May 16, 2012, will mark the first High School Radio Day, a day where high school radio stations across the country will unite to raise awareness of their existence. Founded by Pete Bowers, faculty adviser to Andover High School’s WBFH in Bloomfield Hills, MI, after getting involved with last year’s College Radio Day, the day is set to include publicity pushes, interviews and a nationwide Web chat with participating stations. Of the 200 active high school radio stations, as estimated by Bowers, nearly 30 have already signed on in support. With more than a dozen states being represented and support coming from College Radio Day and broadcasting organizations like Michigan Association Of Broadcasters, Bowers hopes that High School Radio Day can become an annual event. Stations interested in participating can do so through High School Radio Day’s website.
 
Why did you pick May for High School Radio Day?
I suggested that High School Radio Day be held in May, which is the month the first high school radio station signed on the air in 1949 (WNAS, New Albany, IN). Also, I wanted to have it before our schools got off for the summer and a good five months’ separation between HSRD and [College Radio Day].
 
Were you involved with College Radio Day last year?
I did register our station even though we were a high school station because I wanted to support their efforts to bring attention to college radio.
 
What is College Radio Day doing to help support High School Radio Day?
I have talked with the founder and president of CRD, Rob Quicke, who has given me some good advice for putting on our “Day” since they already did their “Day” last October. He has contacted other high school stations who registered for CRD to register for HSRD. We also have been endorsed by CBI, IBS and Michigan Association Of Broadcasters Foundation.
 
Why do you think there are so few high school radio stations?
It’s not easy getting one. It takes a lot of effort by someone at a school district to submit the proper paperwork to the FCC to get a license. Then you need the facilities and equipment, which can be expensive. Then they need to hire someone competent to manage the station. Then there are the costs of operating the station. That’s probably why a lot of high schools have had the plug pulled on them and went dark.
 
Why are high school stations so important?
It’s a two-sided coin. We educate high school students to be proficient as broadcasters over the public airwaves, job one. Second, our stations serve our communities well and make for great public relations vehicles for our school districts.
 
How are you spreading the word about HSRD?
We have given participating stations press release templates that they can use to send to local media. We’ve sent that press release to national media. We have links to our website on the CRD website, CBI website and IBS website. I’ve set up Facebook and Twitter accounts.
 
Do students receive class credit, or is it an extracurricular activity?
Class credit. I teach an intro class titled Exploring Electronic Media and an advanced class titled WBFH Staff.
 
Do you go off air during the summer or invite the community to get involved?
Our school district doesn’t budget for managers to work in the summer, so we have no live programs, but we are automated 24/7/365.
 
What sort of community/school involvement do you have?
We love to do remotes in our community, which is in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. Our favorite remote is at the Woodward Dream Cruise where a million people come out to watch 30,000 cars drive up and down Woodward Avenue.

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars has just released its third album, Radio Salone. Since forming in 2002, the band has toured the world, has fled from Freetown to live in West African refugee camps in Conakry and, now, have been the subject of an award winning documentary. Film-makers Zach Niles and Baker White followed the Refugee Allstars for three years as band members Reuben M. Koroma, Black Nature, Mohammed Bangura, Francis John Langba, Ashade Pearce, Jah Son Bull and Makengo Kamara moved form camp to camp, shunted by the violence and unrest that has plagued the region. Through all of this change, their goals remain the same: educate and enlighten through the unified power of music. We recently had the opportunity to chat with Black Nature about the new album, the presence of radio in Africa and the tneth anniversary of the end of the brutal 11-year Sierra Leone Civil War.
 
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars – Mother In Law by Cumbancha
 
“Salone” translates to “Sierra Leone” in Krio, translating the album title literally to “Sierra Leone Radio.” As Krio is spoken by the vast majority of Sierra Leone, what is the immediate message that the album carries?
A message of hope, peace, inspiration. We called it Radio Salone because Sierra Leone is a country that has been through a civil war and the only way people were hearing about it was through radio. At that time, communication was cut off, so radio was the only means of communication and receiving information. We relied on the radio. People around the country were hearing about the conditions through radio. So the new album is a way to hear about hope and peace.
 
How does the record celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the end of the Sierra Leone Civil War?
Releasing the alum at the same time the country itself is celebrating creates a very positive vibe. The band is like an ambassador for the country. Spreading the memories—both positive and negative—and celebrating the independence.
 
What are your memories of radio from when you were a refugee? What role does it play in Sierra Leone?
Radio was the only way that people knew about what was going on in the world. In a refugee camp, radio was very important. At that point, we were only communicating through radios and I was curious to know what was going on. I remember the rebel leaders we were all communicating with eachother through radios. I would hear about some of the horrible things going on in another part of the country at the same time. Other times it gave me hope to know people were living peacefully, steadily moving back into their homes. Overall, in the refugee camp, radio served as a good way for people to listen to music and just chill and forget about the moment.
 

Why did you decide to record your new album in Brooklyn?
When we were thinking about recording our third album, there was a lot of talk between us and our management, the people behind the machine. We wanted a change of pace, so we recorded with analog for third album. It sounded very different from the second album. [It] was produced by Steve Berlin, [of] Los Lobos. The guy had a great, unique sound. We sound different now in comparison. Now we have more of an old school rootsy feel like vinyl. It is the sound of more traditional music.
 
How does that differ from your experience in New Orleans with Cumbancha?
Recording in Brooklyn was more uncomfortable and really challenging for several reasons. We were all wearing like six jackets at once because it was so cold outside. We were also tired, having come off the road for a stretch of several months. The conditions in New Orleans reminded us of being in Sierra Leone; the food, music, people, were all very similar. Even the environmental conditions due to the natural disaster. Walking around reminded us of our own country.
 
How did you end up working with Victor Axelrod? What did he contribute to the recording process?
I met him when we came to New York. He is a very talented young man. Humble. He listens, is down to earth. When working with a producer we have to be a team. He has to listen to our ideas and we have to listen to his. That made the process go quickly and became really unique. We would go to the studio very early in the morning. having been on the road for six or seven months, we just wanted to relax. He gave us a lot of motivation and courage. We all did it, Axelrod and us together. We all made this happen.
 
Since you’ve been touring the world and recording in the United States, do you ever fear that your music has become less connected to your homeland?
I sometimes consider myself a citizen of the world because I left my country at a very early age I have been in a refugee camp, been around the world touring. That doesn’t mean I forget where I’m from. I miss the culture, people, food and language. At the same time, I try to make that the present that I live in universal and try to represent my country. People will learn from my culture and I learn form theirs. Home is always in my mind, I think about it all the time. I always feel connected to my roots, culture and people.

Singer-songwriter Gemma Ray knows the power of intuition. From the intricacies of her moody, throwback pop songs to the nuances of her stripped-down live show—we just saw her with knives out while on tour with Ane Brun—Ray’s music is orchestration in the most organic sense. Before Ray left for tour, CMJ got a chance to chat with her via phone from her Berlin home about her intuitiveness and, most excitingly, her upcoming album, Island Fire, out May 29 on Bronze Rat. She let loose about some drunken guitar purchases, too.

Runaway by Gemma Ray

Let’s talk about Island Fire. The album has a lush, vintage sound to it. Where did you draw the inspiration to develop the sound of the record?
Well, I always follow my instinct with a song. I don’t make conscious decisions to sound a certain way. In terms of guitars and equipment, I tend to go for older models because they just sound better. So I end up with a vintage sound, which isn’t so much contrived or deliberate.

I don’t really listen to music all that much anyway and particularly when I’m recording. But I’m always after that Lee Hazlewood sound. I’m always chasing that dream, which I don’t often achieve. But I was really happy with some of the bass sounds and those sort of country sounds on the record.

You’ve also been compared to the girl groups of Phil Spector.
That’s definitely an influence I wear on my sleeves. I do have a very big soft spot for a lot of the innocence and these great old songwriters. I try to bring out those elements of myself when I’m making a record, and I try to cling to as much naivety as I can with music. There’s a lot of sentimental things that I strive for that tend to be encapsulated by many girl groups.

You really strike that sweet spot between melodrama and innocence. How do you find that perfect balance in your music?
I guess a lot of drama in my music comes from a lot of the teasing, cool changes I’m drawn to. I don’t know anything about serious music, but I’m drawn to these chord progressions that have almost a Tim Burton-y backdrop. But I’m not sure. I’m just all instinct with music, really, and I end up with a point where it all sounds intriguing enough to me and, hopefully, to other people as well.

I’m glad you mentioned Tim Burton because I wanted to talk about your video for “Rescue Me.” Lucy Dyson, the director, had mentioned that your music is practically from another dimension, and that Island Fire was this planet in a Lisa Frank-esque dystopian world. How were you involved with the crafting of this alternate world?
Well, with the name of the album and the fact it was recorded in a lot of different places, it naturally felt like a fantastical place. I wanted the cover art to reflect that place. But Lucy Dyson also did the cover art and all the album art, and I went to her because I was such a big fan of all her work, and I was hoping there was some common ground there. And I really handed the videos over entirely to her, so I handed her team the baton and let them run with it. That video is definitely Lucy’s baby.

That’s what I love about all [her] videos: The heart’s in the song, and there’s great attention to rhythm. Some approaches we took were where I was in this world, i.e. my real body, but I didn’t quite integrate into the world enough, so we went to an approach where they cut my head and cropped it onto the digitally made body, which was best for the kind of mystical magical world they’d created.

Will you incorporate any of this magic into your show?
Yeah, definitely. But I’m also excited by re-interpreting songs in different formats. These songs are quite hearty, quite comfortable dressed up in different ways. My organ player plays on the album a lot, so I’ve got that element with me live. I have the same drummer live as well, and I play guitar, which is a distinctive part of the songs. I’m lucky to be able to use the people I had on the record. I keep it fresh, really. I try to change it depending on what my resources are.

I know that you like to collect guitars. When do you know when you’ve found the perfect guitar?
It’s funny, really. I had this one binge where I bought three Harmony Rockets because I love them so much. I was really drunk and [in] panic bought quite a lot of them. Ever since then I haven’t really bought any. Like a lot of things in life, they tend to find you. For example, my main guitar that I use is a ’60s Gretsch that my friend Matt Verta-Ray [of Heavy Trash] gave to me in New York when I was recording with him. It was an amazing act of kindness and a brilliant gesture. I’m not so into going into a shop and buying. I think it’s more about getting a guitar that feels special.

There are things I like to modify. But I did come home to Berlin, and a friend was storing things in my house. I thought they were storing their guitars here because I saw all the cases, and then I realized I’ve been slowly collecting all these guitars. But yeah, I tend to pick them up. It sounds too lucky and smug, but I tend to collect them along the way. I find beat-up old guitars and restore them.

How many guitars do you have right now?
I don’t know! I could probably look in my lounge and count. I think I’ve got about… [counting] I see 11. But I’ve had guitars since I was 15, so I feel I need to justify it. But I have nine of the Spanish flamenco guitars and 12-strings, and you know, I use them all in the studio. And a couple basses, too.

It should be great to hear all those guitars on tour.
Yeah, when I tour Europe I can put everything in a van, so I can swap to different guitars a bit more. It’s a bit more fun using them in the studio because when you’re on stage it’s a bit difficult unless you have some guitar techs to hand you different stuff.

Thankfully there are roadies for just that reason.
Hopefully one day I’ll have a couple of guitar techs in an army of khaki shorts. But I try and keep it simple for now.

Inspired by Richard Avedon’s 1963 photo of “The Generals Of The Daughters Of The American Revolution,” Laura Burhenn of the Mynabirds decided to present a new image of a revolutionary woman and write a protest record. Generals, out June 5 via Saddle Creek, is the Mynabirds’ sophomore album, a follow-up to their 2010 debut, What We Lose In The Fire We Gain In The Flood. We recently talked to the former Georgie James singer, who told us about reuniting with Richard Swift, where she got her live show stomp boxes and why it’s time to recognize a new type of revolutionary.
 

 
How did you find Richard Avedon’s photo?
Well, I was in Washington, DC, and there was an exhibit at the Corcoran museum called Portraits Of Power, and it was all Richard Avedon portraits. So there are all these iconic artists, musicians and politicians, actors and people of note from the 20th century, and I had read something in which he talks about the photo, and he says, “This is an image of men who are generals in the Civil War in the faces of these women.” As I was standing there looking at it, I thought, “Huh, my idea of what a powerful woman looks like is very different from that.” So I am thinking about American women who are revolutionaries and are not necessarily wearing a satin gown. They probably have a child in one hand and a briefcase on another. Their hands are dirty because their lives are busy, so it is many different things. That is where it started from. It was this idea of imagining what modern-day revolutionaries look like.
 
Your “The New Revolutionists” photo project sort of runs with that idea of what modern-day revolutionaries look like. Was that inspired by the photo?
It was. When I started thinking about album art, I just wanted to shoot a portrait that was like what I thought my portrait would be if Richard Avedon would come and shoot me as this general of the Daughters Of The American Revolution. I asked a couple of my friends who I think are kind of revolutionary in their own right. In my mind I was thinking of someone who does something that requires courage in their daily life and is about moving themselves, their community and America forward.
 
So we did the album art, and I had a couple of my friends come and take portraits. One of them was Amy Klein, and she used to play in Titus Andronicus, and she is a great musician and thinker and writer and has a blog and is often writing about interesting subjects. So we did these portraits, and I was like, “Maybe I’ll use them in album art, and it will be me on the cover, and I’ll have portraits of other women inside, and it will be like we are thinking of these new generals of the Daughters Of The American Revolution.” Once we did that, I thought that it would be amazing to expand this into a whole portrait project, and that is how it started.
 

 
Why did you decide to make this album a political protest record? What are you protesting?
Before I wrote the last record, What We Lose In The Fire We Gain In The Flood, I started writing these songs that were pretty political in nature and pretty much about being angry at the state of America. It has been something I have been meditating on a lot, this idea of the promise of America and where we could be based on the ideals in which America was founded and where we find ourselves. So I just think it is a very delicate time in our history and time for people to stand up and demand better. It is insane to see what is happening, and it starts being a protest about what is going on and being really pissed off and saying, “Look what is happening all around us. We cannot sleep. We have to be awake to what is happening.”
 
