Once upon a time, before she found her true calling in alt-country and New Porn, a spunky gal named was drumming and singing up a ruckus with garage rock trio Maow. Even before that, she served behind the twee classics, including 1993 s EP+ collection Betti-Cola and 1994 s Come Out Come Out, while Maow dropped The Unforgiving Sounds of..
. back in 1996. Vancouver s longstanding released all three, and it s Mint that 7 tracks, including Chico , Sweet Pea , Summer Samba , and Hello Kitty , all the better to help you cuddle like you mean it.
Like an actual Venn diagram, artists from different spheres (okay, the diagram has circles, but you get the point) of the experimental music world will converge on various venues in Bristol, England from May 31 to June 3 for the . Among the artists performing at the festival are Faust with Nurse With Wound s Colin Potter, Sunn 0))) s Stephen O Malley and Peter Pita Rehberg as KTL, Spring Heel Jack with Mark Saunders and Spiritualized s J Spaceman (or Jason Pierce), Vladislav Delay/Luomo, Pixeltan, Ghostigital, Goldfrapp/Portishead side project Quadrode, Lawrence, Soft Circle, Yellow Swans (an acoustic set), A Hawk and a Hacksaw (with the Hun Hang a r Ensemble), and Maher Shalal Hash Baz ( revolutionary and humble pop from Japan, according to a press release, and of no relation to my Irish-descended self).
Though there are still several acts yet to confrim, the rest of the Venn Festival s current lineup is below.
Though on the slightly-geeky pop the boys of spent nearly a quarter-century churning out, reports of his own band s demise must ve lit a fire under chief songwriter Andy Partridge, whose will unleash no fewer than four Partridge-family projects on US shores April 3 thanks to their distribution deal with Rykodisc. There s Monstrance, the overdub-free, entirely-improvised, self-titled double-disc set from Partridge and mates Barry Andrews and Martyn Barker of . There s Orpheus the Lowdown, conceived over thirteen years worth of sessions between Partridge and Slapp Happy singer and cartoonist Peter Blegvad.
On the Partridge-free tip, there s The Secret Life of , a disc of gossamer pop not far removed from Skylarking-era XTC. Finally, there s the hushed tones and gurgling synths of s Return of the Kildeer. If that seems like a lot at once, know that all but Monstrance have seen release on Partridge s side of the Black Sea in the last few years.
Happy Mondays Back at It With New Album, Tour Fans of Factory Records, sunshine party-pop, and drugs have considerable cause for celebration as yesterday, Monday, March 26, revealed their intentions to return to the dangerous world of releasing full-length albums.
According to NME.com, their as-yet-untitled LP-- which technically follows up 1992 s regrettable .
..Yes Please-- will be heralded by a new single in June.
As Happy frontman Shaun Ryder told the British weekly, I m not the world s best salesman, me...
I m not a salesman at all. I think it s a really great album.
The Mondays-- who reunited in present form back in 2004 and contributed new single Playground Superstar to the 2005 Goal!
film soundtrack-- tapped Howie B and Sonny Levine to produce their comeback album, which will bear the stamp of new Happy Mondays home .
, the Mondays play Coachella in late April. They ve also lined up some UK dates for later in the spring.
The Pack Talk Album, Vans, Parents, the Misfits
Us wearing Vans and skating and having that kind of urban style led to people talking about, 'Oh we're punk rock.' I know some people who would really get mad. You're talking about punk rock, and you don't know what punk rock is.
I don't like it. Southwest, they performed shirtless on the roofs of cars parked in an Amtrak station parking lot during an after-hours Paperthinwalls.com party.
Our meeting was a more low-key affair. Young Stunna, Young L, and Lil B (Lil Uno was napping) sat by their hotel pool, fully clothed, and talked about their careers up to this point: their hit their relationships with hyphy, hip hop, and their mothers. album?
It was supposed to come out in February, right? Young Stunna: Yeah, we actually released an EP [Skateboards 2 Scrapers], which was good at the time. We tried to get the best stuff that we could, and we keep working.
We got the EP out for the fans. going to be on the album? there.
I m about 80% sure. There s no reason Vans shouldn t be on there. From the EP?
No. I mean, there might be. songs.
We wanted to make the EP a separate album. That was the EP. Now it s time for the album, which is going to kill.
in the summer, are you trying to write any big summer jams? L, does the season factor into your beat-making at all? change anything for me, at least consciously.
