chilly, but fear not-- have it covered. On October 24, the Australian-turned-German trio will burn some Coal in the U.S.
, courtesy of . Having a working website though..
.well that s another So who are these Devastations and why should you care? Well, they ve worked with Liars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs Karen O on her shelved solo album.
(Yes, Karen O was working on a solo album at some point. No, we don t know what happened to it.) And they sound a lot like Nick Cave.
In support of the album, Squeezed on both sides of jaunt are a handful of European shows.
The fourth annual takes place this weekend, and artists ranging from Franz Nicolay of the Hold Steady (playing with ) to (hopefully) will play at the festival, which is comprised of 200 local organizations participating in a day of workshops, panel discussions, keynote speeches, music, and art, according to a press release.
Before the event itself takes place this Sunday, October 22, there is a benefit concert scheduled for tomorrow at Supreme Trading, the proceeds from which will benefit Brooklyn Parents for Peace, the non-profit organization behind the Peace Fair.
Artists playing the concert include , Dabrye remixer (who also has a DJ set toward the end of night), and Matthew Perpetua of the wonderful (thanks for new the Long Blondes track and for turning us on to Shrag, man!), whose DJ set will close out the night.
The artists performing at the actual fair on Sunday include Anti-Social Music (a group that includes the Hold Steady s Franz Nicolay, Songs: Ohia contributor Peter Hess, and Ida/Beauty Pill member Jean Cook), , , Jason Trachtenburg of the , duo Magnolia, and, tentatively, Talib Kweli.
The true draws of the fair, however, are sure to be the peace dance and the youth peace contest, moderated by M-1 of , which is like some sort of peace snake eating its own tail, i.e. exactly 17 overlapping kinds of awesome.
Get ready, fans of ! America once again on a fall tour. This time around, give a hearty welcome to Jens Andersson, now officially the sixth member to board the Ark.
Sunday with a special engagement at Washington, DC s . This queen of Sweden will be there, so you really have no excuse to bail out on this In other news, the Ark s weekend. Finally, the band have vehemently denied allegations that they will enter next year s , stating plainly on their website: The Ark will never be part of the Eurovision song contest, EVER.
End of story. Take that, !
They say the rap game is like the crack game.
...
i think we gonna sell weed...
do some hip hop, MC Andre Dres Titus wrote on the group s last December. Almost a year later, the duo of Dres and DJ William Mister Lawnge McLean returns in earnest with a new single and a new album, both digital-only releases.
The single-- Whodat?
-- saw release in late September to online stores via Black Sheep s own BumRush Records and digital distributor . It features four tracks, including clean and instrumental versions of Whodat? and B-side Be Careful .
The album bears the title 8WM/Novakane (8WM stands for Women With Women With Weed With Wine With Me !) and, like the single, it s an online-only release via Bumrush and the Orchard. 8WM/Novakane s arrives October 24, making it Black Sheep s first album in 12 years, and follows Non-Fiction and landmark debut A Wolf in Sheep s Clothing as the duo s third LP overall.
Peter Bjorn and John Release New Single, Tour , recent inductees, are putting out a new single on October 25 on V2 Sweden. Let s Call It Off (a special version with steel drums!) will be released on seven inch and CD formats, and will be backed by (I Just Wanna) European performances lined up in the near future.
Alas, none in the USA. :(
MP3: M. Ward on AOL's Interface Those dudes and dudettes at AOL s must, like, know somebody, because they keep getting top crop to drop by their studio and record exclusive sessions.
Spoon s , once-elusive , and now, gravel-voiced have all taken the Interface plunge.
Perhaps there s just a certain charm in sincerely fielding some hopelessly bland interview questions-- like those Britt and Chan put up with in recent sessions-- from a nervous-sounding gentleman. Poor Ward gets probed on influences, song-writing process, and recent favorites, and you can pretty much see his eyes rolling as he talks up .
Seriously.
Graciously, he shares a few tunes too, including Chinese Translation and To Be Home from this year s Pitchfork , and Paul s Song from 2005 s . Both discs are available now from .
Ward also kindly shares at least one looooooow sigh into the mic, which some folks out there might find sexy.
Ward s presently flexing his finger-picking muscles in Europe, and closes out the year with a couple festival dates in Australia. So two avant-noisemakers get pissed after watching the 2004 presidential election and decide that the next day will be the day they record their long-planned improvised collaboration together.
No big deal. These types turn their axes to grind into axe-grinding all the time, right? Well, yes, but this session is special because it s between s and s Zach Hill, with help from Matt Zivich (Wilco s live sound engineer) and Jonathan Hischke (Hella s touring bassist).
Going by the name Damsel, Cline and Hill have called their first jam session (rimshot!). Aside from the post-production editing of Cline s and bandmate , Distressed s four long tracks were entirely improvised and mixed in a single day at Chicago s Semaphore Studios, and a press release describes the music as somewhere between the most abstract freak-outs of Wilco s more recent material and the looser, more minimalist moments of Hella.