At the same time, I don’t want to come off as a self-righteous bitch. So the album for me had to go somewhere. I had to take all that anger into somewhere positive, and I said that the album is a concept record, and the concept is this idea of starting in this place of awareness and anger and moving to something positive, leaning towards, “What can you do?” I read this book by Naomi Wolf called Give Me Liberty, and she was talking about being involved in this political process and actually how difficult that can be for an ordinary citizen to do because it takes a lot of money. So, towards the end of the album in the song “Buffalo Flower,” I sing, “I’m gonna do what I can/Right where I stand.” Which is like all it is, is me helping my neighbors and standing on my own two feet. It has to start somewhere.
 
This was your second time working with Richard Swift. How was it different from the first?
It was even better than before, which is funny because we had so much fun making the first record. Since then Richard and I have become really good friends, and he came on tour with the Mynabirds last spring and played guitar, and he even sang in the band with us when we opened for Bright Eyes. So on one hand I was really nervous to go after it because I was like, “Oh the last time was so fun,” but once I got out there it was like making a record with your best friend. When I got there I said to him, “I want to do something different. I want it to feel connected to the last record, but I want to experiment, and I want to take time to do daring things.” And he of course was all for that, so it was a great experience.
 
Do you expect the shows for this album to be a lot different than those for the last album?
They are definitely different. It’s more theatrical. There is this artist from Boston who made me a fox headdress, which is really amazing, so I wear it for part of the show. We have some samplers and drum machines and stomp boxes, which I borrowed the idea of from Tilly And The Wall. I am good friends with them here in Omaha, and I called them up and said, “You guys, I really want to do stomp boxes. What do you think?” And they were so funny. They were like, “Oh, we actually weren’t the first people with that idea. Take them.” So we actually borrowed their stomp boxes for this tour.
 
How are you envisioning the music videos for the songs from Generals?
We already shot two of them. One of them I think is going to be finished up next week. I cannot wait. I have seen some of the footage. We shot it in black and white, and the concept behind it is that there is this secret society of women, and we go out, and we are out to get these bad businessmen. I am posing as the leader of this band, and we corner them in this city restaurant, which we shot at Johnny’s Cafe here in Omaha, which is an amazing cafe that is from the ’20s and was renovated in the ’50s. There is taxidermy everywhere, like this buffalo with these weird laser orange eyes. It is so bizarre and amazing. It’s going to be really great. I can’t wait for you to see it.

 
“And they say that a hero can save us/I’m not gonna stand here and wait”
– Chad Kroeger, “Hero”
 
Marvel’s the Avengers are a mighty team of superheroes called together to vanquish evil forces so powerful that the strength of one hero is not enough. With their combination of bravery, brute physicality, cunning wit, technological know-how and teamwork, they save the world through the cumulative total of their diverse abilities. They are wildly different, but together they form an entity that’s eclectic and cohesive. More than anything, the Avengers are an argument for collaboration and adaptation, for checking your ego and personal hang-ups at the door in favor of pursuing a common good. The Avengers themselves are like a great movie soundtrack, so how come The Avengers soundtrack sucks so much?
 
After years of movies of dubious quality (cough, Thor, cough) and countless corporate tie-ins (drive your Avengers-approved Honda to buy some Avengers-approved Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!), Marvel’s gargantuan movie/investment/all-encompassing-corporate-goo-monster The Avengers will finally crash into theaters this weekend. The reviews are in, and they’re mostly positive, with some finding it a bit overblown and others refusing to see the movie on (understandable and compelling) ethical grounds.
 
I haven’t seen the movie yet, though I plan on checking it out soon. I have however spent some time with the film’s soundtrack, which is pretty horrible in all of the most predictable ways. The album kicks off with its most noteworthy track, “Live To Rise” by the recently reunited Soundgarden. As far as reunited grunge ballad cash-ins go, it’s pretty inoffensive; the opening riff suggests the band is at least somewhat reinvigorated and still capable of reproducing that distinct ’90s guitar crunch. Things get more distressing as you continue: Papa Roach, Shinedown, Bush and Evanescence all provide songs that sound as though they traveled through some alternate universe wormhole where brooding metallic-sheen rock rules the land and Scott Stapp is our sitting president.
 
The disappointing thing about the Avengers soundtrack is not that it’s particularly offensive or generic. The problem is there are no odd gems or bizarre collaborations. There are no misguided experiments. It’s as smooth and bland as Chris Evans’s chiseled abs. Maybe I’m an idiot for wishing for something better or stranger, but here’s the thing: I have a soft spot for superhero soundtracks and, as a humble student of superhero soundtrack history, I can tell you they used to be better.
 

For example, the soundtrack to the pretty forgettable film Superman III is a treasure trove of eccentric early-’80s oddities. A hybrid score/soundtrack collection, the first half features composer Ken Thorne’s score, which drew heavily on themes created by John Williams, but the second half is where things get adventurous. Musical innovator and synth-soundtrack maestro Giorgio Moroder was brought in to provide his distinct futuristic touch to the proceedings, and his songs are both undeniably fun and a little bonkers considering the context. Moroder and honky-tonk country act Roger Miller team up for “They Won’t Get Me,” an oddly moving cowboy-electro song. It’s precisely the type of creative and inspired collaboration at which soundtracks can excel.
 

Next page: Batman and Judge Dredd lead the Silver Age of superhero soundtracks

Each month our friends at The AU Review will be highlighting the best new music from Australia. Check out their top picks for May below.
 

Velociraptor – Brisbane, Queensland

Andrew Wade, State Editor: This street-fighting, garage rocking, 60′s-reminding indie supergroup Velociraptor (comprised of members of the musically varied yet similarly excellent DZ Deathrays, Tiger Beams, Tiny Migrants, Strange Attractors, Running Gun Sound, Comic Sans and a few more), Cynthia puts a slightly polished spin in comparison to the band’s relatively small back catalog without losing any of the charm. They take musical cues from early British rock legends such as the Kinks and the Hollies, while Jeremy Neale’s raspy and incredibly well suited voice rises over the group’s backing vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on a ’50s doo-wop song. It’s an achievement that the song (indeed, the entire group’s output) is so tight and complete sounding, considering the band has twelve members (yes, twelve).
 

Steering By Stars – Adelaide, South Australia

Sosefina Fuamoli, State Editor: Steering By Stars are my favourite act in Adelaide at the moment. They’re about to release their second album and won the opening slot for Adelaide’s Laneway Festival this year, wowing audiences in droves. I love the mood of the song. There’s something incredibly decadent and dramatic about the arrangement; the repetition of the drums keeps you tied down, which is good because the wall of sound/build up of tension on the track is so easy to get taken away with. Lachlan Wilson’s vocals are raw and passionate, while his work on keys adds to the constant build up of sounds and into some epic crescendos.
 

Pluto Jonze – Sydney, New South Wales

Larry Heath, Editor-in-Chief: This track’s a few months old now but deserves a look by music fans around the world. Sydney musician Pluto Jonze has been hard at work for many years, building his fanbase while refining his craft. “Plastic Bag in a Hurricane”—an effortlessly catchy tune and radio hit down here—is the culmination of all that hard work. It deserves all the praise it receives and here’s hoping it receives a little more. If he comes over to your neck of the woods, don’t miss your opportunity to see Pluto Jonze. Spolier alert: The TVs you see in the video are a big feature in his live show. I seem to remember there were dolphins involved at some point, too.
 

Mikelangelo And The Tin Star – Melbourne, Victoria

Mandy Hall, State Editor: Melbourne outfit Mikelangelo And The Tin Star is delivering a new generation of surf music. Dark and exciting with great energy. When they play it live they have go-go dancers (Go-Go Gadget Go Girl), which makes everything better.
 

Brown Horn Orchestra – Perth, Western Austraila

Tony Lendrum, State Editor: The Brow Horn Orchestra is incredibly talented and has this wonderfully uplifting vibe when they play that makes it impossible not to get the toes a-tapping. The band’s single “Goliath” is testament to that. It’s brilliantly produced, has these lush layers of sound and is a song about coffee—basically a winner all around.”

 
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.

Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, Tennis‘s core married duo, have created some distance between themselves and the seafaring origin story that inspired their debut, Cape Dory. The breezy, Brill Building retro-pop that forms the band’s Patrick Carney-produced sophomore release, Young And Old (named after a Yeats poem that chronicles similar themes of personal evolution), spent some time at the top of CMJ’s college radio charts, recently earned the indie milestone of performances on both Leno and Letterman and now keeps the four-piece band busy on an ever-expanding U.S./European tour. We sat down with singer/keyboardist Moore in a wood-paneled dressing room at a last-minute Brooklyn Bowl gig following Tennis’s Letterman appearance in New York.
 

 
Young and Old has been out for just about two months now. Have you noticed a shift in the way people write about you or interact with you at shows?
When the record first came out people were taking really wishy-washy, ambiguous positions with us instead of saying, “I don’t like it,” or, “I like it.” They weren’t sure about us in the way people aren’t sure about most buzz bands, and that was really frustrating at first. But in the last couple of weeks we’ve played the Tonight Show and the Late Show, and we’ve been No. 1 on CMJ college charts, and all of a sudden things have just been happening out of nowhere. And I truly cannot tell you what changed [laughs]. I’m happy for it, and it’s kind of a rewarding change. I don’t want anything to come easy for us. I want to work for it.
 
Is that the same mentality that inspired your sea voyage?
Yeah, I guess that method of shaping my own life, of putting myself in trying experiences that will maybe bring out something new or refine a character quality that needs to be challenged, that existed long before our music career existed. We sailed out for similar reasons.
 
Do you have any new adventures planned yet?
The tour is our adventure for right now. Me, I can only handle one adventure at a time. Patrick, on the other hand, that’s what makes him tick…that’s really cheesy, but that’s what really truly motivates him. So he’s always planning our next sea voyage, and I’m always telling him, “Wait! We’ll conquer this tour now. We’ll conquer the ocean later.”
 

Your video for “Origins” looked like an adventure in itself. Why did you decide to go with a ski chase?
Patrick grew up in the mountains, and so did James (Barone), our drummer. We really wanted to make a video for “Origins” that wasn’t this really heavy, literal depiction of the lyrics. So we thought it would be awesome to emulate these ridiculous James Bond ski chase scenes from The Spy Who Loved Me. Our first idea was to have James be the villain and have him chasing Patrick, but we quickly discovered that James cannot ski—at all. We ended up using Patrick’s 60-year-old father as his stunt double. Patrick’s dad is a much better skier, and we had him wear this black villain mask and this black leather outfit and pull a fake, plastic toy-looking pistol and chase Patrick down the mountain with it. He was totally game.
 
We caught your Bowery Ballroom set last month. Have you noticed how crazy excited the audience gets when you step away from the keyboard for a dance break?
Yes, and we’re trying to write to that. There were a couple of months where we were touring this new record and I had a double-tiered, two-keyboard setup, and for like five different songs I was playing one hand on each keyboard and doing everything myself. It was very fun and very rewarding, but I had trouble engaging the crowd as a frontperson because I was multitasking so much, so we just decided to hire a fourth member to lighten my load. It’s much easier for me to connect with the crowd when I’m looking at them.
 
Have you thought about a keytar?
People say that! And, you know, I could try to bust it out, but either people would find it so gimmicky or else it would come off like I’m ahead of a trend. But I have a feeling that wouldn’t be the case.
 
Another thing we noticed at Bowery: Is that a giraffe in a space helmet tattooed on your arm?
It is! These are my anthropomorphized animals [pulls up her right sleeve]. There’s also a squirrel at a control console on the bottom here.
 
My Better Self by tennisinc
 
What’s the story behind your cosmonaut creatures?
When I first met Patrick in college he would draw these comic sketches of this giraffe doing human activities like discovering the pyramids or being in outer space. I saved some of the drawings, and later on when we were married I had one tattooed. I told Patrick he had to get something of mine if I was getting something of his, out of fairness. So he got a picture that I drew of a stuffed panda bear drinking a cup of tea on his forearm. Our only rule was that we wanted it to look horrible and hand-drawn like a little kid in a notebook, so we told our tattoo artist to freehand it.
 
That’s pretty cute. Did you know that Brooklyn Bowl’s promo site about this show describes Tennis with the tagline, “They’re cute, they’re married, and they make super nice music”?
I did not know that.
 
Does that summation bother you?
Totally! I mean, there’s way, way, way worse ways that they could describe someone, and I won’t get in anyone’s face about it, but I would rather the fact that we’re married not even be considered. That is irrelevant to everything, and it’s really personal. It’s weird. People talk about that as if it’s a quality definitive of our music, but it’s not. Or the fact that marriage is “cute.” That’s not the word I’d use. Not that we have a hideous marriage, but it’s not cute either. It’s real. It’s hard. It’s normal, like any other marriage.
 
If you could write your own tagline for Tennis, what would it say?
Two marginally talented—but very diligent—people, devoted to unlocking the mysteries of pop music.
 
That would look good on a T-shirt.
I am characteristically verbose. Of course my tagline would be a run-on sentence.

At the top of the dingy green-carpeted stairs on a late afternoon in the sun-soaked Bowery Ballroom, CMJ sat down with Cursive frontman Tim Kasher. Later that evening, Cursive would play to a sold-out crowd at Bowery for the second night in a row. The band’s current tour is in support of Cursive’s February LP release, I Am Gemini, a concept album detailing the story of good and evil twin brothers.
 
Kasher told us just why he approached the new album as he did and warned of the dangers of dorkdom.
 

 
You’ve mentioned that you “had the feeling” you wanted to write about schizophrenia in I Am Gemini. Were you writing about anyone’s experience with schizophrenia or just the idea of it?
Um, I guess my own. I mean, I’m certainly not schizophrenic, but I think that we all have some level of multiple personality disorder. That’s certainly something that I always get pretty frustrated with and have dealt with. I remember dealing with it since I was young, since I was a little boy. But I think that’s just us grappling with like—without sounding kind of crazy—those voices in your head that are always kind of battling each other.
 
You seem to have a thing for horror and the macabre: creepy sideshow carnivals, Frankenstein monsters, haunted houses. What attracts you to these?
I think stuff like that is kind of fun. It’s tricky because it’s such a slippery slope, you know? I think a great example is like Nightmare Before Christmas. Like it’s a really great movie, but it also fits so snugly into Hot Topic. And I think somebody like Dresden Dolls too, I really love Dresden Dolls, but I can certainly recognize how—I mean, I’m being rude—I realize how nerdy their crowd can likely be. But they probably see that too. I just have an attraction to the gothic, and therein lies kind of like the sideshow mentality as well. So I dunno, I feel like you just kind of grow up with stuff like that. I am a big horror fan. I think it’s all kind of dorky, but I also find it kind of romantic to write about, so I try to kind of toe that line and make sure that it doesn’t become too…dorky. [Laughs]
 
The I Am Gemini liner notes are so visual, complete with stage direction. Think these will guide any music videos that you might have for tracks on this album?
I had a lot of daydreams while I was writing it to initially really like set production in motion and try to get something made. I made a point to kind of like put a halt on all of those daydreams because I wanted to make sure that the record was done correctly. Now that I’m on the other side of it all, it goes back to the dorkiness of gothic material, and I would be slightly horrified I think to see how stuff like that would turn out.
 