Maybe subconsciously we wanna make a summertime beat, but I don t think I write it to be a summertime beat or started to blow up, but you guys don t seem to be totally a part of that, so it. That s our culture. At the same time, we come from diverse backgrounds, so you re not going to just hear hyphy hyphy hyphy hyphy hyphy.
You re going to hear this, this, this, this, this, and then some hyphy. So we re part of the hyphy movement, but we re not hyphy.
In a bid to make the coming spring endless, Mr.
Christian , laptop provocateur, will unleash his illustrious electronic sounds upon the gathered hordes at a number of European festivals next month. While this is wondrous news for residents of and folks happening through Vilnius, Lithuania, and Ljubljana, Slovenia, it leaves the rest of us a bit cold, and even more desperately in need of a sick Fennesz fix.
Fortunately, not long after his tour, Fennesz will reprise his collaboration with noted composer (The Last Emperor, etc.
). The pair s Cendre follows up 2005 s Fennesz Sakamoto one-track EP and arrives Stateside via on May 15. Cendre collects 11 new joint efforts and has Mr.
Fennesz tearing it up on the guitar and laptop, while Mr. Sakamoto throws it down on piano and laptop. That shit is hot.
Keep those ears perked, as Touch should have a Fennesz full-length proper on the way in late 2007.
I play it for people and say, 'What is this shit? How do you interpret it?
' And they're like, 'This sounds like some sad-ass soundtrack.' If there s one thing we can count on from s Scott Herren, (now going by his full name: Guillermo Scott Herren), it s that he always has a ton of collaborations and side projects going almost simultaneously. So far this year, those projects are : a new Prefuse 73 album, a new album, Golden Pollen, scheduled for a June 19 release on , and a full-length collaboration with Japanese MC , tentatively due out in May.
We caught up with Herren recently to talk about these three projects as well as his relationships with hip hop, his collaborators (including Battles Tyondai Braxton), and the language barrier.
Guillermo Scott Herren: He s one of my best friends. I took Battles everywhere with me on the last official Prefuse tour, for .
I took them from Japan to Italy to Spain, just because I really believed in them, and I wanted to show the world what they could do. I wanted to bring them to a Prefuse audience because I thought we had a lot of similarities, and Tyondai and I always-- when we re talking about our own music-- we always find these ties. Our influences are very similar, even though they come out different.
And I was like, There s no way my crowd is not going to respond to these guys. They re just as banging as any beat. Anybody that brings any kind of heat with hip hop or whatever-- if they get what I m doing, they re going to get what they re doing.
Pitchfork: Was the response good?
GSH: Yeah, it was great. I think it opened a lot of people s heads up.
They were just like Holy shit! when they would drop their beats.
Pitchfork: Have you heard the full-length, Mirrored, yet?
GSH: Yeah, I m supposed to be working on a remix, but instead I m working on the Prefuse record because there s so much work to be done with it.
Pitchfork: Do you know which track you re remixing yet?
GSH: Not yet, but I m sure it will be fitting.
It will be fun. This Prefuse shit is just out of control. There s so much to do because it s two records, and they re totally different.
My head s got to split in half and do two different things.
Pitchfork: How are they coming along? There s no release date set yet, is there?
GSH: The timetable is definitely TBA. The goal that we ve made with each other, me and , is that I would try to turn it in by June, and thank God for Warp being supportive and calling me to make sure I m okay. Like, You ve got a lot of work, are you okay?
and I m like, I m cool, I m cool. My brain hasn t melted yet.
This coming Tuesday, April 3, will beam down three reissue packages bearing the mark of , the 60s songwriter and producer whose work on the Tornado s interplanetary Telstar and his own avant-garde LP I Hear a New World helped usher in a brave new world of noise into pop music.
How important was this guy? Put it this way: . .
The Joe Meek EP Collection boxes a dozen discs of Meek s production, while Vampires Cowboys Spacemen Spooks collects 60 wordless Meek-works including a congregation of crazy covers of Meek-era standards like Wipeout and The Can-Can. Meek freaks will also be treated to Joe Meek s Freakbeat: 30 Freakbeat, Mod and R B Nuggets, the title of which suggests its contents rather well. Stephen Marley Talks Mind Control, Family, Jail
I could tell by the coldness of the walls, by the crampedness of the floor, that this place was not meant for man, much less a righteous youth!
