A friendly reminder that this weekend The Cumulus Festival is taking place. Tomorrow night’s show at the Vera is the only all-ages one and has quite the stellar line up including:
Bronze Fawn
You.May.Die.In.The.Desert
The Friendly Skies
Speaking of You.May.Die.In.The.Desert, Brandon and Mike were kind enough to join me in the studio to guest DJ with me during my radio show. I’ll be posting an archive of that in the coming days.
Now I’m off to go weep due to the Beach House show tonight being 21+
A few weeks ago Times New Viking and Deerhunter played for a sold-out all-ages crowd at one of Seattle’s premier music venues, Neumos. I was lucky enough to organize an interview with Adam (drums & vocals), Beth (keyboard & vocals), and Jared (epic guitar) of TNV.
Times New Viking hails from Columbus, OH: An area which appears to have quite a buzzing Punk/Garage scene. Although Times New Viking has been synonymous with the College/Indie Music talk this year (mostly due to their spot on the Matador Label Roster), this interview deals with the band’s origins, evolution, and purpose in the greater garage punk scene.
I was fortunate enough to have a punk connoisseur conducting the interview. Jeremy of the exquisite Rainydawg show The World is a Drag is the host of this interview.
For this interview, the band insisted on getting drinks. Because Seattle is ever-so strict on their drinking policies (and because I am under twenty-one years of age), the band and Jeremy had to surreptitiously sneak me into the bar.
Note: The bar atmosphere is the source for all the background noise. I’d be happy to translate the audio to a text format, though I feel it is not necessary for this interview. In fact, I love the background noise given the context of the interview. A lo-fi punk band doing a pretty roughly recorded and mastered interview in some shitty bar in Seattle. What could be better? The interview is attached below.
Releasing without a doubt one of the best Indie Pop records of the year, The Born Ruffians have had a wonderous year in music. Red, Yellow, and Blue is a very enjoyable and fun album to listen to. Although it did not make my year end list (Which I could be posting in the near future) there was a prolonged period where I was convinced it would.
Luke LaLonde, the lead vocalist of the Toronto outfit, The Born Ruffians, was gracious enough to stop by our studio and perform a unique and original set. When LaLonde set up, he said how he wanted to perform some of his lesser known material in addition to some of the Ruffians’ stuff. This lesser known material can be found under the moniker Skeleton Me.
The end result is LaLonde playing the Ruffians’ song, I Need a Life, off of Red Yellow & Blue, and merging it seamlessly into a Skeleton Me track. This is a unique listen unlike anything expected by a member of the Born Ruffians. Utilizing loops and heavy reverb, LaLonde branches out of his designated Indie Pop categorization into something yet to be explored by the Ruffians. Hopefully a future release by the band will be somewhat influenced by this.
Thank goodness the autumn quarter has come to a close. I finally have a good amount of time to make up for all the overdue material I have yet to post. I’m sorry reading this blog can be frustrating at times, due to the sporadic updates, but I’m so very glad to have your continued support.
Back in Mid-October we had a full tour’s worth of bands stop by the studio. On October 12, 2008, Rainydawg Radio was fortunate enough to host Warren and Nic of Plants and Animals for an interview over the airwaves. The next day, we hosted Young Rival, Nurses, and the Born Ruffians. Young Rival’s session can be found here.
Onto Nurses. Nurses are a group out of Portland, OR who utilize vocal harmonies which have come to be expected with bands in the “Indie” scene today (see: Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, etc.) However, Nurses use of blending aged classic instruments such as a Fender Rhodes with a Roland SP-505 give them a sound that few bands in music today can achieve. A sound which is both contradictorily familiar yet refreshing.
Yet, for the in-studio session they chose to do a stripped down set. It’s interesting to see the difference in their full fledged produced music (which you can find over at ye olde myspace) versus this in-studio. Be sure to grab the full version, with the interview, to hear an intriguing conversation about the Mayan calender, post-apocolyptica, and the most effective way to kill zombies.
