Few musical groups have the power to bring worlds together like robot helmet-wearing French beatmasters Daft Punk. In the ‘90s, they merged the disparate worlds of techno and rock; the following decade, they created a dance-floor quake that was part disco, part heavy metal. Now, Daft Punk has bridged the gap between fan-boys and technophiles with their ambitious soundtrack and orchestral score for Tron: Legacy.

The duo of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, as they’re known sans headgear, provided the pulse-raising beats that drive the sequel to the 1982 original. In fact, as only their fourth studio album in nearly 14 years, news of the soundtrack prompted electronic musicians around the world to make their own fake Daft Punk tracks, anticipating what a futuristic vision coupled with the group’s cutting-edge electronic stylings might sound like. But with all the bogus “leaks” onto the internet, the real Tron: Legacy soundtrack explores an entirely new sonic direction for the electro maestros, juxtaposing their drum machines with the lush textures of a full orchestra.

The Hollywood Reporter recently met up with the Grammy Award-winning musicians at Henson Studios in Hollywood to discuss their first venture into film scoring, philosophies on the future and what happened behind the scenes on the set of Tron: Legacy.

THR: How did you get involved with this film?

Thomas Bangalter: We first heard that their people had tried to contact us without really succeeding, so we got back in touch with them. That was quite a long time ago around fall of 2007. I think we were really approached by [director] Joe Kosinski in the early process of the early research and development of the film. It wasn’t greenlit yet, and there wasn’t really a script per se. We were on tour at that time, and it took almost a year to decide whether we had the desire and the energy to dive into something like that.

THR: What made you think that this film would be good, even though you had no script and the production hadn’t started?

Bangalter: You never know whether something will be good, but the interesting thing for us was that Joe was concurrently working on this film with Steven Lisberger, the director from the first one, for which we have great admiration and respect as a human being and the legacy of that film. Having Jeff Bridges on board helped too.

We were interested in the relationship between society and technology, and how the place of technology in the world had changed so much. The first movie in 1982 was a very colorful, hopeful, naive look at technology, and the power of the computer. Thirty years later, this new movie would be a dark and not-innocent look at technology. It was in common with how we feel about technology, which is this love-hate relationship with it. It can be wonderful and terrifying.

THR: How did you feel about all the fake Tron tracks that were being passed around on the internet?

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo: As long as we’re putting out better music than what’s out there, then it’s not hurting us.

Bangalter: There’s a lot of expectations and fantasizing of what we are and what Tron is, and it can be an exciting thing and everyone can have their own different thoughts of what they would like it to be.

De Homem-Christo: And it has to do with the fact that we don’t do music very often and these big expectations of what Tron could be.

THR: What was your first experience seeing Tron as a kid?

De Homem-Christo: We didn’t go to the movies much as a kid, but I remember going with my parents, and my brother and me. We saw the posters, which got us excited. I was 8 years old.

THR: How did that first experience of seeing the original Tron influence the style of Daft Punk today?

Bangalter: I think Tron is a good example of minimalism. That’s what we liked with the direction of the new film. It can be huge film, but there’s a lot of negative space, so there’s this certain minimalist approach, that “less is more” feel, that we appreciate artistically.

There is also a timeless quality to it. In the first Tron, one thing that really resonates with us was the influences that it carried from the past. It almost looked like Georges Méliès silent film, Voyage to the Moon or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. It was shot in black and white, and then animated, but also it was the first film that had computer graphics. This bridge of being something that looked like it was being made in the 1900s as much as something that looked like it was 20 years ahead of its time is always something that we really liked in art.

THR: There is an anachronistic feel to the soundtrack too. There are electronic elements, but there are rich textures to the strings as well. It’s got a Lawrence of Arabia feel to parts of the score.

Bangalter: It’s funny you mention Lawrence of Arabia, because when we started to look at that concept art, we actually started putting music together before we had the script. We thought of the digital world as being like a desert. Jeff Bridges’ character almost looks like the Ten Commandments. We liked this idea of taking classic Hollywood scores and try to clash it against electronics and 1970s science fiction soundtracks with a much darker feel, like John Carpenter.

