Boston crew Non-Event (hot on the heels of their 10th Anniversary) are hosting Raster-Noton founder and intensely great live performer Frank Bretschneider this Thursday at the Goethe-Institut.  You should go.

The details:

FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER
performing a special experimental “EXP” set

with Mem1

Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02116
8:00 p.m. / $15 or $12 with valid student ID

As noted, Bretschneider will be performing work from last year’s album, EXP, which came with a second CD full of corresponding visuals for the music.  A sample:

Thanks to the Destination: OUT blog for putting up this super punk 7″ that Ornette Coleman put out in 1969. Free jazz singles – who knew?  I did not.   Head over to the blog RIGHT HERE to grab the mp3s of this rare vinyl and lots more…

Meanwhile, I’ve taken over booking duties at the classical/contemporary artist management group Ariel Artists, based in Boston and representing soloists and ensembles from Boston and New York City. The roster is a blast and, collectively, offer a super crash course in 20th Century music (from Debussy on to Satie, Stravinsky, Cage, Stockhausen, Morton Feldman,  John Luther Adams, Mei-Fang Lin, John Zorn and Toshio Hosokowa, plus lots of brand new commissioned works), not to mention an across-the-board excellency with classical/romantic and earlier stuff.  A website overhaul is on the way and lots of exciting stuff on the way from this group in general. I’ll try to avoid overzealous plugging of shows here all the time, but will let you know as they come up since they’re all great performances on their own, with or without my involvement. On the immediate horizon:  a string of shows by solo pianist Oni Buchanan in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.

I recently had a chance to catch one of three US performances of Tyondai Braxton‘s music by the Wordless Music Orchestra at Lincoln Center in New York. Full disclosure – a few friends were deeply involved in the project, so I can’t claim impartiality to the subject (do you care?), but the performances felt too big to let go without mention. Braxton recently left the avant-rock supergroup Battles to focus on solo work like this. Seeing that it made music like this possible, I’m glad he did so. For those familiar with this music, as released in 2009 on Central Market (Warp), the live performances probably didn’t offer too many revelations. Braxton’s compositions take most of the big-picture scores of orchestral engineers of the last hundred years through the paper shredder. The optimistic buzz-whiz of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the zany Mouse Trap contraptions you can trace from Danny Elfman on back to Bernard Hermann and Raymond Scott, kazoo and percussion pranks from Spike Jones, and the cautiously aware tonalities of Copland and Bernstein all play into Braxton’s compositional schemes.  There’s also plenty of thorny guitar work which, depending on your frame of reference, might be either the most familiar or most alienating part of the music.  It’s likely, though, that none of this stuff comes from way out of left field, regardless of what seems to be the easiest way to frame it (i.e. the clashing of indie and classical scenes).  Ennio Morricone was pairing nasty-sounding surf guitar and harmonica with orchestras in Clint Eastwood westerns almost 50 years ago, and most of our grandpas never minded, so it’s kind of stunning that the concept of “genre-bending” still raises eyebrows anywhere. Nevertheless, it does, and seeing music that lives this far in between worlds get superstar treatment at places like Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress is . . . notable.

The group onstage set up in regular orchestra arcs of strings, french horn, trumpets, percussion, a couple electronics engineers, a small choir of kazoo players, and six guitarists (Braxton himself took first chair guitars), and were conducted by Caleb Burhans. Who knows how some of this stuff was constructed on record but, live, six guitars pulling off Esquivel-style rubber band slides in unison and thunking out low blasts sounded incredible. Disembodied beatbox loops started off a little awkwardly in the mix, but even those eventually made sense as the night went on. The percussion section broke out a few alien-looking pieces of equipment to saw across with a bow for eerie squeals, and yeah, the kazoos sounded appropriately goofy. In short, it ruled. The group performed Thursday in DC, and the material is scheduled for one more run in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Battles, meanwhile, has moved on as a three-piece without Braxton, who had ironically started out as possibly the least-known member of the band back in 2002. Their upcoming record, Gloss Drop, is on the way (also from Warp) in June. The band — Ian Williams, Dave Konopka, and John Stanier — enlisted a bunch of tech-fetish superstar guests to round things out and possibly make up for Braxton’s absence in the music, everyone from Yamantaka Eye to Gary Numan). Prefix Magazine posted the track “Ice Cream” (featuring Mathias Aguayo) last week, and it’s interestingly straightforward. The sound is still builds off of plastic, computer processed and stunted guitars and tricky syncopated beats, but it’s all a little more compact and poppy. It’s not a step backward, exactly, but definitely a change in strategy toward a less curious path.