Way back at the beginning of Autumn Quarter at Rainydawg Radio, one of Seattle’s very own Post-Rock trio, Bronze Fawn, were kind enough to join me for an in-studio in the wee hours of the morning. Given that this was the first in-studio of the year, there were a number of expected technical difficulties along the way. I hesitated to post these MP3s for a while, as they do not reflect the quality of this Seattle band; however, I figure any exposure is better than no exposure. Please, blame me for the shitty mix and audio levels.
Bronze Fawn are a quality act and group of really great guys. They headline the Cumulus Festival Day Three at the Vera Project on January 25, 2009. You.May.Die.In.The.Desert as well as The Friendly Skies will also be playing that show. If you don’t go, and you’re in the Seattle area, I can say without a doubt that you hate music. Without further ado, here are the In-Studio mp3s.
I really suck at this whole “blogging” thing. I’ve been back and forth between the coasts, traveling backwards and forwards in time. I just got back to Seattle last night. Expect an influx of posts after I survive my college finals. For now, here’s live rips from Rainydawg Radio’s Local Showcase. The audio quality is pretty much impeccable, despite a few peaks in some sets. Props to Benny for setting this all up.
My affinity for Post-Rock has grown infinitely over the past year. One of my favorite aspects of the genre is the seamless line between audio and visuals. In a sense, the visuals are equally as important as the audio. Take your pick of post-rock bands: Mono, Sigur Ros, Unwed Sailor etc. their physical music packaging are always pleasing on the eyes. Perhaps it could be due to the lack of lyrics in the genre which generates this motivation to create striking visuals. Regardless of the reasoning, I love it. Here’s one of my favorite Seattle Post-Rock bands Bronze Fawn integrating visuals into their live set.
First off, I’m alive. I’ve been super-busy lately with school work and getting adjusted back here in Seattle. I’m living in a studio apartment in the U-District, it has treated my nicely thus far. I’ll be uploading way overdue content in the next few days.
Starting off, we have an interview conducted on Sunday October 12, 2008 by my good friend Kyle Hargus. He sat down with Warren and Nic of Plants and Animals and discussed topics ranging from the Montreal music scene, starting off their musical careers there, and working on their great debut album Parc Avenue (which you can purchase here). Be sure to give it a listen.
No one local news source ever won me over in my first year living in Seattle. Whether it was The Seattle PI, The Stranger, The Seattle Weekly, etc. I always had my problems with the papers and their perspectives on different matters. Of course it’s Seattle, so everything is liberal. You just need to see what gradient of liberal-ness it is. Well, I’ve found my holy grail of news sources, and it’s Seattlest. I always loved this site from the start, mostly because my friend Tim Willis’ photographs are often featured on the site. But I’m a fan of what they do, how community based it really is, and how vast of a demographic it covers (see: dcist, gothamist, londist, etc.)
And now they have forever won me over. Capital Hill Block party is going on in Seattle right now, and with it, the sound of thousands of hipsters orgasming in unison. Last night, Greg Gillis, and his act Girl Talk played an all-ages gig (for the first time ever?) in Seattle. This is what seattlest had to say about it:
Girl Talk: We didn’t know anything about Girl Talk before this weekend, except that Cap To The Hill really likes him and so does The Stranger. The first person to come on stage was a sweatpants-clad dude (Girl Talk, natch) with a headband around his forehead: strike one. The music was pretty catchy, all rhythmic and pop, but then–and here’s where Girl Talk completely lost us–a horde of girls and boys bounded up on stage and began to dance, badly. They didn’t leave. This wasn’t some kind of flash mob; this was planned. Something about the schtick was actually offensive to Seattlest, and it’s only now, sitting here in Moe Bar, that we’re even able to figure out why; it’s something to do with the fake happiness factor, the fact that the entire set could have been an American Apparel ad, Target commercial, or a High School Musical reunion. Why does everyone love this band so much? Are we missing something? We left after fifteen minutes, because Thee Emergency was playing thirty feet away and Dita Vox is extremely hot.
Thank you, Seattlest.
Photo comes from my friend Hudson Berry, who was lucky enough to goto Whartscape in Baltimore. Greg Gillis performed as DJ Trey Told ‘Em. Not that other shit act.