THR: Tron: Legacy deals with the idea that technology helps us create another doppelganger in the digital realm. With social media and interactivity as it is today, we all have another persona. How do your costumes reflect this idea of embracing another persona?

Bangalter: We really feel like The Wizard of Oz sometimes; we’re the guys behind the curtains pushing some buttons. We like this idea of stimulating the imagination and blurring the lines between fiction and reality. But technology is actually making this thing harder. In the same way that you’d have a magic trick 30 years ago, the same magician who does the same magic trick today in the digital age, it’s much more complicated to keep the secret, and to make the trick happen, because of this access.

THR: Would you ever do away with your costumes?

De Homem-Christo: This all existed before the costumes.

Bangalter: We feel like we’re building something aesthetically, so we like the idea of the evolution. So far, each piece of music or everything has been to expand it, instead of backtracking or trying to destroy what we have done.

THR: Are you working on any more soundtracks?

Bangalter: We never say never. We want to do more Daft Punk music. We’ve learned a great deal of things from this. We like the idea of having this addition to our palette. It definitely opened up some new possibilities of adding traditional instruments with electronic ones. We are trying to find every artform to express ourselves.

THR: What about a new Daft Punk record?

Bangalter: We just finished this thing, which was a challenge, and we’re now working on things to come.

De Homem-Christo: We like to keep things as a surprise. It’s always better like that.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Hollywood Reporter Online December 16, 2010

*

-

Related posts:

1. Motion City Soundtrack: ‘Nerds at Heart”
2. Punk ’77 by James Stark
3. Fussible from Nortec Collective

Death can overthrow the status quo that a family relies on. Death creates a new kingdom that a grieving family inhabits, and it is here, in the world without a loved one, that families learn to exist and to move on. Welcome to the new normal.

Director John Cameron Mitchell explores this “world without” in “Rabbit Hole,” based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s heart-achingly raw play about the death of a child. The director of “Shortbus” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” has never been afraid to delve into taboo subjects, and “Rabbit Hole” strips death naked, revealing the reality of grief, sorrow, and recovery with unabashed honesty.

Nicole Kidman plays the stoic Becca, a mother who tries to forge through the emotional devastation of losing her 4-year-old son, Danny. Alongside her husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), she tries to shed her conflicted emotions—rage, denial, hopelessness, apathy—and ultimately learns that each person’s recovery is distinct and unique.

Kidman bravely plunges into the role, drawing from her own personal experiences—including the recent birth of a child with husband Keith Urban—to make Becca nuanced and real. She expresses Becca’s emotions with her whole body. Her anger courses up the musculature of her neck, her hands twist like winter tree branches as she heaves with tears.

Back Stage recently spoke with Kidman about “Rabbit Hole” and discussed living in a house with the cast, finding a studio to back their film, conjuring up gut-wrenching grief, and how her character infiltrated her dreams.

Back Stage: This film is brutally honest about such a taboo subject. What interested you about this script?

Nicole Kidman: I think the intimacy of it. It was really raw, and I just felt that it was very real and delicate. The way in which the scenes were written and the emotions were handled were not histrionic. People have said that it feels very “real.” And that, as an actor, is something that you want to hear. I think that someone said that it was like watching your neighbors, like you’re peeking through the window at them and watching, hoping that they’ll get through it.

Back Stage: When was the first time that you read it?

Kidman: I read it as a play first. That was years and years ago now, because it takes such a long time to develop and then film and release. It’s been a long, long road for us, and this is obviously difficult subject matter, so just getting it made was hard, just getting the money to make it was hard.

Back Stage: What difficulties did you face with financing the film?

Kidman: We just found the financing ourselves, and we did it for a very, very low budget, and that was it. So we could choose whichever director we wanted, and we had all the power over it.

Back Stage: What was it about John Cameron Mitchell that made you know that he was the right director for this film?

Kidman: I just think he’s very, very talented, and I also think he’s very raw, which suits this material. I think a director that’s very cold, or that’s slightly removed or stoic, wouldn’t have been so good because the script itself was very restrained. So it was the combination of a very raw director with a restrained script, I just thought that was interesting. And I just like him.

