CMJ » Willie Almack

OFF! – OFF!

Willie Almack — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:45:09 +0000

If you haven’t heard the hype or seen the hats, OFF! is the L.A. hardcore revivalist project headed by ex-Circle Jerks/Black Flag frontman Keith Morris, dreadlocked harbinger of teen rage. The power trio that Morris has assembled behind him consists of vetted rockers from Hot Snakes, Redd Kross and Burning Brides, which technically makes OFF! a “supergroup,” but there’s none of the bloat associated with such ensembles on the band’s first eponymous full-length. Every ounce of flab has been trimmed off, melted away, in favor of delivering the pithiest sonic “fuck you!” and/or “fuck yeah!” per song.

Although there’s none of the overproduction that might come along with the “supergroup” classification, that’s not to say there’s no self-indulgence. It’s not that the album suffers from any bizarre experiments, quite the opposite. It’s just that Morris is content to do more or less the same thing he’s already a proven master at. There’s no attempt by the band to delve into any style other than Hermosa Beach hardcore of the early ’80s. While this could go terribly wrong by less qualified practitioners, the members of OFF! have more chops than a Fairfax butcher. Punk is often associated with scrappy adolescents screaming over sloppy guitars, but the instrumentation here is as tight as a top-shelf jazz ensemble, without the studio slickness. The fact that Morris is pushing sixty is, well, kind of weird, but makes the group all the more impressive, as his denunciatory yelps drive the music along with the blistering rhythm section.

OFF! is not nostalgia music. There’s no wistful longing here. It doesn’t even feel like a “return” to the genre: it sounds like, as far as Morris is concerned, hardcore never died, and that OFF! is simply here to put out another excellent hardcore record. The authenticity goes all the way down to the album art, designed by Raymond Pettibon, whose stark cartooning has graced Black Flag, Minutemen and Sonic Youth covers. Anyone who heard the group’s previous release First Four EPs will find the self-titled LP a further distillation of what made OFF! so initially appealing. The production is thicker while still delivering a scruffy live feel, and the songs are even shorter. Not a second is wasted. OFF! is like a perfectly executed kickflip: over before you know it, but immensely satisfying.

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Liars’ North American And European Tour Dates

Willie Almack — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:26:15 +0000

The June 5 release of Liars’ sixth full-length WIXIW is fast approaching, and in anticipation, the band has announced tour dates across Europe and North America.

The first single off the album, “No. 1 Against The Rush,” comes out May 29 along with remixes from synthpop legend Vince Clarke.

06/02 – London, England – Field Day
06/07 – Paris, France – Nouveau Casino
06/08 – Utrecht, Holland – Tivoli De Helling
06/09 – Brussels, Belgium – AB Club
06/10 – Berlin, Germany – Roter Salon
06/12 – London, England – XOYO
06/15 – Manchester, England – Ruby Lounge
06/20 – New York, New York – Webster Hall
06/22 – Los Angeles, California – Music Box
07/05 – San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore
07/07 – Portland, OR – Doug Fir Lounge
07/08 – Seattle, WA – Neumos
07/09 – Vancouver, British Columbia – The Biltmore Cabaret
07/11 – Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge
07/13 – Denver, CO – The Bluebird Theater
07/14 — Lawrence, KS – The Granada
07/15 – Omaha, NE – The Waiting Room
07/17 – Minneapolis, MN – First Avenue
07/18 – Milwaukee, WI – Mad Planet
07/19 – Chicago, IL – Metro
07/20 – Detroit, MI – Magic Stick
07/21 – Toronto, Ontario – Lee’s Palace
07/23 – Montreal, Quebec – La Sala Rossa
07/24 – Boston, MA – Paradise
07/25 – Washington DC – U Street Music Hall
07/26 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
07/27 – Cleveland Heights, OH – Grog Shop
07/28 – Columbus, OH – A&R Music Bar

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Tom Gabel Of Against Me! Comes Out As Transgender

Willie Almack — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:51:22 +0000

Tom Gabel, singer for Against Me!, has come out to Rolling Stone as transgender. The singer reported undergoing years of stress due to gender dysphoria, and that she will be changing her name to Laura Jane Grace, along with taking hormones and undergoing electrolysis treatment. She will remain married to her wife Heather, who has been “super-amazing and understanding,” Gabel said. Gabel’s full interview will be published in the upcoming May 11 issue of Rolling Stone.

