road from Brownsville.

If you grew up almost anywhere in America in the staggeringly ignorant days of being a teenager before the internet and were at all interested in bands beyond the regular MTV rotation, what you probably used to do was, get out a pen and paper and send away to the indie record labels for catalogues being sure to include a self addressed stamped envelope.
Many, many weeks later the catalogue would arrive. It was never too big, often Xeroxed or a simple single b/w sheet. Maybe there were a handful of bands you already knew and some that seemed larger than life just because you kept seeing them there in these catalogues or mentioned in interviews. In reality maybe a hundred kids cared about most of these but, in those days, there were no ‘friend counts” or page views and they were mysterious, mythological and known only by what you could figure out from reviews and articles in imported mags from England or the one time you saw that video on 120 minutes at 1 a.m. already dreading the Monday morning alarm clock. And so, you’d read and re-read the catalogue studying the blurb and the picture and the song titles and band names and eventually you’d check the boxes to the record you already knew you wanted taking a chance on two or three other singles you knew next to nothing about and then send it back and begin the wait by the postbox for your records to arrive.

It’s so strangely archaic now; it was so insular and personal. There was no immediacy or rush because you were alone in your development and nobody you knew had heard or seen these records and the anticipation was yours and yours alone. From SST I grew old waiting on Screaming Trees, Sub Pop made me grey waiting for Superfuzz and Bigmuff, Drag City made me hold out for months for Pavement’s first 10′, while Merge let me waste away awaiting Superchunk. I’ve long since forgotten the abysmal failures, the waste of wax singles from absolutely terrible bands but the good ones were prized scalps. It was a time when ‘I knew them first’ status was remarkably inclusive, measured in years not weeks. It was brutal and absurd. No doubt the kids are now more than all right being able to glom the entire history of The Fall or some such in a night grabbing the back-catalogue via wikipedia and few clicks. And the price we pay is of course that blog life has made everything passé three weeks from release. But those of us old enough to remember, do have a certain right to bemoan the miles we walked barefoot and the dues the youth of today take for granted if only because it stunk and we earned it.

The relevance of all this is that a few weeks ago I gave up a Sunday trying to track down The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart debut on vinyl. I went to no less than four NY shops looking for it only to find everywhere was sold out. ‘We’ll have more in next week,’ they all said. ‘Ridiculous,’ I thought annoyed at having to wait for it. And thus, impatient and either forgetting exactly how long mail-order used to take or made wonderfully nostalgic by the few TPOPAH mp3’s I already had to go on, I went home and straight to the Slumberland records site to order it. I hadn’t even thought of doing such an absurd thing since high school and I immediately regretted the decision.

 The weeks went by, and I was reminded of the above memories, and then Pitchfork gave the album a huge review and totally like stole any shot I might have at ‘I knew ‘em foist,’ status but now you know what? I totally don’t even care. It arrived today and so, I’m happy to report that indie labels have become far more responsible and prompt in the years since I was made to suffer.  A scant few weeks after I ordered it, we’re listening to it on, what to god I hope is, one of the last truly cold nights of this winter.

This record is so brilliantly Vaselines and Jesus & Mary Chain and Shop Assistants and any number of sounds I would have truly flipped on in junior high and high school that it’s almost as if it’s a long forgotten mail-order only just arrived. Not that it’s dated or purely nostalgic, because there is certainly a something new about it all if for no other reason than it’s re-contextualizing of those sounds. But their name says it all.  The songs are great, classic ‘Left of the Dial’ hits sounding tinged with melancholia and the hope that maybe this week the new girl will show up in your class, be given the seat next to yours. Romantic titles, love obsessed and innocent, single string solos washed in fuzz, it’s maybe the perfect way to wait out these last heartsick, dark days of winter. 

Insanely catchy, densely layered and nothing but beautiful, this, Luke Temple’s first record under the Here We Go Magic name, has just become our favorite Saturday morning LP for 2009.
Wrapping acoustic guitars and shimmering vocal lines into the textures of retro synthesizers and poly-phonic beats, this record hits all the right Gang Gang Black Beach Bear Collective contemporary experimental reference points as well as touching on perpetual left of center obsessions like Can, Eno or the The Ethiopiqués series. But, unlike a lot of similar paced and themed records of late, here the haze of drone and reverb pulls back to reveal well-crafted and classic songs befitting a much less-cynical time. It’s totally unique, experimental and artsy, but it’s also timeless and elegant, and, Amazingly, what the melodies and vocals evoke most is the entire Paul Simon songbook turned inverted art dream.

There’s certainly something otherworldly and alchemical in the sound of Here We Go Magic. The scope of the writing is so broad and the instrumentation so varied and mysterious that it’s impossible to really figure out how it’s being done. Tape compression has warmed the sound pulling everything into a tightly packed mass with only flickers of strumming allowed to escape.

The first four songs all open to one another expanding and growing the concept until finally landing on central track ‘Tunnel Vision‘. It’s the kind of track that stays with you for days and when it finishes it’s a relief to escape into relative simplicity of ‘Ghost List‘, an ambient tumbling of loops that builds into a storm. It’s then that the far reaches of this record begin to be touched developing evermore Eno-like, scenic, ‘weird’ and wired until final track ‘Everything’s Big‘ leaves you feeling ‘everything’s going to be all right’ with a come down and say goodnight worthy of Nina Simone or ‘On The Beach‘ era Neil Young.

Check out more here

The valentine’s show we played at Glasslands was so much fun, with our great friends Kyp Malone & Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson aided by Marques Toliver both turning in gorgeous sets to get arrows unquivered and hearts shivering. But it was closer Wild Yaks who bust those hearts in uncontrollable, sweaty shouts of joy and so this seems like as good a time as any to mention, Wild Yaks might just be the last great pure punk rock band in America… or maybe it’s just cupid’s tomahawk got me feeling giggly for ‘em. 

Rob Byrn doesn’t stop. He’s stoked, a dude so committed to the cause of keeping the party going that he literally shakes with enthusiasm; he also might be the first guy since the boss to believe, really believe, Rock And Roll could save A life. It’s not showmanship and it’s not an act, it’s just a full and total commitment to the words and sounds coming from his body. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also blessed with an unaffected Wolf Man Jack voice and a true sense of plain spoken poetry.

Rob’s Wild Yaks, (Zack Davis: guitar, Martin Cartagena: drums, Dan Scinta: bass) take over rooms with storming full voiced shouts of joy & damnation spewing guitar solos and pugnacious beats. Cables come loose, clothing comes loose, guitar-straps slip from shoulders, sweat pours and love, poetry, laughter and pure, un-tainted punkrockgaragegopselsoul music comes crashing down all around.

They should have been on SST or Rough Trade back in the day, but they will be at SXSW and house parties and I hope to god soon on a record.

“If you love me as much as I love you and we agree that our general goal is the same, for the best possible thing to happen at any moment, then my faith in you and your methods is beyond question.”-Rob Byrn
Amen, brother.