by Gumshoe • October 2011 I'm going to take the fall, but we all took it on the chin, so I'm not bitter; just let me lay out the facts for you as I attempt to conjure the tension, heat, and occasional ecstasy that accompanied this year's Austin City Limits festival. Quick aside: Why am I so obsessed with music festivals? Time and time again, I slog over to these things and ask myself "WHY, OH WHY?" Then the next time something comes around I hitch up my buggy and do it again. FOR WHAT? Well, it's ...

Nestled along the river, in between a land of desolate factories, sits a little dive bar equipped with a simple wooden stage, complete with white Christmas lights twinkling overhead year round and an ever-present green sign over the stage. The Hideout Inn is a cozy institution of Chicago rock. Whether its seeing a friend’s band, catching Iron & Wine play a secret show , or listening to Jeff Tweedy recite lyrics to Black Eyed Peas songs, the little venue is a music lover’s mecca, and it seems everyone who visits comes away with lifelong memories. A springboard for countless musicians ...

While “attending” the Newport Folk Festival Sunday (from my couch. thank you NPR), I was reminded that my music collection consists of “The Secret Sisters”, (which by the way, should not be a secret) and how I should be listening to them more often. The Secret Sisters consists of Laura and Lydia Rogers who are really sisters and hail from Alabama. The sweet, simplistic blend of their vocal harmonies that only family can capture, take you back to the innocence of the 50’s, while their traditional country sound makes me want to grab a lemonade on the porch or ...

The Lightning Seeds will close the Main Stage on the Sunday of 2011's Headstock Festival, while The Herbaliser Band also join the bill in a UK exclusive

The Lightning Seeds will close the Main Stage on the Sunday of 2011's Headstock Festival, while The Herbaliser Band also join the bill in a UK exclusive

