Igorrr - Very Noise

 #Igorr #Gautier Serre #extreme metal #breakcore #experimental #industrial #baroque metal #trip-hop #death metal #electronic #Meat Dept #animated music video

We have a challenge for you: Watch Meat Dept’s latest video and try and keep a straight face. Chances are you probably can’t. A weird and wacky music video created to accompany French musician Igorrr's track,Very Noise, it may surprise you to hear that there is a quite a serious meaning behind it – amidst all the madness. “Very Noise is an attempt to transcribe on video the synthesis of numerous testimonies of stroke victims that we have collected over the past few years,” explains David Nicolas of Meat Dept. “About 3/4 of the stroke victims are heterosexual white males over 50 years old, and the visions that arise from these experiences are in common with the neuroses of this category of the population. Identity disorder, existential anxieties linked to erection problems, transfer phenomenon to a more sporty image of the father, a burning desire for extreme but playful activities such as motocross or solo rock climbing…”
What on the face of it seems to be impossible to link together, was actually created with a lot of consideration and much thought. “The notion of figurative abstraction is also very significant in the stories, it is a form of link between two ideas that challenge each other, one could speak of a remedy for cognitive dissonance generated by overlapping fantasies,” explains David.
Bearing in mind the serious subject matter underpinning the project, Meat Dept have approached it in a typically humorous and open manner. “We just opened our psychic channel and went fishing for ideas,” recalls Laurent Nicolas. “We basically took the ideas as they came and translated them instantly into images, without any filter or thinking, like the “cadavre exquis.” Then we connected the dots to create some kind of story and everything made sense.” The team behind Meat Dept are David Nicolas, Laurent Nicolas and Kevin Van Der Meiren, who's varied backgrounds across animation, design, art and film have proved quite a prolific combination. As a collective they have previously had a short film premiere at Sundance and produced idents for Adult Swim, alongside their own personal film and music video projects. They are currently working on their first series, entitled Black Holes, which has been signed by a US television network.
Looking through their portfolio, it is clear that the team has a unique way of looking at things, that manifests itself in such intriguing work. Their process that facilitates this seems to be one which snowballs from one idea: “The deal with Igorrr was total freedom. We started from a motion capture bug in a loop David was working on: the chewing gum character on the boxing ring. Then we improvised and built around it, with a lot of experiments,” explains Kevin. “Then what’s important in our approach is the attitude we have towards the variety of tools and techniques we’re using. Technology plays a very important part in our process. We are as excited about the technology as the art itself. We love to play around with new tools and push them to their limits. As we said, the starting point of the video was some weird bugs and distortions in motion capture movements. From this technical problems can sometimes arise interesting forms. You have to be open to that kind of discovery.”
When they were approached by Igorrr, the team were experimenting for an exhibition that focussed on loops. David explains that this was where the collaboration began: “At the time we were preparing an exhibition of living paintings, made of loops, basically an animation sequence that loops perfectly and can be watched endlessly,” he says. “Gautier loved the concept, but listening to the track, we were really disconcerted. It’s very violent and unpredictable.” The fast and varied nature of the track itself is obviously something that drives the visuals, and many of the scenes are directly synced to the beat - something that Meat Dept considered important. “Of course, especially for a track like Very Noise, it’s all about rhythm. Towards the end of the process, we adjusted the cuts together with Gautier and he tweaked the music a little bit and added some sound design to make it perfectly fit with the images,” says Laurent. “Some say he’s a genius but he’s just a maniac really! Jokes aside, it was great working with him. Great guy!”
The video has had an amazing reception so far, with millions of views on Youtube and the inevitable reaction videos alongside them. Famous fans of the piece also include Mike Judge, someone that Meat Dept hugely admires. Based on the success of Very Noise, attention turns to where they go next. We ask them if any of the characters may make an appearance again in the future, to which Kevin responds: “Haha! The Grandpa biker is definitely coming back…”  From: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/meat-dept-digital-film-310120

Mrs. Piss - Self-Surgery

 #Mrs. Piss #Chelsea Wolfe #Jess Gowrie #noise rock #experimental rock #industrial #goth metal #sludge metal #alternative rock #music video

Chelsea Wolfe and Jess Gowrie have formed a new group called Mrs. Piss. Their debut LP Self-Surgery is due out May 29 via Sargent House. Today, they’ve shared two singles, “Downer Surrounded by Uppers” and “Knelt”. Wolfe and Gowrie started the project while touring around Wolfe’s Hiss Spun album in 2017. They recorded Self-Surgery at the Dock Studio in Sacramento, California and at Wolfe’s home studio the Canyon. Wolfe performs vocals and guitar, with Gowrie on drums, guitar, bass, and programming.

In a statement, Wolfe said:
Working on this project brought Jess and I so much closer as songwriters and production partners, after reuniting as friends and bandmates. It was freeing and fun to channel some wild energies that I don’t typically put into my own music. We tried not to overthink the songs as we were writing them, but at the same time we did consciously put a lot into crafting them into our own weird sonic vision. This project was a chance for us to do things our own way, on our own terms, and we plan to invite more women musicians along for future Mrs. Piss recordings.

Gowrie added:
To me, Mrs. Piss represents a musical chemistry cut short long ago that now gets a second chance. Creating with Chelsea has always been very liberating for me, and we both push each other to try new things: anything and everything. Both of us have grown so much as writers and musicians since our first band together (Red Host), and with the journeys we had to take separately to get there, we both have so much more to say; so much more pain and anger to express. That said, we also had a lot of fun doing it, not to mention how freeing it is to not give a fuck and to just create.

From: https://pitchfork.com/news/chelsea-wolfe-and-jess-gowrie-announce-new-album-as-mrs-piss-share-new-songs-listen/

öOoOoOoOoOo - Chairleg Thesis

 #öOoOoOoOoOo #ex-Pin-Up Went Down #experimental #avant-garde #art rock #progressive metal #avant-garde metal #experimental metal #black metal #electronic

 