In the last few months, Gabel started performing an acoustic track live addressing her gender identity, entitled “Transgender Dysphoria Blues.” We applaud Gabel for her bravery, which will hopefully set a precedent for more openness toward the transgendered community in the future. Gabel, too, wishes that “people will understand, and hoping they’ll be fairly kind.”

Below, she performs “Transgender Dysphoria Blues.”

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New Tomas Barfod Track, “November Skies”

Willie Almack — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:45:09 +0000

Danish house producer Tomas Barfod released a new track featuring Swedish singer Nina Kinert, titled “November Skies.” The cut features rich and textured synths over a steady four-to-the-floor, with soaring vocals by Kinert.

Below you’ll also find last week’s video for “Broken Glass.” Both of these tracks are off of Barfod’s upcoming Salton Sea LP, out May 22 via Friends Of Friends.

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New Shows For The Sword

Willie Almack — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:07:33 +0000

Doom-metal powerhouse the Sword announced a set of June tour dates today leading up to its appearance at Metallica’s Orion Music And Arts Festival in Atlantic City, NJ.

The band signed a multi-album deal with Razor And Tie in March, and after the festival, the Sword will begin recording its first album of the deal, set for release this fall. Check out the tour dates below, as well as the band’s latest single, “Hammer Of Heaven.”

Tour Dates For The Sword:
06/17 – Houston, TX – Fitzgeralds
06/18 – New Orleans, LA – House Of Blues Parish
06/19 – Atlanta, GA – Masquerade
06/20 – Raleigh, NC – Kings Barcade
06/21 – Baltimore, MD – Sonar
06/22 – Westchester, PA – The Note
06/23 – Atlantic City, NJ – Orion Music And Arts Festival

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Track Premiere: American Gospel’s “I Know”

Willie Almack — Thu, 03 May 2012 17:36:05 +0000

American Gospel is the solo project of Gregg DellaRocca, singer and guitarist for the Republic Of Wolves. Today we’re premiering “I Know,” a track off of his upcoming May 15 release, Tall Tales Vol. 1.

DellaRocca’s voice is full of pretty yearning and pain, which contrasts nicely against the catchy horn line provided by members of ska band the Toasters’ brass section. We learned this fun fact from DellaRocca himself. Check out our other findings in our mini-interview, and listen to the track below.

What’s the story behind “I Know”?
A lot of the stranger, more abstract lyrics in this song actually refer to a story I’ve been developing for sometime now titled Daniel’s Favor. I plan on focusing on this story and its themes more directly in the future, but generally speaking “I Know” is about finding someone that you’ve lost. It’s also about that moment when you realize you don’t know anything and how understanding that moment can lead to knowing something quite profound.

What makes American Gospel different from the Republic Of Wolves?
I think there’s a lot that separates the two projects. The most obvious for me is the genre-hopping I do on this album, and that’s something I plan on continuing to do with American Gospel in the future. The Republic Of Wolves is primarily heavy and dark with the occasional soft spot, so all of TROW’s members have side projects that, like American Gospel, are doing something different. All of us just really like writing music, all types of music, so I guess TROW is just our outlet when we want to write alternative rock.

In “I Know” you sing the line, “A thousand years in the future/We’ll all live in the ocean.” If you were around in a thousand years, and we were in fact living in the ocean, would we be in boats? What’s your vision?
Well, for one I’d probably have a large sail boat and ask to be referred to as “The Mariner.” I think dirt would be the new currency, and we’d all have to watch out for “The Smokers” (They would ride jet skis). Some of us would evolve and have webbed feet and gills. We’d all be searching for dry land. Dennis Hopper would also be there.

