Monthly Archives: July 2014

“My love affair with vinyl began somewhere around the age of 5 or 6. In the ‘80s, my parents had a diverse record collection and a state of the art (at the time) sound system. For them, listening to recorded music was serious business. I remember learning to use all of the components: the receiver and the equalizer, how to clean the records, how to set the needle so it would start right at the beginning of a song.”

“I remember even when they got a CD player, I was always more fascinated by the vinyl. Maybe it was because the covers were so big, like I was holding a painting in my little hands. I remember staring at Madonna’s midriff on Like A Prayer, The cool lighting and composition on Bowie’s Let’s Dance, the psychedelic illustration on Sir Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I would pour over the lyrics inside as I listened until I had memorized them so I could sing along. That’s how I learned to sing.

During high school, I was very active so portable music was necessary. I never fully broke up with vinyl, I would dub records and CDs onto tapes and make mixes for my friends. I was getting more into the independent underground music of the time, ska and punk from Asian Man and Victory Records, Indie and Hardcore from Revelation and Polyvinyl Records, and stuff like that. Maybe it was cheaper or easier for those bands and labels to put out CDs because that’s what I was usually able to find. It was very rare that I found a vinyl record during the mid-‘90s by one of my (at the time) favorite bands like Braid or Boysetsfire. That could also be because I was in Hawaii.

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Any shelf dedicated to classic California punk requires representation by the Flesh Eaters of Chris Desjardins, aka Chris D. Never a bad record has he made under that moniker, but the finest of them remains the talent-drenched and enduringly brilliant 1981 LP A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die. It’s just been given a welcome reissue by Superior Viaduct of San Francisco.

I first learned of Chris D.’s work in the latter portion of the 1980s, my discovery largely aided by the diligent underground music press of the era, in particular the scribbling of Byron Coley. While numerous zines featured reviews of both the Flesh Eaters and Chris D.’s band of the period The Divine Horsemen, it was really Coley that helped to put Desjardins’ art in proper context.

In fact, Coley’s such a determined champion of the man’s work that his new liners for this reissue aren’t an extra so much as a prerequisite. And the insight was found in more than just reviews, articles, and prior sleeve notes, as Coley and Forced Exposure publisher/writer Jimmy Johnson conducted an extensive interview with Desjardins for issue #12 of their reliably hefty “quarterly” mag. The duo also provided space in the back for “Chris D.’s Video Guide,” an enjoyable and extremely enlightening tour of the guy’s VHS collection.

I’d already sized Desjardins up as a major part of the USA’s roots punk brigade, his output landing in the same rough region as The Cramps, X, The Blasters, The Plugz, and The Gun Club, but the conversation in FE presented him as an uncommonly astute member of the punk community (especially when compared with the average Flipside chat).

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Steely Dan was Thee Consummate anti-garage band of the seventies. Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen didn’t just polish their LPs; they buffed, burnished, lacquered, and airbrushed them until they were as perfect as Andy Gibbs’ coif. The Kings of Studio Sheen were perfect examples of what could be done if you were willing to spend 4,000 hours creating LPs as high gloss as a Lamborghini just off the assembly line. They produced the most waxed wax this side of insane perfectionist Tom Scholz of Boston, who has been known to spend a good decade spiffing up an LP before it meets his impossibly exacting standards.

Lots of people hate Steely Dan for this—I myself, a big Dan fan, want nothing to do with anything they released after 1976’s The Royal Scam, because they finally took the whole 50,000 coats of lacquer shtick a bit too far, while also moving towards a smooth jazz/pop fusion that left me cold—but I’ll stand by their earlier LPs to the end. Over the course of four years they released five albums that boasted great melodies, brilliant lyrics, and the best studio musicians money could buy, including guitarists Rick “All-American Boy” Derringer, Elliott “Total Fucking Genius” Randall, and Larry Carlton, which is why you’ll search in vain for a mediocre guitar solo on a Steely Dan record. They had impeccable tastes in ringers.

The Steely Dan story is familiar to most; Becker and Fagen met at ultra-liberal arts Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (where I once spent a weekend so dissipated that when I left my pal Dan, a Bard student, was pissing blood), formed a band they named after a dildo from William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and in 1972 put out debut Can’t Buy a Thrill, which turned them into overnight sensations thanks to its songs “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years.” (I remember my eighth grade English teacher, a young and pretty flower child type, playing them for the class as examples of the “groovy new poetry” being “dug” by young people).

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Blood Cultures appeared earlier this year with the startlingly brilliant, melodic pop jam “Indian Summer.” Since then they have slowly released a few tracks including a new single which will be pressed as the B-side to “Indian Summer,” the bit-crushed, self-help ballad “Meavy Hetal.”

What is most refreshing about Blood Cultures is their ability to let their music speak for itself. Indeed, no one even knows who or what comprises or composes this glittery programmed pop. Is it the masked figure in the pictures? Probably not. This healthy serving of mystery is complimented by no website, no Facebook, no Twitter handle, and no personal information anywhere.