öOoOoOoOoOo - Samen (Apathia Records)
Fans of Pin-Up Went Down will find this debut record from France’s newest export Chenille (let’s just call them that for the sake of sanity) quite remarkable. That’s because what these two musicians have done (with help from Pryapisme skinsman Aymeric Thomas on session drumming) actually works to build upon the Pin-Up Went Down formula, and hey – it even has the same frontwoman, Asphodel. You might even call this act Pin-Up Went Down 2.0, even though this time around there is much more of an experimental factor, almost to the level of Unexpect and most certainly Carnival In Coal, as well as the obvious Diablo Swing Orchestra influence, not excluding Mr. Bungle (who inspired pretty much all of this stuff to be honest.)
When you listen to this one don’t expect one approach to continue for too long. There’s disco, death metal, pop music, freaky atmospheres, black metal blasts, electronic bits, Seussian horns and even Dahl-friendly Oompa Loompas. Yes, I said Oompa Loompas. You’ll actually hear them chiming in on this weird circus music around the mid-point of the album, particularly on the cut “No Guts = No Masters.” You may also hear some lounge, drum and bass and heavy bits of groove. The album even incorporates chiptunes. It’s not just an “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of album, because Samen also includes the kitchen sink, as well as the saxophone. At this point, we may as well call Chenille an avant-garde act, because there is just no other way to put it. I’m telling you right now listener, I had no idea what I was getting into with this one at first and was wondering what in the living hell I was listening to when opener “Rules Of The Show” came onto the scene. I said to myself, “Disco pop? Who in the hell sent me this?” Though as I kept listening, I suddenly realized that there was more to this than I ever could have imagined.
Samen is the kind of record where one will discover something new with each listen and must be absorbed thoroughly through repeated listens. You just won’t get it the first time, because there’s just too much to ascertain. It’s all going on at one time, in true experimental “paint on the wall” fashion. Some people don’t even see this as music, but that’s okay as it is literally marked as an exhibition, as if it was an entry in an art gallery. This classification fits, because Samen is literally abstract art in the form of music. Additionally, I can’t even discern as to what some of the songs might be about and feel that this is is one record where the experience will be enjoyed more with the actual booklet in hand. Asphodel’s lyrical matter is extremely difficult to understand, though I believe opener “Rules Of The Show” is intended to make a sort of strong feminist statement. As for grasping at straws, “Well-Oiled Machine” seems to have something to do with peer-to-peer file transferring and Who’s The Boss. I guess it is appropriate to mention that while I was born in the eighties, I never took interest in that show, nor The Wonder Years. Aside from the weird scientific excursions taken here, we also have a couple of catchier (yes, even in this style) numbers in the form of “Purple Tastes Like White” and “I Hope You Sleep Well” where the Oompa Loompas appear along with death metal vocals. Baptiste Bertrand comes into play as he manages the guitars, bass, programming and the vocals on “Well-Oiled Machine.”
Carnival In Coal was the literal birth of French experimental metal, so it makes sense that Pin-Up Went Down and this new incarnation in Chenille would only continue to expand on some of the greatest things in this genre. In all honesty, Pin-Up Went Down was a hard sell for me because it was too poppy and not experimental enough, nor did it have the amount of extremity that I remembered from Carnival in Coal or other works by Arno Strobl. Yet in this new, daring format I find Chenille to be one of the most interesting avant-garde acts of the last decade. This is what happens when the formula is done right, and if you don’t understand it or just don’t get it, that is entirely acceptable. After all, Chenille aren’t meant for everyone and not everyone will be able to get into them very easily. But I don’t think that Asphodel and Bertrand would have it any other way. Samen challenges the mind, but it also twists and distorts easily accessible pop music in a way that would make most American contemporary labels scratch their heads. I could see several executives now with confused looks on their faces, wondering how and to who they would actually market this record. Which is why those gentlemen aren’t working with this act and the fine folks over at Apathia Records are.
I am not sure about some of the other writers here at New Noise, but I have always been one more into experimental and overly weird approaches. So chances are that if you’re going to combine a shoehorn with a trombone and filter that through a bubble bath somehow, I’ll be game for the experience. That being noted, you need to open up your mind extravagantly wide for this one as it can go from depraved and ugly to rather pretty in a mere second. Chenille can offer a bite or they can be soft and fluffy. Sometimes they may just turn into a type of amorphous antimatter. It simply depends on the song. Although I’ve talked about a couple of the tracks here already, my intention is not to spoil such an interesting record for you. I haven’t even explained every style utilized on this record, particularly because I haven’t been able to catch them all. I will say that the most extreme moment on the disc is the French language cut, “Hemn Be Rho Die Samen” which also closes the disc, showing listeners right at the very end how demonic and hopeless this act can sound when they want to. I have a feeling that most of the more elite metalheads out there will probably just check out that one, but I recommend that the more open-minded of listeners give the entire album a chance. There’s simply nothing like it and hasn’t been any similar approaches for quite a while. Even when there were, nothing this over the top was ever attempted. I applaud Chenille and hope that this is only the beginning of something grand. As a minor side note, you might have noticed that the band’s moniker is a literal caterpillar which was intended. After all, that is what Chenille literally translates to in English. It’s quite clever. Just as clever as this album as a matter of fact.  From: https://newnoisemagazine.com/reviews/album-review-ooooooooooo-samen/

 

Mr. Bungle - Sweet Charity

 #Mr. Bungle #Mike Patton #experimental rock #avant-garde metal #funk metal #thrash metal #avant-garde jazz #alternative rock #death metal

I like to imagine that Mike Patton and the rest of Mr. Bungle got the idea for California by going on a vacation together to sunny Malibu, only to be greeted with an eccentric, disturbed cartoon version of the city. Shells of spent bombs litter the beaches, mutated and irradiated people walk the piers, and the ocean is an off-putting soylent green tint. A malignant, beating sun hangs over everything, threatening to scorch the earth with a solar flare tentacle at any given moment before burning out in a fit of spite.
Then it all turned out to be a shared fever dream that everyone remembers differently, but dedicates to tape in a sort-of Mad Libs version of artistic vomit, hence the absolute whiplash-inducing stylistic melting pot the album became.
Seriously, it would take a whole book to really delve into and take proper attendance of the myriad of influences and sounds heard here. One thing is certain though – it’s weird as hell; uncanny even for Mr. Bungle’s standards, whose previous album was an experimental rush of blood in the mid-90s.
Two years removed from what would be Faith No More’s final album until 2015, Patton just seemed to eurostep right into Mr. Bungle’s high-flying capers with California, an album that had no proper precursor and no successor since. Surf rock, doo-wop, space electronica, psychobilly; it’s incomprehensibly dense, risking haphazard levels of structure. At any given time, it always seems like a hop, skip, and a jump away from being the first album to be charged with disorderly conduct.
California is rife with themes of death, heaven, or an ‘end’ of some sort, as if implying The Golden State – or at least Mr. Bungle’s version – is where a lot of aspects of humans go to die. “Retrovertigo” is the death or severe repression of empathy in favor of profit and image as the instrumentation staggers drunkenly through sunburnt rock. “Ars Moriendi”, one of my favorite songs, translates from Latin to ‘the art of dying’, and is a surreal romp incorporating West Asian tones and instruments. An accordion tears through much of the track in a bid to keep up with Patton’s wild vocalizations and Latin chants – or perhaps it’s Patton trying to keep up. Like many other points on California, it’s hard to know which direction is the correct one – when asked, the album only responds with a cryptic ‘yes.’
“Sweet Charity” expertly riffs on lounge music, “Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy” is a trippy and plucky electronic monolith, much like the eponymous golem, and “Vanity Fair” is a doo-wop pop (doo-pop?) nightmare of self-flagellation with much too positive a mood for the lyrical content (this isn’t a complaint, as I love that kind of tonal disparity in music). The album seems to touch on almost all forms of contemporary music, both then-current and old.
Hell, there’s even flecks of metal if you’re desperately searching for the heavier side of Mr. Bungle. “Goodbye Sober Day” becomes rapidly unraveled as it goes from soft rock lightly coated in tropical themes and becomes devoted to Kecak chants and harder instrumentation. In this manner, the album chooses a ceremonial death – one not adherent to any perceivable culture or religion – though less of the body and more of the ego or hubris that could be found throughout California. One where the end of the rainbow was only concerned with self and not much else. Either that, or I’m wildly overthinking it.
That’s kind of the beauty of Mr. Bungle and much of Patton’s work – in search for a possible tongue buried in cheek, there’s genuine criticism and a fashioned theme to track as you listen to the enigmas they call songs. It’s like your brain needs a decoder to unlock the knowledge that the band may or may not have buried far, far below the substrate of quirky, but talented musicianship and a desire to dizzy anyone brave or unknowing enough to give their records a spin.
This all makes it weird, though also maybe prophetic, that this album also fueled a big feud between Mr. Bungle (chiefly Patton though) and Red Hot Chili Peppers (chiefly the band’s frontman, Anthony Kiedis). RHCP were kind of mad that Mr. Bungle named their album California when they had an album called Californication. Because, you know, RHCP invented California or some shit. The two albums were actually going to release on the same day, but Warner Bros. (the label for both releases) delayed California by a month and some change. Kiedis took things a step further by using his stardom and pull to get Mr. Bungle kicked off a handful of summer festival shows that RHCP were also playing.
Mr. Bungle fired back by ‘dressing up’ as the members of RHCP at a Halloween show in 1999 where they learned songs from Californication backstage at the set, drew on crude interpretations of the tattoos each RHCP member had, and went out there to do a full-on mock of them, complete with purposefully bad cover songs, and mimicking heroin injections on stage as an obvious dig at Kiedis’ drug problem. They were obviously pissed at the loss of income and huge exposure potential for the better part of a year, but this was juvenile and tasteless at best – don’t make fun of someone’s drug addiction, people. Then again, so too were Kiedis’ moves, so everyone took an L. This all likely stemmed originally from Kiedis thinking that Patton was stealing his style in their Faith No More’s “Epic” music video from 1990. You can read more about it complete with quotes from both parties over at the Bungle Fever fansite or on Mr. Bungle’s Wikipedia. In closing; Anthony Kiedis used Ego Trip. It’s super effective!
Anyway, yes, music. California being the swan song for Mr. Bungle is fitting given its themes. The album sounds like the sun not only setting on the band, but the world itself with its apocalyptic tropic wasteland interpretation of West Coast (really, American) idealism and isolationism. So many weird bands are indebted to this clown prince group for being so outlandish in their expressions, both artistically and performance-wise. Even with only three albums, they’ve proven to have more influence than other offbeat bands with double or even triple the discography. If none of it works for you, don’t worry – there’s a Mike Patton project for just about everyone. Good luck out there!  From: https://everythingisnoise.net/features/a-scene-in-retrospect-mr-bungle-california/