.. running the gamut from serene electro-acoustic ambience to unhinged, cathartic squall.
All the damsels and dudes can get Distressed on October 24, when the record comes out on .
because this news is seriously breaking. 3.
..2.
..1.
..0mg, s Greg Saunier has a , and according to a press release, it is where he expresses his musical soul.
We thought that sort of thing was reserved for records, but whatever. In addition to info regarding Saunier s daily musical doings, the MOG includes lists of songs Deerhoof spun while making The Runners Four (Bowie, Metallica, Miles Davis) and their upcoming album, Friend Opportunity (Amerie, Billy Squier, Flaming Lips), as well as his favorite albums, favorite songs, and more. on Saunier s listening habits, you dorks.
Opportunity will be released on January 23, 2007 courtesy of . In addition, the band is working with composer Ed Shearmur on the soundtrack to the Justin Theroux-directed film, Dedication. And Saunier mixed new LP, The Days and Nights of Everything Anywhere, which Best of all, Monday and performing a Milk Man ballet, based on Deerhoof s 2004 album of the same Finally, we d like to you that Deerhoof are currently on the road with the , , and more.
And they ve added a few gigs since last time!
While she s no Freak Nasty, Austin-based folk-rocker (given name: Sara Beck) might get a few hips dippin with her second record, the self-released Mold the Gold. The 13-track set follows up Mule School and features production by Steve Squire and Paul Oldham, brother to a certain .
Those family ties paid off, as Bonnie Will Oldham himself guests on the new album, playing some guitar, lending some vocals here and there, and joining Pink on the final track for what a press release describes as a power duet.
Click the link below to download Don t Ever Change , which sees Pink and Will cooing sweet nothings at each other, such as Please baby, won t you shut the fuck up? Ah love, ain t it grand?
Hardly strangers, Pink has, in fact, toured with Bonnie Prince Billy in the past.
While you re at it, also scope P-Nasty s wacky video for Mold s Away Message , and catch her live as she rocks Austin s Emo s tonight. Exclusive: Sebadoh, Ted Leo to Play Noise Pop 1993, San Francisco s festival has grown into one of the most respected indie rock extravaganzas in the country.
In 2007, the festival will celebrate its 15th anniversary from February 27-March 4, and it has invited some stellar guests to the party. So far, Leo/Pharmacists, John Vanderslice, and Jolie Holland have all RSVPed to the event, and many others are on the way. In addition to the tunes, Noise Pop will put on its first-ever Noise Pop Expo, a two-day event (March 3-4) featuring panels, a designer fair, art installations, a poster show, and more.
It will also hold its annual film festival. Portland, Oregon folksters are gearing up to sing The Unsung Colony. The band recorded its latest project, a 12-track affair, in ringleader Adam Selzer s studio-- and, quoth a press release, at a small town high school for symphonic band?
We can t be sure, but we ll find out on October 24 when Colony hits stores courtesy of PDX s fine . Come November, fellow P-town imprint will unveil Colony in lush vinyl format, with a CD of bonus material. In support of the disc, Norfolk Western-- not unlike the rail line from which they derived their name-- will spend the closing months of 2006 crisscrossing the country.
Ladytron, Ladyfuzz, Ladyfinger, the Ladies hold conference in the ladies room are getting ready to piss off and seduce a whole continent, as they kick off a North American tour tomorrow night in their hometown. The month-long stint will see the quartet playing alongside Magnolia Electric Co., Bound Stems, Catfish Haven, and more.
Sometime next year, plans to put out a mysterious Ladyhawk release tentatively titled . A track from that release, , is available from the label s website. be featured on a limited edition split seven inch with that will be given away by the Fader magazine.
It includes the previously unreleased track Soap and is due in mid-November.
Photos by , unless otherwise indiciated. Scope part one .
Night two of 2006 began at the , a beautiful modern space that has been temporarily transformed into a concert venue for the duration of the festival. The sound was immaculate and the set times tight, as has been the case for much of the festival thus far.
First up, the always dependable and eternally cutesy .
Was that another cover of Gnarls Barkley summerjam Crazy , heavy on the melodrama, thrown into the end of the set? Indeed, and the attendees ate it up. Up next was .
This Liverpool trio-- and recent signing-- rocks the a cappella and tight, jerky post-punk in a fashion very similar to the Futureheads. And they had the appropriate jokes, noting that there s a chain of grocery stores in the UK called . Again, the crowd loved it.
And why not? We needed to get primed for the amazing tap-dancing circus that is , whose whirling dervish performance was a true celebration on stage and plastered dreamy smiles upon every face.
Elsewhere, , an American Julliard graduate, performed his neo-classical experiments with Icelandic super-producer Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bj o rk, Bonnie Prince Billy s The Letting Go).