Back Stage: The subject is so taboo, as well. It must have been really difficult to have to sell people on a film about a child’s death.

Kidman: When we were trying to raise the money for it, as well, it was right at the time when [the economy] had crashed, so everyone’s saying, “No, no one wants to see anything like this; they want to see popcorn movies, big entertainment.” And I said, “But this is real, this is entertainment—it’s just maybe not comfortable entertainment.”

Back Stage: The movie seems to be about catharsis and about moving on, as well as solidarity in grief. Everyone feels sorrow, and that fact can unify us.

Kidman: I think it’s hopeful, I really do, because it’s about people coming together through pain, and I think that’s an important thing for us to see, that people can fuse that way.

Back Stage: What other characters from other films, or books, or any sort of media did you look to for inspiration for your own character?

Kidman: I read [Joan Didion's] “The Year of Magical Thinking.” But part of it, as an actor, is that just, when you hit a certain age, there’s a well of experience and a well of emotion that exists. For me, having just given birth a year prior, having three children, having been through many things in my life over the last 43 years, I just think, if I stay open enough, then there’s all of that to mine.

Back Stage: Was it difficult to dredge up these difficult feelings?

Kidman: Well, I’m not constantly mining it, because you know this was a six-week shoot, so I kind of go, “Okay, I’m gonna go into a place that’s taboo, that’s deeply disturbing.” But I want to do it because that’s part of being an actor, it’s part of being an artist, I suppose. I have no understanding of why, but at the same time, I know that I want to tell stories that somehow connect us, and I feel like this is one of those stories.

Back Stage: Grief often manifests itself in physical ways. As an actor, you have to become these characters and take on their grief. In what ways did this grief physically affect you?

Kidman: Just in my sleeping. I really didn’t sleep well. It was disturbed. That’s when I know my psyche is disturbed and I’m deeply involved. It’s really layered and connected. I just have to go, “Okay, I’m just really not going to sleep much.” And weird dreams and nightmares permeate my psyche.

Back Stage: Did you begin to dream as your character?

Kidman: No, but the emotions arise sometimes, even that you’ve [performed] days before. It’s so strange how the subconscious plays out, suddenly there’ll be those similar emotions, very, very present and very, very powerful, you know? I’ll wake up crying or I’ll wake up in a fetal position or wake up terrified and not know where I am.

Back Stage: Were there any points in this movie where you thought that you couldn’t do it? Perhaps that this might be a role that’s too difficult, too emotional?

Kidman: Oh yeah, as is my way, I sort of get dragged kicking and screaming to make it, and then when once I’m in it, I don’t want to give it up, and then when I’m finished, I think, “How did I even go there?” It’s a strange process, but I get there. I just was like, “Oh, my God, I can’t do this now. I just had my baby. Why would I want to do this? I don’t want to do this,” and then, “Whoa, you have to do it. We’ve raised the money, you can’t get out, you’ve signed the contract.” And then I go, “Ugh… okay.” But then I go, well—I suppose a lot of it is saying, “I need to honor this. This is an extraordinary role; people go through this.” And that’s my way of honoring those people and, in some way, reaching out to them.

Back Stage: You’ve been acting quite some time now. Do you find these “difficult” roles are easier now, with experience?

Kidman: I’m just very careful about what I choose now because time is so precious. I’m just not willing to waste the time, whereas maybe in my 20s, I was willing to try anything. But life is not about the past. My husband said a wonderful thing to me: He said, “The rear-view mirror is small; the windshield of a car is big.” I really try to approach my life that way.

Back Stage: And that’s such a great thing for a country singer to say. That’s a lyric right there.

Kidman: You’ll hear it in a song. [Laughs.]

By Drew Tewksbury

FromBack Stage Magazine, December 8, 2010

*

Related posts:

1. Anton Corbijn
2. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About his Father
3. Interviews: Julian Schnabel and cast of “Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

In the long history of nightclub openings, Spaceland’s introduction to Los Angeles in 1995 stands out as particularly troubled. In the pouring rain, Mitchell Frank — then a 33-year-old musician, DJ and promoter — moved his sound system into the venue, where he acted as booker, doorman and soundman.”That first day was so chaotic,” Frank says 15 years later, sitting in the comfort of the downtown offices of his Spaceland Productions and remembering the wet March evening when the Silver Lake institution first opened its doors.