The sheer sensuality of Le Berger 's textures, which the project's shepherd (sorry) summons despite " primitive means and scarce source material ", & their languid, looped unfurling hardly prepare you for an elaborate metaphysical conceit . But i n a new interview, Sam Landry reveals the Tron -invoking concept behind his luxuriant recent Expeditions on the Grayscale & riffs on a host of other topics - tradition, genre, collaboration, other musical outlets & a rare physical release ahead (" something very cinematic, theatrical drone if you will "). Also featuring: Sam's 'generative' aScapist sideline, including a stripped-down edit of 2A - the self-described "aerial feel" of Clouds . Oh, & a fine mix ( Stephan Mathieu + Taylor Deupree - Largo > Terry Riley - Poppy Nogood & The Phantom Band > Le Berger - Gnascor Encore & Core à Corps > Terry Riley - Poppy Nogood & The Phantom Band > Roger Eno & Peter Hammill - Wise Men > Shakti - Mind Ecology > Chihei Hatakeyama - Voices II > Loscil - Nautilus )... What's the concept behind Expeditions? Let me start this one with a bit of a disclaimer: all this is done rather unassumingly and candidly, the last thing I would want is for the concepts surrounding an album to supersede the music. I personally think there's much more to imagination than meets the eye, but if you don't like the conceptual mumbo jumbo, ditch it. It is a fair bet that most readers have seen Tron. (or you know, the new Tron...) Well, the Grayscale is similar to that - a world outside the world answering to its own rules and parameters, yet we have access to it. It is a meeting or gathering place for creative minds. It is where duality vanishes, not because it is transcended or engulfed in unity, but because polarity ceases to exist. Everything in shades of gray to approximate your location on the gazeous - liquid spectrum. Always a blend of sea and air, no solid land. It thrives on the very creativity of the minds involved, is nourished by it. The only pre-requisite to enter this arena is to shed your ego, even if just for a short while. You can wander long and wide, none of which will be recorded or traceable. But once you come into contact with the mind of another a coordinate is created and the events that take place can now be shared with the myriads of other worlds. As if the frontier between our world and the Grayscale became thinner upon that meeting. The last few of those meetings to have been recorded are the following: Don't go away J (#c2c2c2) - Surfing (oh so succinctly) with a tragic French poet. Pam Pam some'n wild (#a0a0a0) - Sailing (with such balance) with a post-modern composer and a noiselifer. Dust it begun (#dbdbdb) - Floating (oh so aimlessly) with the very creator of the Grayscale. Bern deep'n'bub (#5c5c5c) - Sinking (oh so steadily) with an acclaimed film composer. The coordinates are indeed in HTML color codes (a few asked...) The name of the pieces give a (vague) indication as to who took part in the meeting. And the timing of the pieces is a play upon unity and trinity, as well as the fact that I turn 33 on 11-11-11. Et, comme on dit, voilà! Le Berger - Dust it begun (#dbdbdb) [re-up] I s there usually a concept behind your music ? Depending, for "Sounds of..." or "The Holiday Drones" there was no particular idea linking the pieces together. There can be a general theme (insomnia and charity respectively) and specific pieces can bring about a particular imagery for me which is usually quite self explanatory within the title. Think 0007 [Thanks to Bobby the Navigator] which is about seafaring or After The Bombings which deals with devastation. But I would not refer to those as conceptual works per se. If we're speaking about other releases, then most definitely. How do concepts help you make music? They rarely do! I don't set out to work around any particular preconceived notions or concepts. It's usually either amidst the work in process or after I have a few things that fit together that a pattern seems to emerge. There is a lot of trials and errors in my work, so sometimes before I choose to keep or discard certain things I can listen to a piece or a group of pieces for days on end. This way I can get into a state of immersion somewhat, and also gain a new perspective on the piece(s) away from the work. It's how I assess if that first enthusiastic impression I had while working with it really translates upon listening. That's usually when the music starts being evocative for me and images start to spark, and then it snowballs! And then this type of material, compared to others like blues, folk, pop, etc., gravely lacks in narrative and then even compared to other instrumental genres it still has very few (if at all) events occurring in the length of a piece. Some artists chose to embrace this and go the abstract route (bless them). I simply opted a more impressionist way. Do you see yourself as working in any kind of tradition? "I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member." - Groucho Marx With that said, I don't have the vanity to think "here I am breaking grounds that no one ever threaded". I enjoy being a part of this long line of breeders we call humanity and can't deny being influenced by some of them. It's just this thing where it's hard to have the detachment to know where you belong as a creator in the midst of it all. Time will tell? I think one of the marvelous liberties we have today is to mingle with so much content coming from different eras and currents, then how it incorporates into the work is often times more or less conscious in my opinion. How has your music changed since you began? Essentially, not at all! Guess I just know a little bit more what I'm doing, not sure if it's a curse or a blessing... Do you consider your music 'drone'? If so, why drone? Is drone something you just recognize when you hear it or does it have specific ingredients? Let me put it this way: I had no clue I was doing 'drone' music until people told me. The making of music is the making of music. Labels and genres and nomenclatures and currents and so on are only sticker we apply on top of it to help discern which is which. In that sense, sure it's drone, it's whatever anyone wants to call it if it helps associating it with other creators that do something similar. Though it's quite fascinating how much plurality and eccentricities can be found in something labeled thus. Do you use anything besides a laptop to make your music? I use a desktop actually. ;) Best thing anyone's said/written about your music? Worst? "i see my children playing...and i see my children watching their children playing...i feel the span of years that have yet to happen..." - Tom, a fellow dronist (aka Lattice ) about 0003 [No thanks to you] Worst probably was something like "ugh, annoying" or such. Not very exciting I'm afraid. Fingers crossed! What's your goal with aScapist? I never perceived the aScapist sideline as something ...

Ok, hat is sick. Jay actually captured the thing on video on his blackberry or something. Fucking crazy, watch here . *Bonus: "Watch The Throne" is coming, it's big, and everybody heard it by us. The big news starting a few days ago and well throughout the week from almost every major music news source was all of this Watch The Throne talk. Jay played the just-about-complete record to roughly 20 or so people in a pot-smelling room of the Mercer Hotel after coming from the Yankee game. I don't know about you but I'm pretty fucking excited ...

die intensität ist sofort wieder spürbar. der nachdruck, ein pendel, das nur nach einer seite ausschlägt. die stimme, das slawisch getränkte organ, bereit für große sprünge. meine vernachlässigung wird nicht nachgetragen. zum glück hat mich der gute th. auf das neue album von alina simone aufmerksam gemacht. denn ansonsten hätte ich mich noch viel später erst mit "make your own danger" beschäftigt, dem nachfolger zu "everyone is crying out to me, beware", das mit coversongs der sibirischen punksängerin yanka dyagileva gespickt war. nach "placelessness" ist das aktuelle album im eigentlichen sinne erst das zweite full length der in brooklyn lebenden ...