 
Some of the criticism surrounding I Am Gemini says your intent isn’t clear, it’s not relatable. Do you have a response to that?
No, I think that that’s all there. It’s all concerns that I’ve had. So counter to that, it’s been nice that people also have been following it really well, so that’s good. In researching to write it, I read librettos, operatic librettos, and I couldn’t follow them at all, you know, I didn’t know what the story was, I didn’t know what was going on. So, I tried pretty hard to make it cohesive, but I also reedited it. I didn’t want to like spell it out for dumbshits. I think it could have been spelled out better, but it also would have been less tasteful. Point being is, yeah, that was a major concern I’ve had, and it doesn’t really bother me that people feel that way. And also, frankly, if you’re going to read through it once and then say, “That’s not going to work,” it’s not that it doesn’t work. I think maybe I might offer a little bit of defense and say, “You have to read it more than once.” [Laughs] But you know, absolutely fair enough. I’m always open for criticism.
 
I mean, anything’s going to get criticism.
Yeah, especially when you do something like this. It’s not going to be right for everybody, and that’s really OK. I’m just kind of hoping it will for others.
 
You guys play “The Martyr” every night on tour. Are there songs you enjoy playing live more than others? Does anything from I Am Gemini make it onto that list?
I really get a kick of playing “Birthday Bash.” I think it’s a fairly traditional song in the way it works, and it’s traditional for a reason; it’s kind of like a driving story. So I find that kind of fun. I think that I certainly have much more interest in songs that kind of tell a story versus thoughts and ideas, though those are all absolutely fine too.
 
A while back it occurred to me that there are songs that you kind of have to play every night. In a way you’re kind of—well, I’m sure this is not the case for all artists—I kind of agree with the listeners, like “OK, I can see, I guess this is one of the better songs.” So I don’t mind playing it every night, and also there’s the whole concept of playing off the audience. So even though we play “Art Is Hard” and “The Martyr” every single night, it’s like still, they get real excited about it. It’s kind of fun.

 
When you hear the name David Banner, the first thing that pops into your head might be his 2005 single “Play.” But what you might not know is that when he’s not whispering sweet, suggestive nothings in your ear, Banner is an actor, activist, entrepreneur and all-around businessman. The rapper, who will be releasing his sixth album, Sex, Drugs And Video Games, May 22, is calling its release a movement, and by charging a minimum donation of $1, he is trying to find a perfect mix between hip-hop’s mixtape tradition and the revenue-producing LP sales. Never short on ambitions, with this album, Banner says he wants to change the image of hip-hop, regain the genre some respect and bring the community together around the music. And, naturally, make fans touch themselves.
 

 
Sex, Drugs and Video Games: Is it an album or a mixtape?
It is an album because I want people to know that the things we call mixtapes are free. It is an album that we chose to make, and people have to donate a dollar.
 
You’re calling this album’s release a movement, “2M1” movement to be exact. How is it a movement?
It is a movement because we are asking two million people to donate a dollar, and it is about collecting emails and building a team. We will create a movie and with the movie, show what this is all about, which is representing ourselves in ways in which we want to be seen. The two million people are those who are active and are excited and will move with me.
 
Why charge a dollar?
The minimum donation is of one dollar. The reason for one dollar is that I am giving you an album with all these artists: Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, A$AP Rocky, Game, Snoop Dogg, Bun B, Big K.R.I.T. and others, and this album in reality is worth $30. I am giving you videos with each song, and we are putting out a song every two weeks and a week after that a video. There is no reason at all for people to not donate. There will be something you like on this album, even if it is not me. We have great beats and great artists working together to create something amazing.
 
Why title it Sex, Drugs And Video Games?
The title is asking people to think, because sex, drugs and violence is what people stereotype so much about hip-hop. For example, what do naked women on the sidelines have to do with football? So, when we have those stimuli we ask why the music reflects that. If life is essentially a video game, who has the controller? It’s not that I don’t like sex or video games, but in this album I ask why all this stereotyping and why all this violence when it is not what we are about.
 

You have mentioned before that this movement is about regaining respect for the urban and hip-hop community and reinforcing it as a viable entity. Why do you feel this respect has been lost?
I think it is No. 1 by giving away free goods. We give away so much. We don’t respect anything that we get for free, and this devalues the music. And it’s not only about music but also culture, and this relates to the Trayvon Martin murder with people not having respect for people, for each other and for music. That is what the movement is about; it is showing people that hip-hop is a viable entity.
 
How do you think hip-hop has been a viable entity?
It connects to everything in culture from fashion to politics. The culture that it has built is so important. The only part of hip-hop that has lost entity is us not doing it for ourselves. That is what the movement is about, us making things for ourselves and supporting ourselves. As much as hip-hop has built, record labels still don’t take us seriously, artists don’t get anything from it, and the labels, they don’t give a shit about us. It is not fair. The little money they give us is nothing compared to what we do for them. We need to stand up and do things for ourselves. That is what this movement is about, us taking the reins back.
 
Over the last few weeks, you have been very outspoken about the Trayvon Martin case. Does the album relate to that at all?
The movement is not connected to the case, but I am very involved in politics. However, one of the reasons I try not to relate this to my music is because it poses a distraction to my listeners. If I am talking about a case, I try to make my fans keep connected to the case and don’t talk about my music. Hip-hop is supposed to be the voice of the people and provide safety, and music should not be blamed for violence.
 
After getting the $2 million, you said you were going to shoot a movie. What’s happening with that?
At this point, we are still working on it. I don’t like to talk about it much because that would be getting ahead of the project, and I don’t want people to lose focus on the movement. I want people to focus on DavidBanner.com and join in. Yeah, there is a plan, but it is constantly growing, and I can’t really decide on anything until I know who wants to and is going to be involved.
 

How did you come up with $2 million as your goal?
I pray and meditate a lot, and that was the number that god gave me. There is no explanation, no reason. That is the number that popped in my head, and that is the number I am going for. I will not budge from this number.
 
What can fans expect from this new album?
I want them to expect to touch themselves after they hear my voice, and that is what usually happens. They will want to jump on the dance floor and shake their ass, and they will also want to stand up and get involved in their communities and be active and go get activated. It is a mix of everything. It is funny because a lot of women were asking me for physical copies with my face on it, just after they heard the two songs we have put out, just so they could rub it against their bodies. But yeah, people can expect big things.

Following SXSW, James Smith, James Cleare and Heather Robb—former schoolmates who now comprise the singing/songwriting core of Brooklyn folk-rock band the Spring Standards—can officially check “perform an unplugged encore for Bill Murray” off their bucket lists.
 
“We’re playing the last song of our showcase, and people are applauding and want us to play another one, but we couldn’t go over the venue’s curfew,” Smith says. “And all of a sudden, out of the crowd, from nowhere, Bill Murray just comes over and sort of whispers, ‘Can you just play one more?’”
 
A consummate Life Aquatic lover, Smith responded as any Murray fan would in that situation:
 
“Oh, son of a bitch!”
 
Chance encounters are largely responsible for the band’s body of accomplishments since moving to New York City from the Pennsylvania/Delaware border. This includes releasing three self-financed albums of upbeat folk feasts, indulging a filmmaking friend’s pitch for some metropolitan cowboy cosplay, covering country icons with anywhere from two to 20 of their local band buddies as Dill Dotson And the Chupacabra Kings and choreographing fan-crafted puppet versions of themselves in one of several off-kilter music videos. The band’s newest project is a pair of EPs called Yellow and Gold, two Kickstarter-funded collections written and recorded six months apart, though unified by a vision of complementary colors.
 
We sat down with Heather and the Jameses to talk about Yellow//Gold on the patio of Brooklyn’s Qathra Cafe, which is within walking distance of Heather and James Cleare’s Brooklyn homes, as well as friend and producer Dan Molad’s apartment studio, where the Spring Standards wrote and recorded most of the new album.
 

 
Where did the concept for Yellow//Gold come from?
Heather Robb: It was actually an idea we briefly thought about when we were sequencing our last record. We were on our way to a gig and were like, man, these songs are so hard to sequence because some of them feel so specifically in one direction and some of them feel so specifically in another direction—maybe these should’ve been two EPs? When we talked to [producer] Danny [Molad] about it in the fall before we started recording, the distinction between the two EPs out of the gates was vivid in our minds, and connecting those songs to colors was vivid in our minds.
 
James Smith: The first color we attached to our music was yellow. We all knew that was the vibe, and we all had similar, subtly different ideas of what the sound of yellow was. So when we were writing Yellow I wasn’t writing [emits heavy metal noises through clenched teeth] “dugga-dugga-duh, dugga-dugga-duh-duh.” We were all writing for the color.
 
So how did those colors end up sounding?
James Cleare: On Yellow we’re more introspective, focused on the acoustic tones and spacey, Beach Boy harmonies. But on Gold we used a lot of organs and gnarly bass guitar and electric guitars and noise and stuff that you haven’t heard on our other records.
 
HR: A lot of the material, particularly for Gold, was written in the studio, which we’ve never done before. The confidence we gained in tracking Yellow offered us more freedom and the audacity to make bolder choices, which we needed for Gold. We wouldn’t have been able to make that record two years ago. We also learned a lot of songs after-the-fact, out on tour and at SX, which is the opposite of how we normally write and learn songs. It worked really well.
 

 
How many shows did you guys play at SX this year?
HR: I think it ended up being nine. We basically just said yes to everything, ’cause we wanted to play as many shows as possible in support of the new record. The thing about SX though is that for every one good show you have at least three terrible shows. You have like—and this happened to us this year—shows where the bar isn’t even open, and the bartender finally gets there and is like [adopting a husky, apish voice], “I don’t know who booked this, but my orders are this…”
 
JS: His exact words were, “Well Richard isn’t FUCKING here, so everyone get the FUCK out if you’re not the band!”
 
HR: It was noon, kind of an early show, but some fans came out, so we just played on the sidewalk.
 
There’s a video of you playing a song in the middle of the audience at Bowery Ballroom. Do you guys go off mic often?
JC: That Bowery show was our first album release. What a great show! It’s not rare for us to play off mic, but it is rare for us to go into the middle of the crowd and make a triangle.
 
HR: Once in Wisconsin we brought a whole audience into the men’s bathroom to do a song because the acoustics in there were so amazing. Everyone just followed us!
 
JS: People kept leaning the wrong way and setting the sensors off [laughs]. Then one time we were playing a show in Kentucky, and the power grid went down, and the whole block or 10 blocks just lost electricity. It was crazy—all the streetlights and everything was just out, and it was pitch-dark in the venue and hot too because it was summertime. There was one spotlight from an emergency light in the middle of the room, so everyone circled around us in this one spot, and we ended up playing another 20 minutes.
 

I really like the puppet versions of the band in the video for “Queen Of The Lot.” Did you make them yourselves?
JC: We did not make the puppets. That would be very weird to make puppets in our own image.
 
HR: We were approached by a fan who was a puppet maker.
 
JS: This guy’s actually amazing. His name is David Valentine. He’s really sweet, and he’s one of our most supportive fans. But I will say, before I got to know him, it was kind of creepy when I picked up these puppets. He came to us and was like, “Would you guys you like puppets of yourselves?” And when someone asks you that you don’t say, “No.” You have to be like, “Yeah. Give me a puppet of myself.” So he made these puppets, and he was like, “Let’s pick a place to meet.” So I was like, “Great, what should I bring to transport these puppets?” And he was like, “Just bring a duffel bag you can fit three toddlers in.” And I was like “…We’re meeting in an incredibly public place, right? Union Square? At midday?” [laughs] So this guy made these puppets and we had to find a use for them. Thus the music video for “Queen Of The Lot,” which took forever to do.
 
HR: We worked with a group called Story Pirates, a theater company and creative education program based in Manhattan but with schools in all five boroughs, and they just started another in L.A. I’m actually a teaching artist with them! But they have amazing puppets, and they donated a bunch of puppets and puppeteers for our video.
 
JS: A lot of the puppeteers had to be in these weird crouched gremlin positions to choreograph the scene with the dancing birds, and our good friend Seth Kirschner directed it. He’s actually a really accomplished actor who’s been in a few episodes of 30 Rock—he’s always the director dude who’s yelling at Tracy Jordan to learn his lines.
 
What became of the puppets?
JC: After the video I had all three of them at home. They were in a plastic bag, but one of them would always fall out, and I’d be staring at a likeness of myself. That was kind of disturbing.
 
JS: The puppets were at my house for a while when I lived in Queens. One night when my friends came over and we had a couple of drinks, we decided to make videos of these puppets before the “Queen Of The Lot” video, and we’d make Heather and James’s puppets just make out intensely on camera. We’d be filming them dancing and having a great time, and all of a sudden two of them would stop, turn to each other as the music played and just violently make out. That’s probably the most fun you can have with puppets that look like your friends.

 
Lo-fi pop quartet White Birds is a young band, but it’s also kind of old. Before White Birds, three of the members used to play together in a group called Drink Up Buttercup, a band whose sound and tone were much different than White Birds’. After Drink Up Buttercup disbanded, James Harvey, Farzad Houshiarnejad and Mike Cammarata formed White Birds. Some supporting tour dates and a four-song EP released on a cassette tape soon followed.
 
White Birds released its debut full-length, When Women Played Drums, on the group’s Bandcamp page on Valentine’s Day. The 10-track LP is a series of ethereal, reverb songs steeped in sun-drenched nostalgia. CMJ called vocalist James Harvey up for an interview as he was about to go on a walk, a stroll that was disappointingly canceled because of rain.
 
NO SUN by WHITE BIRDS
 
Three of you guys used to be in a band before this. How did White Birds form out of that?
James Harvey: We just kind of made that band. The four of us got together and got stoned, and we sang some songs, and then we started playing them out, and everybody was kind of into how wild everything was. We got kind of sick of it not too far in, but then people kept wanting to see us play, so we kept playing. Every time we had a show to recreate the spectacle, which was a really natural thing in the beginning for us; it wasn’t contrived at all. But we took that and for the most part, the three of us that are in White Birds it seems like more chilled-out, pretty stuff, so we just kind of wanted to make what we like and what we would like to listen to instead of something that was born out of four dudes getting stoned in a barn.
 