THE KONKS

The Konks are a Boston institution and it will be sad to see them go. From the ashes of Bullet LaVolta, Kustomized, the Racketeers and a lot more came this ugly concoction of garage punk on a couple of drums – one of them forever teetering precariously on a stack of milk crates. They’ve bridged the gap between the glorious (yet sometimes moldy) Abbey Lounge-centered rawk scene and the weirdo noise pranksters (see their long-standing alliance with Tunnel of Love), and for that alone they deserve all sorts of medals. These guys are beloved across the board.

They never really toured, but they did play New York a bunch and once got an on-stage introduction from ’70s sleazegali Kim Fowley. They found a trashed upright bass one day, duct-taped it together, and used it for gigs until it caved in on itself mid show at the Midway. When they flew to Vegas for some shows, Davis duct-taped the milk crates together and checked them as luggage. They put out a record on esteemed Bomp! Records (Dead Boys, DMZ, Black Lips) that slipped through the cracks when label founder Greg Shaw passed away. “The audacity, right?” says Wilson. That album’s “29 Fingers” was later resurrected in Rock Band — Davis is an office manager at Harmonix.

But it’s their blatant disregard for lofty ambitions and their zeal for meeting moronic challenges head on that will fuel this legend for years to come. Case in point: the time they won Little Steven’s goofball “Underground Garage Battle of the Bands” on a lark. “We played to 30 people at the Roxy,” says Wilson. “And they gave us thousands of dollars’ worth of gear.” They sold most of it. After they won, they went straight to the Abbey, where they had a show that night.

Another thing that deserves mention is the completely badass synths they hand-built for release with last year’s “Nerves” 7-inch. One of the coolest things anyone has ever put out with a record:

Link to the complete story at the Boston Phoenix here.

TRABANTS

Trabants — who isn’t a sucker for surf, spaghetti westerns, and foreign pop music?  This band has been curating sets full of the best instrumental pop from all over the world for the last year and half or so — everything from Burt Bacharach’s zany “Bond Street” to the hazy psych freak-outs from old French compilations. And of course, there is impeccably played surf.

The debut Trabants album, dubbed “Highwire Surfing’’ and recorded in old-fashioned mono, is a testament to the power of old-school rock ethics, from its sparse arrangements to its trippy delay. There’s sputtering spring reverb on the guitars, crisp melodies, warm drums, and sly horn lines all over the place. Penna pulls elements from spaghetti western soundtracks such as wheezing harmonicas and sound effects piped in from Telstar satellites. The only twist is in the names; Penna’s affinity for Cold War Eastern European ephemera in Ketman carries over in such song titles as “St. Petersburg Shake’’ and “Zubrówka,’’ the name of a Polish vodka banned in the States. “Trabants’’ themselves were small East German cars ubiquitous throughout Soviet bloc countries.

Link to complete article at the Boston Globe here.

On the occasion of a quick Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven tour throughout the Northeast, where they played their Kerosene Hat and Key Lime Pie albums, respectively, I spoke with David Lowery and Jonathan Segel about the genesis and legacy of CVB’s weirdo swan song, which came at the end of their new contract with Virgin Records as the band was just beginning to simultaneously hit a genius stride and fall apart at the seams (to borrow slang from Tom Waits, maybe this was what it was like to see a band walkin’ Spanish).

