Josh-Manhattan dweller…
Don-I know, right? I can’t relate to this shit. Actually, I worked here tonight and I got a little loopy and then I went to the city I did my fucking standup and then, it would have been really easy to go home get in bed, but I came back out…
Josh-It’s hard getting out here, man, fuck that shit.
Don-Yeah, It’s well, I dunno, man, I tell you, this is like good living, good living out here.
Josh-I got a nice place.
Don-yeah, you got a good spot going on, man.
Josh-It’s allright. I want to hear about your stand-up.
Don-It’s good man! It’s good. So far so good.
Josh-I’m not surprised.
Don-I did yesterday and I did today and it’s gone really, really well, I got…
Josh-both days were good?
Don-Yeah! Like, I did last night and things went well. But then tonight was a kind of a challenge where I had to follow that up so I went home and wrote a bunch more shit and went out and did it and I dunno, I was, I don’t want to sound like… cocky… but I kind of killed it both nights.
Josh-I believe you.
Don- I feel good, I’m going to go with it, I’m going to write some shit.
Josh-Awesome.
Don-But you, man! you’re on some shit right now, you are a… busy dude!
Josh-I am a busy dude…
Don-You’re back from Japan…
Josh-Back from Japan.
Don-You’re playing, or you played… last night. Did you play last night?
Josh-Yeah.
Don-Was that, that was the Webster Hall show?
Josh-Yes.
Don-How’d it go?
Josh-It was nice. I actually really liked that gig. It was like a really mellow one for us, but it was very satisfying, it felt very therapeutic. It was fun.
Don-You mentioned that you guys have never really done media stuff before, always shied away from interviews and now you are in the thick of it. You’re on the front page of the fucking art section of the New York Times today, beautiful photograph, you all look great, so you’re back into it, man, this is what a lot of bands aim for right?
Josh-I guess. I guess so. I dunno, I just want to be able to make music so, I’m assuming, or not assuming but, hopefully all this ‘banter’… it’s going to make it easier for us.
Don-Yeah, well, you know it’s… more people hear about you, the more people see you. but so now you’ve done the record, the record’s out, it’s been like three years in the making…
Josh-Yeah.

Don-Do you feel like you’re already done with that or, you said you were going to record again soon?
Josh-We’re recording in January. Going to Joshua Tree, out in the desert, to a friend’s house.
Don-Is that? Is it Bono’s house?
Josh-Uh, No. It’s not Bono. And the Edge won’t be there either.
Don-Fuck! That would be… that would be so fucking good. Man! If you guys have like the Edge playing on your record, man, that would be… something else.
Josh-It would be sweet but I’d be out of a job, he’s too good.
Don-well, no, seriously, I think you’re better than the edge, you’re better than the Edge.
Josh-Thank you.
Don-I think, you’re the hidden ingredient of that band. I think, you know… Degraw… you know, he gets a lot of the attention but you’re sort of the hidden one. Because, I remember listening to you guys over the years and I’d be like, “I didn’t hear any guitar”, but then I’d actually see it live and I’d see you playing and I’d go, ‘Oh, Josh is actually making all these sounds happen.’
Josh-Half the time when we play, we get these reviews, Central Park Summer Stage was the most recent, after we did that, I read a couple of reviews online where people were like, the guitarist was strumming furiously and no sound was coming out. (laughs) Like they think I’m not doing anything, which is funny.
Don-No… well, on the new record I feel like the guitar is more apparent, It’s really good.
Josh-It’s more ’straight guitar’.

