From an April post: Festival time for WFMU once again and this time a little further than a
jaunt into the autumnal Catskills. Thanks to kind invitation and plane
tickets courtesy of Primavera Sound, WFMU is hopping the pond over to Barcelona, Spain for live broadcasts from the prestigious festival at the Parc del Fòrum onMay 28th, 29th, and 30th!
We'll be packing our remote gear (and 3D glasses for Gaudi building
viewing) and parking it alongside the Mediterranean for three days of
multiple-stage broadcasts of some sure-to-be stellar FMU-friendly live
sets. The schedule exact set-time broadcasts for us have not been
finalized, but take a gander at some of the fest's heavy participants here.
We're unbelievably stoked to be invited as American radio ambassadors
for these shows; the lineup is dizzying, and again, totally perfect for
WFMU and its freeform-lovin' listenership. Super thanks to our pal
Jaime Casas for helping to get the ball rolling, and all the cool peops
at the fest we're looking forward to working with!
Updates! WFMU is here, the weather is ridiculously incredible. We survived the post-Barcelona victory over Manchester United street carnage last night, and we're starting our broadcast from Spain today around 4:30 PM Eastern time, going until 7:00, then reconvening 8:00 PM through 11:00PM. During that time we''ll be shuttling between the ATP, Rayban, Estrella, Pitchfork, and Rockdelux stages (yeah, it's a big ass festival) and you're likely to hear the Magik Markers, Bats,Spectrum, Vaselines,the Jesus Lizard, Jay Reatard, and Wooden Shjips! Maybe more as permissions are still being finalized. Some of these may spill into our Day 2 broadcast if time doesn't allow. WFMU will be on its Facebook and Twitter pages too to try to give you a rundown of exact start times and what you can expect during the evenings.
Saturday, the 30th: Day three from 3:00 PM Eastern until midnight. Perhaps airing some of the sets we were unable to get to from Thursday or Friday? But playing on assorted stages that day are Jeremy Jay, Th' Faith Healers,Oneida,Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti,Deerhunter.Once again, this is all subject to change, but to the best of our knowledge you'll be hearing these sets on these particular days, and we'll do our gosh darndest to keep you up to date online. As usual, we'll also be looking into archiving as much of this as we can ala our ATP and SXSW shows, and get some up on the Free Music Archive too (artist-approval-pending)! Tune in, send us good vibes to keep us fueled for our all-nighters in Barcelona!
Few bands revelled in the seedy underbelly of the American stripmall like Houston's Culturcide, a band fueled by the Boss' 80s bluejeans back pocket lint and grizzle from the bottom of a Burger King deep-fry tray; they were also purveyors of possibly the greatest holiday single ever, "Depressed Christmas" (MP3). Chelsea Whores is an exhibition by Mark Flood, an artist well-involved in that band's general orbit, running here in New York at the Zach Feuer Gallery (520 West 24th Street), from May 22 through July 10th and features his collage works and what he's termed "broken paintings" from 1979-2002 (though one recent review from Los Angeles states that all of the materials claiming to be decades old were actually made in the last two years). The refuse of American consciousness Flood chooses to deal with has included literal debris from Hurricane Ike, modified road or food service signs, and as we see left, lots of mutated iconography (one of my fave images he has made in the past has Annie Lennox on the Eurythmics' Touch LP cover being rearranged into garish Elephant Man-style paste-up). Great quote on Germany in NYC about the Chelsea Whores exhibit that makes me even more down with it: "His influence is comparable to that of the American artist Andy Warhol,
but whereas Warhol's work features talent, Flood unintentionally
devises a tedious formal vocabulary, layered with meaning and metaphor."
Haven't seen them on a Maxwells marquee yet, but Personal and the Pizzas assure everyone that they are indeed New Jersey's finest rock and roll band. As a radio station in the central orbit of many Jersey bands (some of whom utilize weaponry), we issue our standard "who are we to argue?" response.
Killer new 7" reissue of 1981 Fall/Joy Division-inspired Belgians AA, out via Brooklyn's Softspot Music label in a limited edition of 500. The band chose its monicker as such so they could be filed in store bins in front of Abba. They got some brief buzz in the Rough Trade shops; Bush Tetras and Y Pants took some of their 45s back to New York, but the band never really got into cruising altitude playing sporadic gigs here and there. Neat to see this resurface.