When describing the band, there’s always the Brian Wilson comparison. But in an interview you said the Beach Boys wasn’t as direct an influence as people think. Who or what then are some of your primary influences?
I’m more of a song guy than anything else. I’m not really into specific bands as much—you know, like an entire catalog as I am a random song. But as far as the lo-fi recording influence goes, I always loved current stuff, like I really love Dirty Beaches and the sound of his recordings. We recorded various versions of the songs, and we ended up liking the lo-fi original recordings more. So yeah, hearing a band like Dirty Beaches or something and the fact that they’re putting out lo-fi stuff, or like Wavves and stuff like that—not that their newer album was like that—it just made me feel secure and relief that I felt was the right way to hear the songs. I felt like they had more honesty and heart to them. A lot more initial gut feeling let into the recording than when you try to redo and perfect something, so just hearing bands like Dirty Beaches, Wavves, stuff like that, their releasing the lo-fi type stuff kind of gave me some sense of confidence that there was an audience out there for that type of thing.
 
What was the recording process like for When Women Played Drums?
A few of the songs on the album we had coming together over the course of early 2011, and then I had a really, at the time, a really terrible breakup. And all of a sudden I just started writing songs like crazy. I would just record them as the feelings came to me, and like I said, that’s why we ended up sticking with the original versions because I felt they were much more heartfelt. So every time some big emotional thing would happen during the course of this breakup, a new song would come out of it. The album’s not necessarily in any order sequentially with what happened during the breakup, but yeah, it’s all just these little different stories of all the emotions I was feeling during that period of time in my life.
 
FLOATING HANDS by WHITE BIRDS
 
So would you say that’s the overarching story and theme of the album then?
Yeah, you know, I was with somebody over three years, like we were practically married, living together, whatever. And then one day it came crashing down, but then it dragged on forever like those things tend to do. So making this album really helped me get over that. And [I made] it with the other guys in the band who are my best friends, so having them there and doing something like creating an album about the end of a relationship like that really has some great healing power.
 
You guys seem to have a strong online presence, what with your Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. How important has that been for the band?
Basically we’ve had this album finished since last summer, and we didn’t have a label or anything like that, so the only thing we had to get the music out to people was Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr, so obviously that’s something we didn’t want to go to waste. We definitely try to strongly use those sites to their full potential. And you know, you figure out new things every day, but I think we keep people who are interested updated with every little piece of new content we can.
 
The band has a record label now, though, right? Grizzly?
There’s been so much confusion with that. It’s actually really funny. I see the little Google Alerts every day pop up, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, the album on Grizzly Records.” But actually what happened was Chris, who plays guitar, bass and keyboards in the band, went to college with this guy named EJ who runs Grizzly, and he sent him some of the tracks, and he was like, “Yeah I’d love to put out a tape.” So we put out like a little album teaser, four-track tape in September when we were on tour with Asobi Seksu. And after a while we got kind of tired of waiting around to put the rest of the stuff out, so when the tape sold out, we decided to put out the entire record online. And you know, we might end up doing some kind of physical release for the full-length, but for right now we just have the four songs off the album that were released on Grizzly on a cassette tape and then the rest of the album. The only place you can get it is on our Bandcamp.
 
What was the inspiration behind releasing the four-song preview on a cassette tape?
Well honestly I think it’s the most affordable way to put out something physical. Vinyl costs a lot of money, and CDs just seem kind of, maybe it’s just me, but I feel like they don’t really have any value to them. You just burn them, throw them in a stack, whatever. I feel like people don’t really treat them with care, so that was an inspiration behind doing it on cassette instead of doing it on CD so to speak. So you know, more of an item that somebody can hold in their hand, and it’s not just a shiny thing that ends up in a pile of CD-Rs basically.
 

How involved were you guys with the music video for “Hondora?” It seems to share the same lo-fi aesthetic as your music.
I have some friends in a band called Mammal Of Paradise. And the woman who made the “Hondora” video, her name is Ashley Connor. She made a video for Mammal Of Paradise, and I saw it, and I was like, “OK, she is definitely on the same page as us as far as, you know, that kind of hazy visual look that our sound evokes.” And I hit her up, and I shared the same tune with her, and she was instantly all about it. We didn’t tell her what to do. We just said, “We like what you do already, so just do that.” And she did, so that was awesome.
 
What are the group’s plans for the rest of 2012?
Right now we’re not really focusing on touring as much as we are. We’ve just been recording more new material, a little bit higher quality stuff. We’re really excited about that.
 
Will those be entirely new releases or reworked versions of the songs on When Women Played Drums?
I believe they’re going to be new releases. We’ll probably end up putting a new EP or album together sometime before the end of the year. For us, we had a band that we toured with, and we saw what happens in the beginning when you’re just touring and you don’t have that much exposure yet, and it’s just kind of a fruitless venture. So we’re just going to do things right this time and keep putting out songs hopefully that people like, and then when enough people like them, we’ll go out on the road and play them for them live.

Many know Norfolk multi-instrumentalist Kishi Bashi (or K Ishibashi) through his relationships with other artists. He’s a founding member of Jupiter One, who toured with the likes of Regina Spektor and Sondre Lerche before settling into his current position as a touring member of beloved Athens, GA, freak-funk band Of Montreal.
 
But with the release of his first solo effort, 151a, Ishibashi is preparing to step into the spotlight himself. While crafting the complex string arrangements on Of Montreal’s latest record, Paralytic Stalks, Ishibashi simultaneously accomplished the hefty task of crafting a debut LP completely from scratch, writing, producing and performing all of the instruments himself. Recently, CMJ got the chance to sit down with Ishibashi before an Of Montreal gig at Webster Hall—in which he performed as an opening act, as well as with the band—and chat about the new album, his stellar fans and what it’s like in the “mind-fuck” world of Kevin Barnes.
 
How’s the tour been going so far?
It’s great. It’s almost wrapping. I think we’re mostly through it.
 
You do your solo set, and then you come back out with Of Montreal. How are the two sets different?
They’re completely different. Basically, when I do my set, it’s basically by myself. It’s softer, since there are no drums, but I beatbox.
 
151a has a lot of sounds, and it’s really lush. Do you think the album translates well to a live setting?
I mean, I treat it as two different things. I really win over the crowd with my live show, so that people are like, “This is cool,” and check the album out. I have a pretty aggressive show.
 
Bright Whites by Kishi Bashi
 
This album was funded through Kickstarter, and you passed the limit; you asked for $12,000, and you got $20,000. How did that come about?
I think Kickstarter is great. It’s this independent way to fund things. Traditionally, there’d be a label, and if you don’t have a label, you’re kind of screwed. You need a lot of money to promote your album and a publicist, and you have to hire a radio promotion campaign, and there’s all this cost. So traditionally, it’s a pretty uphill battle if you don’t have a label. So this was a great thing because it was a way for your fans to help. People want to see you succeed, and fans want to see their favorite artists succeed, so they’re really generous. And like, Kickstarter, in their info thing, they mention that the average pledge will be $25. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but a lot of people have that money and they want to help you, so I found people to be really generous.
 
It sounds like this project was done almost as a partnership with your fans.
It’s a really new way to do things. CD sales are going down, and digital sales are too. This way, it’s kind of like a pre-sale, and the fans feel like they’re a part of this recording process, whereas usually they just get the album and let that be it. This way, they’re actually supporting it directly.
 
How did you come about crafting the sort of playful sound on the record?
It was really organic. I kind of limited myself in really starting with violin as the creation point of these songs. So it’s not like we have songs that are verse-chorus-verse-chorus. I took the approach of saying, “Man, I’m going to have to do this by myself with the looping thing, so let me do something where I can make a convincing song that’s loop-based.”
 
Chester’s Burst Over the Hamptons by Joyful Noise Recordings
 
I noticed that a lot of the songs sort of morph, like “Chester’s Burst Over the Hamptons.” How did you work with the flow of the songs? Did you go in with a set concept in mind, or did the songs create themselves?
Well, you want to know a secret about that song?
 
Sure!
The violin part in the beginning of the song is the same one as “Manchester,” only sped up. I was playing around with it. I do a lot of processing, so I was thinking about what would sound interesting, and that was really cool sounding, so I got inspired by that sound. So that’s how that came about.
 
What were you listening to when you made this album?
Someone asked me that the other day! I actually don’t listen to music. I mean, I listen to a lot of music, but for some reason, I haven’t heard any new music recently. A lot of my music comes from being a career musician, so I play the music of Regina Spektor and Sondre Lerche. Of Montreal is a huge inspiration too. I was a huge fan before I joined, and I worked on this album. That’s how I got to be friends with Kevin Barnes.
 
Kevin Barnes played some roles in this album too, right?
On the [Room For Dream] EP, he played some stuff. I kept him in mind. I wanted his blessing, so I tried to push the envelope with my own creation. I’m a very traditional, simple-song type person, but when I started working with Kevin and doing a lot of production for Paralytic Stalks, I saw how he’s all about multi-layered and mind-fuck type of stuff. It’s pretty incredible how much of a creative force he is, and working with that band inspired me to just, on top of a beautiful song, have multiple layers so it’s interesting for multiple listens.
 
Did any of that carry over to your album?
Yeah. A lot of vocal layering, that’s inspired by his work. And the violin—I’m kind of lazy, so violin was always, like, my for-hire thing, since I’m good at it. It takes a long time to do that stuff, and I like to get paid, so it never occurred to me to do it for myself.
 
Are you going to be putting out more solo material soon?
Yeah, once I get a chance. I’m doing double duty right now, and I’m going to Europe in two weeks, so I’m in Of Montreal, but I’m also playing a lot of shows as Kishi Bashi.
 
Your daughter is featured in the album art. Does she inspire you musically?
She’s the focus of my life. She’s heard the album. She loves it. She heard it and said, “Daddy, your album’s awesome!” I tour a lot, and I have to explain to her that people want to hear my music and that I’m traveling, and she’s always like, “It’s OK! I want other people to hear it too!” It just melts my heart.
 

What’s her favorite song on the album?
Oh, I don’t know. She likes “Bright Whites.” She’s actually on there. In a few places you can hear her laughing. I think I was tickling her to get her to giggle. I was totally using my daughter. [laughs] I’m in my studio, and she likes to visit, and sometimes it’s annoying, but she also gets to be a part of it too.
 
What were some of your other sources of inspiration on these songs?
My inspiration is usually musical first. I think there are two types of songwriters. There are those like me, who form musical ideas and then turn them into stories. If I could get away with instrumentals, I’d probably do that, but I’m conscious of the power of words. I like the sound of words, and I try and do my best to turn it into something. For example, with Of Montreal, Kevin Barnes is a poet. I’m always in awe with how engaging his lyrics are. Which is why his fans are absolutely in love with him; it’s heartfelt, intelligent prose, which is something I’m working on. So most of my inspiration is musical, with efforts to turn it into a story.
 
How would you say that your solo work differs from your work with Regina Spektor, Of Montreal and other artists you’ve worked with?
Well, with Regina, I was just in her band, a hired gun. Of Montreal, I’m still one of this huge machine. Of Montreal is kind of unique in that it’s really Kevin’s music split up and dictated amongst the members of a rock band. So basically, it’s his vision turned into an actual musical form. Which is pretty incredible; I’ve never been part of something like that before. I also love performing violin and guitar, so it’s fun for me. But my solo stuff is my passion.

“I noticed we’re doing pretty well on your charts,” says Jon Philpot, lead singer of Brooklyn psych-rock band Bear In Heaven, toward the end of our conversation. “Maybe you can give us a little internal bump on that? Maybe push that number a little higher on the sly, since we’re all buddies and stuff?”
 
I’m pretty sure Philpot is joking, but it can be hard to tell. This week Bear In Heaven released its newest full-length, the synth-heavy, space-disco monolith I Love You, It’s Cool, and the group recently embarked on a large U.S. tour, yet there’s still a mischievous quality to the band members that suggests they’re not taking any of this too seriously. In the months preceding the album’s release the band offered a stream of the record on its website, but instead of the typical Soundcloud, it was a 2,709-hour “slow stream” that turned the album into an ongoing ethereal mush. They even released a mockumentary chronicling the “making” of the stream. They also maintain one of the funniest musician Twitter accounts on the Internet. At the same time, the new album is dense, challenging art-pop with an aching, beating heart. To get to the bottom of these contradictions, I caught up with Philpot to discuss the new album, the band’s top tweet-dog and the soft-rock singer Philpot gets compared to the most.
 
I Love You, It’s Cool feels like more of a dance record than your previous work. Was that something you guys discussed going into the recording process?
That was definitely an objective. It’s not like, Rusko or anything, but we wanted to edge more in that direction with what we do. I think we got in that direction, but it’s not a full-on dance record. It was on purpose. I’m glad it was at least noticed. It would be crappy if we tried to make a dance record and no one noticed.
 
Have you noticed different responses from the crowd when you play the new songs live?
We just started yesterday with our first day on tour, and we played a handful of shows at SXSW, and there was kind of a difference in the audience participation. As our shows from the last record progressed, we sort of started angling songs more in that direction. There was definitely a lot of moving and swaying going on, and it was as if people were less hesitant about it. Now it’s more of an immediate reaction, in a way, which is good.
 
Bear In Heaven – Sinful Nature by Bear in Heaven
 
It’s been three years since the last record. What was the biggest challenge in making this one?
There was a little bit of a challenge trying to find money. That was thankfully figured out, because our label, Hometapes, sparked up with Dead Oceans, so that was a challenge. We were making a record on our own time for a while and not really knowing if we could actually afford recording it for real. And then the other challenge, really, was getting it from the studio to the live setting, and that’s been pretty crazy. But now that that’s over I’m really happy about that. I mean, the making of the record, in all honesty, was the best time of my life. It was like a long-term dream.
 
I love the title of the record. Where did it come from?
It’s very relevant to us. It’s sort of like a statement on the state of the world. It’s about this peace, where you can find love, you know? And the translation of it is whatever you want to make of it. The generation of it came from our ex-bandmate Sadek Bazarra. I don’t know if you know this, but he did the record cover. We’re really great buddies still. He didn’t, like, leave the band because he hated us or anything. He left the band because he couldn’t tour as much as he wanted to. But the album title came from him.
 