On that first night, L.A. music writer (and L.A. Weekly contributor) Jeff Miller was just 16, and he almost didn’t get in because he was underage. “There was that biblical, torrential rainfall, and we were sitting at some restaurant across the street just waiting to get in. Rob Zabrecky [the singer of Possum Dixon] had called me earlier and left a message saying, ‘Come see the show tonight, we’re opening for Beck and some band called the Foo Foo Fighters.’ ”

Back in 1995, Frank was one of many budding promoters hosting bands. Today, he’s a successful entrepreneur and the Spaceland club is one of his many endeavors, which include El Prado bar, cantina Malo, the twin Echo and Echoplex venues, and his umbrella organization, Spaceland Productions. He also serves as president of the Echo Park Chamber of Commerce. If you’ve hung out in Silver Lake or Echo Park, chances are you’ve set foot somewhere connected to Frank.

“I just never wanted to be that guy with a gray ponytail sitting at the back of a show — no offense to guys with gray ponytails,” Frank jokes. “So I branched out to other businesses.”

Though his canny entrepreneurship would help redefine the demographics of Silver Lake and Echo Park, back in 1993 the first inklings of the concept that would end up becoming Spaceland stemmed from a stereotypically slackerish “Eureka!” moment.

“I was watching TV late at night and we were spacing out and we saw these girls scantily clad with T-shirts, and [the soundtrack] was like, ‘Dreams, Dreams, Dreams of L.A.’ Then this guy came on and hosed them down, very sensually. Then the address popped up: 1717 Silver Lake.”

Frank lived a few blocks from Dreams of L.A. and was convinced that this was the perfect spot for a different kind of club. The goal was to create a place in his neighborhood where he and his local friends in bands could hang and play without having to go to Hollywood. And the Dreams of L.A. location was central to the artists and musicians gathered in the hills of Silver Lake.

Mitchell then approached the venue’s owner, a German expat named Horst Wolfram, with a proposal to host a monthly night called Pan. Wolfram had owned the building for decades, first when it was called Red Chimney in the ’60s or the ’70s (memories are hazy — it might or might not have been a gay club), which he then turned into Dreams of L.A. during the disco era. At some point in the ’80s it mutated into the Top 40 club Frank saw advertised.

When he and his associates approached Wolfram with the idea for Pan, the club owner begrudgingly gave them Thursdays. Gradually, over the next two years, Frank split with business partner Nancy Whalen, expanded the club night to three days a week, and eventually, after a rebranding as “Spaceland,” took over the entire operation in 1995.

With the help of talent buyer Liz Garo and booker Jennifer Tefft, Spaceland developed a reputation among musicians and fans for breaking acts before they hit the big time. Frank readily lists the many legendary nights he witnessed at his club, including Jenny Lewis’ first impromptu show, where she just walked onstage and began to play. “She wasn’t on the bill, so I was about to throw her out. Then we heard that voice,” Frank recalls.

They once booked Elliott Smith for a “secret show,” one so secret that fewer than 100 people showed up. “This was before text messaging and the Internet, so I just got on the phone and called everyone I knew and said, ‘You have to get down here now!’ ”

But few of those early shows matched that first rainy night, when Frank made up for the less than ideal atmospheric conditions with a now legendary roster. Foo Fighters had just formed and Dave Grohl was still considered just the drummer from Nirvana (their last-minute addition did not even make it to the commemorative poster).

And the headliner had only recently graduated from being a folk musician playing Silver Lake house parties to national attention through the unexpected hit “Loser.” “Before the ‘Beck thing’ happened,” Frank laughs, “he was just the guy who would show up and play Woody Guthrie songs till early in the morning.” Beck of course would soon become a little more than a one-hit wonder — leaving behind poster mates Lutefisk and Possum Dixon.

