Trimdon Grange Explosion - Christians' Silver Hell

Trimdon Grange Explosion are a psych folk ensemble from North-East London Comprising Alison Cotton (viola/vocals), Ben Phillipson (guitar/vocals), Mark Nicholas (bass) and Karl Sabino (drums), the quartet formed in the aftermath of the split of acclaimed folk-rock outfit The Eighteenth Day of May of whom all four were members. The self-produced recordings of Trimdon Grange Explosion's eponymous set took place in various North London locations. The nine tracks (plus one bonus track on the download) range from original compositions to acid-tinged group instrumentals to songs from the folk tradition, arranged for electric instruments. Trimdon Grange Explosion is a grand continuation of its previous incarnation's psychedelic fusion of the modal rock of The Velvet Underground – among others – with their own English traditional music roots. Evidently, there was unfinished business.
“Has Acid Folk ever sounded so mesmerizing and as incendiary as this...Open tuned guitars chime out hypnotic raga model notes against Viola and rolling drums to create a droning wall of Spector like sound .” -Optical Sounds  From: https://trimdongrangeexplosion.bandcamp.com/album/trimdon-grange-explosion   

A.L. Lloyd wrote in his book Come All Ye Bold Miners on The Trimdon Grange Explosion: As sung (one verse only) by R. Sewell of Newcastle (June 1951). Remainder of text from J. Jefferson, Trimdon Grange, County Durham. From a ballad by Thomas Armstrong, who prescribed for it the tune Go and Leave Me If You Wish It, now it is usually heard attached to the come-all-ye type tune given here. The explosion occurred on 16 February 1882. Seventy-four miners were lost (six of them died in the neighbouring East Hetton colliery due to afterdamp seeping through from Trimdon).

Martin Carthy sang Trimdon Grange on his 1974 album Sweet Wivelsfield. This track was included in 2003 as The Trimdon Grange Explosion on his anthology The Definitive Collection. Carthy sang this song at least twice in John Peel BBC Radio sessions.

Martin Carthy commented in the first album’s sleeve notes: On 16 February 1882 there was an explosion of either firedamp or coaldust at the Trimdon Grange colliery in South County Durham (which is still remembered to this day) in which seventy-four were killed. The usual fund-raising procedures—all unofficial of course—went into action, and one of them was the writing and selling on the streets of this song. The tune is the Victorian parlour ballad Go and Leave Me If You Wish It to which Tommy Armstrong wrote these words. The tune was also used by Evangelists as a hymn tune both here and in America where it is also known in the guise of Columbus Stockade. I thank Bob Davenport for teaching me the song.

Maddy Prior sang Trimdon Grange Explosion in 2008 on her Park Records CD Seven for Old England. She noted: Tommy Armstrong (1848-1920) was born in County Durham at the height of the expansion of the mining industry, and lived most of his life in Stanley which was ringed round with pits and drift mines and was described as ‘like the Klondyke’. During his life the area was transformed from a rural landscape to a major urban complex. He documented these changes and all the life around him was celebrated in his songs, and he became known as the ‘Pitman Poet’. He would get his verses printed up and sell them around the pubs for a penny, and the money, in many cases went to the victims of tragedies, or else to pay for his beer (he had fourteen children).

From: https://mainlynorfolk.info/louis.killen/songs/trimdongrange.html

Shocking Blue - Send Me A Postcard

I remember as a teen being fascinated with the so-called British Invasion bands - Cream, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Animals - and, of course, the quality American groups like Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Doors. So when a song called “Venus” arrived on the U.S. charts in 1969, peaking quickly at No. 1 and selling millions of copies worldwide, I took little notice. The hit was over-played on the radio, plus there was so much other great stuff out there. The female vocalist was good, for sure, but the song was mellow, a plain-vanilla studio recording. The band was from the Netherlands, and, in America, relatively unknown other than for “Venus." I had always thought of them as one-hit wonders.
Not long ago, I was trolling through old YouTube performances of bands from the sixties, as I’m apt to do when I can’t sleep. In addition to my main beat at Forbes covering adventure, I write about classic rock. Truly live performances are hard to find on the channel because, back then, most videos were lip-synced, some horribly, to studio versions of the songs. When I came across “Venus,” though, one performance was stone-cold live, in 1970, in France. I was blown away by the band’s chops, especially vocalist Mariska Veres. Raw on stage, the charismatic woman sounded like a European equivalent of Airplane’s great Grace Slick.
When I googled Mariska, a bunch of references came up, but mostly to actress Mariska Hargitay, detective Olivia Benson on the long-running television series, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” I continued to scroll down, eventually finding Veres. What an interesting person she was. My immediate thought was to track her down for an interview, but found sadly that she had passed in 2006. Of the Shocking Blue band members, in fact, only one is still alive - Robbie van Leeuwen, the lead guitarist and principal songwriter who had penned, “Venus,” and, as he admitted later, made him wealthy. But van Leeuwen is extremely media shy, and grants few interviews these days.
Veres, on stage, sang powerfully to where, like Slick, you couldn’t take your eyes off of her. She was also beautiful, like Slick. But in real life, unlike the wild-child Slick, Veres said in interviews that she was like, “Holy Mary.” Additionally, she spoke only Dutch, and, as such, had to memorize Shocking Blue's songs in English. A tidbit: In “Venus,” the opening lyric was misspelled on the song sheet. It was supposed to read, “A goddess on a mountain top." Veres sang it as it was typed, which was, “A godness on a mountain top.” Van Leeuwen later admitted that the gaffe was his fault. When Bananarama butchered the tune in 1986, the lyric was corrected.
In short, Shocking Blue was way more than “Venus.” Gems virtually unknown in America like, “Send Me A Postcard” (my personal favorite), “Never Marry A Railroad Man,” "Daemon Lover" and “Love Buzz,” (later covered by Nirvana, the raucous version of which did not impress van Leeuwen), will get your attention.  From: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2024/02/15/shocking-blue-more-than-venus-check-them-out-you-may-be-shocked/

Magic Bus - Mystical Mountain

Magic Bus have pretty strongly established their style in the two albums preceding new release Phillip the Egg, and they don't really deviate from it here - again, it's an intoxicated bland of Canterbury-esque whimsy (drawing largely on the warm humour of Caravan and the mystical interests of Gong) with West Coast hippy sensibilities, as well as tight jamming in the instrumental sections reminiscent of the overlap between Ozric Tentacles and You-era Gong. If that sounds like the sort of thing you'd enjoy, then you're in luck, because that's exactly what hatches out of this egg. If you've heard Magic Bus's preceding albums, you pretty much already know what to expect here and whether or not you'll like it.

Magic Bus remind me of Gong more than any other band minus the silliness. Kind of a Psychedelic, Folky style with some Canterbury flavours thrown in. I'm going to call Phillip the Egg their best although the one before it is right there too. A six piece band with vocals and maybe the funniest title for an album that I've seen in a while. Released in 2017 we get plenty of analog keyboards, really good guitar in many styles, upfront bass, drums and flute. The flute and sound bring The Smell of Incense to mind as well. But is there mellotron on here? I thought I heard it on two songs but none is credited unlike that Norwegian band I just mentioned who like to swim in it.
Top three tracks include the opener "Mystical Mountain" and for 3 1/2 minutes we get a very Canterbury-like sound here especially the vocals. He reminds me of Richard Sinclair in his vocal style. After 3 1/2 minutes it turns experimental somewhat and Psychedelic. Check out the guitar 8 minutes in! "Trail To Canaa" is a Psychedelic/Folk styled tune with strummed and picked guitar, flute and organ. It's Tull-like 2 minutes in as they amp it up with flute. I like the multi-vocal melodies and determined sound that follows 3 minutes in. Organ is in along with the bass, guitar and drums. The guitar lights it up around the 4 minute mark. Last top three is "Kepler 22B" and this is where I thought I heard mellotron before 4 minutes. I know there's flute there. The guitar that follows is a highlight for me. I like the heaviness on this one. A really strong album when it comes to the style they play in these modern times.  