There was this one night where we were in the rehearsal room, getting drunk. And we were listening to the demos and getting excited. And then he wrote a little note, left for me and Joe. One of the notes said, “Dear Jon: I love you, it’s cool.” It was a good discovery. It was one of those days when you’re recording a record, and every fourth day is like a hard day, and you’re like “I can’t figure out what the hell this song is about and what it’s going to be.” And I saw this note, and I realized it was all fine.
 
You guys worked with David Wrench on this album, and it’s your first time working with an outside producer. What was that like?
It was the first time we had ever had anyone outside of ourselves. On the last record, we had friends help us record, but David really came up with great ideas. He helped us with the process of realizing this record in a way that was bigger than what we could do with demos or on our own. He’s got a lot of great musical ideas and a great knowledge of weird music, which is an essential element, to have someone that speaks the same language.
 
What weird stuff did he bring to the table?
I’ve never been into Julian Cope, and he brought Julian Cope into our world. We’d pretty much written the songs by the time we’d gotten to the studio, but it was a good thing to have. Cope made good music, and the way they made those records was different. It was different from the way that I would make a record.
 
Bear In Heaven – The Reflection of You by Bear in Heaven
 
With the “slow stream” did you intend to poke fun at the way records are promoted online?
I don’t know what it was. Some of our friends had these teasers on their website, clocks that said stuff like, “14 days until the record comes out!” with a clock ticking down. I mean, what the fuck are you doing? I guess you have to do something to announce your record. But musical content is its own thing, it’s kind of great. [The slow stream] is just a piece of art, for better or for worse. And it develops, like music for the soul, you know? It worked out in a lot of good ways. Every time I would turn it on, it was like an unexpected treat.
 
Your band has a very funny, underrated Twitter. Do you write the tweets?
That’s mostly Adam [Wills]. I guess you could called Adam a tweet-dog or a tweet-bird. He loooves to tweet. But we definitely are conscious of approaching Twitter with a sense of humor. I mean, that’s the best way to go about it, right? I guess it’s just the way we are as dudes. [Jon to Adam: "Dan from CMJ says our Twitter is underrated!" Jon to CMJ: "He says thanks."]
 
You guys are right up there with the Tanlines Twitter. Really funny.
Funnier than Tanlines?! Adam says the Tanlines ones are pretty funny.
 
Your band has a pretty hard to define sound. I saw someone online compared you to Toto. What’s the oddest band you’ve ever been compared to?
I was going to say Pet Shop Boys. I think that’s a little weird, but I get it. Oh, REO Speedwagon, but that’s just because I do sing a lot like that guy. If we did an REO Speedwagon cover that’d be cool.

“There are artists whose bread and butter is just making music that sounds verifiably like it came somewhere out of 1994,” says Philadelphia rapper Lushlife, aka Raj Haldar. He’s having a cup of tea at Atlas Café in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, hours before playing a show at the Knitting Factory a few blocks away. “And, as much as my own music is informed by that era, I feel like I want to try to take some step forward without losing sight of the groundwork behind me. It’s like, ‘Come on, we all loved the ’90s. Let’s get over it.’”
 
This is a funny thing to hear from an MC whose dense, polysyllabic rhymes are often compared to Illmatic-era Nas and whose list of hip-hop reference points—Black Moon, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, A Tribe Called Quest, Gangstarr—barely make it past Y2K. But the beats Lushlife raps over in his gruff, rat-a-tat flow are aggressively contemporary, almost to a degree that suggests calculation: His last mixtape, No More Golden Days, featured Haldar rapping over blissed-out, ethereal concoctions by producers like Clams Casino and slowed-down, blown-out versions of recent indie-rock staples like Gang Gang Dance’s “Adult Goth” and Fleet Foxes’ “Mykonos.” His new full-length, Plateau Vision, jettisons some of the blog-bait for more even weirder, spacier, synth-snarled New Age boom-bap and hiccupped psych-rock. Is it chillwaverap? Cloud-rap? Trillwave? Self-aware-post-chillwave? Does any of this matter?
 
Big Sur – Lushlife by lushlifemedia
 
When asked if he’s frustrated by these genre classifications, Lushlife is more amused than anything, perhaps excited that people finally know how to classify a soft-spoken, self-effacing rapper who went on a juice fast, often name-checks the Smiths and looks like he might volunteer at a library. “In 2009, I put out a record called Cassette City, and there are tracks on there in hindsight that I feel like they could fit in the ‘chillwave’ or ‘cloud-rap’ categories,” says Lushlife. “I just think there wasn’t a way to process them neatly at the time. But maybe I’m just giving myself a pat on the back.”
 
Far from being a trend-hopper, Haldar has been developing his aesthetic for a long time. Born in New Jersey, he started DJing at the age of 10, teaching himself how to cut and scratch, and scrounging record stores for obscure Smoothe Da Hustler singles. After a brief stint studying jazz composition at Rutgers, a lost year at NYU and a few years abroad in England, Haldar has made Philly his home for the last seven years. Having recently turned 30, he’s something of a hip-hop academic, and his lyrics, packed full of literary, spiritual and musical allusions, confirm that.
 
Still I Hear the Word Progress (ft. Styles P) – Lushlife by lushlifemedia
 
With guest verses from Bad Boy and Ruff Ryder alum Styles P, Das Racist’s Heems, conscious Canadian Shad and Memphis cloud-classicist Cities Aviv, Plateau Vision feels liberated from regional geography and history. “In some weird sense, from the lyrical standpoint, the narrative of Plateau Vision is somehow about this idea of anthropology,” he explains. “How it relates to the advent and growth of hip-hop culture and seeing B-boy nostalgia culture through the lens of classic anthropological tropes.” But for such heady material, the buoyant, contemplative album never feels like a term paper.
 
“I like to think that my music has a broad appeal,” he says, finishing up his tea. “I don’t know right now whether that’s come to fruition yet. I think right now, to be very honest, it’s just this subset of people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and have extremely broad tastes. That’s the best way I can explain it, since I don’t have a lot of ways of getting a broad understanding of who’s listening and who’s not. But I’m glad that anyone is listening.”

No one is more invested in anonymous online discussions about Scuba than Paul Rose. His Twitter page is littered with the detritus of time spent trolling dogmatic electronic music forums like dubstepforum and Dissensus, sessions that inspire him to fire off a succession of derisive tweets and log off. At least Rose has good reason to be so invested in what fans have to say about Scuba, for he and Scuba are one and the same.
 
Last month, Rose released his third album, Personality, and if anyone had anything negative to say in any remote corner of the interwebs, no one heard it louder than Scuba. Personality was in some ways a rite of passage; its colorful, club-friendly posture is divergent from the sparser and moodier basswork of his past, a move that alienated him from some stubborn fans. Such are the growing pains of a blossoming production career. For every handful of new fans, a comment pops up under a dubstepforum thread titled “Tunes you hate that everyone rates.” In the words of the Internet, haters gonna hate.
 
Scuba – The Hope / Flash Addict [PER001] by Hotflush
 
What was the concept behind Personality?
I was trying to consciously let influences come through that I had been repressing before—like ’90s house and ’80s pop and big synth stabs and stuff that I wouldn’t have thought would have been suitable to what I was making in my left-field beat/dubstep stuff. I just wanted to be able to be a bit more honest to my background and influences.
 
Why were you trying to suppress influences before?
I don’t think it was a conscious thing. It was just more that I was doing something specific for the first two albums. I was occupying a space in a scene, in the dubstep thing I was still very much a part of. Not to say that it was a dishonest representation of myself, but it was a genre I was conforming to, to a certain extent. I was just trying not to be constrained by anything, genre-wise, and allow stuff to come out that wanted to come out that wasn’t coming out previously.
 
It’s interesting that you use the word “constrained” when talking about dubstep because I see you as a pioneer of that sound.
Right. I guess it’s as much of a curse as a blessing, being associated with something from the very start of it. It means that everyone always thinks of you as That Guy from That Thing, you know?
 
So from that perspective, having seen it blow up, do you have a different view of the rise of dubstep?
Well, someone’s going to have to write a book about it, and I hope it’s not someone who was actually there—there were so many little factions and competing rivalries. It’s interesting, the way it’s gone, because the U.S. stuff has completely taken over. That’s fine because the U.S. producers are doing their really hard stuff better than the U.K. guys are. It’s not my thing, but it is what it is. And, obviously, they’ve been pretty successful with it.
 
Do you see Personality as a statement about that rise?
It wasn’t a conscious attempt to make a mainstream step or reflect upon the mainstream success of other people or anything like that. It was a kind of reaction against the relative success of Triangulation and feeling for the first time ever that people are actually going to be interested in what I did after that. I definitely felt that after Triangulation, people were going to be like, “OK, what’s going to be the follow-up?” One of the few conscious things that I was trying to do was just not to do Triangulation again and not think about people who liked Triangulation or what they were going to want—and yeah, a lot of them don’t like what’s come out of it. But what can you do?
 
Scuba – You Got Me (from Triangulation) by Hotflush
 
Where do you think those people are coming from? Is commercial viability associated with a club sound?
I think people do associate it in that way. I mean, [Personality] is more dance-y, it’s definitely a lot more clubby, but I don’t think that equates to being more mainstream. I’m really happy with it though. I think it’s my best album, definitely. Not a lot of people seem to think that, but you know, fuck it, whatever. Loads of people do like it, don’t get me wrong. It’s already sold more than the last one. It’s just the Internet. I should stop reading the Internet.
 
The rise of dance music in general is interesting.
I heard someone speculating that it’s all a big conspiracy to sell more drinks. I’m not sure about that though.
 
I feel like raves and dance parties are not suited for drinking.
That’s the thing: It always used to be, certainly in the U.K., that clubs didn’t want to put on techno because people didn’t drink. They just drank water. I think it’s a bit different now—I mean, people don’t take as much Ecstasy as they used to, right?
 
What is the process of DJing like?
Well, I do think DJing is an underrated skill. I enjoy the challenge of putting certain kinds of music in different contexts and trying to make people dance to stuff that they wouldn’t dance to normally.
 
How is DJing a different process or experience than, say, playing in a band?
You are performing, but obviously you’re not playing an instrument. I think playing longer sets sorts the men from the boys because using different moods and taking people up and down over longer periods is like—you have to think much more than actually do. When you’re playing four or five hours, you have to think five or six tunes ahead.
 

You said “separating the men from the boys,” which is an interesting term to use, because DJ culture is so male-dominated.
OK, here we go.
 
Yeah, I know.
As that sentence was coming out of my mouth, I was like, “Oh no, what am I doing.” I think it works both ways. On the flip side of it is, sometimes it can create opportunities for women. If you look at Nina Kraviz, for example—I don’t think she would be anywhere near as successful if she weren’t an attractive woman. I really shouldn’t say that on record. It is right to say that [DJ culture] is male-dominated, but it’s almost inevitable because the mindset that the average DJ has is definitely a sort of male, geeky, trainspotter-y thing, and girls just don’t—this is a massive generalization, obviously—but it just seems to be more of a male trait than a female trait.
 
Not to say that there isn’t a large sexist undercurrent as well. Using Nina as an example, you only have to read the comments and the reviews of her album, and a large portion of them are like, “She’s hot,” “She’s hot,” “She’s hot.” Which is a fair comment, but you know, it’s not really that relevant to the music.

Alex Winston would like to clear something up. “First, I would like to say that I’m not an Elvis-obsessed person,” she says. It’s an assumption people might have made after seeing her in a white studded jumpsuit or after hearing her threaten to “Kill the bitch that bats an eye at Elvis” on her Velvet Elvis EP.
 
Winston says the King only indirectly inspired the EP’s title track. The idea for that song came from the documentary Married To The Eiffel Tower, which is about objectum sexuals or “people who fall in love with inanimate objects.” Winston’s inanimate object of inspiration? A velvet Elvis painting she saw in a second-hand store in her hometown of Detroit. “In the ’70s, if some girl who was an objectum sexual saw this painting, she would definitely fall in love.”
 
Alex Winston – Velvet Elvis by AlexWinstonOfficial
 
OK, Winston is not an Elvis fanatic. But is she a Mormon?
 
It’s a fair question after listening to the song “Sister Wife,” where, amid layers of chiming synths, tinkling bells and puffing percussion, Winston sings about vying for the attention of a shared Mormon husband. Turns out she doesn’t have a polygamy fascination, but she is interested in the idea of “feeling like you have a sister wife because you have to share something that you love and don’t want to share.” Instead of embodying the people in the songs on her EP and her debut album, King Con, Winston is simply finding inspiration in role-playing.
 
So if she’s not an Elvis maniac or a competitive Mormon, who is Alex Winston? Winston is a 24-year-old singer/songwriter who lives in Brooklyn but grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. Her dad owns a scrapyard there, but music has always been his passion. Winston remembers him dragging her to guitar conventions when she was only 5. “He wanted me to start playing [guitar] when I was 7. I was like, ‘No way, you’re crazy. I can barely read.’” At the age of 10, she started playing guitar and taking opera lessons, lessons she pursued for a decade. Winston still appreciates opera, but in terms of her own frolicking, Kate Bush-styled pop music, “It’s not like Puccini inspires my songs,” she says.
 
Winston played in bands in high school, but it wasn’t until she was 18 that her songwriting skills started to congeal. She made demos of her original material on her computer and shared them with other artists and producers in Detroit, but many of them were more interested in reshaping her sound rather than working with what she was offering. She found a better fit in the New York-based producers and DJs of the Knocks, whom she met through a friend. “What I really liked about them was that they weren’t trying to change me,” she says. Feeling a little stunted in Detroit and wanting to be closer to her team, Winston moved to New York.
 
Winston wrote the King Con songs over the last two years, and she recorded most of them at Brooklyn’s Mission Sound. The first time she played her material live was during CMJ 2010 at Public Assembly. “I ended up showing up to the venue at 1 o’clock, and we weren’t playing till about 6. So I thought, ‘I’ll calm my nerves, I’ll have a couple drinks, whatever,’” she says. “By the time we started playing, I was a little drunk. [That] was not a good show, but I definitely learned a lesson.”
 
If the buzz on Winston began that CMJ, it escalated considerably in 2011 with the release of her music video for “Sister Wife.” Most directors pitched her polygamy-themed ideas, but none of these compared to the winning treatment. “The first thing I read is ‘cat puking blood,’” she says, “and I was like, ‘Of course!’” The final video was based off of a 1970s Japanese horror film called House, a gory flick where cats do indeed puke blood. “We were trying to capture that, but I don’t think a lot of people got it. They were just like, ‘This is fucking weird.’”
 