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Windshield Smasher

 #Black Moth Super Rainbow #Tom Fec #psychedelic rock #electronic #indie/alternative rock #experimental #folktronica #synthpop #music video

Tom Fec is quietly building a tiny, twisted religion. Like the KISS Army and Misfits Fiend Club before him, the mastermind behind the psychedelic synth projects Black Moth Super Rainbow [often shortened to “BMSR”] and Tobacco has started his own “Rad Cult.” This past summer, Fec used a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the release and distribution of his latest album, Cobra Juicy. He named the hypothetical record label that would carry it “Rad Cult.” The money pledged by fans also funded the ancillary packaging and artwork Fec wanted to produce. Most notable among the BMSR accoutrement was a specially designed full-head latex mask of a terrifyingly mutated orange face. The Kickstarter was a roaring success, so there’s now a small army of BMSR-devotees running around with identical orange head masks. Ominously, the first music video from the album, “Windshield Smasher,” depicts a group of similarly orange-masked hoodlums accosting a young couple with baseball bats, ultimately forcing frosting-covered cake down their mouths and chopping off their hair while pinning them to the hood of a car. Beneath all this scruffy bravado, however, there’s an artist who truly believes giving his unvarnished id free reign is the best way to satisfy his fans. Before BMSR head out on a nationwide tour this spring, Fec talked with us about the making of Cobra Juicy and where his brand of lovably leering weirdness comes from.

I’d like to talk about the “Windshield Smasher” video. It’s such a fun but weirdly disturbing clip. Where did all that come from?

It started off being a bigger-budget idea, and we kind of had to compromise to it being what it is. It’s the first video from the new album, so I wanted to come out baseball bats swinging [laughs]. I thought it was the perfect visual idea for that.

For me, this video typifies the vibe you’ve got in a lot of your work wherein there’s this sinister or leering feeling. There’s the offbeat violence of this video, song titles like, “I think I’m Evil,” etc.

I think mainly what I’m going for is, I don’t like music that’s all one thing, because I think it’s corny no matter what you’re doing. Like a dark metal band: “Everything is evil.” To me that comes off as corny, and a lot of other music that’s just happy, whether it’s indie stuff or pop music or just happy or whatever, it just comes off as corny. It just needs to be more complicated than that. We’re not that simple, especially now in 2013, and we shouldn’t be listening to stuff that’s so straightforward and simple.

It’s interesting you say that because I noticed Cobra Juicy has some of the most structured and pleasant pop songs you’ve ever written, but the “Windshield Smasher” video is probably the most directly threatening and unsettling visual piece you’ve put out.

I always like having fun with what I do and what I put out there because, from the second people started listening, like when Dandelion Gum came out, they had expectations for what the video should be. Everyone figured it would be this sunny valley trip with people in fields with weird colors. That shit is so predictable and so stupid and it’s been done so many time. I remember when the “Sun Lips” video came out, so many people were so upset, like, “This isn’t what we expected! This isn’t what we wanted!” But that’s just how it is, that’s what entertains me, and that’s why I make this stuff. “Windshield Smasher” was violent, but it wasn’t too mean. I still think it was kinda good spirited, but it was a lot of things at the end of the day.

From: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/tom-fec-black-moth-super-rainbow-tobacco

The Flaming Lips & Erykah Badu/Amanda Palmer – The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

 

 #The Flaming Lips #Erykah Badu #Amanda Palmer #psychedelic rock #alternative/indie rock #neo-psychedelia #experimental rock #noise rock #music video

The Flaming Lips and Amanda Palmer invite you to experience Heady Fwends track “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” again — for the, uh, first time. Erykah Badu, you might recall, sang on the original version of the song, an out-of-this-world highlight from the Lips’ recent collaborative album. She then appeared nude, along with her sister Nayrok, in an NSFW video — a video which Badu immediately slammed and Lips leader Wayne Coyne later removed (though not without suggesting the dustup was part of Badu’s plan all along).
Dresden Dolls singer Palmer ably fills in on vocals for the song’s latest, still-NSFW video. Once again in slow-motion, once again running about five minutes, and once again centering around a nude woman in a bathtub, the new clip blessedly ditches the shots of female body parts covered in questionable foreign substances and is, on the whole, a more toned-down affair. Palmer, who previously made a video in support of pubic hair freedom, certainly seems less likely to turn around and repudiate this one. That’s particularly true considering that Coyne is directing the forthcoming visuals for Palmer’s “Do It With a Rock Star,” which, tweets suggest, will be both literal and, one more time, NSFW. If there was anyone who thought the Flaming Lips might start acting a little less zany now that a multiple Tony Award winner is about to debut the long-awaited Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots musical, well — was there anyone who really thought that?  From: https://www.spin.com/2012/08/naked-amanda-palmer-replaces-nude-erykah-badu-in-flaming-lips-video/

Last week, The Flaming Lips released a video for their collaboration with Erykah Badu, “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face”. Directed by George Salisbury, the rather explicit clip featured Badu’s sister, Nayrok, naked and covered in various strange substances. As it turns out, however, Erykah did not approve of the video’s release and has since penned an open letter to the Lips’ Wayne Coyne. In it, she claims, among other things, that Coyne misled her from the start, promising a “concept of beautiful tasteful imagery” that would “take my shots (in clear water/ fully covered parts - seemed harmless enough) and Nayrok’s part (which I was not present for but saw the photos and a sample scene of cornstarch dripping) and edit them together along with cosmic, green screen images (which no one saw) then would show me the edit.” Instead, Erykah says Coyne “disrespected me by releasing pics and rough vid on the internet without my approval. That is equivalent to putting out a security camera’s images of me changing in the fitting room. I never would have approved that tasteless, meaningless, shock motivated video.”  From: https://consequence.net/2012/06/erykah-badu-doesnt-like-the-flaming-lips-video-for-the-first-time-i-ever-saw-your-face/

