Sandy Bull film screening plus performances from DRMWPN, 500MG (Mike Gibbons of Bardo Pond) and Ultimate Vag (Members of Kahoutek and To Live & Shave in LA), and Drag City DJs
Wednesday, July 1, 2009, 8:00 pm Chopin Theatre: 1543 West Division Street, Chicago
Here’s a description of the movie from the filmmaker: No Deposit No Return Blues is a documentary K.C. Bull made about her father, psychedelic rock legend Sandy Bull. He played the role of the outsider, writing meditations on his instrument and bringing classical music to the cosmic happening. He was many things, but the way the film remembers him is through his instrument and how it connected him to the outside world. In the early sixties, before such six-string heroes as Ry Cooder, Leo Kottke and Richard Thompson impressed with their ability to hop among and fuse musical genres, Sandy Bull glided from classical and jazz to ethnic music and rock & roll with grace and verve. Incorporating elements of folk, jazz, Indian and Arabic-influenced dronish modes, Bull’s ethereal, psychedelic folk-rock recordings– which looked beyond American roots music for its inspiration–and performances, made him a cult-hero to a generation of musicians and adventurous audiences. In 2001 Bull died of lung cancer, but not before his daughter began to fashion a personal portrait of a gifted musician and moving ode to a father and daughter relationship. The film is KC Bull’s understated way of saying, “Have you heard of my dad? No? Oh, you should.” I agree, you should.
Concert of Pre-recorded Tapes of Pandit Pran Nath performing Afternoon & Evening Ragas w/ Live Commentary by La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela
Sunday, May 31, 2009, 4:00 pm MELA Foundation Dream House
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor,
New York, NY 10013
Admission $16. MELA Members, Seniors, Student ID, $12
Limited seating. Reservations recommended.
212-219-3019 or 212-925-8270
In celebration of Pandit Pran Nath’s extraordinary life and work, MELA
Foundation presents a memorial tribute concert of the Master’s
pre-recorded tapes of Afternoon and Evening Ragas on Sunday, May 31,
2009 at 4:00 pm in the MELA Dream House, 275 Church Street, 3rd floor,
New York. The concert is curated by La Monte Young and Marian
Zazeela, who will present commentary on the music during the event.
The concert will continue for several hours.
For further information: mail@melafoundation.org
Here’s an event coming up this weekend that we’re sure many of our customers and friends will be interested in attending. Pandit Pran Nath was an Indian musical genius and introduced the Western world to the vocal tradition of North Indian classical music. A major influence on an entire generation of American, European, and Japanese minimalist composers in the early 70s, La Monte Young and Terry Riley entered a formal master/disciple relationship with Pandit Pran Nath that lasted until his death in 1996. If you haven’t heard his work, we can highly recommend these archival recordings of The Raga Cycle, which were recorded in Paris in 1972. As we wrote in the review: “It is not often that we’re able to say an album is unambiguously timeless, but have no doubt, this one is.”
This one struck me as way outta-the-blue. Particularly because we seem to be in a cultural moment where you can pick up a magazine and read a feature on a former all-girl band — from the West Coast, no less — where any affiliation with the “riot grrrl” movement is refuted like its the kiss of death.
Perhaps there’s a fate worse than that; I recently discovered, while perusing the Spring issue of Skyscraper, that male author and editor have grown so accustomed to glazing over the same copy-and-pasted string of riot grrrl bands that a reference to a band named “Bikini Girl” actually appeared in print.
So although I’m an unwavering proponent of this early-’90s feminist music scene, the timing seems baffling for Teenage Teardrops, the underground L.A. label / book imprint responsible for top-notch releases by No Age, Pocahaunted, and Soiled Mattress and the Springs to unleash this 12” comp of three obscure Seattle and Vancouver bands covering Huggy Bear and Bikini Kill. There’s seemingly no rhyme or reason to this release — aside from the fact that those two pioneering riot grrrl bands wrote simple killer punk songs that are a blast and a half to play with your own band.
The result is a mixed bag, a real Arnold Palmer — half the covers kick off with enough gusto, but by the time the vocals kick in, go sour like any ol’ band’s mediocre cover of an untouchable song. The other half harnesses the excitement of being at your local riot grrrl cover band show, and you’ll be wishin’ you were in the all-girl pit up front. The best tracks totally come from Vancouver’s Baby Control, who covers BK’s blink-of-the-eye ripper “In Accordance With Natural Law” and nearly hyperventilates through Huggy Bear’s “Pansy Twist.”