From:  https://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=54516

K's Choice - Loreley Festival 1997

K's Choice - Loreley Festival 1997 - Part 1 

K's Choice - Loreley Festival 1997 - Part 2

She strides into the room, her wild, bleached mane damp from a long day of interviews and rehearsal. He follows close behind with a casual gait and cool, unaffected manner. Lounging in the bar of the Troubadour on a sultry Los Angeles afternoon, modern rock band K’s Choice oozes quintessential rock star quality. But over apple juice and insightful reflections, siblings Sarah and Gert Bettens seem grounded by the Belgian comfort that they are quick to remember and eager to discuss.
"A lot of the things that I wrote about in this record are inspired by, or just triggered by, melancholy and missing home,"lead singer Sarah reveals. "It’s a very strange way of living, always being away from home – the same nine people on a tour bus coming home for, like, one week and then going on the road for two months." This nostalgic feeling drives their emotional songwriting, culminating in their third and latest album, "Cocoon Crash." The Bettens lead the band, which includes guitarist Jan Van Sichem Jr., drummer Bart Van Der Zeeuw and bass guitarist Eric Grossman. Last week, K’s Choice kicked off their American club tour after a 10-day stint with the Lilith Fair tour. Beginning in San Francisco, they stopped next at the Troubadour in Los Angeles on Tuesday, dispensing their version of what Americans have coined "alternative rock."
"Alternative music means something else in Belgium than it means here, and I haven’t figured out yet exactly what it means," Sarah admits. The two explain that "alternative" music in their country remains faithful to its name; a "really original" and "really experimental" form that doesn’t necessarily apply to their style. "I don’t think we’re an experimental band," Sarah says. "It’s pretty straightforward songwriting – emotional, acoustic guitar, about things about ourselves. But here, I’m not really sure what it means. A lot of things that are ‘alternative’ seem really mainstream to me." But she adds, "We’re not just the pop band who has one song, and that’s it. I think we take our lyrics very seriously, and we really try to make something that, although it doesn’t sound experimental,we really try to make something very genuine."
Their musical philosophy imbues every aspect of their songwriting in "Cocoon Crash," from the friendship-inspired ballad, "Winners," to the self-affirming "Believe." Their key distinction from the oxymoronic "mainstream alternative" scene is their unabashed willingness to be positive. "We wrote a song about that," Gert says. "It’s called, ‘Too Many Happy Faces.’ It’s the quote of a singer in a Belgian band that told friends of ours after a show that he liked it, but he thought there were too many happy faces … It is kind of cool to be negative. We want to emphasize that it doesn’t need to be that way."
Their thought-provoking lyrics fused with an edgy, electric sound was what attracted Alanis Morisette when she stumbled upon the relative unknowns at a music festival in Germany in 1996. Morisette invited the band to join her American tour. Their break coincided with the growing popularity of their single, "Not An Addict," which ultimately became their biggest hit. While the song’s success propelled them to American notoriety, pressure to deliver another hit plagued K’s Choice when recording "Cocoon Crash." "The record company kept telling me, ‘We don’t have the new "Not An Addict" yet,’" Sarah said. "There’s nothing that stimulates you less than people who tell you stuff like that … but while we were working, we were just trying to make the best record we could make.
You can’t do anything more than that." The result is an album with a greater intensity than their 1995 sophomore release "Paradise in Me," said Sarah. She attributes this new level of quality to the band’s growing closeness through the years. "Cocoon Crash" is also characterized by a wide range of musical genres, from folk to rock. "To both of us, an interesting thing on our albums is a lot of dynamics in the lyrics (but) especially in the music," Gert says. "We try to do that live too. That surprise element is always interesting."
The dynamics of their live act was evident in Tuesday’s show at the Troubadour with a variety of songs that pleasantly jerked the mood of the evening from smooth ballads to jolting rhythms. Sarah shifted from song to song with a rasped intensity that the unaccustomed ear could have mistaken for hoarseness. But fans knew it was distinctively Sarah. While K’s Choice entertained with a high energy that infected the eager crowd, their performance left die-hard devotees uninspired. The band’s slow start dragged for the first handful of numbers but managed to gain momentum once they unleashed "Not An
Addict." With their growing popularity in the United States, K’s Choice seems far removed from their much-missed home. But their pensive lyrics act as an ongoing reminder of their true priorities, much like the Celtic cross tattooed on Sarah’s forearm. "I wanted something that, for me, meant that I’ll always believe in something," Sarah explains. "But I didn’t want specifically a Christian cross because I really don’t know what I’m going to believe in 50 years. But I know, for me, it means that life will always have a deeper meaning, and there’s a universal truth, whatever it is."  From: https://dailybruin.com/1998/08/02/making-the-right-choice

Simon & Garfunkel - NCRV TV Holland 1966

 Simon & Garfunkel - NCRV TV Holland 1966 - Part 1

 

 Simon & Garfunkel - NCRV TV Holland 1966 - Part 2

 

 In 1966 Simon & Garfunkel had a TV special for Dutch TV (NCRV station) in a music program called ‘Twien’. It was broadcasted for the first time on August 12th 1966. Mostly shows were recorded in Hilversum (where all TV stations and their studios were located) but not this one. This live performance was recorded in Haarlem, in the De Waag theater. Possibly in June of the same year. Recently a very nice book was published called ‘Pop TV 1960-1975’ by Richard Groothuizen. This book gives an overview of all Dutch TV shows, dedicated to pop music. It’s an account, almost day-by-day, with all artists that played in these shows. The book also mentions the Simon & Garfunkel performance. But was this performance planned? No. The story goes that CBS Holland wanted Bob Dylan in this special. But as we all know Dylan had changed from acoustic to electric performances and the show producers wanted an acoustic show. CBS thought it more wise to give Simon & Garfunkel the show.  From: https://paulsimontimeitwas.com/2010/04/19/simon-garfunkel-in-twien-1966-holland/

In 1966 Simon Garfunkel did their first European tour. Besides Scandanavia, they visited at least England and The Netherlands.  Here they recorded the now infamous Twien TV Show. They also performed in Haarlem, De Waag, on June 29, where they were interviewed by Dutch newspaper ‘Het Vrije Volk’. Here’s a translation:

Het Vrije Volk, Thursday 30 June 1966

Two 24 year old boys stopped by in The Netherlands for a short while, together with their girlfriends. Since last December (and that really is just 7 months ago) they sold 5 million records. Simon & Garfunkel yesterday recorded, in Studio Irene in Bussum, a TV Special for NCRV TV, which will be broadcasted on August 10). In the evening in De Waag in Haarlem, where Cobi Schrijer has a place of pilgrimage for every folksinger who visits our country, Reina starts knitting while Paul Simon’s girlfriend is reading a leaflet of a Soda Pop company.
Paul Simon, a small dark little man with a Caesar-like haircut in a burgundy red sweater starts to talk. ‘We sing folksongs from the city. That’s the future and where all the problems are now. The rural blues is not appealing to the people so much anymore. Art Garfunkel and I are already singing since we were 15. Art never cared so much to be in show business. This is our first large tour together, because his still studying mathematics at NYU.
The first hit of Simon & Garfunkel was The Sound of Silence in September 1965. Which was quickly followed up by ‘Homeward Bound’ and ‘I am a rock’, written by Paul Simon. Do they still agree with the content of  their lyrics? Paul Simon: ‘Yes. Even though I have had many requests, I wrote for myself, because the lyrics talk about problems that have my interpretation.’ A couple of moments later Simon & Garfunkel are on the very small stage of De Waag and sing ‘I am a rock’ and ‘Homeward Bound’.