Having just released his debut solo album, Mind Control (Universal Republic), on March 20-- and about to embark on a tour of North America on March 29-- took time out of his busy schedule to speak to Pitchfork.
His work with his brother on Damian s 2005 album, , and on Mind Control s awesome The Traffic Jam has an exciting ferocity to it, but Stephen was kind and warm over the phone as he talked about his family, his career, and the arrest that landed him in a Tallahassee jail for possessing a certain Jamaican natural remedy.
Pitchfork: You ve been away from the Melody Makers-- the group you were in with your siblings Ziggy, Sharon, and Cedella-- for a while now.
Stephen Marley: As a group, but not as a family.
Pitchfork: How is being a solo artist different for you than being a member of a group?
SM: Well, being a solo artist you have to carry the whole show.
It s more focused on you. You re in the driver s seat. You re not the shotgun.
You re not the passenger. You re the driver, so you have to keep your eyes open and know where you re going.
SM: Yeah, there s a little more pressure, but to me, it s good pressure.
I like challenges.
SM: Being in the spotlight!
Pitchfork: Or being in jail?
You have those three songs on the album that are inspired by your experience of being put in a Tallahassee jail for marijuana possession. What was that like?
SM: Well, it was an experience still.
I mean, it wasn t a great bad experience. It was an inconvenience. It wasn t justified, where they put us for this plant that we had.
It wasn t justified, because I was behind bars with people that cut people s throats. And at the same time, I can go out to any bar on any given day and have as many shots of Jack Daniels and be as drunk as I want to be. So it didn t feel right, and it made me very curious as to why, really, do they fight this plant so much when it has so many different uses, you know?
Pitchfork: Have you found any answers to that question?
If all that E! Wild On I constantly find myself losing sleep over is any indication, they party awful hard-y in Spain, which explains how the 14th annual plans to cram over 50 acts into its three day span.
The multifaceted bill with a party spirit -- heavy on all things hip-hop, electronic, and experimental-- is coming to Barcelona June 14-16.
Towering over the lineup like an intergalactic robot over the streets of Tokyo are the indefatigable . Not only are they Friday night s headliners ( featuring all their classics ), but the Beasties will also perform instrumental, sans their usual adenoidal references to 70s sitcoms, at a gala event on Thursday night.
A black-tie shindig with the Beastie Boys? Don t they remember how that house looked at the end of the Fight for Your Right video?
A hefty lineup and further details are available on the Sonar website, but here are the highlights: Beastie Boys, Devo, Dizzee Rascal, KTL (aka Peter Pita Rehberg and Stephen O Malley of Sunn O)))), Clark, Justice, Mogwai, Junior Boys, Wolf Eyes, Simian Mobile Disco, Black Devil Disco Club, Cornelius, Various, New Young Pony Club, DJ Nu-Mark, Mira Calix, Rahzel DJ Js-One, DJ Mehdi, Uffie and Feadz, and FM3 Plays the Buddha Machine (that should be interesting!
). While Sigur R o s campaign for majesty and beauty with fairytale tongue in wide open spaces, fight the war against ugly musics from the homefront. Their precise, delicate compositions have a hearth-warmed, parlor-spun charm, and while they threatened to lull the inattentive into slumber at last Friday s show at the , folks with an ear for nuance and controlled grace likely found much to delight over.
While best known as Sigur R o s string quartet, the ladies only assumed quartet formation twice, maybe three times-- and once for an all-saw encore! More often they bounded restlessly from instrument to instrument, each leading the fragile charge for a song or so on everything from mandolin and Irish harp to keyboards, laptops, and even a makeshift armonica comprised of a row of crystal wine glasses.
As for opener -- can this guy really exist?
Awkward aw-shucks bumpkin Brosseau, far as I could tell, wasn t putting on an act. He really was slipping up because he had ants in his pants, as he put it. And he really did try to convince the governor of his home state, North Dakota, to write the liner notes for his album-- by impersonating Bob Hope s bit in Spies Like Us.
So Tom s between-song story went. In all, Brosseau s banter made a more favorable and lasting impression than his vaguely-quirky, blue-eyed folk tunes, but both suited the evening s no-frills fireside vibe.
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