Claire Boucher’s electronic bohemia is colored black. There is no golden-hearted hooker and wistful romance, no Moulin Rouge can-cans. Just Harkonnens and darkness. Boucher, aka Grimes, stepped into music just three years ago and came of age in the Montreal DIY loft scene. She’s now calling from her parents’ home in Vancouver. Wipe your mind of all images of Mom doing your laundry and making you a wholesome egg-and-bacon breakfast while you loaf about and watch cable. Boucher’s home away from home is a dank basement without sunlight. But she has all the creature comfort she needs: a mattress on the floor.
 
Grimes – Genesis
 
“I like the basement here because it’s dark. It’s perpetually night. There are no windows. I don’t like daylight. I just—it’s unproductive.” In self-imposed exile in a similar land-of-always-night, her newest album, Visions, was born. “I blacked out the windows and did tons of amphetamines and stayed up for three weeks and didn’t eat anything. I definitely can’t make music in the daytime.”
 
There’s a subtle beauty to Grimes’s tracks. Lyrically, Visions is a thunderous bastion of glossolalia, an echo chamber of angelic babbling. Grimes’s vocals are silky, her pop gothic. “This record is a sci-fi record—a sci-fi R&B record,” she jokes. But the jest rings true. An elfin crust-punk with a dignified stage presence, Grimes personifies her sound as a retro-future science fiction villain. “I like the bad guys!” she laughs. Her previous album was explicitly named for Dune’s post-industrial waste planet, Giedi Prime, from Frank Herbert’s iconic novel Dune (and an added “s” had the album title rhyme with Grimes). The theme continues on Visions, with beats equally as Bell Biv DeVoe as the lyrics are Mordor.
 
While channeling crystal-worshipping New Age synths on “Genesis” and industrial thumps with “Colour Of Moonlight,” Grimes throws a bone to a well-known Pokémon tune on “Vowels = Space And Time.” “I always thought Jigglypuff’s song was so beautiful and kind of iconic,” she says.
 
Although this is her third solo album, Grimes only entered the world of music in 2009 when she learned to record samples of herself attempting different instruments. She started mixing them on GarageBand and hasn’t stopped since.
 
Dismissed from McGill University for truancy, the 23-year-old’s hobbies in the past few years have been anything but pedestrian (or legal). In 2009 she drifted down the Mississippi River on a poorly constructed shantyboat stacked with potatoes and live chickens. In 2011 she and fellow Montrealer d’Eon spent a week playing shows and doing acid in Mexico City: “The promoters were these really cool, really amazing crew of super intellectual lesbians who had this insane hairless dog, and they did acid all the time,” Boucher says. “Every day we would wake up and come downstairs, and they’d have filled this bowl of weed for us. We’d smoke and go to the Museum Of Natural History.”
 

In the interim, Grimes played a pivotal role in organizing illegal loft shows in Montreal. The space was soon laden with about $6,000 in fines and forced to shut its doors. The collective of people who ran the art space didn’t try to reinstate it after the closure. “It wasn’t worth it especially because the fines were mostly from the bar, and if you can’t have the bar, then you can’t make up the fines,” Boucher says. “It just became economically not viable at a certain point.”
 
Many of the artists exiled from the art space, including Grimes, found a home on local label Arbutus. After two successful albums on Arbutus (and a split EP with d’Eon released on Hippos In Tanks), Boucher soon received calls from other labels looking to sign her. She declines to speak too in-depth about the negotiations, but she mentions that “there was a lot of drama” in the process of leaving Arbutus, which has released Visions in Canada. “There were a lot of tears to leave the label that basically built my career,” she says. This winter, though, she settled on 4AD for the non-Canadian release, and she says the label is “chill with a whole bunch of stuff that most labels aren’t chill with.” It’s a natural fit, as Boucher’s Tank-Girl-in-space act fits perfectly into a catalog defined by the Cocteau Twins’ quirk
and the Breeders’ sugar-sweet vocal charm.
 
In just a few months, Boucher’s daily routine has changed immensely. Her art and photographs have made her an ideal postergirl for DIY counterculture, and the fashion community has embraced her look of combat boots, flowing skirts and a strategically shaved head. The doe-eyed pixie was featured on Style.com and was seen traipsing about Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week. Boucher welcomes the new experiences,
but they’ve made some hurdles higher and harder to leap. “You know, there’s all this bureaucracy now,” she says. “I am not responsible for my own shit anymore.”
 
Boucher prefers shows happening at “3 in the morning at some crazy place” to performances at established venues, but that was before she had a booking agent. Now, Boucher is adjusting to life as a touring artist. She’s lost the autonomy to book shows on a whim and much of the social atmosphere that comes with independent booking. But she is both a producer and a musician, and to continue forward, some sacrifices are necessary. “I’m trying to organize what I want as a career, which is sort of hard to figure out,” she says. “Not that this is a career, but whatever the fuck it is.”
 

Brad Oberhofer is comfortable living by coincidence. Chance encounters and happy accidents have always yielded more exciting results than any inflexible plans he’s made. For example, there was no way he could’ve predicted that by moving from Tacoma, WA, to Brooklyn, NY, in 2008, he would end up in a band with the guy who taught him exactly one guitar lesson when they were both 16-year-old kids in Washington state. Things just happen, often for the best.
 
I recently met up with Oberhofer on New York City’s Lower East Side. Barely 21, Oberhofer cuts a tranquil figure in his Tacoma-thrift wolf-print sweater, skinny jeans and wispy tuft of dark brown hair that bobs joyously when I mention I’ve already heard his debut album, Time Capsules II. He sits across from me at a wobbly table, nursing a whole-wheat bagel and small drip coffee at the Cake Shop venue. It’s all silent but for the Talking Heads soundtrack, the occasional fliff of readers turning pages and our quiet conversation that has recently turned to debate over the highs and lows of Watch The Throne.
 
Oberhofer came to New York City in 2008 to study music composition at NYU, but he says he feels more like a student now, with fans and critics on the Internet giving him more feedback than his professors ever did. Today he and three friends, two fellow Tacoma natives, play lush pop-rock arrangements all under the name Oberhofer. But the band’s namesake has another way of describing the band’s style.
 
“It’s really just a combination of fuck-ups that coincidentally sounds pleasant,” he says.
 

 
Oberhofer calls his craft “coincidence pop”—an improvised patchwork of brainstorms, experiments and mistakes that occasionally come together in thrilling, accidental harmony. While recording Time Capsules II, mostly by himself in U2 producing legend Steve Lillywhite’s studio, Oberhofer tested the limits of every instrument (and implement) at his disposal. The resonant ping of a metal column in the tracking room becomes a glockenspiel stand-in. The tinny plunk of a toy piano becomes softer and more innocuous when flipped upside-down. In the right context, even a bandmate’s huffy outburst becomes another part of the symphony.
 
“It’s buried, but you can hear our drummer [Pete Sustarsic] scream and slam the door shut in ‘Haus,’” Oberhofer says. “Pete is super talented, by the way. I just work better alone when recording.”
 
Oberhofer’s dual role as coincidence seeker and solitary experimenter casts him as a sort of mad artful-pop alchemist. For a first creation, Time Capsules II is a beautifully portioned chemistry of guitar, bass, piano, percussion, violin, xylophone, Theremin, accordion and just enough metal-tracking-room-column to leave room for Oberhofer’s commanding vocals. His lyrics range from pure hooky gibberish built to unite festival audiences in a chorus of oohs and ahs to deeply personal remembrances of the fleeting love that inspired him to sit down and write four years ago (“All that I wanted was a little bit of heart/I gave you my love and you tore it apart”). The result is tender bedroom pop put on blast by studio shine. It is material that sounds perfectly comfy alongside the sing-along guitar-and-vocal hooks of Tapes ’N Tapes or the hyper-produced glitz of Neon Indian; Oberhofer has opened gigs for both.
 

 
The next few steps in Oberhofer’s ongoing, coincidental journey through space-time include rehearsing a live show in support of the album, tweaking the 50-some demos he’s already recorded for what will inevitably become a sophomore release (Time Capsules III?) and playing Coachella in April. Oberhofer has never attended the festival as a civilian, and now his first experience there will involve being on the same bill as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. “It’s weird,” he says. “Well, it’s not weird. It’s just…new.”

 
Some questions are unpleasant. “I remember, maybe in 2007, when we first started being a band,” says Bowerbirds’ Phil Moore, “and we had an interview with somebody—I forget who—and they asked us, ‘What will the band be if you two break up?’ And I was like, ‘It probably won’t. I can’t really see it being a band at all.’”
 
The annals of pop music are filled with great breakup records but not many reconciliation albums. Sure, “Breaking up is hard to do,” as the song goes, but calling it quits and then getting back together can be much, much harder, and the complex emotional transactions and personal concessions involved—forgiving each other, admitting one’s own fears, learning to live with another person’s faults—aren’t exactly the type of dramatic scenarios that lend themselves to pop songs, even within the self-styled “literary” world of folk music. There’s a reason Shoot Out The Lights, Richard and Linda Thompson’s famous last album as a married couple, wasn’t followed by another record titled Let’s Go Buy Some New Lights Cause We Shot The Old Ones Out. Blood usually stays on the tracks.
 
This makes The Clearing, the third LP from the Bowerbirds, a thematic rarity, a truly odd bird.
 
Moore and Beth Tacular began the Bowerbirds together, and their relationship has always been central to the band’s music and public identity: two young people in love, singing beautiful pastoral folk songs, living off the land in a cabin, serving as a gentle sonic reminder that occasionally we should stop and smell the bark. “We do get pigeonholed as this folk activist band,” says Moore from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Not activist even, but like folk, green, hippy band or whatever. And I feel, personally, it’s not as if I don’t believe in all those causes, I just think it’s hard to relate to being called a folk musician now.”
 

 
The group released its debut, Hymns For A Dark Horse, in 2007 and soon began work on the follow-up album, Upper Air, writing half of the songs in one session and then going on a three-month tour. Moore and Tacular drifted apart during this time, eventually ending their relationship. “That was really difficult,” says Moore. “To be on the road together and constantly having to make decisions and having to play shows and putting yourself out there. It really took its toll on the relationship.”
 
The pair wrote the second half of Upper Air upon returning from the tour, which makes it at least half of a breakup record or, perhaps, a record of broken people. “We didn’t really make a big deal of it on [Upper Air] because we were still in that really vulnerable spot where we didn’t want to share that kind of information,” explains Moore. “We actually had to release the album and play that whole album while being broken up for a year, and we didn’t really want to answer questions like that at the time. We were on stage singing breakup songs about our breakup.”
 
At the midpoint of the song “This Year,” one of the standout tracks off of the new album, Moore sings, “On and on goes the long winter/My eyes now fixed to the stars/We’ve been there before and I’m fairly sure we’ll find a clearing/In the forest of our hearts.” It’s a stirring moment. Moore’s dewey, Terrence Malick-like transcendentalism colliding with the plainspoken truth that, all poetics aside, life sucks and pain is cyclical. Notice that Moore says he’s “fairly sure” they’ll find refuge. There are no guarantees.
 
It turns out the couple found its clearing. “We moved apart for a while, and then that was really good for our relationship even though it really sucked at the time,” says Moore. “Eventually we started hanging out and dating again without the band happening. I realized all the stress of touring was the main cause of the breakup, and it had a lot less to do with how we felt about each other.”
 
Though Moore and Tacular were back together, there were still changes to be made within the band. The recording sessions for The Clearing saw Tacular assuming a greater creative role, contributing more vocals and lyrics as the group worked on the new songs at home and later recorded tracks in Wisconsin at Justin Vernon’s April Base studio. “We talked it out, and we just had to let go of some things and allow each other to be who we set out to be in the pinnacle of our dreams,” says Moore. “We had to hold onto our dreams and really allow each other to grow and change in the midst of writing the album. And, I think we—it sounds kind of vague, I guess—I feel like we kind of gave each other more space this time around because we figured out it wouldn’t work if we didn’t.”
 
That space is felt throughout The Clearing, which is both cavernous and intimate. Given the luxury of time, the arrangements are more adventurous than their previous work, incorporating ominous, swirling post-rock textures that Moore explored in his former band, Ticonderoga. By expanding beyond the group’s original template of accordion, bass drum and loud string guitar, the songs now conjure the same sense of awe elicited by the seas, forests and skies described in the lyrics.
 
Dead Oceans, the band’s label, recently released a six-minute minidocumentary on the making of The Clearing. In the video Moore and Tacular discuss their breakup and show us around the cabin they’re building—Moore’s hair tucked back in a ponytail, Tacular’s now streaked gray. They look tired.
 
The two sit on an old couch and take turns speaking to the camera. “We wanted to try to make the album as beautiful as we can and have it contain all the darkness that we have in our minds on a daily basis,” says Tacular, Moore’s arm around her as he gazes off. “The things we’re worried about—our relationship, the state of the world, the environment or our dog that’s on a chain—[we wanted the album to] contain that but also contain all the amazingness and beauty and wonder that we have, and try to make the wonder win.”
 

 
“I’m a success story,” says Rahmeece Chevosier Howell over lunch in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. It may sound like an odd claim coming from a 20-something lyricist who’s banking on his forthcoming sophomore album to make his name stick in the popular consciousness and, more serious yet, to feed his children. When an upbringing is hostile to the point that success is defined by simple survival, however, it’s a serious accomplishment. “A lot of my friends didn’t make it,” he says.
 

 
The word “rough” might not aptly describe the life that Howell, who raps as Fatal Lucciauno, endured growing up. Born in Chicago to an abusive household with a father who was addicted to crack and entrenched in the city’s gang culture as a member of the infamous Gangster Disciples, his upbringing is a Cimmerian tale of violence, drugs and poverty. Now, two decades after his family fled to Seattle in search of a brighter future, Howell is finally able to take stock of the tribulations that helped form the man he is today. “I was the one panhandling, singing, rapping Biggie songs over my dad’s rendition of a Temptations song in front of Subway so that me and my brothers and sisters could have something to eat at night,” he recounts.
 
Far from forgotten, his harsh memories fill his songs with tales of struggle and aggression, the realness of which, coupled with the fact that he’d recently served an 18-month stint in prison on a firearm charge, earned him an unceremonious black-listing for a time from the city’s premier venues. Though the local scene rallied, and eventually the ban was lifted, it’s clear that a bitter taste remains.
 