From: https://paulsimontimeitwas.com/2012/11/25/1966-simon-garfunkel-in-holland/

 

Nickel Creek - Live on Austin City Limits

 Nickel Creek - Live on Austin City Limits - Part 1

 

 Nickel Creek - Live on Austin City Limits - Part 2

 

Though rooted in bluegrass, Nickel Creek built a reputation as one of the most adventurous and eclectic groups in progressive acoustic music. Comprised of siblings Sean (guitar) and Sara Watkins (fiddle) and mandolinist Chris Thile, the trio first made a name for themselves as teenagers, blazing their way through the festival circuit before being picked up by the Sugar Hill label. Their Alison Krauss-produced 2000 debut revealed a youthful and forward-thinking group whose virtuosic playing and three-part harmonies touched on everything from jazz to alternative music. During their initial run, they continued to move away from bluegrass' core and were rewarded with crossover success, a Grammy Award, and plenty of critical praise. After going on hiatus in the late 2000s, each member continued to flourish with projects like Punch Brothers, Fiction Family, I'm with Her, and various solo albums. A 2014 reunion yielded a new Nickel Creek album, A Dotted Line, and although Thile and the Watkins siblings continued to pursue their own endeavors, the trio maintained a sporadic performing schedule together heading into the 2020s. In March 2023, following a nine-year gap, Nickel Creek released their fifth album, Celebrants.
In 1989, Sean Watkins and Chris Thile were both students of the same music instructor. Along with Sean's younger sister Sara, the trio first began performing together as preteens in their native San Diego. They got their start while watching the band Bluegrass Etc., which put on weekly performances in a pizza parlor. A local bluegrass promoter liked the idea of such a young string band, and thus Nickel Creek were formed, with Thile's father Scott joining them on bass.
 Nickel Creek were regulars on the festival circuit through most of the '90s, and during that time, Thile recorded two solo albums, 1994's Leading Off... and 1997's Stealing Second. In 1998, with help from Alison Krauss, Nickel Creek landed a record deal with the roots music label Sugar Hill. Krauss produced their self-titled debut album, which was released in 2000; with the kids apparently all right, Scott subsequently retired from the band. Though it was decidedly a bluegrass record, Nickel Creek boasted elements of classical, jazz, and rock & roll, both classic and alternative; naturally, the influence of progressive bluegrass figures like Krauss, Edgar Meyer, and Béla Fleck was also apparent. Perhaps aided by the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which brought traditional roots music to a whole new collegiate audience, Nickel Creek became a slow-building hit; by early 2002, it had gone gold, climbed into the country Top 20, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Bluegrass Album. Meanwhile, Sean released his solo debut, Let It Fall, in 2001, and Thile followed suit with Not All Who Wander Are Lost.
Nickel Creek released their sophomore set, This Side, in 2002; it debuted in the Top 20 of the pop charts and went all the way to number two on the country listings. Even more eclectic than its predecessor, the Krauss-produced album turned indie rock fans' heads with a cover of Pavement's "Spit on a Stranger." This Side won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in early 2003, after which Sean issued his second solo album, 26 Miles. In 2005, the group worked with producers Tony Berg and Eric Valentine (the latter had worked with Smash Mouth and Queens of the Stone Age) to produce Why Should the Fire Die?, a dark and introspective collection of new material that found the trio steering even further away from their bluegrass beginnings.
In mid-2006, Nickel Creek announced they would be taking an indefinite hiatus following a scheduled tour the next year so the band members could concentrate on solo work. Thile eventually formed Punch Brothers, releasing a debut album, Punch, on Nonesuch in 2009. Sara Watkins also released an album on Nonesuch in 2009, the self-titled Sara Watkins, which was produced by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin fame. Sean Watkins, who had formed Fiction Family with Jon Foreman (of Switchfoot), also released an album in 2009, the duo's self-titled Fiction Family from the ATO label. Meanwhile, siblings Sara and Sean continued to host a monthly revue called The Watkins Family Hour at Hollywood's Largo club, playing free-form and impromptu sets with a wide array of musicians who might be in town for the evening, including names like Gabe Witcher, Benmont Tench, Greg Leisz, Jon Brion, Jackson Browne, Glen Phillips, Mark O'Connor, Ethan Johns, Matt Chamberlain, Tim O'Brien, and Tom Brosseau.
Nickel Creek's hiatus extended into the first half of the 2010s, with the members continuing to record their own projects. Thile in particular was quite prolific; his work during this period included two further Punch Brothers albums, The Goat Rodeo Sessions -- a collaboration with classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma -- and even a classical album of his own, Bach Sonatas & Partitas transcribed for mandolin. For her part, Sara Watkins released a sophomore effort, 2012's Sun Midnight Sun, and Sean Watkins released a second Fiction Family album, Fiction Family Reunion, in 2013.
Ending their hiatus, Nickel Creek reunited in early 2014 to celebrate their 25th anniversary as a band. Their first album in nine years, A Dotted Line, appeared on Nonesuch in April of that year and was supported by an extensive tour. After this the band members again focused on their own endeavors, while still performing occasionally as Nickel Creek. Sara Watkins formed the trio I'm with Her with fellow songwriters Aoife O'Donovan and Sara Jarosz and also recorded an album with her brother as part of their Watkins Family Hour project. Sean Watkins released his fifth solo album, What to Fear, in 2016 and later that year Thile took over as host of the long-tenured radio variety show A Prairie Home Companion from its creator Garrison Keillor. Later rebranded as Live from Here, the show featured Nickel Creek a handful of times before its eventual cancellation during the 2020 global pandemic.
During the quarantine period, the group dug into their archives and in 2021 released their first concert album, Live from the Fox Theater, recorded in Oakland, California on May 19, 2014. After playing a series of Nickel Creek livestreams earlier in the year, both Thile and Sara Watkins returned to their own work releasing the respective solo albums Laysongs and Under the Pepper Tree. By 2023, however, the group had readied a new studio album, their first since 2014. Featuring the core trio augmented by double bassist Mike Elizondo, the lengthy 18-track Celebrants was as complex and daring as anything in the group's catalog.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/nickel-creek-mn0000399733#biography  

The Band - King Harvest

Greil Marcus
: You take a song like King Harvest (Has Surely Come). Is that a blues song? There’s a lot of blues in it, but it’s not a blues song. Is it a country song? Absolutely not. There’s a progression in there, a ‘sweep’ that country music doesn’t have. And yet there is an anxiousness, a nervousness, a sense of being alone in the singing - it’s pure country music. Is it rock & roll? Sure, it’s rock & roll. And you could go on from there… but what you don’t want to do with that song, you don’t want to take it apart, you know, separate it into its constituent elements. You want to go with it. You want that song to take you somewhere you haven’t been. Or if you know the song, you want it to take you where it took you before. You want to get lost in that song. And when you’re lost in that song you’re floating through a whole vast American story.

Levon Helm
: Some of the lyrics came out of a discussion we had one night about the times we’d seen and all had in common. It was an expression of feeling that came from five people. The group wanted to do one song that took in everything we could muster about life at that moment in time. It was the last thing we cut in California, and it was that magical feeling of ‘King Harvest’ that pulled us through. It was like, there, that’s The Band.