One of the more continually fascinating musicians out there (and by out there, we also mean “out there”) is Wayne Coyne, frontman for The Flaming Lips. Recently, Co.Create spoke to him about his latest creative endeavor, involving a whole mess of artists in a massive caravan through Mississippi, part of an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for Most Live Concerts In 24 Hours (Multiple Cities). The title is currently held by Jay-Z. It’s part of the O Music Awards. More on all of that here shortly. In the meantime, we got to the bottom of a more recent Flaming Lips flare-up - the Twitter war that erupted between Coyne and Erykah Badu after the video for her cover with the Lips of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” appeared online (Video in link is NSFW). If you followed her Twitter feed, you know Badu claimed to be blindsided by the butt nekkid nature of the piece, in which Badu (or, maybe her sister as her body double) can be seen writhing bare-skinned in gold glitter, fake blood, and something that looks like … let’s say - heavy whipping cream. Reached for this story, a Badu rep said only that she had provided all she wanted to say on her Twitter feed @fatbellybella and added, “Wayne knows exactly what happened and why this became a problem. The video was unfinished and unapproved.” On that Twitter feed, Badu told Coyne to “KISS MY glittery ASS” and worse.
Coyne has apologized publicly to Badu for any confusion and partially explained his version. But the whole thing got worse before it got better, with both sides accusing the other of seeking publicity with the now-notorious video. With a little more time to mull it all over, Coyne offered Co.Create even more perspective on what it’s like to find himself a player in such a modern drama involving personal brands, guerrilla PR, and technology that fanned the whole flame war.
“I think part of it, this Twitter war, a lot of it I thought was just entertaining, but part of it, I think, plays into Erykah has a side to her audience that isn’t aware at all of who the Flaming Lips are and what we’re about, and I can say almost certainly that just about everybody in the Flaming Lips audience knows who Erykah Badu is. It gets to be a little bit of Erykah playing into this very conservative portion of her audience and sort of defending herself against what they thought about the video, which I thought was kind of funny and kind of absurd after a while. But I didn’t want to and I would never tell people what really happened. There’s a little bit of a sacred obligation to working with people. I knew going into working with Erykah Badu that she’s a freak - that’s why I wanted to work with her. You know. Usually it’s a freak in a good way, but it can be a bad way, and I accept that. I would say she’s inherently interesting, she’s unpredictable. A lot of it to me is funny. But I know to a lot of her audience, that she is important; what she thinks about something like this, it’s important to them that she say something about it. So I kind of let that go, and I would just chime in on the things I thought were entertaining and funny and not really try to stop the things that were mean and vicious and racist or whatever. That’s just the nature of Twitter, and I think that’s what’s cool about Twitter. There’s no referee and there’s no restrictions. As far as the video, I can’t imagine anybody who knows how videos are made, if we really do believe that Erykah Badu is her own woman and she is a presence and she’s in control and she’s powerful and she’s important, that she could really allow her, or her sister, and her manager, and her lawyer to be in a room for two days straight with us and not know what kind of a video we were making. It’s absurd. I could show you exactly the footage of us all laughing and laughing and laughing and going, “This is crazy, this is funny.” Of course, I mean, how am I going to get her and her sister to do a video like that if they didn’t want to do it? I’m just a dude making a video; I think it would be great. So if we really think about what’s happening, it would seem like ‘Really? You didn’t know we were making this video?’ So, I mean part of it to me is I just play along with whatever Erykah says is the story. I play along and say I’m sorry if that’s the way it’s perceived. I mean, I’m not going to tell everybody exactly the blow-by-blow truth of it. But I mean, it’s a Flaming Lips video: I made it, we paid for it, we arranged it, we did all the editing, everything about it. Erykah and her sister literally showed up to do the thing and said ‘Good luck, see ya later, sounds like fun.’ That’s the way that we approached everything that we’ve done. And I thought, yeah, Erykah might make it into something. She gave me a little bit of a warning like ‘Get ready this thing’s gonna blow up.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And then ‘All right, here we go.’ So I’m a little bit at the mercy of her machine like everybody else is. I’m playing shows in Europe and she’s doing all this stuff. I try to just laugh at the things I think are funny and try to ignore the things that I think are mean and stuff like that. But that’s my take on it.”  From: https://www.fastcompany.com/1680966/anatomy-of-a-twitter-war-flaming-lips-wayne-coyne-speaks-on-feud-with-erykah-badu

 

 

Gentle Giant - On Reflection

 

#Gentle Giant #progressive rock #British prog #eclectic prog #classic prog #hard rock #experimental rock #jazz rock #neoclassical #medieval #1970s #animated music video

Free Hand was Gentle Giant's seventh studio album and first for new label Chrysalis Records. It was also their highest charting album in the States. It’s a strange prospect to promote an album 46 years after it was recorded. “I don’t think any of us were thinking back then that any of this would happen now with us in our 70s… it is a bit odd, really,” says Gentle Giant’s Kerry Minnear (keyboards, mallet percussion, vocals and a multitude of other instruments) in his soft, Dorset burr. Derek Shulman (lead vocals, main lyricist, woodwind) adds: “Honestly, I’m enjoying talking about it, because when the band finished… it could have been grief, but I just didn’t want to go back and revisit [Gentle Giant]. But now it’s a pleasure. There was no expectation that this was going to be preserved.” “That’s very true,” says Minnear. “I think the multitracks only survived because Gary [Green – guitar and vocals] stepped in and then dumped them on me when he moved to the USA. They’d been up in my loft for years, until interest started to bubble and they’ve served us really well.”
In many ways, the creation of Free Hand in the spring of ’75 was an artistic venting at the relief the band felt having finally escaped from a troubled professional relationship with the WWA record label and from equally disheartening management obligations. They were primed and ready.  “We were at a pretty good high, we’d established the band and were doing comparatively good business in Europe and North America. I think we were quite mature as a band and recording Free Hand proved a happy experience,” says Derek. Ray Shulman (bass, strings, vocals) expands, “As bands develop they tend to splinter and move apart, and I think that it was the last album we made where all of us were together in Derek and my home town of Portsmouth to write and rehearse.” “And we weren’t in London,” Derek emphasises, “we were in Portsmouth of all places, so that was us cocooned on the south coast! And Gary and poor Kerry were sequestered to leave their own homes and join us.” “That’s alright,” says Minnear with a laugh, “I got a wife out of it!”
Reportedly, the whole writing and recording process for Free Hand took about seven weeks – “I don’t think we ever spent longer than four weeks doing the actual recording,” recalls Ray. “In fact, [1973 album] In A Glass House took about 12 days from start to finish,” adds Derek, “We worked our fingers to the bone to get what we wanted when we recorded. We didn’t like to drag things out and jam all day – that would have been a terrific waste of time.” Ray agrees, “We were very structured in what we did.” The focus was very much on Ray and Kerry to deliver the music. “Although Kerry and I had collaborated on earlier albums, by the time we recorded Free Hand we were working on our songs independently initially. I’d go to Kerry with my backing tracks for help with top lines and to Derek for the lyrics. Kerry was a bit more self-contained, he’d get a little bit further on before looking at lyrics with Derek. I used to start the Revox and just play. Then, listening back, if phrases caught my ear, I’d develop them,” explains Ray. Derek elucidates his role: “Lyrically, it was partly abstract, but as the album title suggests, it was about getting out of the record deals and ugly contractual obligations and I think we felt free and at ease. Free Hand was much more personal than our previous album, The Power And The Glory, which was a statement on world affairs and how power corrupts, and the whole Nixon/Watergate thing. Free Hand looked at things that were personal to the band and what was going on immediately around us.”
As far as musical influences are concerned, the group were rarely tuned in to the sounds of their fellow proggers. “We never really listened to any of our contemporaries, not that I recall. For me it would be more like James Brown or things like that!” says Ray. “I listened to Charlie Parker. We listened to a lot of modern jazz, the American band Spirit, and Frank Zappa – Zappa was an influence, I have to say. Hot Rats was one of my favourite albums of that time,” Derek recalls. “We had such eclectic tastes and weren’t really interested in other bands labelled the same as us, although not for any particular reason,” says Ray. “Ray was classically trained on the violin, but we were both in pop bands in the late 60s,” says Derek. “R&B and soul were major factors in our upbringing and we loved that music, and Kerry was classically trained and considered Tchaikovsky a sort of mentor. Whatever was good we liked – ABBA or whatever – I don’t think we shut anything out.” “Those diverse backgrounds were also part of our secret,” reflects Ray, “Gary would play these kind of progressive, jazzy lines with a blues inflection, which made it quite unique, and the combination of all of us perhaps shouldn’t have worked but did.”
Displaying maybe some of Gentle Giant’s trademark precision and attention to detail, Ray Shulman isn’t about to give their 1975 album a completely uncritical ear. “Funnily enough, on Free Hand, some of it sounds a bit under-rehearsed to me. The next album, Interview, is a lot tighter playing wise. There are some loose bits on Free Hand, which kind of annoy me…” He won’t be drawn however on exactly what he might want to change. “All of it!” he exclaims initially, much to his compatriots’ amusement. “No, there are just some bits I hear now and go, ‘Hmm.’ It’s a great album, it’s just parts we could have done differently… and if I’d realised I would have commented at the time, but we didn’t have the time!” Minnear also recalls a missed opportunity, “One of my laments is the fact that the track Free Hand had a different ending live that Ray wrote – it was a much better ending than what I wrote on the album. Live Free Hand came over as a much more killer track when it went into this sort of interesting French waltz.” Derek, however, is unperturbed about any perceived weaknesses: “I’d rather do an Édith Piaf: ‘I regret nothing’ –  it was what it was,” he affirms. He is clear about something he particularly likes, though: “I think the beginning of Just The Same, with the finger snaps and the counterpoint piano and other instrumentation, that’s really clever. It’s pretty hard to hear where the downbeat is. Having dealt with many other bands [Shulman has worked in various record label executive roles over the last 30 years or so], there aren’t many who’d have started a song like that.”
Conversation moves over to Steven Wilson’s role in remixing and preparing the Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound versions. It’s been a positive working relationship since 2014’s re-release of The Power And The Glory, as Ray explains: “He originally contacted me through my involvement with DVD and Blu-ray authoring, and asked if we still had the original tapes for In A Glass House, because that was the one he could really see sounding better. Unfortunately, I had to tell him that they had gone forever. On some albums, like with some of the Octopus mixes, he said that he really couldn’t make them sound much better than the master we had, because he’s enough of a fan and technocrat that he knows what’s achievable. He’s a fan and wanted to remix stuff and we were like, ‘Well, yeah, okay.’ We had talked about getting some 5.1 mixes previously but Kerry and I felt that we didn’t have the experience or equipment, so he came along at absolutely the right time. I think we’re probably among the least fussy of the artists he’s worked with. Other projects give him explicit notes after every mix and he’s on to version five or more before they master. What he brings to it and what his ears suggest really works and we’re always really chuffed by what he does. He lightens everything up and there’s more space around everything – I don’t know if that’s a technical feature or whether it’s just his ears… I think probably it’s just his ears. I don’t think we’re ever done more than two revisions, have we, Kerry?” “No, it’s just been one or two places where it would be nice to hear some specific things,” agrees Minnear, “but usually what he brings out is very sensitive to what we were doing. You just have to mention something and he’s quick to see what you mean and he gets it.” Ray chips in. “Yeah, tiny bits really, nothing major.” “He’s really nice to work with as well,” offers Minnear. For Gentle Giant and Wilson fans alike, Derek has some additional breaking news and a heartfelt plea. “Ray has been working with Steven on two other albums, which will be released in the next few months: The Missing Piece and Interview. Hopefully, people will like the Free Hand remix enough to generate further interest. I really wish we could get hold of In A Glass House because it was a milestone for the band – I would love Steven to work on that, it’s a really interesting album. No one seems to know where the multitracks went. Could Prog put out an APB for it, because we would really love to find it? The best thing we could ever do would be to remix it and make it sound like it should have sounded, because it was done under such bizarre circumstances that it really deserves it.” “Possibly check in a skip outside WWA’s offices in Mayfair first!” quips Ray. Alongside the Atmos and 5.1 versions there’s also a Blu-ray included with Free Hand with specially created visuals accompanying each track created by Derek’s son, Noah.
Derek shares some final thoughts; “Everyone’s done their best possible work on this and it shows. Our music has really stood up and more and more young musicians and fans have caught on to what we were doing 40-45 years ago. We’re not Led Zeppelin, we’re not Pink Floyd – for that to have happened is very heartening. To know that what we did has some legacy to it. What we did was authentic, we weren’t following anyone, and the fact that the audience has become much, much larger is the most bizarre thing – kids are listening to it and trying to play it – something for all of us to be proud of.”  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/on-reflection-gentle-giant-and-the-making-of-free-hand