London’s Docklands may not be the first district in London to spring to mind when it comes to putting on jazz. But times change, and with the opening of the new Boisdale Canary Wharf jazz club bringing a much needed infusion of the music to the area there’s also the return of the free entry Canary Wharf Jazz Festival in August. The festival has just announced its line-up for the annual affair that this year takes place from Friday 12- Sunday 14 August. Typically well programmed, the fest takes places at Canada Square Park in Canary Wharf and ...

PopMatters : They are performers who made it big but crashed and burned from the lethal mix of sex, drugs and living large. Or they’re once-popular artists whose musical significance barely registers a blip with today’s younger listeners. Whatever the case, these artists are the fuel for “Unsung,” TV One’s popular documentary-style show that chronicles the rise, fall — and sometimes resurrection — of black performers from the 1960s to the early 1990s who’ve either been done wrong, done-in or self-destructed. Later episodes examine the careers of the Spinners, Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle, rapper Big Daddy Kane, funk ...

Vom 14. - 17. Juli findet bereits zum 23. Mal das belgische Dourfestival statt. Während im Premierenjahr 1989 lediglich fünf Bands in der Provinz Dour auftraten, wartet die viertägige Feierei auch in diesem Jahr mit sieben Bühnen, mehr als 200 Bands sowie einer Vielzahl an DJs auf. Pop trifft auf Reggae, Metal auf Techno sowie Punk auf House – das Dourfestival ist dafür bekannt, dass es durch eine imposante Stil-Mischung begeistert. Zur Einstimmung gibt es hier einen ersten Trailer: Dourfestival – Trailer Hier könnt ihr eine kleine Auswahl des großen Line-Ups bestaunen:  13 & God , Aeroplane , Air Guitar Belgium, Angel Crew, Anthony B , Anthrax ...

As sampled in Tech N9ne's "Worldwide Choppers" Featuring Busta Rhymes, Twista, and Yelawolf Apparently Tech N9ne has an infatuation with choppers, both Midwest and Worldwide. This is the fastest song I've ever heard. I'm especially blown away by Busta Rhymes' speed on this track. I'm listening to this song right now and I just can't get over how fast these guys spit. You can always count on Busta and Yelawolf to spit fast as hell, but I had no idea that Tech N9ne and Twista could go off like this. Shows what I know. This ...

Another month flies by and here's a collection of all our reviews - be they album, DVD or theatrical releases. Even a couple of telly things. Thanks as ever to all our intrepid reviewers. Album of the month goes to the return of TV On The Radio (R.I.P Gerard Smith), film of the month to Duncan Jones' second feature 'Source Code' , and DVD of the month is jointly awarded to the Spanish language comedy-drama 'Abel' and the Mexican (sort of) massacre 'Machete' . Links to those reviews and more below. ALBUM REVIEWS: ALBUM OF THE MONTH : TV On The ...

Talking Heads : (Nothing But) Flowers [ purchase ] One day some time ago, I was in New York City, and I overheard a remarkable conversation. Two young ladies, both vegan, were talking about an awful experience one of them had had recently. She had decided that she ought to get closer to nature by getting a pet. She chose a snake. She wanted to find vegan food for it, but she learned to her horror that it only ate live animals. Almost sobbing, she told her friend that she was forced to get rid of it. Now, these two young ladies might ...

To say Vakill's fans have been clamoring for his third album's release would be a bit of an understatement. And there's a good reason for that beyond his skills as a lyricist who also has a strong ear for beats. Armor of God has been delayed time and time again over the past five years or so, to the point some folks were calling it the underground's version of Dr. Dre's Detox .   But Vakill's apparently readying the album, which his is first since 2006's Worst Fears Confirmed , for release on Moleman Records this ...