Back on March 20th, WFMU did its second SXSW show down in Austin, this time joined in the hand-picking and presentation of the bill by our friends at Aquarius Records in San Francisco. It was a pretty massive event, 14 bands in all, and the outdoor stage kicked off that evening with one of AQ's picks from their hometown, Prizehog. Like the band Harvey Milk (who coincidentally opened WFMU's SXSW show the previous year), this trio specializes in downtuned, sludged-out epic psychedelic metal, though for my money these guys take it into a more spaced-out realm. Their great studio CDR had a somewhat primitive vibe of lo-fi basement doom done on bareboned recording equipment, but live in the outdoor concrete pit of Spiro's I thought they sounded no less destructive, and even more expansive. Worked totally great on the radio as well, check out these MP3s below. And also check out an assortment of 2008/2009 live MP3s from our SXSW shows up on the Free Music Archive (with more to come). Thanks again to Prizehog, AQ, and all the bands and Austin attendees!
Iowa rockabilly kings had a record on Teenbeat back in the early 1990's called "Every Song We Fuckin' Know" that featured such classics as "Wigglin' Couch", "Martians From Mars" and "Bake That Brisket." There's now 28 minutes of them on Public Access TV on their My Space page. The singer's name is Nobody, and Teenbeat boss Mark Robinson once told me that when he visited, the guy kept a refrigerator full of nothing but canned peaches.
Upon hosting a live set on my show from Pink Reason (which was at that particular time just a solo Kevin Failure) back in 2006, I learned about the years Kevin spent with his relocated American parents in 1990's Siberia, and also learned some history of what was surely a rich but uber-contained underground punk and psychedelic rock scene going on. A couple years earlier, Igor from Kim's record store in NYC had already floated me a CD of Opizdenevshie which I really dug, couldn't quite assimilate to anything else in contempo psych-punk, and wanted to know more. I later found out that this band had done music with Egor Letov, an Omsk-born avant-protest-punk who had laid a pretty intensive foundation for mid-to-late 80's Soviet underground music, particularly in the band Grazhdanskaya Oborona. A few months ago after Kevin had settled down in Brooklyn, I jumped at the opportunity when he offered to bring out some of his collected sounds from the then-Soviet (and especially Siberian) underground; the three hour show's archived here. Pretty much everything he brought down blew me away, especially the LP Stid I Sram by a Novosibirsk-born woman named Yanka (AKA Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva). During her 1988-91 presence on what was a super tight-knit scene, she was the significant other of Letov playing in assorted combos as well, and he played on her records in turn. Yanka was found dead in 1991, drowned in a river with the official tag of suicide, though apparently that's been somewhat debated. That particular debate can surely be fueled by the track "Pridyot Voda" which Kevin played, an epic, 9 minute fiery folk-punk anthem with Yanka spitting out angry verse after verse, literally referring to the act of drowning before the song leaps into a devastating, swirling organ solo that wouldn't sound out of place on a noise record. It's really incredible, but apologies for the short skip within the MP3 due to the vinyl not being in optimal shape. Letov, by the way, passed away from heart failure in 2008, and Kevin did a tribute performance in tribute to him, which you can check out some of on You Tube.
While being a usual event on the subcontinent, all-night Indian classical concert events are not so common here in NYC. Rob Weisberg's Transpacific Sound Paradisepreviews one this Saturday, May 2nd between 6 and 9 PM live on WFMU : NY-based tabla player and scene advocate Samir Chatterjee has organized a 10th annual all-nighter taking place Saturday to Sunday May 9 to 10 at the Society of Ethical Culture (2 West 64th Street, Manhattan). Included on the show: three musicians who will be among the many
participants in the concert: highly regarded veteran virtuosos Pandit Soumitra Lahiri (sitar) and Sri Shailendra Misra (tabla); and representing the next generation, Samir Chatterjee's son, up-and-coming tabla player Dibyarka Chatterjee. Tune in and prep for Saturday's all night-flight.
If you're out and about in NYC on Tuesday, May 12th, Spain's esteemed SONAR festival makes a one-night-only soujourn to our fair city with assorted artists from Barcelona, plus Prefuse 73, Beans, and our own Mudd Up! host DJ/Rupture. The show is free, but you need to sign up here, and it'll all be happening at the Baryshnikov Arts Center at the Howard Gilman Performance Space, 450 West 37th Street. SONAR NYC is part of an ongoing Catalan Days fest happening in town now through May 20th. Also, if you haven't heard the news yet, WFMU will be making its own little pilgrimage to Barcelona at the end of May for a three day simulcast of some of Primavera Sound's massive fest, more details on that forthcoming.