Diamanda Galas - Deliver Me From Mine Enemies

 #Diamanda Galas #avant-garde #experimental #avant-goth #classical crossover #performance art #operatic #blues #jazz #spoken word #piano #a capella #extreme vocals

It was 1984, and Diamanda Galás — then in her late 20s, a moaning, screaming singer who wrote music with titles like “The Litanies of Satan” and “Song From the Blood of Those Murdered” — was visiting a friend’s lover in a hospital in New York. As in so many early ’80s New York hospital rooms, the man was dying of AIDS. “I didn’t know much about the AIDS epidemic at all,” Galás said recently in the rambling San Diego house she grew up in. “And it looked as if prongs were stuck into the middle of his body. The idea of such excruciating treatment and excruciating pain, just — I had to come to terms with it. And he said to me,” she recalled, “‘Would you do a piece about this — you know, about what you’re seeing right now?’ And I said yes, I would.” Released two years later, her answer was “The Divine Punishment.” Over pounding, seething electronics, Galás groans, whines, chants, squeals, mutters and gags, bellowing lines from Leviticus and Psalms, sometimes guttural, sometimes wailing.
“This is the law of the plague,” she claustrophobically intones, as if she’s lashing the listener in a dungeon. “To teach when it is clean and when it is unclean.” She followed it with two more albums radiating fury at the silence surrounding AIDS, which claimed her brother in 1986. Then came a milestone performance piece, “Plague Mass,” that condensed the trilogy into a blood-soaked cry of anguish. “I couldn’t imagine how she could do this to her vocal cords — such power and technique,” the Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry said in an email; Harry promptly started seeing Galás’s vocal coach.
In the decades after its arrival, this music ended up more discussed than actually heard, lost in the shuffle as Mute, the label that released it, was swallowed by one conglomerate after another. Galás, 66, has spent years wresting the material back and beginning to reissue it; a remastered “Divine Punishment” is out on June 10 — in all its blistering glory, and in the midst of yet another plague. “I think she’s the most important singer of the past 40 years,” the vocalist and songwriter Anohni said in an interview. “She’s expressing reality: not her reality, the reality. She’s always been willing to offer her body as a channel for reality, as a conduit for the expression of the moment.”
Those jeremiads of the ’80s forever intertwined Galás and AIDS. But her work both before and after the trilogy shared many of its preoccupations, with her classically trained yet brutal tone blurring the line between observing suffering and becoming its mouthpiece. The content was enigmatic — sometimes wordless, sometimes poetic — but the evocation of apocalyptic distress was indelible. In album after album, performance after performance, she has screeched for those left voiceless by physical infirmity, totalitarianism, mental illness, incarceration, sexual violence, exile, right up to what she calls “the genocide of the old” that’s been wrought by the coronavirus pandemic — though she’s never spouted the popular slogans about the fashionable issues of the day. Her next record, “Broken Gargoyles,” coming in August, takes as its inspiration the disfigured German soldiers who were ostracized in the wake of World War I.
“I’m really addressing the same thing over and over again,” she said, draped in black, her eye makeup vivid, sitting on her sofa. “The issue of a person who is isolated from society — either through choice or through necessity, through a sort of legal structure.” “Broken Gargoyles” finds her voice as singeing as ever. The question is when audiences will hear it in person. Galás’s last live performances were four years ago, in Los Angeles. Over a long period she spent stretches in San Diego, then finally moved back here for good, to care for her ailing parents — the age-old role of a Greek daughter. “I always was working,” Galás said, “but I wasn’t working in the public eye.” Her father died in 2009. The death of her mother — “my best friend and confidante” — in 2018 was particularly difficult: “After that, I thought, what’s this idea of being a singer? Because I realized I was singing for her.”  From: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/arts/music/diamanda-galas-divine-punishment.html