Don-You said, you’re getting a new guitar? You have one in mind over at Main Drag? Did you pick that guitar up you were talking about?
Josh-Yeah, Bruno [mutual pal] helped, I came home from tour with five dollars or whatever and I just traded all this stuff and then Bruno leant me the rest of the money to get this guitar because…
Don-did you get it?
Josh-Yeah I did, but it still needs to be set up for synth stuff. It’s just, like, I take equipment on the road, and we’ve traveled so much, that shit just gets beaten up and you know I’ve played the same guitar for years in the band and it just gets totally destroyed. It’s a mess.
Don-So, what made this new guitar stand out to you, like why did you want to get this guitar.
Josh-I dunno, you’ve probably had that experience, you play guitar.
Don-Yeah, you see a guitar and you’re like, ‘this is the one. I need to have this guitar.’
Josh-I think I’m attracted to strange, lost, instruments, or something like that, outsider instruments, the one that doesn’t get invited to the party.
Don-The loner guitar.
Josh-The loner.
Don-So you have it now?
Josh-yeah, I have it, it’s nice. I’m getting it set up tomorrow and then hopefully I will be able to make some money at some point and I can afford to put the…
Don-you guys aren’t making money yet? I mean, you guys are on top of the world, right? New York Times! You guys you’re fucking doing it, this is like, people form bands and their dream is to get to the point that you’re at right now you’re at that point.
Josh-I’m working at Daddy’s right now. (laughter)
Don-(Laughter)

Josh-yeah, man, I mean, I don’t know, I mean, we kind of like, I am fortunate because we’ve made some money over the years.
Don-You did that um, Boadrum thing, which is amazing.
Josh-Yeah, it’s just like, sometimes we’ll get something that pays, but, it’s real up and down, I mean, I did come home from tour and I had five dollars and, It doesn’t feel so good.
Don-Yeah.
Josh-Like, I’d been living on my change jar until the show last night.
Don-So that’s the lesson. If you form a band, you’re not going to make any money at all and you’ll realize your dream and you’re still not going to make anything at all.
Josh-It ain’t about the money until you have as many grey hairs as I do and then you have to worry about money.
Don-you have… about thirty-four grey hairs.
Josh-Maybe thirty-Five.
Don-Well, I just got the record, I got the record yesterday, or two days ago and, and I’ve really gotten to listen to it and it sounds, obviously, really fucking solid, it’s really good um…
Josh-Thanks, Don, you’re a sweetheart.
Don-Well, you know, I’m just sayin, I’m just sayin…¦
Josh-Worth the buck. But…
Don-But you know, a little more work and maybe you’ve got something… seriously, you guys could try a little harder next time.
Josh-Yeah, I love you Don.
Don-Alright. That’s that, Gang Gang, oh shit.

Download Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna at  OTHER MUSIC

more GANG GANG here & here.  

Don Stahl is a comedian and writer. He dwells in Manhattan. See more here

Our buddy Jacques Renault is out with an awesome video for his track ‘Bad Skinned‘
This near 7min cut of furious disco basslines and Zaxon rayguns is off his new Rvng Of The Nrds Vol.6 12″.The Video was created by Lifelong Friendship Society & Strange Baby. 

   
There’s an acceptance of pain involved in the individuality of things like skateboarding, punk and noise, graffiti and not being able to do things ’cause you’re underage and just not belonging to whatever ‘normal’ is; but through this pain comes creativity and a bit of its own sort of feeling good.

The Smell, in downtown Los Angeles, is a kind of culmination of all these things and acts as a breeding ground for an all-ages revolt against accepted aesthetics, sonics and ideology. Relatively broad ranges of groups perform at The Smell, but its definite roots are in hardcore punk and noise. On any given night you can walk in and feel your body tremble from a frequency you never knew existed, upon further examination you’ll see, not hear, singers screaming on the floor or on an amp, ripping their shirts and about to pop a blood vessel, yet, because of the amplitude already at its peak, the vocals make little to no difference in the enveloping soundscape. 