By the time Key Lime Pie came out, the group had jettisoned two of their earliest members, guitarist Chris Molla and Segel, with the parts Segel had written for the album’s demos having been tossed in favor of in-studio bits by his replacement, Morgan Fichter. After about a year of touring, the band collapsed.

That was around the time Segel finally gave the record a listen. “I sort of hid from it for probably a good year. I think I was in [Bay Area music attorney and manager] Barry Simons’s office, and he had a cassette of Key Lime Pie sitting there, like a promo cassette from Virgin. I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard it,’ and grabbed it. He’d already listened to the first side, so when I put it in the car stereo, the first song I heard was ‘June.’ I thought it was the best thing that Camper had ever done. I was really bummed not to have been a part of that.”

Segel wrote Lowery a letter to let him know as much, but it sat unopened at Lowery’s home while Camper were out on the tour where they imploded for good. “He got back from all that and got this letter and thought I was making fun of him because the band had just broken up.”

Link to the entire article at the Boston Phoenix here.

One more interesting point about this record (and yeah, I’ll admit to having a bias for this record rather than Cracker’s Kerosene Hat):

As noted above, founding member and violinist Jonathan Segel actually was involved in this record all the way through the demo recording stage, so a lot of claims about how his leaving opened the door for more straightforward songwriting seem a little off-base. An extra detail in the above story is that when Segel borrowed the tape from Barry Simons, Simons had already listened to the first side, so when Segel put it in his car stereo the first song he heard was “June.”  Not world-shattering, but kind of charming anyway, right?

Also, it would be fun to trace the design genealogy of this record, in terms of what it influenced, how contemporaries dealt with it, etc..,  I’ve always looked at it as a kind of painfully early ’90s design/font, but closer inspection (i.e. actually asking who did it) reveals that it’s the work longtime Camper associate Bruce Licher, who had been hand-constructing things for them since their first record with an old letterpress machine.

Meanwhile, always be encouraged to check out Lowery’s 300songs blog, which is one of the more interesting retrospective works going by any middle-aged indie rocker in the land. He’s planning on a book sooner or later, though he tells me “I’ve learned a lot about the book industry since making that promise…”  Lowery also has a new solo record on the way next month — The Palace Guards (429 Records).

Anyway, if you haven’t listened to Key Lime Pie in awhile, try it — the thing still holds up, and watching the band play this stuff last week in Boston was thrilling.

One of the best releases of the year came from Austin’s Octopus Project, who based their Hexadecagon (Polyvinyl) on an insane live experiment in a Texas parking lot:  ”With eight speakers arranged in a circle surrounding the audience, and the audience in turn surrounding the band at the center, The Octopus Project performed Hexadecagon twice to over-capacity crowds at SXSW 2010. Overhead, the music was accompanied by eight synchronized video projections. The performance required an integrated eight-channel audio and eight-channel video system, hence the name “Hexadecagon,” the geometrical term for a sixteen-sided object — a sixteen-sided audiovisual panorama.”

The record came out earlier this year on Polyvinyl and the band has slowly been trotting out the goodies ever since, including a series of great videos capped off so far by this week’s “Catalog” video — GO WATCH IT NOW — and a truly incredible special edition vinyl package, pictured below:

The cut & assemble zoetrope and ten bonus “roulette” tracks can only be experienced via analog technology.

The roulette tracks are bonus songs – all exactly the same length – cut to wax in concentric, interlocked grooves, such that the listener never knows which song is played when the needle is placed on the LP. All ten tracks resolve to the same ending and drop into a single, final locked groove.