His Name Is Alive - Are We Still Married

 #His Name is Alive #experimental rock #dream pop #avant garde #alternative rock #indie rock #neo-psychedelia #art rock #Quay Brothers #animated music video #stop-motion

This was the first music video that the Quay Brothers were entirely responsible for, having previously contributed animated sequences to Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' (d. Stephen R. Johnson) in 1986. They had previously been approached by Warren Defever, the Michigan-based founder of the musical project His Name Is Alive (alongside vocalist Karen Oliver and drummer Damian Lang), who wanted to licence extracts from Street of Crocodiles (1986) for use in one of their music videos. The Quays refused permission, but were sufficiently intrigued by Defever's work to agree to shoot a music video for him from scratch.
'Are We Still Married?' was originally released in 1991 as a track on His Name Is Alive's second album Home Is In Your Head. This is very typical of the band's work, and indeed many other releases on the 4AD label, creating a dreamlike ambience through selective distortion of instrumentation and vocals, to the point where it's often hard to make out specific lyrics. Naturally, this approach suited the Quays down to the ground, and they duly ignored the song's textual content in favour of a typically oblique evocation of childhood.
The most immediately striking image is of a young girl, whose head is barely visible, but whose ankles expand and contract in a rhythmic motion. This looks as though it was computer-enhanced, but the effect was in fact entirely mechanical - the Quays' regular technical collaborator Ian Nicholas built a hinge mechanism in the girl's ankles. Around her, a somewhat moth-eaten white rabbit plays a manic solo game of ping-pong.
The video was initially inspired by an image by an anonymous photographer of a girl standing in front of a door holding a paddle. There was also a white doorknob in the picture, which the Quays initially mistook for a ping-ping ball. Although the Quays claimed not to have read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, there are unmistakable echoes, from the general theme of little girls growing and shrinking before one's eyes, mysterious bottles of unidentified substances and doorknobs that turn into ping-pong balls.  From: http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1222875/index.html

His Name is Alive are a rather eccentric experimental rock project from Livonia, Michigan, currently based in Detroit. Founded in 1990 by guitarist, composer, and sole constant member Warren Defever, the band is fond of Genre Roulette, having recorded songs ranging from Dream Pop, alternative rock, funk, prog rock, and Baroque Pop to experimental noise and gothic ambient compositions. The band was originally signed to 4AD Records, under whom they released a string of critically acclaimed records throughout The '90s, but were dropped by the label in the early 2000's after failing to meet sales expectations. After this, the band went defunct until 2006, when Defever revived the project with a new lineup. Since then, the band has steadily released new records and shows no signs of slowing down.  From: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/HisNameIsAlive

Spectres - Mirror

 #Spectres #noise rock #shoegaze #post-punk #alternative/indie rock #experimental #music video 

Hailing from Devon and based in Bristol, U.K., Spectres are a noise rock quartet combining elements of shoegaze, drone, indie rock, and, to some extent, post-punk. Made up of vocalist/guitarist Joe Hatt, guitarist Adrian Dutt, bassist Darren Frost, and drummer Andy Came, the group's ascent to widespread critical acclaim both on record and on the stage began after they had started to dominate the U.K. gig circuit. The outfit's first foray into the public eye was with the 2011 EP Family. The release cemented their penchant for harsh noise and uncomfortable swathes of distortion, enveloping somewhat straightforward, albeit dark, melancholy pop songs. It was this sound that began to earn the band comparisons to pioneering noise acts such as My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus & Mary Chain.
This led to Artrocker magazine crowning them "Unsigned Band of the Year," a title that spurred on more activity for Spectres as they took up residence in a makeshift bedroom recording studio to record their next EP, the highly visceral Hunger, which was put out by the group's own label, Howling Owl Records. Following this, the band went on scheduling more performances around the country, eventually deciding to relocate from Devon to Bristol. It proved to be a bold move, as the ensemble increased activities with Howling Owl, promoting the likes of Wilde, Towns, and the Naturals. A significant change came for the group when esteemed independent label Sonic Cathedral asked them to support Lorelle Meets the Obsolete on a nationwide tour, eventually landing Spectres a spot on the label roster.
Further success followed when they released their debut album, Dying, in 2015, an effort that gained further comparisons to acts such as Sonic Youth and A Place to Bury Strangers. They were hailed by NME and The Guardian, which stated the band was among those heralding a "new wave of new noise." It was around this time that Spectres had started to fully earn their reputation as a visceral and dangerously loud and raw live act.
The band unexpectedly courted controversy when it recorded and released an unofficial theme song for the 2015 James Bond movie Spectre, a move that started out as an elaborate joke due to the issue of the group's name and the film's title. However, the track ended up drawing in positive attention due to continuous airplay from BBC Radio 6. Spectres then shared a series of angry e-mails purported to be from the management of Sam Smith, singer of the movie's official theme song, castigating Radio 6 for favoring Spectres' song over his. However, the e-mails later turned out to be fake, and Spectres were forced to apologize.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/spectres-mn0000741839/biography

Puscifer - The Mission (M is for Milla Mix)

 #Puscifer #Maynard James Keenan #art rock #experimental rock #electronic #industrial #progressive rock #eclectic #music video