But this festival is all about kinetic energy, so a trip over to to see hardcore kingpins and hometown heroes next didn t feel out of place at all. The screechy Blood Brothers/At the Drive-In-style rawk got a bit tiresome, but -fronted were there to pick up the slack with their dreamy and occasionally aggressive Canuck pop. Unabashedly soaking up the adoring crowd s sweat and cheers, the band didn t skimp on the prolonged jams.
Finally, rounding out the night was Sweden s amazing (pictured above), who skronked out their no-wave roots with incredible tightness, muted scratch guitar, and dying-goose saxophone ablaze. Rumor has it that the weekends in Reykjavik find the kids smashing their beer glasses in the streets, so tonight I ll be wearing my galoshes.
Stay tuned for installments from Iceland Airwaves through the weekend.
More photos ahead. Nick Cave, Low, Magnolia Electric Co. to Play ATP The lineup for the -curated festival is shaping up to be typically high-quality for ATP, with (playing solo), , , (aka Tortoise bassist Douglas McCombs), , , , Grinderman, and Papa M (aka Slint/Will Oldham/Stereolab/Tortoise/Zwan member/collaborator ), in addition to Dirty Three themselves.
, Dirty Three s ATP will occur April 27-29, 2007 at Butlins Minehead in Somerset, England.
For most intents and most purposes, sometime Zero 7 vocalist and solo artist (surname: Furler) is an adult contemporary musician. Her latest longplayer, Colour the Small One, finally hit the States in January this year via (having seen release in the UK in early 2004), and brims with elegant, innocuous balladry-- the sort that gives television drama music supervisors wet dreams.
So the casual fan might be a tad surprised to casually click on over to this week and find Sia s official website has apparently been hacked by a toddler. Or that s the gimmick, anyhow: Kooky kids scribblings, a giddy Sia smiling all over the place and dancing in a variety of costumes (Elvis, pirate, ladybug, Darth Vader, banana), and a message from the artist that begins, hello and welcome to my completely retarded website. ahoy there!
say YES YES YES to some infantile regression...
Sia goes on to describe the new website as like an electronic luau...
a total hawaiian happening! Riiiight.
Truth told, the various dance numbers are worth a gander, and Sia certainly gives a run for her money.
You ll also hear a bunch of new tunes and some Sia classics and remixes while watching her bust a move in a banana costume. Not a bad deal.
According to Sia, the drawings come courtesy of coriole kindy , a name that fetches precisely zero Google matches.
To anyone who s witnessed Sia live, however, this playful new look shouldn t be terribly surprising, as she s pretty much a total nut. Catch her as she solo tours the States this November, or at a number of UK Zero 7 gigs. As forge ahead with what has certainly been one of the indie tours in recent memory (remaining dates below), road manager has happily offered Pitchfork a batch of scandalous Xiu tour Polaroids, hell bent on corrupting the minds of our readership.
Well, okay-- one semi-scandalous pic (the line about rocking out with one s cock out comes to mind), a little knife play, a little blood, and a bunch of family-friendly vacation shots. , Horvitz to drop off film at their local Xiu gig, promising to mail participants unique photos of Xiu gang hilarity on the road.
Best of all, it s not too late to get your own prized piece of original photographic Xiu tour memorabilia-- if you re lucky, it just might be NSFW.
Buy ye some film (Polaroid 600, plz) and get ye to a Xiu show now.
Sonic Youth, Beefheart, Devendra Exhibit at NYC's P.S.
1
So do Black Dice, Eye of the Boredoms, Alan Vega of Suicide We all know that people like and Don Van Vliet (aka ) are killer musicians, but they also like to express their creativity through things you can see with your eyes. For proof, see New York City s s Music Is a Better Noise , an exhibit opening on October 29 and running through January 8.
Taking as its mission the bringing together [of] musicians who make art and artists who make music, or for whom music is an integral part of their creative process, according to a press release, Music Is a Better Noise will occupy both the Drawing and Painting Galleries of the New York museum and will also include a video portion in the Vault.
Contributors to the exhibit include the aforementioned Moore, Gordon and Van Vliet, , Eye from , Barbara Ess from Y Pants/the Static, Christian Marclay, , Bjorn Copeland from , , , and Suicide s Alan Vega, who will unveil a suite of new sculptures from New York City s detritus and discarded junk. There is also a video by Ara Peterson that features a score from (aka Peter Kember of ).
The opening day of the exhibit, October 29, will also include two live performances, one from Vega, who will perform during the day, and another from s , who will provide musical accompaniment to a screening of Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (yes, the infamous incident) as part of a different exhibit, Defamation of Character .
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Is one of your favorite artists (that's not somebody you know personally) releasing a new record you'd like to see covered? You will remain completely anonymous, unless we are given your express permission to reveal your identity. (Please note that publicists, managers, booking agents, and other artist representatives are generally exempt from this rule, but will also be granted anonymity if requested.
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