Possum Dixon’s singer helped the underage Jeff Miller and his friend sneak into the club, claiming they were his brothers. “We caught the last songs of the Foo Fighters, and Beck went on,” Miller remembers. “He was still a performance artist at this time, and near the end of the show, he put a walkie-talkie up to the microphone, and went into the bathroom with the other walkie-talkie and interviewed a guy peeing.”

Miller, like so many who had “found” Spaceland, spread the word about the “Eastside.” Then the L.A. Times proclaimed Frank as “The Mayor of Silver Lake,” and the hype of the “Silver Lake scene” began. Longtime residents of this narrow corridor would see housing prices jump from $200,000 to $2 million, and soon boutique coffee shops replaced corner bakeries and gentrification swept in. Spaceland — and the always-diversifying Frank — have gotten flack for being the shock troops of this demographic shift.

But whatever the larger social implications, Spaceland did become the hub of a certain bohemian music scene, a site Giant Drag frontwoman Annie Hardy calls “the place to play if you were wanting a quality audience and venue.”

“Having a residency at Spaceland totally makes you develop as a musician,” Hardy adds, “and it really helps to develop a fan base. Our residency there ended up getting us a record deal, I think.”

For some bands, says Joey Siara, guitarist and vocalist for the Henry Clay People, Spaceland is an essential place to cross-pollinate ideas and plant the seeds for larger projects.

“There’s kind of a Cheers vibe going on,” Siara says. “Monday nights are free, so it’s easy to just end up at Spaceland. You get enough other bands hanging out and drinking beers, and all of a sudden you have a music scene, where bands are constantly challenging and inspiring their buddies to make more — and hopefully better — music.”

For other bands, Spaceland is an integral step in solidifying a sound that bridges the gap between obscurity and accessibility. Nikki Monninger, bassist for the Grammy-nominated Silversun Pickups, says Spaceland made her want to move to Silver Lake, and the club served as an incubator that helped to launch her little band toward stardom: “We played our first L.A. show there. They were very supportive at a time when we really didn’t know what we were doing. If Spaceland didn’t exist, I’m not sure we would.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, April 9, 2010

*

Space Is The Place

Related posts:

1. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Skull Sessions
2. Télépathique – Last Time on Earth
3. Interviews: Vince Vaughn and Comics of “Wild West Comedy Show”

Few directors can tackle insecurity, existential crises and serious emotional baggage with the lighthearted finesse of Noah Baumbach. Whether it’s a well-dressed fox who can’t give up chicken thieving, an overeducated ’80s family with underdeveloped communication skills or college grads who just want to hang, Baumbach deftly switches between melodrama and humor like a tennis pro switches from forehand to backhand. In short, Baumbach makes melancholy marvelous.

In Baumbach’s latest effort, Greenberg, Ben Stiller plays an emotionally fractured New Yorker, Roger Greenberg, who tries to regain his mental balance by house sitting his younger brother’s lavish Los Angeles home. Greenberg’s only goal: do nothing. But instead of rediscovering his emotional center, Greenberg’s life is upturned when he becomes romantically involved with his brother’s personal assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig). Almost half Greenberg’s age, the aimless Florence looks to him for stability, but together they’re an awkward, slightly endearing mess. Back in L.A. after a long absence, Greenberg’s past reemerges as he confronts the friendships that faded as well as the lover he lost, played by Baumbach’s wife and Greenberg producer/co-writer Jennifer Jason Leigh. When Greenberg contacts his old bandmate, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), Greenberg obsesses over his decision to break up their band on the brink of success. Surrounded by the effects of his choices, and a now unfamiliar youth culture, Greenberg is an anachronistic man trying to withstand the inertia of time.

Like all of Baumbach’s movies, Greenberg’s soundtrack acts as both character and setting. At times it antagonizes, drawing attention away from the action, while other times it carries the story. For a film about musicians, Greenberg’s soundtrack could not be an afterthought, and Baumbach put the important task of scoring the movie into the hands of LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Baumbach worked closely with Murphy, who is a newcomer to the art of film scoring, to find the right sound for the Greenberg’s unique vibe.

