Dancing About Architecture Music News Report 11.24.09
Posted by Ian Wright on 11.24.2009
An interview with St. Vincent, bands added to the Pavement ATP and Primavera Sound festival, Future Islands get a record deal, news on the new Interpol album, a new Spencer Krug project, U2 to play Glastonbury, rare Neutral Milk Hotel live footage and more ... (I'm baaaaaaacccckkk)
The bit at the start
Hello all. I'm back. You probably didn't miss me.
My 2 weeks off were supposed to involve me doing something really exciting and realising a lifetime's ambition. Instead it turned into a bit of a disaster and I had a death in the family. Not really according to plan.
Anyway, I'm sure no one reading this cares. One of the last things that I did before I went away was to sit down with Annie Clark (St. Vincent) for an interview before she opened for Grizzly Bear in Dublin. She's a nice lady and our chat went a little something like this …
You've just finished up a 25 date tour with Andrew Bird but you're doing this tour solo, is it intimidating going back to being solo after playing with a band for so long?
I find that it works on a couple of different levels. One level is yes it's a little scary because there's more at stake because I'm kind of juggling on stage a lot but I think there's also something very liberating about the fact that there's really, really, really nothing to hide behind and it's all sort of trial by fire. And actually, I became close with Andrew on the tour, or rather would pick his brain all the time about things because he's such a remarkable guy. We'd talk a lot about playing sets solo because he plays solo quite a bit and he was saying that he tries to do one really scary thing every set just to keep himself from going into autopilot so I look at it like that.
You don't find the experience restrictive compared to playing with musicians because when I saw you play solo before you were using samplers and drum machines and the like and you have to stick to what you have programmed as opposed to being able to jam it out a bit more if you have a band?
Actually in a lot of ways playing solo with drum machines and things and samplers you have more freedom because you don't have to telepathically communicate to your band members that you'd love to add an extra bar, you can just go with it. And that way it's really fun, especially because a lot of the beats on the Actor record at least, a lot of it is drums sets, but a lot of it is intended to be like, sexy, mechanical.
I've seen videos of you doing acoustic sessions and playing a lot of the Actor material and in them you either sing or play on the guitar melody lines that on the record are played by different instruments. I'm wondering, do you compose on the guitar and with your voice and then transpose for other instruments?
No I typically do the opposite, or at least with this record I wrote almost all of it on the computer so it started off not very tactile. And then I wrote a lot of my guitar parts on the computer. I did end up writing a lot on guitar, but for woodwind, trying to trick my brain into doing something then it would normally do.
What do you use on the computer? Reason?
No, I used garageband. I would score out every song for the most part. It made it easy in the sense that I could walk into a room with actual players, a French Horn player, a flautist and just say "this is your line, here's how it goes" and it was just my way of writing music, as if I'd written it all on a score.
When you're not writing songs or rehearsing of being St. Vincent how often would you just sit down with a guitar and just play because you enjoy playing or is it something that you want to get away from when you're not working?
I find actually that it's really refreshing a lot of times, especially if you're sort of a scatterbrain or space cadet you have to trick your brain into working. So I'll just sit down to play for the enjoyment of it and just try to keep my brain solely like, "well we'll just see where this goes" and keep it very low pressure. I think the second you start going "I'vegottowriteasongin20minutes" it becomes a little self defeating.
Do you do exercises, or scales or do you pick other people's songs or ...
I pick some other people's songs. I've been trying to learn all of the Dirty Projectors record.
That must be tough.
It's really hard [laughs]. It's really hard. And I'm a pretty competent finger picker, my right hand is probably better, but it's a really hard record. Have you tried to play that record?
I wouldn't even try to attempt it unless I tried to do a torch song version of some of the stuff.
Yeah, it's really hard, I think you'd have to go to classes to bridge the Dave Longstreth gap.
On the subject of playing, I think that you've got quite an idiosyncratic type of style. You use some extended techniques, like when I saw you on Letterman, you played "Marrow" and you battered your guitar with your fist. Is that stuff that you experiment with or how you started to play?
That's stuff that I've kind of been working on for a while but a lot of times for example there's a fuzz pedal when I'm banging on the guitar just to get that [makes sharp fuzz sound] and there's a capo on the right fret so it's going to be in the right key or whatever. Or one of my favourite things to do is to hit the guitar behind the bridge so you get this sort of pained sound.
Do you favour tailed bridge guitars for doing that?
Well you'll see tonight I play this, I primarily only play vintage guitars, I have this Silvertone which has a very long tail to bridge ratio and that sounds pretty cool but also I have this Harmony Silhouette or Bobcat and it's especially good sounding behind the bridge with a fuzz pedal. Anyway, I think a lot of that stuff comes out from playing live a lot and sometimes out just sheer frustration or intensity and you to it instinctively.