ANAVAN IN ‘40 BANDS/80 MINUTES’   

The Pehrspace in Echo Park is another center for bands and artists with this DIY approach; Sean Carnage organizes a night on Monday’s there that features a good variety of progressive noise and other experimental groups. A little more than a year ago Sean released a documentary entitled ‘40 Bands 80 Minutes‘, the film is a document of 40 bands from the L.A. DIY scene playing for 2 minutes a piece for a total of 80 minutes. Abe Vigoda, Explogasm, Wives (Dean and Randy from No Age) and Anavan were among the bands involved in the project. It’s not only a showcase of these bands but also about the support the bands give to each other, something quite redeeming about the L.A. scene in general. Everyone’s in it together, pushing each other yet not in a competitive manner, much like the support from peers while skateboarding. A group of individuals helping each other and whoever else wants to get involved.

NASA SPACE UNIVERSE   

One band that’s really pushing things on all levels is NASA Space Universe. They combine the harshness of noise with the fast anxiety of 80’s hardcore to produce violently direct music with a piercing social message warning of societies doom and decline. Kevin Rhea, the singer, goes off into deeply emotionalized conspiratorial, psychological and philosophical rants about the draining of our minds through media and the government, all the while working up the audience into a frenzy. 

THE MAE SHI AT THE SMELL  

Bands keep forming and un-forming, house venues and art galleries start then get shut down but still optimism remains amongst everyone. Even with all this press the scene’s getting, there’s still a genuineness that remains and doesn’t seem to be leaving, in fact all this attention seems to only add fuel to the fire; for something that started with no direction, it’s become quite an interesting journey to watch.

MIKA MIKO  

JASON-Jesse, it’s interesting that the scene is so defined by it’s youngest participants. I know that’s really true in places like the OC that the kids are really shut out of things. And this reclaiming of territory and marking out something that is really meant for the kids is rad. It’s not something I think NYC kids relate to because teenagers in NY are kind of hanging around clubs and bars from a young age.

JESSE-I get pretty bummed about most things being 21+ since i’m 20 and because i’m very much against the elitism that it sort of produces by keeping ‘kids’ out of ‘adult’ things.

JASON-It seems the roots of hardcore run pretty deep for sure. Does this mean that the scenes you’re talking about are boy-centric like hardcore was and is, or is this more inclusive than that? I was looking at the pictures on NASA Space Universe’s myspace and there did seem to be a number of young ladies in the pit. 

JESSE-Just from my personal observation, I’d say that there is a definitely larger male presence but it is a very open scene and there are quite a lot of girls involved with things. 

JASON-Who’s the girl’s version of NO AGE? 

JESSE-Theres a few bands with all or mostly girls, namely Mika Miko and Vomit Bomb there’s also this band All Neon Like, they’re all different though vomit bomb’s like 77 thrash/metal and mika miko is like no wave punk stuff. 

VOMIT BOMB AT THE SMELL

JESSE-When things are at their craziest there’s still a love that’s present and if you fall, people are gonna pick you up, and girls are just as involved with all that as guys are, there’s just overall more guys in the scene than are girls but no one really discriminates.

JASON-Awesome. And it’s also interesting because even though it seems there’s a big carry over of some of the more agro aspects of Hardcore and Noise, there’s also a definite break from it’s traditional images. The bands and their artwork and style all seems much more playful and colorful than hardcore. Do you see that same difference in the scene between ‘FUN’ and something more ‘agro’? Is it a big party atmosphere and is humor important to the scene?

JESSE-I’d say it is definitely a fun environment, although there’s alot of heaviness, overall people are quite positive even amongst the gentle violence. Humor is definitely a substantial factor, there’s alot of blurring the lines between seriousness and parody. But some take it so far that it’s hard to know they’re satire unless you know them personally.

  

JESSE HLEBO IS A PHOTOGRAPHER, FILMMAKER, WRITER, and the editor of Commonism, “an online art/music/culture/collective zine who’s purpose is to promote positivity in the san francisco, los angeles and orange county scenes with the hopes of creating a closer unity and sense of community between them.” See more here. and here.  