I remember gazing from a freezing cold Oxford Street into the windows of the HMV record store in London. The three Christmas displays in late 1969 were Abbey Road, Let It Bleed… and The Band. Not a bad year, then. The cover touched something in my imagination. A sense of longing. And I hadn’t even heard it. The first track I heard? Easy. It was King Harvest on late night BBC television, accompanied by a weird black and white 1920’s cartoon. I couldn’t believe the oddness of the sound. The great spaces in the music. The yearning keening voices; the odd stumbling arrangements. The dead slap of the drums. It was like nothing I’d heard before. Maybe it was better than anything I’ve heard since. Later - too many weeks later - I listened through the album with a sense of disbelief. It encompassed an America of the dreams. It rooted music after the dweebling sounds of Pink Floyd and the pretensions of early King Crimson. The up-and-coming Chicago seemed merely workmanlike. Half my record collection seemed as dull and well meaning as Chicago Transit Authority. The Stones were raw and tough, but oddly hairless - oddly chinless even. The Beatles were producing sublime sounds, but it was St. Petersburg 1917. On the West Coast all was mellow. But some British musicians felt that Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead had traded musical competence away for the sake of originality. They were into Alvin Lee and how fast you could play. Bob Dylan was meandering through the backwaters of his roots on Nashville Skyline. The Band had it all - rawness, competence, sublimity, experience, originality and roots.

William Bender: 
King Harvest is touched with a double vision. It’s marked by an ironic interplay between the rich yet somehow threatening sound of nature and the querelous, grasshopperish whine of the farmer… Then comes the refrain, with Danko and Robertson on guitars creating a controlled hush that is just the right rustling background.

Levon plays his ultimate drum part, where the cymbals whisper like the wind through the rice, where the hard slap of the drums shove home the farmer’s plight. Robbie Robertson isolates the bass and drum on the Classic Albums video. For him the rhythm section is the whole basis of the song. Rob Bowman says that the ending of King Harvest might be Robbie’s finest moment as a guitarist, in a style Andy Gill later described as ‘death-by-a-thousand-delicate-cuts’ and Bowman goes on to quote Robertson:

Robbie Robertson: 
This was a new way of dealing with the guitar for me, this very subtle playing, leaving out a lot of stuff and just waiting till the last second and playing the thing in just the nick of time. It was an approach to playing where it’s so delicate. It’s just the opposite of the ‘in your face’ guitar playing that I used to do. This was the kind of thing that was slippery. It was like you have to hold your breath while you’re playing these solos. You can’t breathe or you’ll throw yourself off. I felt emotionally completely different about the instrument.

To me, the instruments all assume distinct personalities, reflecting and commenting on the lyrics. There’s the guitar, picking, plucky, strutting and wirey, creating an argumentative extra line. Then there’s the bass, dogged, persistent. These are the farmer. The extended notes of Garth’s organ are a contrast, with the irresistible sweep of history resonating through them. Then the drums, the inexorable thump of the seasons changing, the rustle of the wind. Robbie said he’d been immersed in the novels of John Steinbeck. Ralph Gleason picked up on The Grapes of Wrath - the John Ford movie rather than the original John Steinbeck book - when he reviewed the album for Rolling Stone. We’re right in that territory - the line between independent sharecropper, the grandson of Virgil Kane, and industrial unionised worker was thin and getting rapidly thinner when Steinbeck researched the trek of the landless Okies from the dried-up homesteads of the dust bowls of Oklahoma to the wage-slavery of fruit picking in California in the 1930’s. When the story is recalled, the pejorative ‘Okies’ for Oklahomans is always remembered, because the central Joad family were Okies. If you look back to the Steinbeck book, you’ll find that the other group of farmers ruined by the dust bowl were the ‘Arkies’ from Levon’s home state of Arkansas.
What had happened was this. When settlers arrived in the former Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma, in the 1880s and 1890s, the region was enjoying a short, unusually wetter spell which supported farming, and which persisted until the late 1920s. The drought of the late 20s / early 30s was not so much something abnormal, but simply a return to the naturally arid climate of the area. The same happened in the west of Arkansas. With the top vegetation stripped by intensive farming, the whole area became literally a bowl of fine dust. The banks foreclosed on the poverty-stricken farmers. They were starving and dispossessed. They loaded up their few possessions on battered Model-T Fords and trekked west to California where they could earn subsistence wages in the burgeoning fruit plantations. They became white slaves.
But on the surface King Harvest takes place further south than Steinbeck’s Oklahoma. It never mentions the dust bowl specifically for that matter. If they’re listening to the rice when the wind blows across the water, they’re probably back down in the Mississippi Delta of Louisiana as in Cripple Creek (and most of Robertson’s Storyville solo album.) I’m sure people can tell me where else rice is grown, but that’s the primary image. Robbie Robertson has a knack for combining disparate images and getting resonance from both of them.

From: https://theband.hiof.no/articles/king_harvest_viney.html

Takako Minekawa - Plash

When I reviewed Takako Minekawa's last full-length, Cloudy Cloud Calculator, I lazily referred to her as a "female Cornelius." Seeing how I was under a tight deadline at the time, this comparison adequately conveyed to the Pitchfork audience that Minekawa was all about classic pop, and that she had the multi-instrumental and arrangement chops to realize her syrupy-sweet musical dreams. Imagine my surprise when I read in Giant Robot that Minekawa is not only going steady with Cornelius, but that she would be writing and recording with him for her next record. Man, I love being right, especially when I don't have to work hard to do it.
And so it seems, with her new beau at her side, the already talented Minekawa can't be stopped. This record easily surpasses everything else she's done, with newfound production sophistication and better songs to boot. Gone are those grating moments of excessive twee; instead, our ears are treated to extended passages of warm musical bliss, where modern technology is gracefully deployed in the service of the pop song.
See, this is where Minekawa and her Japanese ilk have a real leg up on the American indie pop crowd: Elephant 6'ers know a thing or two about melody, but their deep block on all post-Kraftwerk musical developments continues to disappoint. Those neo-hippies can be as narrow-minded as your average beer-swilling mullethead: "Where are the fucking guitars?" is always the dismal refrain. Artists like Minekawa and Cornelius realize that a drum machine, when used correctly, has more soul than Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts combined. It's the ideas that matter, not the alleged "purity" of the delivery. And Takako Minekawa has musical ideas to burn.
The fuel on Fun9 (pronounced "funk," mysteriously) is provided by a breadth of influences that somehow blend into a singular sound. The opener, "Gently Waves," showcases Minekawa's dreamy voice, multi-tracked into a five-part Wilsonian symphony. "Plash" (one of the four Cornelius collaborations) effectively combines a Brazilian acoustic guitar shuffle with choppy beats. And "Fantastic Voyage" is one of three tracks featuring the sampling artistry of DJ Me DJ You, featuring a great vocal riff shamelessly lifted from Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side."
Though all the melodies on Fun9 are strong, a few songs prominently feature a more complex electronic ambiance. "Flash" (also featuring contributions from Cornelius) shows that Minekawa listened carefully to Oval's deconstruction of "International Velvet" on her remix album: the distorted, distant sound of her vocal transmission undercuts the loping Hawaiian feel of the background music to sublime effect. And "Fancy Work Funk" features a trance-inducing Moog pattern that would do the German electronic crowd proud. With or without her main squeeze, Minekawa has got vision.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5301-fun9/