The first time I saw you play what struck me is that the way you strum appeared to in a flapping motion where you appear to be flicking your fingers out, is that something you've always done or something that's developed over the years?
[There follows a clumsy bit of conversation in which I try to explain what motion that I'm referring to. The video at the bottom gives some idea of what I was on about, but Clark gets the jist]
Well sometimes for extended, you're a guitar player?
Uh huh.
For extended lines, sometimes on "Your Lips Are Red", but it's not that I'm doing that but you can do that technique my uncle is a very amazing, famous guitar player, Tuck Andress. He's a finger style genius so I learned a lot watching him. He does this thing that's really amazing where he can just hit the string, sort of a drum stick technique, where you bounce back very quickly but it creates this pingy, sharp, aggressive thing. I don't know what I was playing, I generally don't have good technique in terms of proper technique but uh ...
Whatever works?
Yeah, whatever works.
You said you play mostly vintage guitars. Do you collect?
Sort of, yeah, I do. A lot of collectors are investment bankers or something like that who can afford to buy crazy stuff but collect more from a specific family of guitars like Kay and Harmony and Silvertone guitars from 1955 to 1969. I think a lot of those guitars have an awesome distinctive sound but I'm a sucker for the aesthetic as well and I think those are the best looking guitars ever. Like Gibson had a funny period in the 70's, Gibson Marauders and stuff. I don't know how into guitars you are but ...
Did you ever see the RD?
No.
It's very square, not quite like an explorer but it looks very cool.
Wait, is that a Gibson?
Yeah.
Does it kind of look like an oblong Firebird?
Yeah. I think ... who plays them? Uh, Dave Grohl!
Ohhh, yeah yeah yeah.
They're some funny looking guitars.
Yeah, they had a really funny period. And those basses that are, is that a marauder? Maybe it is. It's weirdly circular and they're all wood grain for the most part. It was a bizarre period.
In terms of equipment do you have any particular preference to what you use when it comes to like single coil or humbuckers or particular size or brand of amps?
The thing is that I play through so many pedals. A tube amp typically is a better bet. I own a Roland Jazz Chorus but that's for very specific sounds. I typically play through small Fender amps. A lot of the greatest guitar solo ever recorded in the history of electrified music are from Princetons or tiny little amplifiers, overdriving the speaker there and I think I'm more into that, more of a smaller amp than a Marshall stack something.
The Silvertone that I'm playing for this show is a Silvertone Esplanade and it has the pickups in it from Gibson when they put in humbuckers for the first time in these guitars and the pickups sound really good.
You're asking me about guitar stuff, I can talk about guitar stuff. Thanks.
Oh good, I'm glad you're enjoying talking about it. It seems as though St. Vincent is basically you, you write everything. But you've done a few things with other people recently like with Justin Vernon (St. Vincent and Bon Iver do a song together on the soundtrack for "New Moon", the second film in the "Twilight" series), you were on the Merge compilation with The National. Do you enjoy that collaborative stuff or do you like being in control?
I love it. Very much. I've been very, very, very fortunate to collaborate with people that I respect and admire and that I think are amazing. I love The National, they're one of my favourite bands, Justin Vernon is such a wonderful guy and such a beautiful music maker. I love doing stuff like that it's less pressure, and you've got someone to bounce ideas off of instantly. I'm doing a little bit of a collaboration with David Byrne right now, and he's just a genius.
Down the line with future St. Vincent records would you consider bringing people more into the creative process or are you very protective of it?
It's not so much being protective as it is just knowing what I want and not wanting to make that a democratic process. I've never really been in bands so all that is kind of foreign to me. I think where most of my collaborative effort comes in when making St. Vincent records is with the producer, in this case John Congleton who I would consider to be a total collaborator. On Actor he was so wonderful and he knew what I was saying at every turn basically.
With Marry Me, the first record. Everyone says you've a lifetime to write your first record and 2 years to write the second.
Two years??? 9 months! [laughs].
Okay, well I suppose it depends if you're Robert Pollard or not. But with Actor did you start with a clean slate or were there songs that you'd written beforehand and that weren't ready for Marry Me but that you still liked are were thinking that "I want to keep working on those"?
Actor was pretty much a clean slate because I'm not a very prolific songwriter so pretty much every song that I wrote that was worth anything went in to Marry Me. And then I just toured for a year and a half, almost two years, before that record came out and then after. So I started Actor with nothing, with just a general sense of like, "I want to make something that is beautiful and interesting to my ear and ... Oh God, how do I do that?"
Is it an exciting or a frightening notion to know that you have nothing and that you just have to do something new now?
It's a compartmentalised thing. It's difficult to write on the road so right now I'm collecting ideas and writing anything down that comes to me from reading books and interacting with people and hopefully it'll all come together at some point.