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Title Track And Tour Dates From Mynabirds

Willie Almack — Wed, 02 May 2012 17:29:59 +0000

Indie folk-rockers the Mynabirds have just announced a June tour taking them throughout the Midwest, East Coast and Southern US. The band will also be making an additional stop near Portland, OR for the Pickathon Music Festival in August.

The tour will be in support of the upcoming June 5 release of GENERALS, the followup to 2010′s acclaimed What We Lose In The Fire, We Gain In The Flood. The title track off the new album mixes barroom-stomp with protest song. Check out the stream for that single, as well as the Mynabirds’ full touring schedule, below.

Tour Dates For The Mynabirds
06/08 — Omaha, NE – Slowdown
06/15 — Minneapolis, MN – 7th Street Entry
06/16 — Des Moines, IA – Vaudeville Mews
06/17 — Chicago, IL – Schuba’s
06/19 — Detroit, MI – Magic Stick
06/20 — Cleveland, OH – Beachland Tavern
06/21 — Harrisburg, PA – The Abbey Bar
06/22 — New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
06/23 — Washington, DC – Black Cat
06/24 — Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s
06/25 — Chapel Hill, NC – Local 506
06/27 — Birmingham, AL – The Bottletree
06/28 — Atlanta, GA – The Earl
06/29 — Nashville, TN — The High Watt
08/04-05 — Happy Valley, OR – Pickathon

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mOck (Berlin, Germany)

Willie Almack — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:34:49 +0000

mOck is a trio from Berlin that plays the kind of highly technical yet emotional post-ish-rock pioneered by Chicago musicians Tim Kinsella and Victor Villarreal through bands like Cap’n Jazz, Joan Of Arc and Owls. While the noodling guitars and lopsided time signatures will sound familiar to any fans of this sound, mOck has developed something unique with this template, a distinctly European take on the genre that is clean and sophisticated, while still rough around the edges.

CMJ got a chance last week to talk with Conrad Rodenberg, the band’s drummer, who shared with us the nuts and bolts behind the group and its eponymous debut full-length, streaming below.

mOck by mOck

How long have you guys been playing together?
The mark that I always have in mind is early March 2009, but that’s just because we had our first show then. Before that, it’s kind of hard to say. We spent one and a half or maybe even two years just in our rehearsal space, which is mainly because this was the first time I had played drums in a band.

What did you play before?
Oh this and that. I’m in this other band Ampl:tude where we all play synths and keyboards, and I also have a solo project where I sing and play guitar. Felix [Zimmermann], our frontman, always had guitar as his main instrument. He and Freddie [Knop], the bassist, used to be in this other band called lin., which had been broken up for a while before the formation of mOck. Freddie had just finished his studies in musicology but hadn’t been very active in making music himself after lin. disbanded, so for all those reasons it kind of took us a while to figure out just what we wanted to do.

What’s your background in Berlin’s hardcore scene?

Well, Freddie and Felix’s old band were definitely playing shows with a lot of local hardcore bands here. It’s funny talking about them for me because I, well, always really, really liked their music. But they were, at that point, already playing some form of, let’s say, alternative hardcore, something different from the rest of the scene. But lin. was definitely louder, rougher and screamier than mOck is.

So once you solidified your sound, what was the writing process like?
We wrote most of the songs in our rehearsal space in Berlin and recorded them in Hamburg. It didn’t really work with anyone bringing in material that we would then build upon. It would always just come at rehearsal.

Like you’d jam and see what happened?
Well, I didn’t really experience it as “jamming” in the sense that we would play forever and then say afterwards, “oh let’s keep this or that.” We usually would just start playing something and then immediately try to stick a part, and then give it some shape.

The music’s pretty rhythmically complex. Did you record the instruments live or separately?
We recorded live. On the very first day we tried playing to a click, but it didn’t work out at all [laughs]. So, because of that we didn’t really hold onto the idea of recording the different tracks separately. But that’s the same way we did it on our demo and our split 7″. It’s our flow.