Baumbach was not hesitant to bring in other up-and-coming players, including Mark Duplass—actor, director and one of the founders of the lo-fi “Mumblecore” film movement—and Greta Gerwig, Duplass’ friend and frequent co-star. In the end, both left behind the largely improvisational, one-take ethic of their Mumblecore background for the detailed writing of Baumbach’s introspective and absurdly funny meditation on identity, aging and second chances.  Here, we visit with Baumbach to talk about being in bands, resuscitating friendships and when to give up on your dreams.

One of the central themes of Greenberg is deciding when to relinquish your dreams. Do you encounter this problem often in your real-life experiences?
I’ve seen it with friends and in my own life. People deal with it all the time. There are the bigger ones: people who wanted to be a rock star but became a computer programmer. I think the movie deals with the smaller, more hidden aspects of your hopes and idea of yourself, as opposed to how you really are or how things have turned out. I think it’s a major thing for a lot of people.

Why do you think being in a band is such an important, and sometimes emotional, part of young men’s lives?
At some point, most boys and young men fantasize about being in a band. I know lots of people in artistic professions who have been in bands, no matter what they went on to do later. It’s something that they start or pretend to start but never finish. I say this although I’ve never been in a band—I have no talent, that’s why. If I had some talent, maybe I would have…

Have you seen friendships dissolve over band conflicts?
I think a band is a good way to explore the intricacies of friendship, particularly male friendships that turn into commerce. I have a lot of experience with young friendships that, as we started to inch into the professional world, became really affected and hurt by the transition. We were all too young to handle it. We all got into these things as friends, as potential artists with the right intentions, and then something else happened when the air of professionalism dissolves.

The landscape of this movie is very L.A. With The Squid and the Whale it was very Brooklyn. How did the landscape influence this story, or was it the other way around?
The goal was to make it in L.A., but to make L.A. look like a real city, in the way I experience it. My wife, Jennifer, was integral in making that happen. She grew up here and in a lot of ways my acclimation to the city comes through her seeing it as a hometown. I think it’s helped me appreciate Los Angeles a little more.

How did you get involved with James Murphy?
When I was writing Greenberg in L.A. and missing New York, Jennifer and I were in the car and Murphy’s song, “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” came on. I think I was intimated by the song, because it addresses something so directly. I was like, “Who does this guy think he is?” I loved it. I hadn’t heard of LCD Soundsystem and somehow missed the whole “Daft Punk is Playing at My House”-era. I started listening to Sound of Silver a lot when I was working on Greenberg because it felt like another Greenberg-esque voice. Murphy was dealing with a lot of things—aging, identity, self-consciousness—things that I was tackling in Greenberg. It was an inspiration in that way.

Greta Gerwig’s character in this film, a woman in her 20’s trying to find herself in the world, is pretty dead-on for people dealing with quarter-life crises. It’s almost too close to home for a lot of us. How did you develop her character?
She’s a person I knew really well but I hadn’t seen in movies. I didn’t know exactly how to get her in the movie, but when I figured out that she’d be a personal assistant, then it expanded the character. Greta understood it implicitly. She was incredible in her past movies, which were unscripted, but I didn’t know if she would act the same way in a scripted movie. I didn’t want any improvising, but she was so prepared and knew all the lines that I didn’t have to worry. She was so in tune with the character that I often just got out of her way.

“It’s a huge conflict to jettison your dreams and address your reality.”

In the film, Gerwig does embarrassing scenes with great ease. How does one manufacture awkwardness?
The script is the root of the awkwardness, and I try to lay the script out as true as I can. If the actors are being truthful, it takes care of itself.Greenberg is so afraid of embarrassment and so much of what he does is a way to hide and protect himself. Florence, on the other hand, is ready to take people at face value and rolls with the punches. She is open to embarrassment because she is not afraid of it. So when you have two characters in a room like that, it makes awkwardness more likely.

Ben Stiller has been described as a meticulous actor. In what ways did that present itself in the making of this film?
Ben is super prepared and works as hard as anybody. You want everybody to work that hard, and I think it rubs off on people. I chose Ben because I wanted someone who knew what was funny even if he wasn’t playing funny. He had to see the funniness underneath. Jeff Daniels was the same way in The Squid and the Whale.

