Following Krausened, Bitchin Bajas are set to release the superbly-named Bitchitronics on Chicago's beloved Drag City. The Bajas certainly share similarities with founder Cooper Crain's other band, Cave. Beyond both releasing music on the aforementioned label, the two groups are highly indebted to progressive German music of the 1970s. But where Cave makes hypnotic krautrock, with an emphasis on the "rock," Bitchin Bajas stay more committed to the kosmische side of things, crafting transcendent and expansive pieces using primarily synths and organs. "Sun City" is on the short side at just over five minutes, but that's plenty of time for it to transport its listener to some sort of astral plane via beautifully layered, pulsing, Schulze-ian electronics.
For a band that's released about twenty albums and hasn't been actively reclusive, New Zealand's The Dead C is surprisingly distant and mysterious. This aura is bolstered by the fact that the band has only made one music video, and while it was produced in 2003, it has just now become available to view, thanks to The Wire. The video, for The Damned's "Truth," doesn't make the trio (Bruce Russell, Robbie Yeats, Michael Morley) any less obscure. Grainy and pixelated, the video echoes The Dead C's music by taking a familiar rock n' roll set-up and then refusing to comply with any of the genre's tropes. It's minimal, psychedelic, and strangely sad-- much like the song itself. Hopefully we'll get another video from them in twenty years.
Brooklyn's renowned experimental and avant garde performance space, the Issue Project Room, celebrates its 10-year anniversary with the presentation of a 2-month long festival. Supported by a pledge drive aimed at matching a 2:1 challenge grant, Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain will feature an impressive bill of over 50 artists, including William Basinski, Bobb Trimble, C. Spencer Yeh, Omar Souleyman, Oren Ambarchi, Jason Lescalleet, and Pauline Oliveros. The festival will be held at multiple cultural institutions around NYC and will kick off with a preview concert on July 2, featuring Tony Conrad and Yasunao Tone.
Stream the promo video for the festival below, and stay connected to the pledge here.
Kenneth Goldsmith-- poet, WFMU DJ, and creator of UbuWeb-- has a new project: printing out the internet. All of it. In conjunction with Mexican arts organization, LABOR, Goldsmith and UbuWeb are asking you (and me, and everyone) to print out as much of the internet as possible and send it to Mexico City, where the pages will be on display later this summer. While this may be an impossible task, it's a pretty fascinating idea, a sort of reification of this untouchable thing we all hold so dear. Justin Swanhart isn't down though. He put up a petition to stop Goldmsith and company, noting the obvious environmental issues that go along with printing out possibly millions of pages. But, you know, if you'd like you can start by printing out this post.
Vessel's album is called Order of Noise, so why not have a noise artist remix a track from it, right? Triangle enlisted Hospital Productions head and generally dark soul, Dominick Fernow, to do his thing as Prurient. Sometimes Prurient edges on dance territory-- similar to Fernow's project Vatican Shadow-- but the music is almost always harsh or fucked up. That's the true surprise with this "Court of Lions" remix. Fernow preserves the darkness of the original, but smudges the techno into celestial drones just a few cents short of New Age. Of course, he only arrives there after some churning brutality, but for the most part this is among the most subdued music that Fernow has made as of late.
Vessel's Order of Noise came out last year on Triangle. Prurient's most recent release was Through The Window on Blackest Ever Black.
Part two of our three-part interview with Keith Fullerton Whitman sees the musician delving into social music experiences and the communicative side of modern technology. While artists of the seapunk and witchhouse persuasion leverage the Internet to create mystique, Whitman uses it to level with the masses. The newsletters for his distribution company, Mimaroglu, are essay-length screeds in italics and boldface, short lessons in the esoteric, underground, and highbrow. This transparency extends to his own music, as he shares entire Max patches, video walkthroughs of his modular set-up, and the methodologies behind his recording experiments. Whitman may have had a stint lecturing at Harvard, but he never seems like he's trying to wow his audience with his knowledge; instead, he comes off as amiable guy who can't help but divulge the full breadth of his obsessions to whomever will listen. Thank god he's an electronic musician and not a mutilation fetishist. His split with Floris Vanhoof is out today on Shelter Press.