Meat Puppets - Scum

The Phoenix, Arizona trio Meat Puppets made a career out of defying expectations. The two Kirkwood brothers, Curt (guitar/vocals) and Cris (bass/vocals), along with drummer Derrick Bostrom, made their debut with In a Car, a locally released 7-inch — five songs in five minutes — of shrieking thrash-punk and unrealized avant-guitar ambitions. The Puppets’ first album (a full-length disc that spins at 45 rpm) similarly mixes intriguing instrumental experimentation and a bit of restrained country into sloppy blurs of noisy punk.
Meat Puppets II marked the first of many shifts — into radical country-punk. The album offers a startlingly strong set of stylistic contrasts — loud and soft, fast and slow — all supporting moving, poetic lyrics. The songs are melodic and memorable; Curt’s high’n’lonesome singing is made even more effective by its uninhibited shoddiness. One of the best albums ever to blend Joe Strummer with Hank Williams, Meat Puppets II avoids cliches of any sort in its brilliant evocation of the wide open world of the Southwest. Make no mistake — this is not a hardcore album with some corny twang, it’s a fully realized work in a unique hybrid style.
Up on the Sun removes the Puppets further from punk, but doesn’t adequately replace the rock’n’roll energy. Curt’s growing mastery of delicate guitar weaves — an Arizona answer to Jerry Garcia, perhaps — provides the Puppets’ new focus; the hoedown coda of “Enchanted Pork Fist” owes as much to modern jazz as cowboy rock. The title track is a lovely, contemplative folk song with an airy vocal and a skipping guitar riff that repeats throughout. In a lighter moment, Curt and Cris whistle their way through “Maiden’s Milk”; waxing serious, “Creator” offers a poetic contemplation on god and nature. The Puppets sound far more involved and enthused on the superior six-track Out My Way, again quite unlike anything in their prior repertoire. An utterly crazed raveup of “Good Golly Miss Molly” merely caps off a diverse collection of occasionally funky, occasionally psychedelic, occasionally countryfied rock tunes.
Mirage harks back to the sonic translucence of Up on the Sun, forcing Bostrom’s muscular drumming to find a way to maintain its reserve while kicking up a subtle storm. Curt’s intricate finger-picking and plectrum work leads the relaxed stroll on “Mirage,” “Leaves,” “Get on Down” and “I Am a Machine.” The bluegrass-styled “Confusion Fog” shows a different side of the Pups, as does the rocking “Liquefied,” an incongruous souvenir of the band’s early sound with acid-trip lyrics and distorted rhythm guitar. The only discordant ingredient on this technically accomplished record is Curt’s uncertain, often cringeably tuneless singing.
As legend has it, the genesis of Huevos began with a magazine interview in which Curt announced his adoration of ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons. Gibbons’ reply sent Kirkwood into a writing frenzy, and the album — which begins with the Top soundalike “Paradise” — was recorded in one marathon 72-hour stretch. The mildly commercialized sound (rhythm guitar, sweet melodies and a thick Les Paul tone) led hardline fans to call it a sellout, but that’s hardly the case. In this generally upbeat outing, the only discouraging words can be heard in “Dry Rain” and the self-deprecating “I Can’t Be Counted On.” Otherwise, Curt celebrates “Fruit,” “Sexy Music” and even “Bad Love.” Except for the out-there-with-the-cacti vocals, Huevos is quite fine.
Saving most of his liquid lead runs for showy instrumental passages, Curt again plays a lot of rhythm guitar on Monsters, a heavier, more tradition-minded rock album than usual. Beyond “Attacked by Monsters,” however, the colorless and repetitive songs aren’t very appealing, and the sound — which alternates between the band’s late-’80s clarity and a murky sonic swamp — doesn’t do much for them. (Ironically, the vocals here are fairly presentable.) Not among the Puppets’ best. Their eccentricities notwithstanding, the Meat Puppets were arguably the most major-label-ready act on the SST roster when they signed to the London label. The generously endowed No Strings Attached recapitulates the Meat Puppets’ career to date with two dozen chronological selections, from the 1981 EP debut through Monsters.
Forbidden Places is an unfortunate big-league debut, a surprising misreading of the group’s strengths — the earthy introspection underscoring even their most twisted songwriting; their fluid power-trio drive — by producer Pete Anderson. Best known for the downhome cool of his work with Dwight Yoakam, Anderson focuses too much on the backporch promise of Curt’s acid-cowboy whine and sands down the band’s rowdy charm to an over-fine crust. There’s a heavy streak of trippy paranoia in Curt’s lyrics — like the attack of the “little red tongues” and “fat ripe rats” in “Open Wide” — but the guitar twang is too clean, the distortion too polite to suggest menace or fear.
Forbidden Places is actually a double bummer, a so-so record that arrived just as grunge-mania broke wide open. A new generation of ruffian bands, many of them raised on the Puppets’ SST classics, raced past them into the charts. Then, in late ’93, Kurt Cobain invited the Kirkwoods to join him on camera for three Puppets songs (all from the Pups’ second LP) performed during Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged appearance. It was an impressive gesture of artistic respect and punk-rock fraternity which did wonders for the Meat Puppets’ mainstream profile. “Oh, Me,” “Plateau” and “Lake of Fire” became highlights of Nirvana’s resulting acoustic album, particularly “Lake of Fire,” which Cobain sings with a vivid, desperate ache in his voice that now sounds eerily prophetic.
Cobain also lent his name to Too High to Die, contributing a celebrity quote (“I owe so much to them”) stickered on the cover. More importantly, Too High to Die benefits from the surprisingly commercial touch of the Butthole Surfers’ Paul Leary, who co-produced it. Without muting the prairie pothead quality of the band’s sound or Curt Kirkwood’s free-associative imagery, Leary and the Puppets establish a warm, cohesive feel even between strange bedfellows like “Never to Be Found” (tangled hyper-strum), “We Don’t Exist” (hooky speed pop) and “Severed Goddess Hand” (an almost R.E.M.-ish hymn, despite the weirdo title). “Backwater” actually became a hit, a post-modern take on ’70s Dixie rock (its coltish kick bears a disarming resemblance to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”) with a feisty guitar sound that belies the blood and ennui in the lyrics.
No Joke! is made of even darker stuff, a mixed litany of comic bad-trip metaphors and outright nihilism produced by Leary and the Puppets with grim potency. (In the case of “Head,” all it takes is piano, cello and tense electric jangle.) There’s a brutish, heavy metal quality to the guitar fuzz deployed on most of the songs: the gambit practically dares you to hang in there for the good hooks carried by the Kirkwoods’ distinctive vocal drone. That may have accounted for the record’s dim chart showing, and the Puppets’ return to cult status on their way to dissolution.  From: https://trouserpress.com/reviews/meat-puppets/

 

Light in Babylon - Ya Sahra

It’s probably safe to say Turkey’s culture has its roots in Istanbul. And if you’re looking for world music to listen to and some of the most incredible and eclectic rich sounds imaginable, don’t look any further than Light in Babylon. This is a music group whose origins were made on the streets of Istanbul. Singer and lyricist Michal Elia Kamal, Metehan Cifici on the santour, and guitarist julien Demarque make up the core of Light in Babylon, who met in Istanbul in 2010. They toiled away in one of Istanbul’s most popular districts honing their craft and establishing their unique multicultural sound. By 2013, they recorded their first album Life Sometimes Doesn’t Give You Space and followed it up with their sophomore release Yeni Dunya in 2016. Importantly throughout this whole period, modest success followed and today the band along with the support of percussionist Stuart Dickson and bassist Jack Butler, tour across Europe, bringing smiles to the faces of new audiences everywhere. Recently, I had the pleasure to contact Light in Babylon’s spiritual leader, Michal Elia Kamel. Her story alone is fascinating, an Israeli from Iranian origin, with a wonderful positive outlook on life. But while one day I would dearly love to talk to Michal about her interesting life, for now I am very much interested by her creative musical adventure. Here is some of what we talked about.

I read that you were once described as ‘ambassadors of peace’. How do compliments like that sit with you?