For the characters, the scenes are extremely serious, but for the audience, we think it’s funny. Is that absurdity intentional?
I’m trying to get to what’s authentic in a moment. I am interested in how smaller moments in our lives have huge impacts. It’s all about the little moments, not the big ones.  I had so many friends who moved to L.A. to live their rock and roll dreams and it just didn’t happen. I think Noah, as a writer, addresses the periphery of emotional flux. Most writers invest in the opera or the intense cacophony, but Noah observes a change in the human psyche that happens on the periphery. That’s what I responded to with this script. To play a guy with broken dreams who was trying to address his future with a limp of the ambition of his past. It’s a huge conflict to jettison your dreams and address your reality.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Filter Magazine, Issue 39 2010

*

-

Related posts:

1. Alex Gibney: Director “Gonzo” the Hunter S. Thompson Documentary
2. Martín Piroyansky from XXY
3. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About his Father

There’s no shortage of unsung heroes, could-have-beens and flameouts in the long, strange history of rock & roll. But few rockers had as much grit and grime, swagger and sneer as the Stranglers. Formed in 1974, they were scrappy, straight-up punk pioneers. Their machismo-drenched pub rock would have been forgettable if it weren’t so smart and irresistibly catchy. Film aficionados will recognize the off-kilter waltz “Golden Brown” from the pikey fight montage in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film Snatch. The same year found the Stranglers’ “Peaches” used in the opening scene of Jonathan Glazer’s superb gangster flick Sexy Beast.

In the golden era of London punk, the Stranglers played alongside the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and Patti Smith. But unlike the Roman candle that was most punk bands of the past (and present), the Stranglers adapted, evolved and endured for the next 30 years. In the 1980s, they surfed the New Wave swell and fell in line with ex-punkers Blondie, the Police and Dire Straits. Hugh Cornwell, guitarist and lead growler, says that instead of sticking with one genre, the musically adept, cocksure Stranglers weren’t afraid to experiment.

“No one really cared whether we were or were not punk,” he says. “We were just excited to make records. Call us what you want; we didn’t care.”

One band especially took notice of the Stranglers’ iconoclastic, genre-smashing sound: the Clash. “I actually got to know Joe Strummer quite well when he was just starting,” Cornwell says. “We struck up a sort of a camaraderie with him. Before the Clash, he had a band called the 101, and we were doing the same shows on the same bill, so we used to sit around and compare notes on life.”

In 1990, Cornwell broke off on his own to reclaim the raw, stripped-down sound that earned the Stranglers mainstream success back in the early ’80s. In the early 2000s, crate-digging, Internet-scrounging DJs rediscovered the Stranglers as gems from the early days of punk. One Stranglers devotee was White Stripes recording engineer Liam Watson; the power trio’s garage-rock sound had a major influence on Jack White. Watson approached Cornwell and recorded his recent album, Hooverdam, on vintage equipment in his London studio—the same way the Stranglers used to do it.

“At no stage did Hooverdam have any digital work at all,” Cornwell says. “[Watson’s] got this tiny little 8-track studio, and he has 1-inch analog tape. You mention computers to him, and he breaks out in a rash.”

Although the production of the warm, garage-pop rocker Hooverdam was analog, Cornwell embraced the audience who found him through the digital domain. In 2009, Cornwell offered up Hooverdam for free through his website, in the spirit of Radiohead. “We didn’t want to sell this record to just some core Stranglers fans,” he says. “We wanted it to go viral and for young people who had never heard of the Stranglers to get it just because it’s free.”

Though digital distribution is an up-to-the second business model in the free-flailing music industry, Cornwell maintains that social media and the viral nature of music today are really in tune with those early days in London, when the Stranglers played to a devoted audience that Cornwell says was “mobile.”

“People would just call each other and say, ‘Hey, the Pistols are doing a gig,’ or, ‘The Stranglers are doing a show,’ or, ‘The Buzzcocks are down from Manchester.’ All this without texts and mobile phones—just land lines and meeting one another on the streets and at the cafés.”