Ad Hoc: I saw a picture of you performing in Berlin, at Berghain, which is a big dance club. What does the audience make of you when you play something like that?
Keith Fullerton Whitman: Yeah Berghain, I mean, I’ve seen a lot of stuff there over the years. It’s a great place-- the sexual dynamics of the place is first what people are attracted to about it.
Ad Hoc: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
KFW: You know, then music is also-- I’m not gonna say the music is secondary, because music is a huge part of the experience, and they have that incredible sound system. It's really an excellent place to go and listen to music. But it’s also a great place for sharing any kind of experience with a lot of other people. It’s really just a very social place. It’s not like they don’t do any experimental music there; they have tons of experimental concerts there, like a couple a month. There are a lot of bills of those interesting Berlin labels and things that do both dance music and experimental music. It’s not like people who like dance music are only on for dance music. They still like everything, so...
Patient Sounds head-- and Daniel Bachman collaborator-- Matthew Sage is one of those ambient polymaths. As with many droners that came up in the internet sage, Sage seems keenly conscious of the vast number of musical ideas which molecularly abstracted with the help of some home technology. His Casually Dilemma EP sees him traipsing across territory from magma-thick guitar drone to Philip Jeck-style vinyl work to bass-penetrated drones that sound like mndsgn if he listened to more Brian Eno. This is probably the exact kind of pretty music you'd be compelled to make if you were able to get stoned in the Colorado mountains all week.
Casually Dilemma is available now from M. Sage's Bandcamp.
Those crazy Europeans, always getting paid by their governments to make weird music. They must think they're so cool, with their arts subsidies and complex leather sneakers. Jan St. Werner, best known as being one half of Mouse On Mars, just released an album on Thrill Jockey that includes scores to abstract films and recordings of an 8-hour installation in a public square in Umbria, Italy. "2069" is an outtake from that album, Blaze Colour Burn, and is an exemplar of digital minimalism. Processed cello and bells create an oneiric myst, with glacial chord changes anchoring this admittedly academically experimental work in the emotional. It's also worth noting that tonight, St. Werner premieres an opera he wrote, Miscontinuum at Kunstverein, in Munich. It features a libretto written by Oval's Markus Popp.
Though it may seem rare to associate puberty with gemlike ingenuity, Earth Dies Burning represents just that. Founded in 1981, the group of teenagers delineated an early conception of "synth-punk", combining cheap Casio synthesizers, splintered drums, a basoon, and youthful-angst to produce a sound raw enough to carry them through all of 15 shows. As detailed in a short piece featured on the Captured Tracks website, Earth Dies Burning showcased their early exuberance at quite a few popular clubs, accompanying a plethora of LA punk scene heavies: Dead Hippie, The Minutemen, Zoogz Rift.... It is such rawness that has caught the attention of Captured Tracks, who plans to remaster and reissue 17 of EDB's original tracks along with a few live recordings to be released on vinyl within the next month.
Get a taste of Earth Dies Burning via their performance on New Wave Theatre below.
Conditioning is the first of Flower Orgy's releases for New Camp Records. Nate Luce performs solo on nearly all the tracks, except for where guitarist John Anderson (formerly of Girls) is featured. This album brings together many of Luce's home recordings, making it deliciously low-fi. In addition to the rough-around-the-edges sonic quality, the songs themselves stray away from conventionality. The title of the tape refers to Luce's exploration of an escape from conditioning, letting go of conventional style and structure. Luce pushes the envelope with a gentle hand, creating something new from a tangible skeleton of the familiar. An experiment approached with honest naturalism, Conditioning has a lovely, pensive quality.
Conditioning is out July 1 on New Camp, and is available for pre-order now.