GET MORE INFO ON THE BANDS AND VENUES DISCUSSED HERE AT THE FOLLOWING:
THE SMELL
PEHRSPACE
40 BANDS/80 MINS
ABE VIGODA
Explogasm
WIVES
Anavan
NASA SPACE UNIVERSE
Mika Miko
VOMIT BOMB
ALL NEON LIKE
DOWNLOAD NO AGE, ABE VIGODA, MIKA MIKO, ALL NEON LIKE AND MORE FROM OTHER MUSIC

All Photos in this post BY Jesse Hlebo. All rights reserved.

In desperate need of finding a singer for the school’s big music show just a couple of days away, three Japanese teenagers recruit a Korean exchange student to front their newly formed cover band. With a stillness and pacing alien to any American movie about high school kids, 2007’s Linda, Linda, Linda is a near perfect slice of teenage life. As they set about practicing, and practicing and practicing, the girls bond around the common purpose and modest goal of having a good show. They work themselves to the bone, get a pep talk from the Ramones in the Budokan, and nearly blow it all when the rains come. It’s awkward and sweet and an amazingly honest account of what it’s like being in a garage band.

In this the final scene of Linda Linda Linda, the girls get their moment of glory at the big show. It’s so heroically good you’ll get goose bumps.

Join The Profesionals. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1981)
“we don’t put out.”
Cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains stars a 16 year old Diane Lane and a 13 year old Laura Dern as would be punk icons out on a rain soaked tour. Also staring Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and Clash bassist Paul Simonon, the film gets enough right in it’s portrait of underground bands to overlook the dated bits. The Shags-like sound of the stains seems an indie phenomenon some 20 years ahead of its time. Filmed with a dirty loose feel that goes well with a cynical and sarcastic anti-establishment view of the ‘biz’, this ultra-cool film was once abandoned to late night tv and the midnight movie circuit but has just been released on DVD. Rumor has it this is the film that gave the White Stripes‘ their name.

LEAVE IT TO THE AMATEURS. BOYS AND GIRLS, THE LESS THAN ADEQUATE SHAGGS. (1969)
BLESS.

A sedated, zonked out little EP of hung-over low-fi disco, this CDR from L.A. artist and performer Nite Jewel, shimmers in a haze of early autumn Southland sunshine. A layer of hiss will almost certainly get removed and bit more bottom and crispness discovered once these tracks are mastered for the Glass Candy split 12′ coming out later this month on the Italians Do It Better label, but these are deliberately degenerated tracks. Nite Jewel’s Ramona Gonzalez uses the natural compression of an 8-track tape recorder to create a willfully muddy low-fi pop. It’s the fetishization of tape and vintage synths as a means to unlock the obsessive innovation of Outsider Art.

Recently, L.A. has been bubbling up with a whole crop of bedroom pop bands. No Age and Abe Vigoda’s Smash Your Head On The Punk Rock era sonics, Jeremy Jay’s introverted crooner melodrama and Haunted Graffiti’s Dr. Demento homemade psychedelia have all broken through to remind us there is an L.A. beyond the Sunset strip. Certainly there might be something of Laurel Canyon or the too cool for school hedonism of the Germs in it, but really, this is another Los Angeles entirely. Self-sufficient, insular, hipster, nerdy and self-reflective to the point of mythology, this scene of interlocking scenes has followed the path of gentrification and grown wildly in the last decade. 

This image of L.A. fits well with the easy-going lilt of Nite Jewel’s unhurried DIY ethos. Evoking the decidedly blotto feeling of being up for days this is a strobe lit inner party; a lost weekend of decadent self-absorption. The reductive shallow beats are echos from last night’s party; the vaporous looped layers of vocals and synths congeal and run like less than fresh make-up exposed when the lights come on. It’s a world seen from behind sunglasses captured well in the video for stand out track, Artificial Intelligence.

Brooklyn’s own Vivian Girls’ self-titled debut is back in print thanks to label In The Red. A mini album of endless fun, The Vivian Girls bang thrash and clamor with the restless energy of Friday’s final bell. It’s a sloppy smash and grab bag of huge tunes of the kind traded in Brooklyn since the start of the naughties by bands like Cause CO-Motion, The Broke Revue, Blood On The Wall and Tallboys.