John McEntire of Tortoise mixed the album. Did you get to work with him directly on it?
Well, not really. The whole thing came about when we were touring with Joan Of Arc in 2010. We asked Tim [Kinsella] if he had any recommendations for a producer, and he said that McEntire had done good work on their stuff. And that sounded great to us because we had been following Tortoise since the ’90s, and we had always been a fan of his mixing. So we sent him some demos, and he was into it. But we never really met him during the process. It was nice to get a personal touch from him though. There are these snippet pieces in brackets that sound quite different from the other songs on the record. Most of these were spontaneous takes in the studio in Hamburg, and we told him to just do whatever he wanted on those to make them sound distinct from the other tracks. We’re pretty happy with the results.

You guys definitely sound like a lot of Chicago bands, but has the scene in Berlin influenced your sound directly?
It differently has. At the moment, most of the bands that we’re friends with and we play with have a distinct hardcore sound, but it’s pretty different from what we do. Our sounds fit together well, but I don’t know many other bands that have this post-rockish thing going on. My other band makes music that sounds like it’s off a videogame soundtrack, so that’s totally different, but we were signed to a Berlin-based label called Sinnbus that started releasing records that were in a more technical rock direction, so that was a big influence. There’s another band we’ve played with that’s partially from Berlin called Pete The Pirate Squid that definitely has the mathy, stop-and-go thing going on.

Was jazz an influence for the technicality?
Honestly, none of us really come from a jazz background. Still, as the process has been going on, our songs have been getting a lot more, let’s say, “smoother,” starting quietly, more fragile. I’m looking at my record player now, actually, and The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest is on there. There’s that song “Jazz (We’ve Got).” So I guess if our jazz influence comes from anywhere, then, it’s hip-hop. Anyway, one of the first songs we wrote for the album is “57,” and that has this sort of mosh pit part, which stands out from the rest of the LP. It’s interesting to see that we started out with more hardcore roots you can hear, but now there’s this twist!

I Love To Hate will be hosting a release party for mOck’s LP Thursday, May 17, at the Lamp Post in Jersey City, NJ. DJs will be mixing mOck tracks into their sets, and the vinyl will be available for sale as well. The event starts at 10 p.m.

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Tennis Get Creepy In “My Better Self” Video

Willie Almack — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:07:18 +0000

Tennis has just released a new video for “My Better Self,” a track off its latest album, Young and Old. The subtly haunting video has the band playing in a strange and semi-deserted theater with “characteristically verbose” singer Alaina Moore wildly strutting her stuff in spite of the nearly comatose audience. The whole thing has a Lynchian vibe, that is to say, a creepy one, but it’s transfixing.

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Video Premiere: Letterist’s “100MPH”

Willie Almack — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:06:19 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDWLVHfXBOgBrooklyn’s Letterist looks like a rock band but plays the kind of anthemic synth-pop you’d expect to hear over the credits of an ’80s teen dramedy. The Terence Krey-directed video for the group’s latest single, “100MPH,” off the upcoming Solace And Gold, runs with the ’80s vibe via a good old-fashioned chase sequence. Luckily singer Pamela Bell manages to elude her pursuers for enough time to share a verse or two with us.

As for the mysterious bunny-man who appears in the video, the band had a quick explanation. “He is the infamous Broad Street Bunny from Philadelphia. He was arrested during the 2008 World Series parade (we have photos), and he is a big fan of us. Who knew furries liked electro-pop?”

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Top 5 Tongue Twisters On Kool A.D.’s ’51′ Mixtape

Willie Almack — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:05:37 +0000

Yesterday, Kool A.D. of Das Racist fame released a free mixtape titled 51. It’s a sprawling tape, championing backpack-style loop-digging as well as the grimier sides of club hip-hop, all in homage to Kool’s Bay Area roots. You can stream or download the tape over at Mishka’s Bandcamp page.

As per usual, Kool’s thoughtful verses are packed with bits of hilarious wordplay and joyful Dada nonsense. Or, to put it in a more tongue-twisty manner: The lines are littered with languidly literary language that I’d like to make more lucid. The tongue-twisters that appear on almost every track are treasure troves of references. Here’s a parcel (five, to be precise) of them, parsed out for your pleasure.