Howell’s new album, Respect (released February 21 on Sportn’ Life), finds its narrator not completely healed of his past wounds but fighting to live life. The father of six says he may have settled down for now but feels that he’d be doing his listeners a disservice to leave the streets alone on record. He says that his experiences, rugged as they might be, might actually lend strength to young people growing up in tough situations. “I’m not giving you a solution, I’m letting you know you’re not alone,” he says. “See, [kids] don’t want to come to their parents because they don’t want to be looked down on. They don’t want to go to their pastors, or whoever their role models are, because they feel like they’re on a pedestal they can’t reach. They’re around their friends, and they gotta put up a front, so they can’t open up. If somebody who really understands it speaks to them, they’re like ‘oh OK,’ and if they don’t see me hurting and bruised and battered, but know that I have been bruised and battered, then it’s another way to let them go on, because they’re not alone. I’m not watching a video. I’m not watching a DVD explaining hood life. I know what you’re talking about.”
 
Authenticity—and a local fan-base—Howell has, but in a time where the genre has veered toward the more upbeat, or at least dance-friendly, finding an audience on a large scale has been elusive. One of Howell’s primary collaborators, the Seattle-hailing mega-producer Jake “One” Dutton, believes Howell’s simply riding the natural ebb and flow of the national scene. “Everything [right now] is about being high on drugs and partying, but he doesn’t really do that too much through his music,” says Dutton. “He’s kind of going against the grain. Him getting more prominence on the national scene will probably happen once it pushes back to that, which inevitably, it will.”
 

 
Dutton has known Lucciauno for years, having first met at a studio in South Seattle where they both recorded. He says he recognized Howell’s natural gift right away and has worked with him constantly. “He’s just always had something about his voice and his presence that seemed real to me that I don’t get from a lot of people I hear rap,” continues Dutton. “He’s definitely good enough. I don’t have any doubt about that.”
 
But Howell is not without other marketable elements. Aside from the obvious strength of rhyme, he’s successfully harnessed the power of shock through the brutal language and vivid detail of his past exploits. Fans of, say, Odd Future, wouldn’t have to stretch too far to embrace a Lucciauno song like “Adolf Hitler.” The same natural progression could be made from Rick Ross’s tough-talk to Lucciauno’s real-life narcotic experience on “Cocaine (I Cry).” Whatever’s marketable in Howell’s repertoire, though, is most likely coincidence: He just tells it like he sees it. “They say ‘Everybody has a story, what makes yours so interesting?’” he poses rhetorically as he leans over the lunch table. The answer comes with the kind of wide-eyed bravado that has marked many successful MCs: “Because I lived mine.”

British rhyme dropper Speech Debelle earned international attention in 2009 when her debut album, Speech Therapy, won the Mercury Prize, topping popular U.K. acts like Florence And the Machine, La Roux and the Horrors. In August 2011 the culturally conscious rapper turned heads again when an outbreak of destructive U.K. riots inspired her to prematurely release “Blaze Up A Fire,” a track from her anticipated second album, Freedom Of Speech, along with a long-form explanation that stirred some controversy.
 
“These young people are not aliens dropped down from outer space on Friday night,” Debelle wrote. “They are our children. We cannot say there is something wrong with them without acknowledging there must be something wrong with us as a society.”
 
Freedom Of Speech, which Debelle says is deeply inspired by the global riots and uprisings that characterized 2011 in her eyes, is due out on February 21 on Big Dada. Stoked by “Blaze Up A Fire” and the innocuously catchy single “Studio Backpack Rap,” CMJ called up Debelle for an interview from her U.K. home, accidentally interrupting her Friday afternoon toast. So we called again 10 minutes later.
 
CMJ: Did winning a Mercury Prize for your last album change the way you approached this second album?
Speech Debelle: Because of the Mercury I didn’t have to worry as much about getting recognition. I was a lot more particular with this album, I think because I had a better understanding of what it is I was trying to do. I wasn’t afraid to take a step back when need be.
 
How long did it take you to record Freedom Of Speech?
It took about six months. Each song went through a lot of different stages because this time I’m working with like nine instruments, and we’ve got a string quartet playing with us too. After the initial sort of grab of inspiration there’s a lot of going back and forth with different musicians and the producer. We’ll start with this sort of organic sound and just keep breaking that down through production and mixing. This album was actually mixed twice.
 
Speech Debelle – Studio Backpack Rap (FREE DOWNLOAD) by Big Dada Sound
 
That’s surprising. You make it all seem so easy on “Studio Backpack Rap.” Do you have a ritual for writing songs?
When I go into the studio, I switch on. I’m not one of those people that sort of like writes just loads of lyrics at bars or whatever. Outside of making songs, I’m not really a big writer like that. I have to switch on. To rap or to write something, you need to gear up, like when you’re boxing you need to put your gloves on. Boxing and rapping are both skills, and you have to put yourself in the right place to be able to produce what you need to produce.
 
Do you usually have other people around you when you’re coming up with songs?
In the earlier days it was usually just me and one other tech. But this album is a lot more of a social album. I had friends over a lot, and towards the evening they’d come in with drinks, and I think you get that social feel when listening to the album. During the final days of mixing, people would be coming in every day to listen and hang out.
 
It sounds like you really enjoy sharing your music with people. Do you like to tour?
Yeah, I’m always happy to do tours but particularly Europe. I always get to eat great food—I think my No. 1 thing is probably crème brûlée—the vibe is always good, and the audience is always alive. When you do shows in a place where English is a second language, you’ve got people coming from all over who really like this song even if they don’t get all the lyrics. It’s a more musical interaction, and you can really feel it.
 
BLAZE UP A FIRE by Speech Debelle (featuring Roots Manuva and Realism) by Speech Debelle
 
You wrote “Blaze Up A Fire” long before the London riots started in August. That’s kind of a crazy coincidence. What inspired you to write that song?
Oh, everything! Everything that was happening in the world in 2011 inspired that song and the whole album, actually.
 
Yeah, 2011 was a pretty big year for revolts.
Right. I think one thing that 2011 kind of showed me was that so many of us are the same, you know? If you take the London Uni student riots, which happened in 2011—there was one in 2010 as well—and you take the neo-African and Egyptian uprisings and riots, you see it’s a very similar situation. In each group, it’s the same type of young people fighting. The London financial powerhouse of the world is dealing with people with the same complaints and dislikes as people in third world countries in Africa. People all over the world are all in the same boat right now, you know?
 
For sure. Do you envision a world where change can come through speech instead of violence?
I don’t think violence can ever be ruled out, unfortunately. It’s a part of human nature. And it’s not just a part of human nature, it’s a part of every species’ nature. But even though violence can’t be totally removed, I think in our sort of society it’s imperative that we know other forms of communication. People turn to violence because they cannot express themselves in a way that’s capable of being understood or because people aren’t listening to them. Destruction is what so many of these young people have been fed, and now they’ve got an appetite for it.
 
Would you like to inspire change with your music?
No. I’m just trying to do what I enjoy doing. That’s it.

The founders of Profile Records didn’t set out to create an iconic independent hip-hop label. Using borrowed money from their parents, Cory Robbins and Steve Plotnicki started the label as a way to release dance singles, but the label soon evolved into a home for some of the most innovative and ground-breaking rap music of the ’80s and ’90s. Artists like Run-D.M.C., Dana Dane, Rob Base And DJ E-Z Rock, Poor Righteous Teachers, Onyx and DJ Quik helped make Profile a driving force in a musical and cultural revolution. Last week, Sony Legacy released Giant Single: The Profile Records Rap Anthology, an impeccably designed and curated collection of essential Profile singles drawn from the label’s 20-year history and featuring linear notes from hip-hop historian Dan Charnas.
 
To dig deeper into the history and cultural lineage of Profile, we talked to Charnas, former Profile employee and author of the essential hip-hop tome The Big Payback: The History Of The Business Of Hip-Hop. CMJ spoke to Charnas about his time in the Profile mail room, the lessons to be taken from Profile’s rise and the entrepreneurial ethos of hip-hop.
 
CMJ: Is it true that you started out in the Profile mail room?
Charnas: I started in the mail room in fall of 1989. I was interning and doing temp work at a number of different record labels to break into the business, but my gambit was to send resumes to all of the rap indie labels. And there weren’t a lot of major labels involved in hip-hop at that time, and Cory Robbins saw my resume, which included being Phi Beta Kappa summa cum laude at Boston University, and offered me a job in his mail room cause that’s how you start at Profile Records. You don’t start with some executive job—you’re stuffing envelopes.
 
One of the things I did notice when I got there was that [Profile] was responsible for a lot of the rap that was very successful, but they didn’t have any rap junkies working for the label. You had people who liked rap, you know, but the guy who signed Rob Base, he was more of a dance guy. Multimedia people were dance oriented, and rap was sort of treated as a tough set of dance by a lot of the folks there.
 
Do you think there was a unifying quality between all the early independent rap labels?
They were not evangelists for hip-hop, rather they were evangelists for independent music, and they were usually from outer boroughs or suburbs of New York, many of them Jewish but some Italian and Irish. They were like the little disco kids who wanted to be in the record business and wanted to make dance 12″s because they liked going to clubs and hearing music. But rap really started to rise, and there was no one aside from Joe and Sylvia Robinson who was gonna make a haul for those people. So Cory Robbins, he made a home for rap records.
 

In your liner notes, you say in the ’90s the major labels learned how to do rap right. What lessons do you think the majors took from companies like Profile?
A lot of these companies couldn’t sell their act. They couldn’t crack Profile. The first thing is it was a 12″ business at first. And these folks in the independent knew how to sell 12″s, they knew the places to sell them, they knew that they sold differently, they were promoted more in clubs and in shows and on the radio. And major labels had an album-oriented business: They didn’t care about 12″ singles. They weren’t going to invest in artists like that. So one thing that majors learned from the indies that you saw later on in the ’90s was taking this second route. Warner bought Alliance, Sony had RED, so there were ways to distribute stuff.
 
Another innovation that folks learned from indie labels was street marketing. Indie labels put down that tradition. They put together networks of promoters who were in with the producers and the managers. And they had had previous success, so when people were circulating their demo tapes, of course they would rather be on Def Jam than on Columbia or some other parent label because Def Jam was the shit. All your favorite records were on Def Jam.
 
On the flip-side of that, do you think there were things that the smaller labels could have learned from the majors?
Yeah. I do. I mean obviously, a lot of these independent labels ran very sloppily. Profile actually ran very professionally. Profile was on the verge of becoming a major label at one point, and they started a national distributor by buying up small distributors around the country. The definition of a major label is to have your own manufacturing, your own distribution and an international presence. And Profile had it in Los Angeles and New York and London, Profile had distribution across the entire country. It was a hair away from being a major. The issue was that they weren’t well capitalized, and I don’t think that Cory really wanted to get bigger, and he wanted to keep the releases at a certain amount. Also, Profile’s A&R was not major caliber A&R. A lot of independent labels operated on this cheapo ethos, this club ethos. It serves you in those early years, but if you really wanted to become a major, you’re gonna have to be spending a lot more money. If Columbia is wooing this guitar band for $200,000, and you’re coming with your typical $50,000 album advance, you can forget it. So I don’t think Profile really had that vision.
 

Next page: Charnas on hip-hop today

Wally De Backer is old news to many. The lanky Australian with the massive voice has been releasing albums as Gotye since 2003. He sells out shows worldwide, fans flock to his YouTube videos by the millions, and he took home three ARIAs in 2011 for Single Of The Year, Best Male Artist and Best Pop Release. His breakthrough LP, Making Mirrors, came out in Australia in August, but it was just officially released in the States last week. Way to show up late to the party, America.
 
Gotye played a handful of shows at CMJ 2011, and he recently returned to the States for two sold-out, headlining sets, the first at El Rey in L.A. and the second tonight at New York’s Bowery Ballroom. CMJ caught up with De Backer, on the phone in his home outside of Melbourne, shortly before the U.S. release of Making Mirrors to talk about performing at the ARIAs, breakup songs and that damn clever cover by some quirky Canadians.
 
CMJ: The upcoming tour brings you to New York, but I know that won’t be your first time here because I did see you at this year’s CMJ. Was that the first time you played and attended CMJ?
Gotye: Yeah, first time, my first shows in New York. I’d been once as a tourist before. Which show did you see?
 
I saw the one at the Thompson.
Oh, all right. OK. [That show] was like a mini nightmare for me. It was kind of like, “Hang on, I thought me and my managers agreed we wouldn’t do any shows like this: middle of the day, no visuals, no lights.” I felt pretty out of my depth there. I was kind of like, “This is not the right vibe for my music at all.” And yet, some people really loved that show.
 
Yeah, it was great.
It was very far short of the kind of show we usually try to put on. I mean, it’s not a big deal. It’s more I’m really into a lot of the animations and visuals that I’ve commissioned for a lot of these songs. There’s a certain aspect where some of my songs, they’re quite introspective. There are definitely tunes where I feel like the visuals and the lights and darkness and me kind of not being, you know, the guy on the mic, the lead vocal guy, the vibe that I imagine for the song where the music and my part in it are kind of meant to come from a certain sound world or color world or visual space. So when you play in the middle of the day on the top floor of a hotel with a bunch of people five centimeters from your face, that doesn’t really allow you that presentation of that kind of material. [Laughs] But you know, no big deal. I got closer to that with the show at the Brooklyn Bowl and at Santos Party House at CMJ.
 

The vibe at the Thompson Hotel show must’ve been kind of intense for you, but the level of intensity for your performance at the ARIAs must’ve been way higher.
I don’t have the best memories of that night. I was pretty nonplussed by my performance at the ARIAs. I’ve almost been kind of like, “You know what? That would be one video I’d consider trying to remove off YouTube.” It was a real dud in my book. A lot of my music, my voice and the lyric is at center, and so inevitably I’m the focus point. There are a lot of elaborate arrangements around that, but if I’m not measuring up at the center then most of the rest can be fine, but it can still feel a bit like it lacks its core. And I felt a bit like that was what happened with the ARIAs performance. The kind of drama of the performance was great, and the band played fantastic. But I just sang terribly. I kind of reflect on that and listen to it and go, “Wow, I did really badly there.” I’ve sung this song really well live, but that was just about one of the worst times I’ve performed it.
 