Like those bands, Vivan Girls are cut out of the same post-Nuggets psych/garage template as Television Personalities or The Vaselines. It’s the sort of well trodden path where the inherent punk in a classic girl group screamer like The Tammy’s Egyptian Shumba or the jacked up strumming and heavy on the snare snap of The Who’s ‘Kids Are Alright’ is recognized. It leads back, way back to the earliest folk roots of America’s sheebens and speakeasies, a clammering of moonlit inhibitions and wild parties.  It is an inclusive sound that could not be less pretentious.

Drenched in reverb, jangley grit and the effortless sing-song crash of a campfire round, Vivian Girls have an aloof tumultuousness that seems almost oblivious to the thunder landing all around them. The LP explodes from the first and stakes a claim for it’s own intriguing originality with deadpanned lyrics, timeless hooks and an accelerated, exuberant pulse.

The songs are brief direct and full of genuine  enthusiasm  and emotion. The tempos are all racing and propulsive, the melancholic wistfulness of‘Going Insane‘ lasting for only seconds before a blood rush of excitement and goose bumps overwhelms everything. Even the comparative slow jam, ‘Where Do You Run To‘ has all the racing heart, autumn sweetness of a schoolyard crush. And with this, Vivian Girls win me over. With apologies to the poet Wislaw Szymborska, you can be forgiven for thinking the new crush is the first. Vivian Girls are full of promise and their album has in it, all the hopeful Friday-night anticipation of a wide and limitless weekend approaching. 

DOWNLOAD THE VIVIAN GIRLS OR ORDER THE LP
FROM NYC’S BEST RECORD STORE, OTHER MUSIC HERE.

More Vivian Girls HERE.

From 1956 through to the final days of the GDR, radio stations broadcast directly from the Funkhaus. Every program was administered and produced right there within these buildings on Nalepastrasse. More than three thousand people worked there and at one time, the East-Berlin Funkhaus housed a clinic and a kindergarten to accommodate this considerable work force. The now dusty and empty hallways are lined with cubbyholes where tape reels were once stored and exchanged. Elaborate staircases wind to yet more empty hallways. In winter, the snow quickly covers the pathways. Large wall-sized windows overlook the banks of the quietly flowing Spree.  Once a bureaucratic army administered over the thoughts of a nation here. Now there is an odd silence in the halls and the feeling of being surrounded by ghosts and secrets. 

   

The GDR was perhaps the largest secret-police state the world has ever seen. Contrasting it with some other rather infamous police states, Anna Funder points out in her fantastic book Stasiland, the KGB had one informer for nearly every 6,000 Russians under Stalin, under Hitler the Gestapo had roughly one informant for every 2,000 Germans, while, astonishingly, East-Germany’s secret police, the STASI, had one informer for every 6.5 East-Germans.

Most of these informers were just ordinary citizens persuaded to spy on their neighbors and colleagues with the promise of getting access to expensive medical drugs, travel-visas or political favors. To defy the STASI was to risk being refused good jobs or admission to the best universities. The STASI controlled and watched every aspect of people’s lives. Books, music, plays, the STASI viewed these as potentially dangerous elements. Thought and culture had the potential to secretly spread propaganda from the west and in the GDR’s view, this meant that even the most seemingly benign use of culture needed to be controlled. East Germans learned not to speak openly even in their own homes for fear someone might be listening. Even the ostensibly innocent ears of children couldn’t be trusted for, teachers were often recruited to coax children to rat out their parents. So then, in a place in which some 3,000 people were working, and administering and broadcasting and receiving radio signals and disseminating information, news and culture to the entire population of East-Germany, what would one suppose the percentage of STASI to non-STASI was among the workers at the Funkhaus? The likely answer seems to be that it must have been almost entirely STASI. Most assuredly, there is almost no chance that STASI agents weren’t constantly and meticulously supervising every single operation and employee at the Funkhaus.