To be called ‘ambassadors of peace’ it is indeed a big compliment for us, I believe it is even describing one of the reason we do music and the way we observe people and the world. We have fans from all kind of countries, from different religions and cultures, many time people are asking us, how is it even possible..?  But for us it is very clear, we always call our music world music, we see our-self as the people of the world, and our message is that before all nationally, culture, religion, language. We are all first of all humans, when we will remember that we will remember to respect each other.

Your first stage as, described by you, was the street, busking to the eclectic masses of Istanbul. It’s quite an apprenticeship to have started with. What do you recall most about those early days? Do you have any fond memories?

We performed in Istiklal street in our first years as a band, I must say that Istiklal street is not just a street, not like any street but a very special place. In that time (2012) it was a place where people who passed by there were searching for something. Something to happen, some music or art. It was a place of diversity, different people, different cultures, religions, and opinions, all passing there and listening to our music and feeling something.  The reaction of the people was amazing, they wanted to get close, they cry, or smile, or dance. To put something like our music in the middle of someone’s day, just like that, live with no boundaries, create a strong impact and touch deeply the listeners, but not only them, also us, we learn a lot from it, how to understand people, how to respect people, and how to be modest and humble, now that we become more famous and we play in all kind of big stages. We still remember what we learned from our time in Istiklal street.

Do you still love playing for passersby in Istanbul?

Of course we do not play anymore in Istiklal (or any) street, we did it for some time and it gave us so much but since then we moved forward to the next step. Just passing by Istiklal street today takes lots of attention from peoples who ask photos (which we always happy to meet). Having a performance there will be a mess and also in general many things changes in this place since our time performing there, we were hoping to inspire new young groups to continue this culture and go out there and share their music.

What is the mood like when you play at International festivals across Europe? Are people still quite welcoming?

Yes! We must say that we feel ourselves very lucky to have such an amazing people listening to our music. After each of our concerts we always give time and invite the audience to meet us for some photos, signatures and cd’s and it gives us the time to see our audience in the eyes, even if it is crowded and takes long time, we always stay till the last person because for me it is the best part of the concert. It gives me lots of hope to meet so many people with open heart and open mind, people who still believe in people and have hope and spark in the eyes like me. It doesn’t matter if it’s in Europe or in other place, people who listen to our music always react the same and the warm part of them comes out.

What is it about your music that people find so infectious?

We believe that music is not only entertainment, not only for pass the time, music has a meaning and impact on our life. Light in Babylon brings not only music but also emotion, in a world where peoples need more and more to hide their emotion, where television become more cynical and the pop music more artificial. People are hungry for something real, they want not only to hear music but also to feel it! The music we make say something, there is something honest in it, full of hope.

Listening to your music has made me realise how much I have come to appreciate music from around the world. What I’d like to know Michal is who influenced you and why did you choose to make your ‘brand’ of music?

Many things influenced me, not necessary one specific type of music but a mix of music, cultures and ideas. I grow up in a home that women power is something very important and I think you can feel this in my way of singing and voice. I come from a Persian home (both of my parent were born and grow up in Iran) so the culture and the music from home affected me as well. Our band was formed in Istanbul, Istanbul is a very special place for us, and always will be, it is a city with a lot of intense feelings, there is something old with something new, some sadness with a beauty within, some joy with energy and people and lots of movement, in a way, we can describe our music like we just described Istanbul.

You once said that although your band is made up of different members from different regions, who all speak different languages, the thing that unites you all is your shared existence and love of music. That’s quite beautiful and poetic. What else can we all learn about music and its universal appeal?

Yes, music can do many thing and can connect many people but I believe that music carries within some energy and it is very important where the music come from, for what purpose. When you open the radio and hear a commercial there is also music in the commercial, it can be very nice music, but the purpose of that one is to manipulate you to buy something. When we all met each other in the band, music connected us all but for this to be happening we had to have something clean inside, something naïve, we needed to want to be connected and to communicate. Only because of it we could create something like our music that will help others connect and feel too.

Your music covers a range of issues, which include love, loss, life and death, and in some sense existential themes. The world we live in today has undoubtedly shaped who you are. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, our music reflect the way we see the world and the way we change with the world according to the places and the people we meet, and according to the thing that happened in our lives and our dreams. We always say we are a dreamers (we even did our own version for the song “Imagine” by John Lennon), in our music there are many messages but we are not telling people what to do or how to live but we are sharing our own story and dreams and we let them to travel among many people far beyond us. For example, I am Israeli, I write my songs mostly in Hebrew. I have an Israeli passport so there are many countries I am not allowed to enter (Tunisia, Bangladesh, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and more.) my physical body cannot be there, but my voice… my voice fly far away to every place, people listening to our music and writing me from many country I cannot visit, writing me how much power it gave them, that our music helped them to come through difficult time, or helped them to understand many things. Music can travel, music has no borders.

I’d imagine your working relationship with Metehan and Julien is incredibly rewarding. Can you tell me something surprising about your strong bond?

To have your music in a way it is like to have a child, and the people you make music with are the people who are raising with you this child so they must be like your family. I, Julien and Mete started this band we know today as Light in Babylon and on our way, joined us Jack Bulter the bassist and Stuart Dickson the percussionist. We all lived and met in Beyoglu district in Istanbul, around the area of Taksim square and Istiklal Avenue, we all know thus places very well to its music scene, it was our main “playground”. In a way I feel that these guys can understand me, I feel like they are the guys from my neighborhood. Honestly I can say that each and every one of them is a great man. Some men feeling threatened by powerful women or it is hard for them to contain this kind of energy in music but I am feeling very lucky to make music with not only very good musicians but also very good and supportive humans.

I’d love to end on a final note and talk about your amazing song ‘Kipur’ and that incredible video shot in Cappadocia. Firstly, I’d like to say Cappadocia to me is quite a spiritual place. My interest in it stems from not only its geographical beauty but with the people that lived in its rocky outcrops and caves throughout history. Michal, can you tell me how you came to shot the video in Cappadocia? And what can you tell me about Kipur and its message?

I had the idea to have the video clip for “Kipur” song in Cappadocia already few years in my mind, I was waiting for the right moment and the right opportunity. Kipur is a very special and spiritual song. The lyrics are from a poem by Solomon Ibn Gabirol, a philosopher from the 11th century, Spain. The poem is about freedom, spiritual freedom, the ability to understand the nothing and the everything in the universe and within. Cappadocia gives me this feeling, special feeling of something free, but something very settled like those big pointy rocks. 

From: https://the-rearview-mirror.com/2018/03/07/music-can-travel-music-has-no-borders-interview-with-michal-elia-kamal-of-light-in-babylon/

Lamp of the Universe - Return as Light

Sitar-emulating guitars and snippets of mellotronic violins lead up to the hazy vocal lines of Return As Light, the first song of the new Lamp Of The Universe album The Akashic Field. New Zealand native Craig Williamson has once again taken a dive into an ocean filled with kaleidoscopic transcendentalism, and this is what he came up with. I thought about how cool it was that we came into contact, just shortly after he was recommended to me by Scott Dr. Space Heller in his interview on this very blog. He felt Williamson with his bands Datura, Arc Of Ascent and Lamp Of The Universe was a kindred spirit and wished to meet him some time. On The Akashic Field it is demonstrated where those warm feelings stem from.
The music is a mixture of classic 60s psychedelic rock, intertwined with Middle Eastern folk elements, and extremely dreamy multi-vocal patterns. Further on the album sometimes his spaceship takes flight into heavier, fuzzier, space rock territory. It is music made for mind traveling, and meant to take the listener on a magic carpet ride over multi-colored dunes, acidic green oceans, and through wondrous caverns and glowing riverbeds. It is such a satisfying flight, tailor made for headphone heads, with lots of nooks and crannies to explore by ear for days to come. Spending the Corona years in New Zealand, Craig Williamson wasn’t too much affected in his daily routines. I talked with him about this and the new record, and luckily he was willing to shed some light on all of that and more…

How have you been in these pandemic times? How has life been in New Zealand for a musician?