You should get this — not because it’s a must-have covers record, but because you can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who was in a band that tried to cover a riot grrrl song at least once, and by that logic, YOU could’ve been on this record. So support the supporters. This one’s totally limited to 300 on white vinyl (sorry, no MP3s but available on our mail order website and in our Manhattan shop
Last night, Here We Go Magic treated fans to a pre-tour warm up, playing a “secret” show at Brooklyn’s Union Pool. Word of mouth had obviously spread pretty quickly, and Luke Temple and his four-piece backing band kicked off their set to a packed room with “Tunnelvision.” The group then turned to debuting some newer material, which was surprisingly a little more muscular than the hushed, dreamy ambience of Here We Go Magic’s debut album, the two songs proudly sporting the fused influences of Talking Heads and Krautrock, with Temple’s elastic melodies being carried by sinewy guitar lines, synth pads and a motorik beat. (After the set, Temple told me that these songs were the first he had written with his live band and that they had wanted to test out the new material in a smaller setting — along with letting their new bassist get a live show under her belt — before they hit the road with Grizzly Bear.) Even the songs off the Here We Go Magic album took on a new life, with “Everything’s Big” sounding almost like a glammy, Eno-era Roxy Music ballad, and “I Just Want to See You Underwater” getting some synth-heavy cosmic disco polish. Afterwards, the night’s openers, Midnight Masses, took the stage again, but unfortunately, I had to head home knowing there was an early morning wake-up ahead of me. But I’m pretty sure I heard the strains of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” coming out of the back bar as I walked up Union Avenue. Crappy image courtesy of my camera phone!
While writing my Other Music Update review for Not Given Lightly, the new Morr Music tribute to New Zealand indie pop, Lali Puna’s cover of “I Like Rain” by the Jean Paul Sartre Experience reminded me of how blown away I was when I first heard (and saw) JPSE’s “Flex” late one Sunday night on 120 Minutes. I was only 14 at the time but all these years later it still sounds great!
I like to think that Calexico blew like a desert wind through Other Music last fall, as they toured in support of their excellent Carried to Dust album. Goofy cliché’s aside though, the Tucson band can transform and transport like few others, likely because they are so open to transformation themselves, with the core duo of Joey Burns and John Convertino taking inspiration from a constantly changing cadre of collaborators from around the world. Their sound is heavily influenced by their dusty Arizona hometown and the blending of Mexican and American culture that is inherent to the southwestern United States, but honestly, that description is far too static and one needs to see this group live on stage to begin to understand their fluid, free-flowing approach to their international pop music. Somehow they packed the band into a cramped corner of our store — no mariachi this time, but still, these guys can sprawl — and they took us on a trip none of us will soon forget. Plus, there were tacos.
Other Music has been in the process of changing over the host server for our film series, and had to remove the videos from the site for a bit, but we’ve finally re-launched many of the clips and you can again watch wonderful live performances and interviews with some of our favorites, including: The Clean, Antipop Consortium, No Age, White Williams, St. Vincent, Tinariwen, My Brightest Diamond, and more to come.
Liz Harris, the woman more commonly known as Grouper, played a woefully brief set on Wednesday night, largely inundated by chatter of a crowd audibly and visibly (animal masks were at hand) dominated by fans of the headliner. But Grouper’s at-once gloomy and saccharine songs were nevertheless gorgeously delivered, the whole wrapped in a subdued haze of low-end melody, tidal wash, and tape hiss that drifted through an all too modest portion of Terminal 5’s notoriously vast, hangar-like space. Her solo vocal incantations perfectly recreated the amazing, ghostly auras of the Way Their Crept LP, and anyone familiar enough with her music should already know that Harris is quite capable of making a thousand other guitar/four-track/delay and fuzz pedal wielding outfits sound positively sublunary in comparison and fully transcending the sum of those parts. Plus she outdoes even Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher as a shoegazer — Harris didn’t look up from her feet once. If you’re lucky enough to be catching Grouper later this tour, most definitely check out the LPs that she is carrying around with her and selling for chump change considering the true covetability of some of these items (which are, to a great extent, pretty impossible to get elsewhere). Brace yourself if she’s yet to knock you off your feet.
Animal Collective began their set with a gloriously reworked version of “Chocolate Girl,” from their very first album (Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished), and the initiation of a strobing, rainbow-spanning array of psychedelic projections and synchronized LEDs that made the show as visually stunning as it was musically. A massive, blank globe hovering above the stage was home to projections of mind-bending montage and radiant digital geometry in the mode of what Danny Perez has long projected behind Black Dice to dazzling effect (it was almost surely his work here, too). The group ran through much of their newest album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, along with a fair amount of their older material — all of which seemed similarly, brilliantly expanded, whether in time or in the range of sounds (the low-end on just about everything was physically felt well beyond the eardrums) — and two yet-unrecorded songs, the fantastic “Blue Sky” (hear it on their latest BBC session) and their most recent, the transient “Bleed.” There was little sense at all that any replication of recorded material was being attempted — anyone who’s seen the group perform will tell you that their records really can’t prepare you for some of the brilliance they’ll unleash in a live setting. They unleashed it indeed. It seems slightly surreal that the band is now selling out venues with capacities of several-thousand, and it was even more surreal to hear hundreds of people singing along (through every yelp and scream, on some) to their songs on Wednesday night. But it is certainly testament to the Collective’s eminence in the pop music realm that none of this has weighed down their tremendous sound a bit, as some might fear. Songs stretched past the ten-minute mark and the crowd lost little momentum. Music this good has not been gobbled up so ravenously by so many in a long time, and that a truly new-sounding band can (and did), in this musical climate, leave legions of shell-shocked fans and proselytes wandering out of a show beaming about their newly-destroyed brains/ears, is an awesome thing.