Next page: Gotye’s take on Walk Off The Earth

 
Team Clermont has spent the past 15 years helping both new and established artists maintain exposure in the press and at radio. 2011 was especially eventful for the company, with big showcases at CMJ and SXSW and ending off the year promoting a record that was No. 1 for six weeks in a row on the CMJ charts. 2012 brings the company’s 15-year anniversary. Team Clermont’s Shil Patel and Steve Hendriksen talk with CMJ about the past, as well as their plans for the future.
 
CMJ: What are some of your favorite memories of 2011 as far as things you did or worked on as a company?
Steve Hendriksen: 2011 was a great one for us! We had the chance to put on our annual showcases at CMJ and SXSW, as well as our first showcase at Raleigh, NC’s Hopscotch Music Festival (where I actually got to join John Vanderslice on stage for two songs). Also, having the chance to see M83 on Halloween night was pretty legendary.
 
Shil Patel: I had a great time at the festivals too—SXSW, 35 Denton, CMJ and the rest. At SXSW, one of the highlights was getting to see Telekinesis record a few songs with Jim Eno (Spoon) at his studio. At 35 Denton I saw Big Boi, Reggie Watts, and saw Michael Cera pop up everywhere. And at CMJ I had a great time at our showcase and at our party at Barcade. We promoted so many incredible albums, including M83‘s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which ended the year at No. 1 for six weeks in a row on the CMJ Radio 200 chart.
 
Were there any releases that surprised you by how well they were received at college radio stations?
SH: We sent out a single from a New Zealand group called Kids Of 88 in the early part of 2011 that stations really seemed to jump all over.
 
SP: I go back to that M83 album. We all knew it would do well, considering that Saturdays=Youth was M83′s first album to come in at No. 1 on the chart. But I was really blown away by all the support that kept Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming at No. 1 for so long. For a couple weeks over 70 percent of the stations that submitted charts had M83 in their Top 30. That was very impressive to me.
 
What are some releases you’re looking forward to hearing in 2012?
SH: Bear In Heaven! I loved their 2009 release, Beast Rest Forth Mouth, and I can’t wait to see how they’re going to follow it up.
 
SP: I agree with Steve: Can’t wait to hear that Bear In Heaven. I’m also really looking forward to the upcoming Magnetic Fields, Sharon Van Etten, Shearwater, Tindersticks, Nite Jewel and Andrew Bird releases, as well as getting my hands on all those Palace reissues.
 
It looks like 2011 treated you guys pretty well, and 2012 should too with your 15-year anniversary coming up. So now for a little history: How did Team Clermont get started as a company?
SP: Bill Benson and Nelson Wells were both working for the same promotion company in 1997 that Nelson co-founded a few years earlier. They formed a new partnership and bought that previous company (Revolution Promotion Management, the company that broke Hootie And The Blowfish and helped get them signed). With the new company, they streamlined and sharpened their focus on mostly indie artists and less Triple A-leaning artists. However, Team Clermont carried on with almost all of the same great clients: Warner Bros., Geffen, Tim/Kerr Records and more, and with artists like R.E.M. and Little Red Rocket (who later became Azure Ray featuring Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink, two former Athenians).
 
What’s changed the most about college radio in the past 15 years?
SP: I’ve been at Team Clermont since the beginning of 2007, and in that period of time there have been several changes. Of course, technology has changed so many things. Many of the stations we work with were among the first to develop their online presence, offering video of in-studio performances, creating regular podcasts and utilizing social media in creative ways. There seems to be more options for stations to make their presence felt.
 
SH: It’s exciting to see how stations are utilizing new technologies and social media to further their station’s goals and raise awareness. Stations have been able to capitalize on these free services in really creative ways, and it’s exciting to see what they’ll be up to next.
 
Are there challenges you face in radio promotion now that didn’t exist 15 years ago?
SP: Sure, I think one of the biggest challenges at the moment is the transition to digital servicing. Many other companies and labels are dealing with it as well. It makes sense to decrease the amount of CDs that are being mailed out for many reasons. When you take into account everything that goes into mailing a CD to a station (the CD itself, packaging, postage, fuel costs, etc.), it adds up monetarily and environmentally. I know that eventually we will get to a point where we no longer send out CDs, but right now we still ask our artists and labels to mail them out because many stations don’t yet have the time or the infrastructure to shift to an all-digital system. We want to make it as easy as possible for a music director to hear the music we’re promoting. As of now, we find that sending CDs cuts down the number of steps it takes for them to review the music.
 
This year calls for some more celebrations than usual. Have you made any plans yet for celebrating your anniversary?
SP: Yes! We’re working on throwing a 15th anniversary party from July 26-28. We haven’t thrown a Team Clermont Blue Ribbon Ball or Summer Festival since we did the Summer Camp in 2008, and we thought, “What better time to get all our friends in the music industry down to Athens than on our 15th anniversary?” We’re still in the planning stages, but we’ll fill everyone in on the details over the coming months.
 
SH: It’s going to be legendary.
 
Check out some of Team Clermont’s current and past projects on its website.

 
“Misery loves company.” It’s the kind of adage you see on a ceramic mug and greet with a half-cynical, half-sad smile. But there’s a reason the phrase has been around for so long: Often, the best cure for romantic and artistic malaise is to sequester yourself with friends—preferably in a place not easily found. And that’s exactly what Los Campesinos! did.
 
The sprightly, smart, power-pop outfit, whose members met as students at Cardiff University in Wales, quickly gained a following for its cheeky lyrics (and nicknames), as well as its crunchy, catchy, art-punk songs. Love, heartbreak, football—they’re topics that never stray from the minds of young people, and as a result, Los Campesinos! came to epitomize youthful energy in its purest form: limitless, sexually charged and plastered with a gap-toothed grin. But everyone grows up eventually, and inevitably and painfully, someone’s heart gets broken. As the band began to prep its fourth record in the vast valleys of the Pyrenees, lead singer-songwriter Gareth Campesino! ended a long-term relationship, setting the tone for the most potent, mature LP in the band’s discography: Hello Sadness.
 
“It’s never a good time for any of that to happen, but we went through that together, away from everything, so it was nice that we could channel a lot of those emotions,” says bassist Ellen Campesino!, a note of fatigue punctuating her cool cadence. When I catch up with her, it’s noon on a Friday, and Ellen’s at home in Bristol, dealing with a bout of jetlag. The band has just wrapped up a short tour of the U.S., U.K. and Japan: nearly two straight weeks of shows, with just enough time to get from place to place (and plenty of time to listen to the guys in the band talk football).
 
Ellen says the crowds have been terrific: pulsating with energy, just as eager to hear new hits like the victoriously pessimistic “By Your Hand” as they are to mouth along to every word of “You! Me! Dancing!” Japan brought a bit of a shock, though: “The crowds in Japan, they’re really polite. They don’t really talk at all. You think ‘oh, they hate this,’ but they are enjoying it. They’re just quite polite,” she notes. For Los Campesinos!, life on tour is a different adventure every day: scoping out the coffee shops in a dusty American college town, kicking a football around in an abandoned lot not too far from the venue.
 
Hello Sadness by Los Campesinos!
 
So how did such an easygoing group of people make such a disciplined record? Call it introspection. “We kind of started to pull ourselves together and really focus in on the concepts that had been unfocused in the past,” says Ellen. “We wanted to take a more direct approach with this record…to have it be a little bit more of a “less is more” thing and more disciplined.”
 
Hello Sadness resulted from a self-induced sea change, rather than the product of emulation. Out in the Spanish countryside, Ellen recalls, “there wasn’t anything to distract us. We couldn’t just spend the day in a coffee shop or a record store. It was just the countryside, the sunsets.” The isolation had profound musical effects as well: the sound on the album is less confined and more dynamically aware, while still maintaining the rudiments of intimacy: “Hate For The Island” looms cavernously, while “Light Leaves, Dark Sees” offers a telling glimpse into the feelings of loneliness and catharsis that would otherwise dissipate if stuffed into a tiny room.
 
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Los Campesinos! never lost its groove, and in fact, the gang listened to a lot of New Order over the course of its rural retreat. For every tale of heartache, there’s a delightfully quirky anecdote not far behind: a narrative scrap garnered from a fuzzy night out that seems almost too funny to be true. Ellen says that most of the band’s songs “are based on real people and real experiences.” And what about the goings-on in “Baby, I’ve Got the Death Rattle”—Gareth drawing a penis on the snow-covered windshields of cars for every girl who wouldn’t sleep with him? Jokingly, she half-worries if there are “tons of people in Cardiff, who will go to our show, hear the song and then be like, ‘I do remember waking up and seeing all these penises drawn on my car!’”
 
Los Campesinos! will resume touring in 2012, and while Cardiff isn’t on the itinerary (yet), there’s no telling if such an exchange will indeed occur. More likely, audiences will marvel at the growth of Los Campesinos! and the band’s evolution from a bunch of football-loving college kids to, well, a bunch of football-loving adults: older, wiser, with some heartbreak under their belts but still making music as witty and infectious as ever.

 
If VV Brown were a rapper, people would say she is “grinding.” The U.K. songstress is busy creating an online vintage shop, prepping for her sophomore album due out in February and performing around the world.
 
A divine multi-tasker, she took time to chat with us while cooking some spaghetti. Here’s what she had to say:
 
CMJ: After being offered several record deals before, what made you finally decide to sign with Capitol?
VV Brown: I thought they were really iconic. I like the artists on their roster, and I just had a really good feel about them and enjoyed working with the people. The timing also had a lot to do with it. I was already signed to Europe with Travelling Like The Light, and we were exploring other offers in America. Capitol Records came in with an offer, and it was just perfect.
 
You got the American record deal, and then you hit American television. Your first appearance was on the Rachael Ray Show. What was that first experience like for you?
It was amazing. I was really nervous. I never performed on American TV before, and the stigma with performing in America is just huge especially because I’m from England and it’s such a small country. She made us feel really welcomed and fed us delicious brownies.
 

About a month ago CMJ got the chance to see you at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. You weren’t wearing any shoes—is that pretty standard for you?
I never wear shoes when I perform. I like to feel really free. I like to have less distractions from the music. Laughs
 
During that performance you announced that it was your first time performing any songs from your new album, Lollipops And Politics. What made you choose New York as the first place to preview it?
I think New York is the hardest crowd in America; one, because they seem real and, two, because they seem quite European in the sense that their decision making about creative stuff is quite harsh. I also love New York and the vibe. It always feels like home. Brooklyn also has a really great creative environment. It was a great way to start and test the tour. Why not start in New York where they are going to keep it real?
 
At that same show, you mentioned that “Like Fire” was the first song you produced.
On the album I played all the instruments on it. It meant so much to me and still does. It’s kind of a window into a really deep part of me and where I am as an artist.
 
Is it the same beat from Usher’s“There Goes My Baby”? Did you produce that song as well?
I did hear about this about the melody being similar. Hums “There Goes My Baby.” It’s difficult, but, no, I didn’t intend to do it. Maybe my subconscious did. I hope he doesn’t sue me.
 

 
Do you maintain your own Twitter?
I do. I don’t tweet as much as I should, but I do have a Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I tend to be quite emotional, so if something upsets me I take it to Twitter, which is really quite dangerous. Social media is a great way to promote your music, but it is creating a weird thing where people are being really, really open about everything. I find it a bit weird.
 
Lollipops And Politics drops early February. Is your excitement level through the roof?
I’m just cool. It will be what it will be. I think I will be more excited when we go back on tour. But I am excited that people will be able to hear it all. But I’m cool. I’m just going to watch. I’m going to sit in the middle and just be cool.
 
Final question. Can you tell us a bit about the vintage store you are opening?
VV Vintage is launching online at the end of January. I’m very excited about this project. We are selling vintage clothing, and we want people to know that it just isn’t another vintage shop. We work with young designers that come straight out of art school, and we take vintage clothing and turn it into these amazing pieces. It’s in the price range of like an Asos. I would love for people to look out for it in January.

 
How to make a year-end list: Write down all of the albums you listened to a bunch in 2011. Usher’s Confessions came out in 2004. Cross it out. Narrow this pool to 10. Now deal with the fact that you are only allowed five. Stop crying. There’s no room on my desk for your tears. Get rid of the ones you are only putting on there for cool points. Examine play counts on iTunes for a reality check of your real favorites. Fine, hypothetical bootlegs of live shows from 2011 may remain. And yes, you may group multiple mixtapes from the same artist as one entry. Sign, seal, submit, post for public viewing. Brace for judgment. Cope with regret. Make up for it all in 2012.

---

Kristen Bayusik

Data Manager

---

Amy Hintz

Marketing Director

---

Lisa Hresko

Editor-In-Chief

Thank you, Based God, for another fruitful year of #based music. The Internet rap phenomenon known as Lil B had his biggest year yet in 2011, putting out eight releases that spanned mixtape, album and Garage Band .mp3 formats, including the 676-song Free Music: The MySpace Collection. Having already compared himself to the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Miley Cyrus and, um, God, the walking rap meme upped the ante this year, releasing YouTube gems such as “Justin Bieber,” “Charlie Sheen,” “Bill Bellamy” and “Dr. Phil,” to name a few.
 
But it wasn’t just his steady stream of output, goofy or otherwise, that boosted his popularity. Following his announcement in May that he would be releasing a record titled I’m Gay, even news publications like New York Magazine and CNN wanted to pick his brain, yielding some pretty hilarious interviews. Lil B’s growing influence manifested itself outside of the World Wide Web, like in the NFL where his signature Cooking Dance inexplicably became one of the league’s most popular celebration dances. And though Lil B remained voluntarily label-less in 2011, his buzzing rap descendants like A$AP Rocky were able to cash in on a style that Lil B pioneered, which includes rapping over the ethereal dreamscape beats of producers like Clams Casino and boasting about how “pretty” you are.
 
With so much #based music to sort through from 2k11, we picked out a few of our favorites from Lil B’s wildly productive year.
 

---

Best Album: I’m Gay
 
The heterosexual Lil B’s self-proclaimed “statement to the world” had little to do with homosexuality but much to do with fine-tuning his sound in his most affecting release to date. I’m Gay opens to find our hero “Trapped In Prison,” waxing philosophic about the prevalence of “mental slavery,” something he seeks to abolish over the ensuing 11 tracks of fascinatingly warped conscious-rap. It’s unfailingly positive and, at times, genuinely inspirational, especially on cuts like the Obama-sampling “Gon Be Okay.” But the Based God is at his best when going in over luminous soul samples, as on the headnodic “Get It While It’s Good” (streaming below) and the shimmering standout “I Seen That Light.”