When you think of prog metal giants Tool, the word ‘comedy’ probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But the way frontman Maynard James Keenan sees it, it’s essential not only to that band, but to just about every band he’s ever had a hand in – most notably his solo-project-turned- full-band, Puscifer. “It’s always been the case,” he contests. “It just so happens that Puscifer embodies more of that up-front than the other projects – though, [1996 Tool single] Stinkfist... come on!” Puscifer started life as a gag, a punch-line to a joke that only Maynard fully appreciated. The band’s first public ‘appearance’ was on November 3, 1995, when they popped up on the first episode of the Bob Odenkirk and David Cross comedy sketch show, Mr. Show. In a rockumentary-style skit, a wig-and-trucker-hat-sporting Maynard appears as ‘Ronnie Dobbs’, frontman of the hardcore punk group Puscifer (which also featured Tool guitarist Adam Jones). At that point, ‘Puscifer’ existed only as the vehicle for comedy sketches and was more a workshop of ideas than an actual musical project.
“The name ‘Puscifer’ came up even before we did Mr. Show, when I was working with [comedian] Laura Milligan in a comedy club in Los Angeles,” Maynard explains. “Puscifer was one of the fake bands we’d get to play at shows. There were lots of little things happening behind the scenes long before the first full-length – we even printed t-shirts and stuff. Puscifer didn’t really fully realise itself as a project until I started working on the Underworld soundtrack with Danny Lohner.”
A sometime live member of Nine Inch Nails, Danny had collaborated with Maynard on A Perfect Circle’s debut album, Mer De Noms, as well as the ultimately unrealised supergroup Tapeworm. The pair had become a closely knit creative force, Maynard even inviting Danny to help develop ideas for the long-mooted Puscifer project. In turn, when Danny was appointed as the musical supervisor on the 2003 vampire/werewolf action film Underworld, he suggested the pair finally release a fully fledged Puscifer song. The finished product, Rev 22:20, was Puscifer’s first ‘official’ release, but it still took another four years for the band to release a debut album. “Part of the reason it took so long to record a debut album was logistics,” Maynard admits. “These days, you can go onto a bunch of AI programmes, give them a bunch of lyrical and visual prompts, and within five minutes you’ve got the whole thing done while sitting in your underwear drinking coffee. When I was trying to do Puscifer as an independent band, you didn’t really have things like Pro Tools, Final Cut Pro or even iMovie, so everything took budget and I didn’t have a budget.”
Puscifer’s development reached a major turning point when Maynard began working with engineer Mat Mitchell on A Perfect Circle’s 2004 release, eMOTIVe. Recognising that he had again found a kindred creative spirit, Maynard enlisted Mat to help him realise his vision for Puscifer. One of the first songs they worked on became Vagina Mine, based around a riff Maynard had been tinkering with for “a fuck of a long time”. “We worked really well together, complementing each other in strange ways,” Maynard says. “I came up with the riff to Vagina Mine back when I was living in Grand Rapids, pre-Tool. It was an acoustic riff, but when I tried to explain it, [the people I showed it to] couldn’t wrap their heads around it. I just kept shelving it, but I showed it to Mat and he was like, ‘Let’s record it!’ It all spiralled out from there.” With Mat’s help, Puscifer’s sound truly began to take shape. While A Perfect Circle had largely inhabited the same alt metal/prog crossover sphere that he had become famous for with Tool, Maynard knew this new project was going to be something entirely different.
“Trying to reinvent yourself is not an easy task when you have a lot of pressure from an existing, successful thing,” he admits. “With Puscifer, it was hard to find a way to still be ourselves and bring something unique to the table while trying to also force yourself into another box. We really turned on our creative juices to find our way through that minefield and, for the end product, I’d point to the likes of Tom Waits and Kraftwerk. If they had a baby, that bastard child would be Puscifer. There are weird analogue, acoustic instruments mixed with synths and drums.” Over the next three years, Maynard and Mat worked together on Puscifer’s debut album, recording bits in the brief windows of downtime the pair had while Maynard juggled the massive success of both Tool and A Perfect Circle. Maynard freely admits he has no idea how many different sessions and recordings it took to finally pull together Puscifer’s debut album, “V” Is For Vagina.
“It’s hard to track when you’re almost 60 and used a lot of aluminium deodorant back in the day!” he offers with a chuckle. “It literally ended up being a Frankenstein creation, because we were forced to record it in hotel rooms and various studios on our days off, in boiler rooms and dressing rooms. On the original Vagina Mine track there were some tom hits and snare hits that were recorded in a big arena somewhere, alongside acoustic guitar we’d recorded in a closet, and keyboard stuff Mat brought from I don’t even know where. He could have done it at Starbucks for all I know!”
As the songs came together, humour remained a key element, Maynard creating a cast of colourful characters who would crop up in Puscifer song lyrics, music videos and recorded skits online. “Some successful bands get caught in that trap of being afraid to go off brand”, says Maynard. “AC/DC is one of my favourite bands, but you will never catch them dead going off brand. With Puscifer, there’s no such thing – just go.” The approach was undoubtedly bizarre, but became more prevalent in subsequent years as emerging bands constructed their own fictional narratives to great success. Which raises the question: did Puscifer pave the way for Ghost?
“Somebody always has to be first, but I don’t think there’s one person that specifically invented it and then everyone else followed,” Maynard says dismissively. “The ideas of having characters associated with your music was where music was always heading. Our exposure to Canadian sketch comedy show Kids In The Hall, Second City and other things like Monty Python while we were kids all seeped into our subconscious, and shows like Saturday Night Live helped cement this connection between music and comedy. We connected those dots and those characters just started coming out. I’d love to take credit for that... So in fact, starting over, yeah, we did that!”
Released on October 30, 2007, “V” Is For Vagina marked the moment Puscifer officially graduated from Maynard’s gag group into a fully realised creative enterprise. Along the way they had been a comedy country-punk group, subjects of short films and even a clothing line (consisting mostly of novelty t-shirts). The next logical step was to play shows. In February 2009, they hosted a multi-night residency at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, mixing comedy skits and live performances of their songs.
“We were scratching our heads and going, ‘How the fuck do we do this?’ because we had all this movement onstage and all these modified sets,” Maynard recalls. “I still remember the butterflies, because I was so used to just going out and singing my songs, but there was all this improv dialogue and that was nerve-racking. Some of it fell 100% flat, but other bits were fucking awesome.”
Puscifer’s debut album peaked at No.25 on the Billboard 200 in the US and, by autumn 2009, Maynard was ready to take the project properly on the road. There, they picked up the final ingredient to turn Puscifer into a fully-fledged band, British singer-songwriter Carina Round. Carina initially joined as a live member, but soon became a key creative force at the heart of Puscifer – and remains so today. Much like Mat Mitchell before her, Carina’s first contribution was helping them re-interpret Vagina Mine for live performances.
“We didn’t want to be one of those bands that wrote a great song that would sound awful live and be too afraid to actually change it,” Maynard explains. “If you have all three of myself, Mat and Carina working on a song, even if we go off in wildly different directions, you have a frame of reference for what those three people can do. Nine times out of 10 Carina’s decisions are going to be smarter than mine, and the same goes for Mat. Combine that with the insanity that my brain goes through with those two people, and those three creative forces are more than the sum of their parts.”
But with Maynard having so much experience playing characters, who would he like to play in a film of his life? “I keep getting calls from Brad Pitt, but I keep muting him. Ha!”  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/puscifer-story-behind-the-first-album

 

 

The Tea Party - Live Intimate & Interactive 1998

 Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

 #The Tea Party #hard rock #progressive rock #experimental rock #middle eastern music #blues rock #psychedelic rock #1990s #Canadian

Hugely successful in their native Canada, The Tea Party is a rock band with a truly eclectic sound, fusing elements of blues, progressive rock, Indian, and Middle Eastern into what has jokingly been dubbed 'Moroccan roll'. ‘Live Intimate and Interactive’ includes two live performances at MuchMusic--Canada's answer to MTV. The first was recorded in 1998, when the band performed 'Army Ants', 'Fire In The Head', 'Release', 'Transmission', 'Save Me', 'Sister Awake', 'Temptation', and 'Psychopomp'. Then in 2000, the band returned to MuchMusic studios to perform 'Temptation', 'The Messenger', and 'Sister Awake'.  From: https://imusic.dk/movies/0803057901029/the-tea-party-1998-live-intimate-and-interactive-dvd