You probably have noticed that our Live at Other Music Series has been down. We are in the process of changing web servers for these videos, and will be reposting old favorite episodes along with premiering new films. Check back here and of course, we’ll announce new videos in our Other Music Update.
It was quite a weekend at Other Music, and we want to take a minute to thank all of you who helped make the second annual Record Store Day a huge success for us on so many levels. Obviously we are so grateful to the artists who came down to entertain the crowds here, and the labels and artists who made all of those great limited items available just to the participating indie shops. But more than anything, we want to thank all of you music fans who came out in droves Saturday, and actually waited in line to get into the shop all for the simple pleasure of buying some great music!
We started the day at 11AM with a crush of the hard-core collectors looking for all that limited vinyl, and they were greeted with a nice (but quickly shrinking) pile of rarities, and a great breakfast spread provided by our friends at Sony Music, who brought down a copy of Bob Dylan’s excellent new album for us all to listen to while we snacked and shopped. (Together Through Life is out April 28, on Columbia). By 1PM our DJs started up, and it was so much fun hearing what the musicians behind some of our favorite new albums are listening to themselves. There were killer sets from Telepathe, Obits, Grizzly Bear, Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Raveonettes and Prefuse 73 — we wish you would all come back and entertain us every weekend!
Finally, to close the night out we had a stunning solo performance from Bill Callahan, who delivered an hour-plus set of songs from his beautiful new album (Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is out now on Drag City), plus a few classics from the Smog days, and after waiting for up to two hours for admission (sorry to all of you who were shut out, there was just no more room!), the crowd was mesmerized. Maybe all that beer helped (thanks Pabst Blue Ribbon!), but the music was simply intoxicating on its own; in this case, one guitar and one lone voice was all that anyone could ask for, and we were spellbound.
So there it is. It was a great Saturday, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Things are tough all over these days, and even more so in record retailing; New Yorkers know that first hand, as we have lost many of our best shops in recent months, with more closings on the horizon. The support we felt from all the artists, labels and fans this weekend was heartening to say the least, and we hope that the spirit of Record Store Day can carry on throughout the year, and that we will see more of you all in coming months. At the very least, stop by soon to use those 10% off coupons we were handing out all day! Thanks again for all the love and support, and we hope to see you soon, OM.
Like hundreds of other record shops across the country, Other Music will be celebrating Record Store Day tomorrow, April 18th. Obviously, since you’re reading this on our download Web site’s news blog, we wholeheartedly embrace the non-pirated digital revolution – ultimately, it doesn’t matter what format you prefer your music in, as long as you’re listening, discovering and supporting artists. Still, you can’t beat the feeling of walking into a shop and hearing a song you’ve never heard before playing on the stereo, staring at all the CDs and LPs on the shelves and walls, and shooting the breeze with a clerk who loves music as much as you do. Needless to say, it’s a dying culture, and we consider ourselves to be among the lucky few whose doors are still open, thanks to our customers and friends who still love the tactile experience of shopping at a record shop as much as we do.
So if you’re in New York, please come by tomorrow and say hi. We’ve got a great line-up of guest DJs and an in-store performance from Bill Callahan, along with a 10% off all merchandise in the store and on our mail-order site. (Sorry that we aren’t able to extend this sale to downloads.) But no matter where in the country you are, make sure to show your favorite record shop some love tomorrow.
OTHER MUSIC RECORD STORE DAY EVENTS:
11:30AM-12:30PM: Bob Dylan Together Through Life listening party with bagels, muffins, and juice
1-2PM Telepathe DJ Set
2-3PM Obits DJ Set
3-4PM Grizzly Bear DJ Set
4-5PM Pains of Being Pure at Heart DJ Set
5-6PM Raveonettes DJ Set
6-7PM Prefuse 73 DJ Set
9-10PM Bill Callahan Live Performance
*PABST BLUE RIBBON will be supplying the drinks during the Callahn performance - 21+ w/ID
Check out this great article about this day posted in SPIN on-line by their music editor, Charles Aaron, who gives Other Music a shout out along with a lot of other great shops. Also Interpol’s Sam Fogarino, who’s been a long time customer and was also one of the DJs at last year’s Record Store Day, us gave some love on MetroMix New York. We’re blushing…