The Octopus Project has made a respectable name for themselves mostly in the last five years by mixing the conceptual dreaminess of the Flaming Lips with the craft-club kitsch of Quintron and Miss Pussycat.  The music that resulted from that has been some excellent, bizarro synth pop that Captain Kirk might have come across while exploring strange new worlds.  Hexadecagon leans heavier on minimalist arpeggios and slowly morphing harmonies.  Yeah, they’re on the recently overcrowded Terry Riley/Steve Reich bandwagon — which, honestly, I suspect might be more a trend in how we’ve been talking about music lately than any real shift in practice —  but as long as it ends up with something this good, who can complain?

Visit the Project!

The day after Carl Sagan day, I present you with Scrambles of Earth: The Voyage Interstellar Record, Remixed by Extraterrestrials, a semi-secret project that remixes recordings from the legendary golden record/galactic mix-tape that Sagan attached to the Voyager spacecraft so aliens could throw Milky Way theme parties.

Scrambles of Earth collects what appear to be “remixes” of the Voyager Record; although the evidence has yet to be fully evaluated, these may represent the first audio signs of alien intelligence. This account may comport with Hartwig Hausdorf’s May 2010 claim that the Voyager has been hijacked by aliens, as reported in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper HERE.

Seeland’s secretive SETI-X  - “Psychlo Killer / Total Transmission” from Scrambles of Earth:

(yes, that appears to be a Battlefield Earth reference).

Funerary Call is the original product of Harlow MacFarlane, the guy behind food-poisoningly queasy and aggressive sounds of Sistrenatus.  Marlow’s gone back to the more ominous Funerary Call project for now, maybe out of sheer exhaustion from Sistrenatus stuff like this:

Funerary Call, it’s said, works more along the lines of black ambient and ritual music.  So — mega-creepy synth drones and spectral chanting/wheezing.  MacFarlane’s site features this gem of defiantly circular reasoning:  ”Since 1994, H. MacFarlane has remained the driving force behind these ominous electronics and dark ambient textures. Though still obscure, Funerary Call were involved in the early movement of black ambient and ritual music prior to its growth in the scene. As a result of their inaccessibility, they remain one of the most overlooked artists of the genre.”

Xyphoid Dementia, on the other hand, is the ongoing project of Boston noise man Egan Budd (he also runs the Existence Establishment blog).  Budd plays a table full of electronics, contact-mic’d plexiglass, and cinder blocks that he manages to chop together into perfect, cold slates of sci-fi doom and nuclear winter.  His 2010 release, In the Land of the Living, came out as a set of four 3″ CDRs.  Awesome.

(the whole thing is right here:)

But most importantly!  The tour:

11/1 Burlington, VT @ The Monkey House

11/2 Buffalo, NY @ The Funeral Home

11/3 Somerville, MA @ Starlab

11/4 Providence, RI @ Building 13

11/5 Greenfield, MA @ John Doe, Jr.

11/6 Far Rockaway, NY @ The Red Light District

Boston’s WZBC graced us with an incredible run-down of the history of sound design in horror and sci-fi films last Friday — in the spooky spirit of this wicked weekend, I’m linking to the whole thing at the station’s online archive. “Film sound has surpassed the innovations of picture,” says guru Brian Carpenter, veteran Boston composer and bandleader of the sprawling group Beat Circus.

He spends the next three hours with friends Mike Frengel (a PhD in electroacoustic music composition, faculty member at Northeastern University and the Boston Conservatory) and local filmmaker Michael Neel (“I’m working on a web series — it’s Santa Claus fighting mutants in the year 8000″). We check out not just soundtracks by well-known composers (Morricone, Hermann, etc..,), but also get a careful tour of creepy sound effects and foley work by go-to sound designers of great directors. You get lots of uncomfortable clips from the likes of The Exorcist, Blue Velvet, Alien, Psycho, and lots more.

Carpenter also peppers in clips from interviews with classic sound guys like Walter Murch (THX-1000, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation) and NYU professor Steven Jay Schneider (author of Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror).

The Sound Of Horror: Sound Design in Horror and Science Fiction Films on WZBC
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Get this — stream it, download it, put it on an iPod for a long drive down a dark, stormy road. Great conversation.