01. “See how the medium mediate the me’s that you see me by/The TV eye”

Looks like Kool A.D. is mentioning Marshal McLuhan, who said, “the medium is the message.” The T.V. Eye is a reference to a Stooges song, a track less concerned with media studies: The band’s song refers to “Twat Vibe Eye,” as in an ogler’s peeper. Considering Kool’s preoccupation with female genitalia, I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew the meaning of that Stooges track as well.

02. “Text messages, sex, breasteses/Mexicans, Africans, Americans/African-Americans/Born Jamericans/Very, very high/Theramin, seraphim, terrapin slow/Where the pin go?”

The first half here is pretty typical Das Racist material, using a nonsensical list of race names to point out the silliness and irrelevance of those titles. Kool then breaks into a surprisingly evocative ode to weed (most of the time he’s content with just mentioning that he smokes it every day). Theramin because they make spooky space noises, seraphim because they’re angels high in the sky and a terrapin because that’s a sluggish turtle. And the pin thing–well, of course, if you get really faded, you’re bound to misplace a thing or two.

03. “Life is but a Creamsicle/A clean nickel will get you a mean tickle/The dream is to ream lickle teen chickles/And get the green no pickle fo Schickel/stack pancakes/Mike Bickle“

If life’s a Creamsicle, I’m not sure which part is the zesty orange coating and which part is the creamy vanilla interior, but OK, A.D. I originally thought “fo schickles” was just playing along with the same license that has allowed Kool to rap “lickle” and “chickle,” but apparently there was a character on the Showtime drama Queer As Folk named George Schickel who sold pickles. Go figure. Next, Mike Bickle is an American minister who founded an evangelical mission organization called the International House Of Prayer. I think you can figure out the rest. Interestingly, they apparently focus on fasting as a route to God, meaning they probably don’t get to enjoy pancakes that often.

04. “Fuck with Short Cuts like I’m Robert Altman/Fuck with long shots like I’m Robert Altman/Fuck with actresses like I’m Robert Altman/Recycled like half a verse, but that’s art man”

Not exactly a tongue twister, but try saying Robert Altman ten times fast. Short Cuts is an Altman film and long shots are an Altman aesthetic staple. Only one of his spouses was an actress, and not a particularly famous one at that, but I suppose “fuck with” can be interpreted loosely.

05. “I hold money/Herb, cookies and apple juice/Coochies and acid too/Titties and kitties/Cities and nations”

Makes sense that he would mention money first, as that resource can procure most of what follows, like cookies and apple juice. Forget rock ’n’ roll: Kool’s into sex, drugs and wholesome childhood delights.

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Death Grips – The Money Store

Willie Almack — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:26:16 +0000

Hardcore hip-hop used to be kind of scary, but now the “toughest” guys of the lot just seem like bloated parade-float parodies. Death Grips is actually scary, in the right kind of way, the way that releases floodgates of adrenaline. The group makes its major-label debut with The Money Store, an album that is frightening not so much in a “9mm shooting parallel to the asphalt” sort of way but rather in a “serpent with a ruby for an eye that turns you into stone” sort of way. It’s horror-movie sinister but delivered with enough force and talent as to make you forget it’s “just a movie.”

Last year on the lauded mixtape Exmilitary, the Sacramentan trio developed a blog-friendly formula that combined novelty with quality. Stefan Burnett raps, or howls, grunts and spits, like a cracked-out imp dislodged from his own circle of hell. His demonic lyrical onslaught does not always take the forefront on The Money Store, but his evocations of impaled heads, curb stomping, werewolves and Leatherface keep him from slipping quietly into the background. When Burnett casually mentions Linens N Things, it’s funny but simultaneously terrifying: This crazy fool has penetrated the suburban sanctum.