For me musically, it hasn’t changed anything. Obviously there has been a few disruptions with work and what not, and life in NZ isn’t quite the same as it used to be yet, but its getting there… fortunately we haven’t been too effected like the rest of the world.

Can you explain what living in New Zealand has meant for your music? What was beneficial, what less so?


It’s hard to say, as I haven’t lived anywhere else and it’s all I know. But from visiting other countries I feel the amount of extra space we have here gives you a different perception, and that seems to help quite a bit. There are downsides to being so far away from bigger scenes, but its something that is known, and worked around, so isn’t so bad I guess.


Can you sketch your career so far for our readers? What are some of the absolute highlights?


My career started in 1999, as Lamp of the Universe…and has slowly expanded in many different ways. I’m about to release my 13th full length album next month (January 2022) and am still excited by the new music I’m hearing from others too. Highlights would be releasing the first Lamp of the Universe album “The Cosmic Union”, hearing about artists I look up to say they’ve heard about me or have said they like my stuff. To be honest all the positive reactions from everyone to what I do is a highlight for me.


Can you tell us about the way the new album came into being? How was it written and what did you set out to achieve?


I always write for myself first, and I’m continually writing. But this time around I wanted it to be more energetic, more band sounding, so I think that’s how it’s going to be perceived. I wanted to achieve a bigger sound too, improve the overall vibe by making everything a bit more clear and full.


When are you satisfied with your music? Is there a certain formula for a Lamp Of The Universe song?


There’s no real formula, I just go by what feels right. It’s hard to say when I’m actually satisfied with each track, because you could go on adding things forever, but usually just when it just feels and sounds as close as I can get it to how I hear it in my head.


What music are you listening to these days? Are you more of an oldies guy or do you still like to explore new artists?


I like to explore, constantly. I still love the “oldies” too though. My latest things I’ve been listening to would be Aphex Twin, Radiohead, Electric Wizard, Naz, Mastodon, Adam Geoffrey-Cole, Miles Davis, Napalm Death, Pete Namlook, Klaus Schulze, Archgoat, Laszlo Hortobagyi.


Can you tell me about the lyrical concept of The Akashic Field?


It changes from song to song so there’s no concept as such. The Akashic Field as a title though could basically be seen as a receiving of all influences, an accepting of all information I can process to create a new album from influences that I’ve experienced over many years.


If you could curate your dream band, who would be in it and why?


I certainly wouldn’t play!!! I’d just watch in amazement!!!! The band would be Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, Klaus Schulze, Ravi Shankar and Ringo Starr.


What does the word psychedelic mean to you in the fullest sense of the word?


It means freedom to do what you want musically… to drift into the worlds beyond and back again.


What are you doing after this interview? What would you like our readers to do?


After this interview? Probably have dinner and then, like I usually do, work on new music into the night, and listen to LPs. The readers can do as they please, just be nice to each other!

From: https://weirdoshrine.wordpress.com/2021/12/14/lamp-of-the-universe-the-akashic-field-review-qa-2022-headspin-records/

La Femme - Sphynx

Sacha Got, guitarist of La Femme, appears over Zoom from his home in Biarritz, France, the low-key seaside resort town known for its vibrant surfing scene, and where Got met Marlon Magnée, the band’s keyboardist and vocalist, in secondary school. Got is almost unrecognizable to me as he’s dressed in a simple olive green T-shirt—a far cry from the glitzy, eclectic costumes the band wears in videos and concerts. “I don’t know if you remember, but in 2000, there was so many bands just playing on the roof with a T-shirt and jeans, you know?” says Magnée in a heavy French accent, joining in a few minutes later from the band’s studio. “When we arrived in 2010, we were a bit against this normalization of, like, the look…it was too much boring. That’s why we wanted to be, like, extra maximal…and, like, propose a whole universe, like cool hair, cool clothes—cooler direction, you know?”
When the two friends formed La Femme 14 years ago, they dedicated themselves to refining a sound blending soul, disco, electro, and rap. They moved to Paris and played bars and small clubs while working in the restaurant industry. After meeting some pro surfers from California who loved their music and encouraged them to come to the U.S., the pair booked gigs at a few small clubs in L.A., doing their own PR and building a small but loyal following. Then France’s music industry started to take notice. “I think the fact that in France, people saw us doing this, they thought, ‘What is this band doing in U.S.?,’” says Got. “We just released the first EP, and then we had some hype… American blogs talking about us. It’s like the power of the American dream, I guess.”
La Femme’s DIY spirit, glitzy visual aesthetic, and retro style  has won them multiple gold records and Album Révélation of the Year at the French Victoires de la Musique awards. La Femme’s second single “Clover Paradise,” is a rollicking, ‘80s-inspired synth-pop anthem about the dangers of excess, and a bold preview of the group’s upcoming sixth studio album, Rock Machine, due out October 11.

What’s the meaning behind “Clover Paradise”?

MARLON:  The idea was to do like a shuffle rhythm, you know? I love this kind of rhythm with a big snare, ‘80s vibe. And I wanted to do a track like this. And after, I don’t know why, I had the idea of “Clover Paradise” in my head, and then I wrote about when people went too deep into drugs or too deep into spiritual things, and they can lose themselves because they are looking for the truth or other things. It’s a bit like a warning song…everyone can do their interpretation.

It reminds me of the dangers of going too far in one direction or the other ideologically.

MARLON: It’s very interesting, like thinking that it’s the truth and, at the end, being blind, you know? it’s true with communism—it’s a very good ideology, but people will go too deep and you become fascist or totalitarian.

“Clover Paradise” has some pretty solid guitar work.

MARLON: We called a guitarist from California called Josh Landau. He has a project called Stolen Nova. And he is basically a big shredder guitarist. He used to have a band called the Shrine. And it was really cool to bring back this kind of shredding guitar solo because we didn’t really see that kind of stuff in any record except like metal or art rock. So I think it’s really cool to bring back this kind of stuff because we all need more heat and more rock ‘n’ roll. And the same for the sax. In this song it was really hard to cut because the guitar solo is so good, and even the sax solo. So at the end I was like, we’re just going to put four minutes of solo in the whole song. So I think this is really dope because, at the end, you get transported by the music. It fits good in the song, and we really enjoy it. And for the sax player, he’s Patrick Bourgoin, a very, very famous sax player, and he did basically all the big records of the ‘80s and ‘70s. On this song, it works so well. The sax… it’s like, whoa, you want more sax?

SACHA: Yeah, sometimes it takes time to enjoy some stuff. You need to be more mature, maybe to enjoy some sax and shit, you know?

You’ve done five albums in 14 years, all in French. This is your first all-English record. Why now?

MARLON: Well, in the last album we have a few songs in English. But basically by touring the world for 15 years—we went to L.A. the first time 15 years ago, and we had American girlfriends and stuff—we wrote so many English songs because sometimes when you write the song, it’s just the first word that comes to your mind. Is it going to be French or English? For example, “Clover Paradise,” this song came out in English in my spirit, you know? And I think it’s a good moment because now we are old enough—even if we have bad accents—we speak well. We can write good lyrics, and we can talk and have deep conversations in English.

This album has a heavy synth-pop feel to it. What are your musical influences?

MARLON:  Velvet Underground. And also the Sex Pistols. But we also like the Brian Jonestown Massacre. And also we listen to a lot of French Cold Wave and French yeyé.

SACHA:  We also like the guitar song also—this kind of music and energy with reverb. We’ve got a Dick Dale sound too.