Further materials ...
St. Vincent on Letterman
Tuck Andress - I wish
Beg, borrow, buy, steal or download this album.
Burywood – There Exists An Abstraction Ladder
Austinite indie-pop. Possibly the last great record of 2009.
You news, you lose
So what was it that I was talking about endlessly in this column before I went away again?
Oh right it was the Pavement reunion.
A whole bunch of new bands were announced for the ATP taking place in the UK next May that they are curating and I'll be damned if it isn't a pretty spectacular lineup that they're putting together. Added to the bill which already included Pavement (duh) and Quasi are:
BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE
MISSION OF BURMA
CALEXICO
THE RAINCOATS
THE FIERY FURNACES
THE WALKMEN
OMAR SOULEYMAN + SUBLIME FREQUENCIES
ATLAS SOUND
GRAILS
THE DRONES
SACCHARINE TRUST
THE CLEAN
WOODEN SHJIPS
SIC ALPS
PIERCED ARROWS
SPIRAL STAIRS
BLITZEN TRAPPER
THE 3DS
MARBLE VALLEY
THE AUTHORITIES
WILDBIRDS AND PEACEDRUMS
There's enough names mentioned there to make me regret not getting a ticket for this festival (taking place in Butlins Minehead) May 14-16 2010 but hopefully many of those names will be announced for Primavera which I probably will be attending. More on that festival shortly, in fact right …
NOW!!!
Monday also saw the third announcement of performers for next year's Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona. The first two announcements only featured one band each (Pavement and then Pixies) but this one was far more substantial. Announced yesterday were:
Dum Dum Girls
Joker
Panda Bear
The Antlers
The Bloody Beetroots
Delorean
The Fall
Wild Beasts
New Pornographers
BIS
Here We Go Magic
Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions
The XX
I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with that. The Fall rarely put on a bad show, I'll be missing The Antlers in Dublin next week and my only live Panda Bear experience was the bit at the end of Animal Collective's first Tripod gig in Dublin. Then there's Wilco, who melted my face a few weeks back.
Nice things sometimes happen to nice people.
Baltimore's awesome (both musically and personality wise) absurdo-synth-art-pop 3-piece and Wham City alumni Future Islands have signed to Thrill Jockey records.
Early next year the label will release the band's second album In Evening Air but before that the band will put out a limited edition (500 vinyl copies) remix EP on Free Danger called Post Office Wave Chapel and they've got a pretty impressive array of people to work on their tunes.
Tracklisting:
A1 Old Dreamer (Pictureplane Remix)
A2 Flicker & Flutter (Javelin Remix)
B1 Little Dreamer (Jones Remix) [ft. Victoria Legrand]
B2 Beach Foam (Moss of Aura Remix) [ft. No Age]
Are you still interested in Interpol?
More importantly, am I? I'll defend their debut album till the end of time and will argue to anyone that there's never been an album recorded that has a better opening salvo of 4-5 songs (though it does fall off after that, it's the ultimate front loaded LP) and I think that the first thing I ever wrote for 411 was a review of their second album which had a couple of great tunes but if I'm being honest I think that they've been on a bit of a downhill slide since track 6 of Turn On The Bright Lights.
But enough of the past, what about the band's future? Well drummer Sam Fogarino has told Paste that the band will have a new album out next year (it's already recorded) and promisingly enough it's similar in sound to their debut. The album was recorded at New York's Electric Lady studio and according to Fogarino "The new record falls back towards the first. In trying to move forward, there was an unspoken realization that you can't let go of your sonic-defining tag. There was an effort in Daniel [Kessler]'s guitar tone; he rediscovered it playing in his loft space for a year without anybody. The quality of that tone, played in a big room, is just beautiful. It creates an atmosphere ... That big wash of reverb? It's back."
Another Spencer Krug project.
You would think with Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown and Swan Lake on the go Spencer Krug wouldn't have any time or creativity to do more music. Well you'd be wrong.
January 26 will see Jagjaguar put out the debut release from Moonface (which is Krug on his own, much like the first Sunset Rubdown record Snakes Got A Leg). Dreamland EP: Marimba and Shit-Drums will be available digitally and on a one sided 12". The vinyl will apparently also come with, "a dream journal, on which the music is based."
GlastonI'mnotgoing.
On Monday U2 were announced as the Friday night headliner for next year's Glastonbury festival.
That's June 25th.
There's not really much else to this story.
If it had been Liam I would have sentenced that guy to being blown by supermodels for the rest of his life.
Last September you may remember that during an Oasis gig in Toronto an audience member jumped onto the stage and shoved Noel Gallagher to the ground. Daniel Sullivan (for he was the shover) was then making his way across the stage toward Liam Gallagher when security tackled him. Due to the broken ribs Gallagher the elder suffered a number of Oasis gigs had to be cancelled (there's a silver lining to every cloud).