Burnett alone does not possess enough of the traditional skills of a rhyme-smith to carry the group, which is where the production by prolific math-rock drummer Zach Hill and keyboardist Andy Morin comes into play. It’s lo-fi with a purpose and focus, with every shard of noise and fuzz carefully placed to make the beat a chaotic yet intelligible assault. Sample-based hooks are few and far between; instead it’s the intricate, lopsided percussion that takes the spotlight. The pair makes every song sound undeniably Death Grips without seeming like a rehashing of the mixtape. A couple of songs from Exmilitary used diverse sample material from sources like Link Wray and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, but these tracks, while tuneful, seemed more like stoner experiments than full-fledged compositions, like the songs on The Money Store do.

The “big story” here of course, is that something this absurd, abrasive and antagonistic could find a release on a major label like Epic. Clearly Death Grips has not “sold out,” at least if that phrase means sacrificing an amount of creative license. It doesn’t appear that Epic asked the group to sanitize itself; just check out the album art. Likewise, the entire album is available for streaming on Soundcloud, which means the group’s original method of distribution will probably still reign supreme. What it does mean is that in 2012, an album that’s incredibly incendiary and challenging (while still entertaining) can gain recognition from the powers-that-be. Whether you want to whine or get excited about that is up to you. Listening to the record on the other hand, is not. Do it, or Stefan Burnett will find you.

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Q&A: Cadence Weapon

Willie Almack — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:38:22 +0000

Cadence Weapon, aka Rollie Pemberton, is an MC and former poet laureate from Edmonton, Canada, who has made a name for himself via his creative flow and multi-genre approach to production choices. His third full-length album, Hope In Dirt City, will be out May 29 on Upper Class. Recently, CMJ got a chance to talk with Pemberton on the phone about the Great White North, machetes and post-punk, among other things.

So, Edmonton. Is that the “Dirt City” you’re referring to in Hope In Dirt City?
Yeah, that is Dirt City. I mean that literally, but I also feel like the feeling of Dirt City can be transferred to anywhere. That’s the thing: It’s kind of an open-ended concept, but it’s specifically about Edmonton.

Your song “Oliver Square” makes it sound pretty rough.
Well, a lot of people thought that song was like a joke or something when I put it out. But I’ve always stuck to the fact that what I’m talking about, it’s real, all real things that happened to me. I did have house parties where people broke the windows and tried to kill people with a machete. But uh—

Hold up. A machete?
Yeah, there were some street kid gangs having a machete fight in the front yard of this house party. That was like normal. [laughs] Or we’d be driving somewhere and people would just run up to you and try to open the car and break in. It may seem like Edmonton is an unassuming place, but it does have this weird underbelly.

Was that your inspiration to start writing poetry and rapping, or did it come from the music you were listening to?
It’s a combination of both. Because coming from a background of listening to rap my whole life, I would always listen to Nas and Jay-Z and hear them being highly referential about where they’re from, and I realized that there was no such thing for somebody from Edmonton or even somebody from Canada. There’s not an equivalent. So once I started getting into writing more in junior high and realized that I could fill that void, I started doing it.

I like your fellow countryman Shad a lot, but I’ve noticed he doesn’t seem to rap about Canada all that much.
I like to be very specific but in a way that appeals to a lot of people. I always take the Streets‘ Original Pirate Material or the first Dizzee Rascal album as great examples of this: They’re talking in very specific regional slang about very specific things to them, but they’re relatable even if you don’t totally understand the nomenclature.

Your production tends to be all over the place in terms of genre, but the press release for Hope In Dirt City says you’re looking to “return rap music to its essence.” What do you mean by that?
Well, I don’t know if you heard the new song “88” I put out where Grimes does the beat, but it’s this idea of old-school sensibilities with new-school music. The new album has the energy and feel of old-school rap, the kind of danger and excitement I get when I listen to rap from the early ’80s when it still wasn’t concrete what the genre was yet. Some songs had live instruments, others had interpolations of other songs, others were just a patchwork of all these ideas. It’s like post-punk; it used to be a bunch of different types of music that are put into different categories like New Wave or No Wave, but it existed before the distinctions. That’s the way I see my rap.