All that leaves us to talk about is how awesome the music is, which I suppose is the point. Everyone from Hilly Dilly to Turntable Kitchen has placed this mysterious figure in the pantheon of emerging 2014 talent, and with a million plays on Soundcloud within the past 6 months, I would say the general public is in agreement.

Check out the B-side here.

Last Halloween, British 12-string guitar wizard James Blackshaw, in collaboration with electro-acoustic composer and sound-instillation artist Duane Pitre, Slowdive drummer Simon Scott, and multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson, delivered the live score for the final installment of master French director Louis Feuillade’s silent film series of 1913. Fantômas: Le Faux Magistrat, Tompkins Square’s 2LP/ CD/ digital issue of the performance’s recording, reveals an ambitious undertaking that succeeds due to a lively combination of respect and invention.

Perusing the details of the centenary celebration of Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas, specifically an event coordinated by Yann Tiersen hosted last year in Paris’ Théâtre de Châtelet (additionally broadcast live on the European ARTE TV channel) that indeed culminated on All Hallows Eve 2013, is enough to inspire Pavlovian levels of salivation in movie buff/music fans. The affair generated scores from Tiersen, Tim Hecker, Loney Dear, Amiina, and Blackshaw for all five parts of an enduring opus by one of cinema’s most talented and intriguing filmmakers.

Naturally a danger accompanies these sorts of endeavors, in particular the belief that the images receiving a soundtrack are somehow lacking in vibrancy and require a boost of modernization. This often results in knuckleheaded maneuvers (e.g. noise hostility, egregious dance beats) or more problematically gestures of shallow commentary or even attempts to subvert the message of the picture.

Of course, the other extreme is inhabited by scores, reliably knocked-off by studious nimble-fingered scholarly pianists, which are well-intentioned but unfortunately burdened with quaintness. At least this tactic eschews arrogance and largely avoids obnoxiousness; in the case of Feuillade though, playing it overly safe is almost as insulting as underestimating his visual skills and undermining his status as a visionary.

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If you caught our previous Festival Fast Talk, you saw that we spent time at the Red Bull Music Academy at Bonnaroo. The facility was a spot that Red Bull set up, bringing 20+ producers together, granting them time in fully stocked studios, having Mannie Fresh and Thundercat lecture them, and encouraging them to write music.

Though the entire crowd of producers were all great, one producer who definitely resonated inside the pack was BoomBaptist. Just as his moniker implies, he religiously studies the art of boom bap, making offerings to its church in the guise of hip hop beats and heavy grooves. BoomBaptist makes hard hitting and soulful beats over chops of kitwork and carefully queued samples. Be careful, his tracks might just give you whiplash if you’re not paying attention to how hard you’re nodding along when the snare follows the kick and it hits so hard its difficult not to just be like “damn.”

How did you start making music?

My mother instilled a love for music in me as a child. She was a very talented pianist, extremely focused, and dedicated to her craft. She put me through piano lessons early on in life, around six years old, I believe. But as far back as I could remember, I was drawn to the medium. Supposedly I would play the glockenspiel for hours and rock to the rhythm of washing machines as I sat on top of them.

Several years later, when I was exposed to East-coast rap on the radio in Miami, I obsessively studied all the production greats of that era—early ’90s—Premier, Dilla, Pete Rock, Diamond D, etc., etc. I realized that what drew me to those records was the production. At the time, a couple of friends and I had invested in our first turntables/mixer. The package was called the Gemini Starter Kit and was the budget option for people wanting to get their feet wet with DJing. Around the same time, I started dabbling with other styles, playing in a couple of jazz groups (percussion/woodwinds), a Latin group, etc. But ultimately, I had a real love for hip-hop and its production. About a year later, I discovered a free online program named Fruity Loops that was a very elementary option, and that sparked what became BoomBaptist.

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From yesterday interview with Fozzy’s Chris Jerico:

What can we expect from the new Fozzy album, Do You Wanna Start a War?

The only rule we had with this record is that we had no rules. We didn’t want to make a record that was like anything that we had ever done before. We wanted to take our sound to the next level. You know, a lot of bands can kind of fall into a trap of doing the same record over and over again, and that’s fine. We love bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, we love Avenged Sevenfold but we also love Queen and Pink Floyd, Zeppelin and the Beatles, bands that would make a different record every time. There was really no rules or chains as to what kind of songs they would do.

I mean, if you look at a Queen record, there would be a metal song, a rock song, a pop song, a dance song, a rockabilly song, a ballad. It was all good, because it was Queen. That’s what we wanted to do, just make a really diverse record with good songs. I think that’s the difference. There’s some songs that are more danceable songs, you could hear them at a dance club. There’s songs that you could hear at a strip club, there’s songs you could hear at an R&B club, but they are all good, they are all heavy and they’re all Fozzy, and that’s what we wanted to do.

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