According to the Toronto Sun Sullivan pled guilty to assault causing bodily harm. Sullivan is scheduled to be sentenced on February 5th. According to the prosecution, "Sullivan managed to make his way up to the main stage area, run past the electrical cords set up along the stage, pass the drum kit and lunge toward Noel Gallagher, shoving him violently from behind with great force ... Sullivan almost made it to Liam Gallagher, but was tackled by security and was taken to the ground on stage ... He was held backstage for police to attend. Police report Sullivan was resisting, struggling and screaming as he was arrested. Officers tried to calm him down."
Sullivan claims that at the time of the incident he was so drunk that he can't remember anything other than climbing over the barrier.
Video of the footage …
The YouTube video of the week
From the Merge records blog, two videos of live Neutral Milk Hotel Performances from 1998.
If you can you should go to these gigs.
Magnetic Fields
02-04 Washington, DC - Lisner Auditorium
02-06 Montreal, Quebec - Corona Theatre
02-08 Toronto, Ontario - Queen Elizabeth Theatre
02-10 Boston, MA - Wilbur Theatre
02-11 Boston, MA - Wilbur Theatre
02-13 Brooklyn, NY - BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
02-21 Portland, OR - Aladdin Theater
02-22 Portland, OR - Aladdin Theater
02-23 Seattle, WA - Town Hall
02-24 Seattle, WA - Town Hall
02-27 Oakland, CA - Fox Theater
03-01 San Francisco, CA - Herbst Theatre
03-02 Los Angeles, CA - Wilshire Ebell Theatre
03-04 Milwaukee, WI - Pabst Theatre
03-05 Bloomington, IN - Buskirk Chumley Theater
03-06 St. Louis, MO - The Pageant
03-07 Chicago, IL - Harris Theater at Millennium Park
03-10 New York, NY - Town Hall
03-11 New York, NY - Town Hall
03-22 London, England - Barbican Centre
Four Tet
12-08 Paris, France - Élysée Montmartre (DJ set)
12-11 London, England - Plastic People (DJ set)
12-19 Glasgow, Scotland - Stereo (DJ set)
02-05 Berlin, Germany - WMF Club Transmediale
02-12 London, England - The Dome &
02-17 New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge *
02-18 Cambridge, MA – Middle East Downstairs *
02-19 Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle *
02-20 Austin, TX – The Mohawk *
02-23 Seattle, WA – Chop Suey *
02-24 Vancouver, British Columbia – Biltmore Cabaret *
02-25 Portland, OR – Doug Fir *
02-26 San Francisco, CA – The Independent *
02-27 Los Angeles, CA – Echoplex *
03-11 Manchester, England - Club Academy
03-12 Leeds, England - TJs
03-13 Edinburgh, Scotland - Bongo Club
03-17 Brighton, England - Concorde 2
03-19 Birmingham, England - Custard Factory
03-20 Bristol, England - Fiddlers
& with Joy Orbison
* with Nathan Fake
The Yummy Fur
01-14 Philadelphia, PA - Kung Fu Neck Tie (England Belongs to Twee)
01-15 Brooklyn, NY - Lombardy
01-17 Los Angeles, CA - The Echo (Part Time Punks)
01-18 San Francisco, CA - Cafe du Nord
01-20 Portland, OR - TBA (Suicide Club)
Future Islands
11-24 Charlotte, NC - The Milestone *
11-25 Charleston, SC - Adolini's Pizza *
11-27 Raleigh, NC - Berkeley Cafe *
11-28 Baltimore, MD - Floristree *
12-03 Greenville, NC - Tipsy Teapot
12-04 Chapel Hill, NC - The Cave
12-05 Wilmington, NC - Drifters ^
12-13 Baltimore, MD - Jesus Camp #
12-17 Brooklyn, NY - Death By Audio #%
* with Thank You
^ with Lonnie Walker
# with Javelin
% with Jones, Moss of Aura
Writing under the influence
Without which this column would not have been possible:
Talk Radio
Animal Collective – Fall Be Kind
The bit at the end
I saw Atlas Sound on Saturday night. It wasn't quite what I was expecting in terms of arrangements, never would have thought that he'd come out with an acoustic guitar and harmonica but I think that it's kind of cool that Atlas Sound can be whatever Cox wants it to be on any particular night, be it how it was last night or as a full band or doing the laptop/sampler thing. I thought that it was excellent at times but a little meandering (taking 30 minutes to get through a 2 song encore is a bit much), the version of the song with Noah Lennox from the album was super.
As ever, hearing Bradford talk to the crowd is like watching someone walk a VERY high tightrope with no net.