Cadence Weapon – 88 (Prod. Grimes) by Cadence Weapon

How was working with Grimes?
Well, we’re part of the same crew, the Arbutus Records sort-of periphery. But for “88,” I literally just got the instrumental for “Eight” off of Visions and rapped over it. However, that’s not envisioning that Claire and I aren’t gonna do a proper collaboration at some point. It’s definitely going to happen.

You were poet laureate of Edmonton from 2009 to 2011. How did that happen?
Being poet laureate was really a way for me to sharpen my writing because having your writing put out there totally bare when you’re used to rapping over musical accompaniment was a very different experience for me. It took me to all these different places I never thought my writing would go. I ended up doing a poem for the Olympics in Vancouver where I just read a poem about Alberta in front of thousands of people. It was basically a way for me to take writing more seriously because up to that point, like on my last album, Afterparty Babies, a lot of it was very insider-y, very Edmonton-centric. So I thought maybe it was worth it to expand my writing to something of more permanence.

Cadence Weapon – Crew Up by Cadence Weapon

So you think it has informed your music?
Definitely. Some of the songs on the new album are specifically inspired by my poems. Like the title track comes from a poem I wrote called “Dirt City,” which is basically a rallying cry for young Canadians. Canada has a lot of small towns, and there are a lot of places where people feel like having a creative pursuit as your job isn’t a really realistic thing to do. It can be very hard to succeed that way. But I’m trying to be the voice that says, it’s reality, you can actually do it if you work at it, and despite how dark things may seem sometimes, creativity is very important.

Like Celine Dion.
[laughs] Yeah, right. If you work hard enough, one day you can own Schwartz’s.

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Traversing Animal Collective’s ‘Temporal Gyrus’ Site

Willie Almack — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:28:04 +0000

Two years ago, Animal Collective and longtime visual collaborator Danny Perez took over the Guggenheim Museum in New York City for a psychedelic multimedia happening called “Transverse Temporal Gyrus.” If you missed out on that event (it sold out within a couple hours), you can now experience it at home via your computer! Kind of.

The original project took songs and sounds made by Animal Collective and ran them through a computer program that, based on complex rules, randomized and recombined the sounds, sending them through a 36-channel surround sound system in the museum. Yesterday, Animal Collective launched a website version of the exhibition. Once you torrent a rather hefty (224 MB for Mac, 900 MB for Windows) zip file, you will be able to generate your own unique version of the soundscape, all with the press of a button. The generated audio runs for about three hours and is a bizarre collage of spaced-out textures with the occasional appearance of something resembling an Animal Collective song interspersed here and there. A good deal of it is sort of boring, but the way it’s randomized across the stereo channel makes listening to it on headphones strange and immersive. It’s a spatial experience as much as it is a sonic one.

While listening to the audio, you’re supposed to travel around the Danny Perez-curated website, which is basically a bunch of glitched-out images you can “fly through” via scrolling. Occasionally there will be a pulsing blue orb you can click, which just launches a Vimeo video: not all that transportive. There’s also definitely not enough content on there to last the three-hour duration. Still, the audio is pretty neat, especially in the way it seamlessly morphs into a new version if you choose to restart the generation at any point during its runtime. When all’s said and done, it’s probably trippier than the classic Dark Side Of The Moon/Wizard Of Oz mashup, which is saying something. Check it out here.

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Liars Releases New Video For “No.1 Against The Rush”

Willie Almack — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:21:35 +0000

Liars just released a video for the first single off of the band’s upcoming June 5 release, WIXIW (pronounced “wish you”). The single, titled “No. 1 Against The Rush,” places a complex pattern of guitar harmonics over a steady motorik beat, along with equally melancholy vocals and synth leads.

The Todd Cole-directed video is a harrowing, nonchalant depiction of a serial killer out to abduct each member of Liars in downtown Los Angeles. Check out the insanity above and the tracklist for WIXIW below.

Tracklist For WIXIW:
01. The Exact Colour Of Doubt
02. Octagon
03. No.1 Against The Rush
04. A Ring On Every Finger
05. Ill Valley Prodigies
06. WIXIW
07. His And Mine Sensations
08. Flood To Flood
09. Who Is The Hunter
10. Brats
11. Annual Moon Words

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