It was the end of November 1995. The Tea Party had just completed a U.S. tour and were excited about the next album. The Edges of Twilight was closing in on double-platinum sales domestically, wrapping up a year that earned the band three Juno nominations and a MuchMusic People’s Choice Favorite Music Video award. All seemed to be well, but the success of The Edges Of Twilight couldn’t hide the fact that Jeff Martin was in a personal crisis at the time and that the band was in troubled waters – a change of management at that time being just one sign. In retrospect, Jeff Burrows was reminded of that time: “The songs of Transmission were all written at a time when we were going through - not only Jeff going through personal hardship - but the band was going through bad managerial things and a bad American record company. At that point, we didn't know whether the band would even continue at some points. It was a bad vibe, but it was healthy for writing.”
The mid ‘90s were also the time when bands like Massive Attack, Aphex Twin and The Prodigy celebrated great success with their mix of rock and industrial, electronic soundscapes. But the most important soundtrack for Martin’s dark mood was provided by a band whose album Martin got handed over by a friend and was supposed to build the foundation for Transmission: it was a copy of Nine Inch Nails’ album “The Downward Spiral”. Martin was so fascinated by what he heard there that the vision of enriching his own music with electronic elements and mixing it with oriental timbres also grew in him. The idea of combining rock music with electronic sounds was not new, but for The Tea Party this sound cosmos was untouched, new territory – something that was about to change abruptly with Transmission.
Transmission began as an experiment of sorts in Martin’s loft studio in old Montreal, where he had previously “demoed” The Edges of Twilight. The difference, this time, was that Transmission was pieced together entirely and comfortably at Martin’s home. “There was no clock,” explains Martin, who produced the whole album and mixed it at Morin Heights, Quebec, with the exception of three tracks which were co-mixed with Adam Kasper (Soundgarden) at NRG Studios in Los Angeles. The organic and mechanic foils on Transmission began when Martin’s friend, English folk musician Roy Harper, gave him an old ‘80s Emulator II and Martin began messing around with it, starting with a loop sampled from a piece of Lebanese funeral music.
Over the next month, he assembled another five songs at his house and emerged with the skeletons (loops, electronic treatments and guitars) of “Psychopomp”, “Army Ants”, “Gyroscope”, “Pulse” and “Temptation”. Sound landscapes were created, and while they were at first only meant to be fiddling around, it forged a new direction for the sound of the band. After Martin had created the framework for the songs, Burrows and Stuart Chatwood travelled to Montreal and added their instruments parts to the to the musical skeletons Martin sketched out. Both expanded their instrument repertoire once again — Chatwood learned keyboards, which play an important role on Transmission, while Burrows experimented with an electronic drum kit. The band dared to enter new territory and take the risk of alienating old fans with the new direction. Embracing synthesizers, sampling and digital-recording techniques the trio was abandoning its previous musical prejudices, and revitalizing its evocative and intensely emotional sound with a modern approach.
It was February 1996 when Burrows recorded his drum parts in the loft below Martin’s house in Montreal – a space filled with discarded restaurant equipment. Burrows knocked off his bed tracks in two days, giving the band a power on which to build further (later he would add darabouka, dumbek, pod shakers and the lead pipe to select tracks). “Lucky enough, my landlord agreed to clear out the second floor beneath my loft, and there became the drum room and the drum sound that we all know as the backbone of Transmission,” recalls Martin. Chatwood, who plays keyboards more than bass on Transmission, had owned a sampler for four years and began adding his own “shadings” to the songs.
Martin remembers those days: “We’re just working with sounds, making our own sounds, experimenting with rhythms as well, breaks and things like that, to see how we play. We thought that these were going to be demos, when in fact, they turned out to be the record.” By the end of April 1996, after his bandmates left Montreal, half of the new album was completed without any vocals. Martin, still in his dark mood, had been documenting his existence in a “diary of madness” and set about turning it into lyrics.
On no album before and after have the lyrics been as dark as on Transmission. It began with the poem “Transmission”, which pits the glories of modern progress against the depravity parading within, not just poverty, Martin explained, but the “condition of the soul”. Musically, Transmission melds the rock, middle eastern and electronic elements. It made for the perfect album title. The album title was also a reference to Joy Division’s song of the same name. The idea of dropping the band name The Tea Party and renaming themselves Transmission was even briefly considered, in order to gain a better foothold on the American market, but in the end, they decided to keep their original name.
In addition to his personal crisis, Martin also dealt with social questions on the album, which were influenced by the writings of Christopher Dewdney, Canadian poet, essayist and futurist, and also a friend of Martin´s. One of his works, “The Secular Grail” inspired the song “Gyroscope” and his ideas on the nature of consciousness and psychic equilibrium infuse many of the songs on this album. “It’s basically a collection of aphorisms on the human condition and having to deal with the juxtaposition of the new deity being technology and the old ones, the organic ones. And, also in this book, he equates a human being’s psychic equilibrium to something like a gyroscope and how the rate of spin in each particular individual is equal to their psychic energy. And like a spinning top, if outside forces affect it, it will incur a wobble and go off course. With human beings, forces like flattery or conversely, criticism, affect you in such a degree that you start to go off course and you start to shift,” says Martin.
Meanwhile, other songs on the album are also based on books Martin read at the time. For example, “Army Ants” or “Psychopomp”, which goes back to a term used by psychologist C.G. Jung. With so many literary models, a German music magazine titled an article about Transmission with the headline “Books Instead of Drugs”. Martin admits however, that alcohol and drugs played an important role in his life before and after Transmission. After the first songs were completed, the other five songs took shape, including two songs which took the band in a different direction. “Release” and “Aftermath” both had a beauty and ambience to them which belied their ominous lyrics. The final track of the album, “Babylon”, was recorded in in one day during the mixing phase at Morin Heights. The Tea Party’s exciting evolution from blues-rock to eastern-rock to its current hybrid of industrial-acoustic-soul was sealed.
At the end of 1996, the whole album was written and it was time to complete the final recording of the songs. These recording sessions started in January 1997 and were finished in February 1997 with the recording of the vocals. With the recordings in their luggage, the band travelled to Los Angeles for three weeks in March 1997, where a large part of the album was mixed at NRG Studios. The mix was completed at Morin Heights, north of Montreal. The mastering was done by Bob Ludwig, who put the finishing touches to the album in April 1997. With this album the band created a dark colossus, a mixture of rock and electronics, of dark and apocalyptic structures and lyrics, always standing before the abyss and seldom seeing a glimmer of hope. In short, The Tea Party had created a monster with Transmission, which was now ready to present to the public. The first single “Temptation”, which swore the fans to what was to come with the dark video, was the precursor.
The album was first released in Canada on June 17, 1997, followed by releases in Australia, Germany and the USA. The latter was released for the first time on the Atlantic Records label, with the goal of starting fresh and the potential for wider recognition in the USA. The release was accompanied by concerts that could be followed live on the Internet. In 1997 this was still quite uncharted territory! The bands also played at major Canadian festivals such as Edgefest. The Tea Party was also asked to open for two shows of the “Bridges To Babylon” tour of the Rolling Stones, but unfortunately this didn’t happen because Mick Jagger fell ill and the shows in Toronto and Montreal were cancelled.
The band themselves described a performance at Intimate and Interactive at the Canadian music channel MuchMusic as one of their highlights at that time. In this show the official band video for “Psychopomp” was created. The band also recorded two concerts in Sydney, Australia, to release them on a live CD, but that content has not been released to date. And even though The Edges of Twilight is right on par with Transmission, and Heaving Coming Down was their first No. 1 hit, the album is seen by many as the creative highlight of the band.  From: https://transmission.teaparty-online.com/inside/#

White Denim - Pretty Green

 #White Denim #garage rock #indie rock #psychedelic rock #progressive punk #blues rock #experimental #music video 

The Austin, Texas, rock band White Denim flavors its basic rock 'n' roll with a potpourri of other styles, but that's kind of logical, since their origins came out of a virtual collision of bands. White Denim, whose sound has included tinges of punk-funk, psychedelic, country, heavy metal, and Latin jazz, became a band in a sort of ad hoc, almost accidental, manner back in 2005. The band Parque Torch, with singer/guitarist James Petralli and drummer Josh Block, was playing on a bill with another band, Peach Train, which included bassist Steve Terebecki. By the end of that night, Terebecki had joined Block and Petralli and the threesome evolved into another band. White Denim was releasing its own EPs by 2007, and combined a couple of those EPs for "Workout Holiday," their debut album, which, oddly enough, was only released in the United Kingdom. It was late 2008 before the band re-worked some of those tunes and added some more for "Exposion," which became their U.S. album debut. Their latest record is the group's seventh, and their music has always been noted for the different directions it takes, often record-by-record, or even cut-by-cut.
"Well, Parque Torch was James' original trio, which was cool and had no bass," explained Terebecki, from his Austin home, when we caught up with him last week, before the current tour started. "That band was a real in-you-face, riffy punk rock band, sort of like early Replacements. But of course Josh was a drummer with a real jazz background, so they played some really interesting music. Peach Train was the band I was in, sort of the band Makeup, a power trio with a lot of wah-wah used on the guitar, but basically noisy rock 'n' roll." "I was really excited to get a chance to play with Josh," Terebecki added. "I come from Virginia originally, and I had moved to Austin fairly recently then. I had played with some really accomplished drummers in Virginia, but Josh was the first really good drummer I had heard here in Texas. We began trying to build a sound of our own, and all this time later, we're still refining it."
No matter what stylistic permutations White Denim might take over the years, it seems that a basic rock 'n' roll feel, a 1950-60s garage band sound, ends up being their foundation. "I think basic rock 'n' roll is definitely at the root of it all, because it's all born from what we like to play onstage," said Terebecki. "Our live shows tend to be louder and more upbeat than our records anyway. We've all never been fans of performers who get up there and play all laid-back on stage. We have done a lot of experimenting with different things with our recordings, but live, in concert, we are always louder and nastier. We like to do what feels good in the moment."  From: https://www.patriotledger.com/story/entertainment/local/2018/10/04/expect-mix-musical-styles-from/9706010007/