Erich Mielke (center) the head of the STASI with his inner-circle.
“But I Love… I Love all… all people,” said a tearful Erich Mielke six days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To which the crowd began to laugh.  

Further up the Spree and over the wall in Kruezberg, David Bowie,Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed were recording their seminal works while living out a 1970’s broken down vision of Weimar Berlin. Kruezberg proudly holds a claim to this bit of music history, but it’s on the city’s ripped back side, back in the Funkhaus, in this once overly offciated, orderly, micro-organized and perfectly compartmentalized village, that perhaps the future of Berlin’s storied musical history will unfold. Walking into the place today, it’s impossible not to get the feeling that great and impossible works should be made here. It’s the sort of place where a band should hunker down to deconstruct and re-invent and come away with something that sounds like the kind of future Jules Verne or George Melies imagined.

   

In the 1990’s, after the collapse of the GDR, the offices at the Funkhaus fell into disuse. There are now, as yet derailed, plans to radically revitalize the remaining facilities at the Funkhaus to accommodate a number of business, housing and public cultural spaces and a few of the studio’s were sold into private ownership and are now in operation.

One of these private studios is Planet Roc which operates out of the rooms where GDR radio once broadcast it’s live theater productions. Within this one building the most elaborate stagings took place. It’s rumored Radiohead had originally wanted to record ‘Kid A‘ here but the studio wasn’t ready. True or not, it’s an anecdote that seems immediately believable when entering the place

Planet Roc’s rather large control room looks out into four separate live rooms. The largest boasts ceilings some thirty feet high. In the middle of this room is a staircase leading to a brick wall. The stairs are divided into sections of wood steps, stone steps and carpeted steps to capture the different sounds footsteps make. When Liars recorded their third album ‘Drum’s Not Dead‘ here, Angus Andrew would sing from the top of the stairs to a microphone below. As one would imagine, there’s a stone barrel-vaulted dungeon beneath the stairs, because, well, why wouldn’t there be. The dungeon is another thing Liars made liberal use of.

The smallest room at Planet Roc is called the ‘dead-room’; a reverb-less room with spiraling gravel paths hidden beneath floorboards. The air immediately sucks inward around one’s eardrum when entering the ‘dead-room’, it’s an extremely uncomfortable feeling but yields a perfect close-mic’d dryness. While actors acted out their scenes in the neighboring rooms, expert foley artists simultaneously supplied the accompanying sound effects from there in the ‘Dead Room’. These days, it’s is mostly used to catch the spit of aspiring German rappers often seen skulking around the hallways dressed hilariously in head to toe Lakers gear.

Recording The Boggs’ ‘Forts’ in Planet Roc with Liars’ Julien Gross     

I recorded four tracks for The Boggs’ album Forts at Planet Roc. I couldn’t use the control room because a young German pop idol was mixing so, Holger Muller, in-house producer at Planet Roc, built me a makeshift studio there in the middle of the big room. Mek Obaam, who played drums on Forts used the walls and sound barriers to record the flickering stick patterns. To get the ambiguous heartbeat for the track ‘The Passage’, we had all the lights off in that cavernous room, all of us sitting quietly in the dark, listening to the gentle bomp bomp of the mallet. It’s that kind of place; a place where you want to improvise and re-invent wheels and find new and interesting ways to approach things and rip it up and start again.

A view of one the Funkhause’s now unused buildings ripped up and waiting. 

In Part two of this two part series, Walkmen/White Rabbits/Asobi Seksu producer Chris Zane and Rakes‘ guitarist Matthew Swinnerton talk about recording together at Planet Roc.
Read Pt.II Here.

OUR GOOD FRIENDS AND BROOKLYN NEIGHBOURS THE JEALOUS GIRLFRIENDS ARE OUT WITH A NEW VIDEO FOR THEIR DARK AND MOODY, HORN DRENCHED TRACK ORGANS ON THE KITCHEN FLOOR.