MARLON: You have some disco also in this album.

SACHA: Yeah, it’s a great album.

From: https://www.spin.com/2024/09/la-femme-interview/

Dedsa - Annihilation

Nashville psych-rock band Dedsa are on the come-up. Made up of guitarist/vocalist Stephen DeWitt, keyboardist Robbie Ward, bassist/keyboardist Ben Carreon, and drummer Grant Bramlett, the band works together to fuse psychedelic vibes with catchy riffs and hard rock sensibilities. Before their concert at the Mercy Lounge on March 2nd, Dedsa sat down with the Vanderbilt Hustler to talk about their new album Salmon Velocity, out now.

Vanderbilt Hustler: So are all of you from Nashville?

DEDSA: Actually none of us are. Grant and Stephen are both from Birmingham, and Rob and Ben are both from Colorado.

VH: So then how did you meet?

DEDSA: Stephen and Rob moved up here separately just on a whim. Stephen was hanging out with a band that Rob was playing with temporarily, who ended up just ditching us and leaving just us behind, leaving us experimenting on our own. Ben joined us in roughly 2011, and Grant joined us about three years ago, which is when we really consider the true start. We were making a lot of compromises back then, just playing along with tracks on an iPhone. It’s just not quite the same as playing with a human behind a drum kit.

VH: Where did you get the name “Dedsa”?

DEDSA: It started as a joke; we can’t tell you [laughs], but it’s really just an acronym for whatever you want. We encourage everyone to make up their own. It’s graphical, symmetrical, it sounds like NASA, like a weird government organization, maybe potentially evil. It was just funny to us, and it’s the only thing that comes up when you google “Dedsa”.

VH: So tell me about Salmon Velocity.

DEDSA: We’ve had the name for years. We love naming things [laughs]. When we were working on the first album, we were writing a lot of MIDI back then, since we didn’t have a drummer. You can set the MIDI velocity in the computer and color coordinate it, so everything for that album we set to the color salmon. It was a perfect level; heavy enough, but not maxed out. We were like, “That’s what we’ll call our next album, Salmon Velocity!” And we actually did it! Rob ran with it for the album artwork, thinking about salmon spawning and swimming up river, loving that image in nature of things mindlessly following their instincts to their possible death, with a huge predator waiting for them under the waterfall.

VH: The music of Salmon Velocity is all over the place. What’s the inspiration behind that?

DEDSA: We like to be as disparate as possible while still seeming continuous. Some of the songs on the album that we dug out were more like the first album where they’re more studio creations. Songs like “CS80” and “Don’t Open the Door” were tracks we’ve had for a long time that we ended up developing. Some were born from us trying to play together, and some were even just sitting at a computer attacking it from the opposite end. Really I think it’s just because we all love so many different types of music, we’re trying to draw from as many influences as possible.

VH: Who in particular?

DEDSA: We love classical music, like the dynamics of a really great symphony or an opera. We love a lot of jazz, as well all the classic rock staples like Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, or modern electronic stuff like Crystal Castles or Daft Punk. We know where we won’t go, like we’re not about to write a country song or something, but for the most part everything is up for grabs. If we want to do something, we just do it.

VH: What do you think was the hardest part about making Salmon Velocity?

DEDSA: Self-producing can be really tricky sometimes, since we’re so emotionally close to the songs. It’s a very long process for us. There were a ton of mixes and remixes and more remixes. We do produce in our basement, so we have the luxury of being able to come back the next day to keep working. It is a curse and a blessing [laughs], but mostly a blessing.

VH: Your last release was Thrash Plastik in 2013. How do you think you’ve matured since then?

DEDSA: The number one thing is that it’s been great to write with a drummer. It’s much more dynamic, emotional, and we work faster. We’ve also all improved as players, after touring, playing, and rehearsing all the time. We also look a lot older [laughs]. On Thrash Plastik we wrote as we recorded, but this time around we were a lot more systematic when we wrote. I think we’re just more confident as songwriters. The overall theme of Salmon Velocity seems more thought out, with sort of a narrative arc to it, about a crises and self-discovery and finding a new way to live your life.

VH: Where will you be in five years?

DEDSA: We’ll probably be on Mars. There’s a lot less competition up there; this is actually our last show on earth, we’re heading to train with NASA after this. In all seriousness, hopefully we’ll be making enough money to keep supporting ourselves. We want to keep up the slow progression of bigger crowds, better pay, and some festivals for sure.

VH: What would you be doing if the music didn’t work out?

DEDSA: We’d definitely be dead [laughs]. Though Rob would probably still be doing illustrations. But if it all fails we have suicide pact. Or maybe we’d go be hermits, and live in the mountains. We’d go crazy!

From: https://vanderbilthustler.com/2017/03/13/qa-the-hustler-interviews-dedsa-to-discuss-their-new-album-the-creative-process-and-living-on-mars/

Gaupa - Ra

The Swedish Heavy Rock band Gaupa have recently released their second studio album entitled Myriad. The band’s singer Emma Näslund took the time to talk with Metal Express Radio about their new album, their upcoming tour with Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, her favorite artists on Nuclear Blast Records, and more.

Metal Express Radio: Gaupa recently released their second album entitled Myriad on November 18th, what can you tell fans about the band’s new album?

Näslund: It’s a banger! A substantial dosage of the Gaupa universe. Lots of energy, swag and some softer tunes. All in all a good trip I would say.

MER: How was the writing and recording process having this being the band’s second album?

Näslund: It was good, thank you. We started writing new songs about the time we released our first full length album Feberdröm. All 5 of us are deeply involved in the writing process and this time we did a pre-production. We also produce the songs while writing. For me it was the first time I entered the studio and had all the lyrics done.

MER: What are some changes you’ve noticed within the band since the release of your first album?

Näslund: We have tried different ways to work with the administration of being a band and over time we’ve become more like a well oiled machine. When we started out all info regarding everything was mashed together in one chat. We have more meetings and more obligations now as well so you could say it’s a bit more serious than when we started out. But it’s still the five of us doing what we love – writing and playing music.

MER: The band has released four different singles from the album, what kind of feedback have you received?

Näslund: Due to our signing with Nuclear Blast we now reach more people, which we are beyond grateful for. It’s still strange to us to think that someone we’ve never met have heard our music. We have gotten some great reviews of the album now as well and of course it makes us happy campers when people enjoy what we do!

MER: What do you see for plans after the album release?

Näslund: We’ll play Fuzzfestival in Stockholm in December. We will also do a streamed show. In May 2023 we’ll go out on a tour with Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats and Blood Ceremony. This is a dream come true and we are really stoked about it!

MER: Who do you hope to tour with that you haven’t yet and why?

Näslund: Elder. They’re amazing.

MER: Anywhere that you’re looking forward to playing live and why?

Näslund: Desertfest in London and Berlin. Also the Alcatraz Festival in Belgium. festivals are great overall because we get to see lots of other bands too.

MER: How is the Heavy Metal scene in Sweden?

Näslund: Heavy. Although we lack smaller venues and the concept of people spontaneously going out to see random bands in Sweden. I think the heavier bands have a harder time to break through the surface in Sweden, it’s more common to be better appreciated abroad.

MER: What are some of your favorite bands signed to Nuclear Blast?

Näslund: Hellacopters, Meshuggah and Opeth for example. But man, they’ve got a great roster at Nuclear!

MER: What are your hopes for the band’s future?

Näslund: I wish for us all to be happy people and keep having a great time creating and playing music together.

From: https://www.metalexpressradio.com/2022/11/21/emma-naslund-gaupa-for-me-it-was-the-first-time-i-entered-the-studio-and-had-all-the-lyrics-done/