Now 60 years old, Cornwell has lost none of the energy that drove the Stranglers’ success. His live show, he says, is a “chop and change” of Stranglers hits interwoven with the catchy tracks from the crunchy Hooverdam. He embraces the past while looking to the future, bringing together the old hits and the new cuts, the analog and digital, cutting-edge social media and the old-fashioned, hard-knock life on the road. Thirty years after sitting at the pub with Strummer, speculating about punk rock’s future, Cornwell is still most at home thriving in the rock & roll underground. “It’s all come full circle, really,” he says

By Drew Tewksbury

from O.C. Weekly, Issue March 25th, 2010

*

Related posts:

1. Daft Punk Pull Back the Curtain on ‘Tron: Legacy’ Soundtrack
2. Death – …For the Whole World to See
3. Tender Buttons

IN 1972, George Carlin famously ranted about seven words that couldn’t be uttered on television. The verboten expressions were offensive to the sensibilities of purportedly well-mannered people everywhere. For some in the music world, however, there are not seven forbidden sounds, just a single four-letter word: folk.

The London quartet Mumford & Sons, however, realigns folk’s paradigm with soaring harmonies, banjo, upright bass and a single kick drum. The stigma of a genre seemingly relegated to youth groups and corporate coffeehouses is beginning to heal, as folk continues to evolve and grow. “Folk music suffers from [people’s perception] that it is a soft art form,” says keyboardist Ben Lovett. “But I think it’s the hardest to write and perform. You can’t hide behind fancy frills and bells and whistles. You’re not singing about something you don’t care about.”

On Mumford & Sons’ U.S. debut, Sigh No More, the band culls its stripped-down sound from three self-produced EPs released since 2007. Marcus Mumford is essentially a one-man-band as he confidently croons and strums the guitar while stomping a tambourine and bass drum with his feet. Joining him are Lovett on keys, Ted Dwane on upright bass and Country Winston Marshall, who plucks the banjo with rapid-fire precision.

To complete Sigh No More, the band worked with Marcus Dravs, who has produced Björk, Peter Gabriel and Arcade Fire albums. “[Dravs] really encouraged us to think hard about the songs before we recorded them,” Mumford says, “to play the best we could, and to be self-controlled with the kind of crazy ideas that new, over-excited bands get the first time they go into a studio.”

Although the influence of Arcade Fire in Mumford’s powerful voice is undeniable, Mumford & Sons’ sound is shaped more by the distinct colors of folk in Britain. “American folk was partly born out of the ever-evolving forms of blues and civil unrest, whereas British folk has more classical origins from composers like Haydn infused with traditional Celtic music,” Lovett says. “But it’s important to our music to digest everything around us, from music to literature to everyday life. If you put all that stuff in, the music you write will only be richer.”

Sigh No More is emboldened by riches. The lush vocal harmonies concluding “White Blank Page” rise to the sky as the instrumentation falls away, leaving the voices to tower like a Sequoia that withstood a forest fire. “Roll Away Your Stone” shifts from a ballad squeezed deep from Mumford’s lungs to a swirling square dance, best performed from back porches or in veterans’ halls. Squeezeboxes, floor stomps and tambourines evoke an intimacy carved out by Mumford & Sons. These songs are invitations to spaces long forgotten.

With rhythms more at home in the Laurel Canyon of the 1960s, it’s hard to believe that the band comes from the urban sprawl of West London, but it embraces this dichotomy. “We are both urban and rural folk,” Lovett says. “We live and breathe the city of London and whichever cities we have the fortune of visiting on tour, but we run for the hills when we can and relish the space and the beauty of our countryside.” In London, they are not alone as folk rock revivalists; along with rough-folksters Noah & the Whale and the honey-voiced Laura Marling (with whom Mumford occasionally drums), Mumford & Sons are in good company. But unlike their cohorts, Mumford & Sons stays true to songs of old that were hummed in the times of yesterday, plucking strings connected to history and the heart.

“We’re not writing coffee table music,” Lovett says. “We want to write with a purpose. We want to write music that matters.”

*

By Drew Tewksbury

from “Getting To Know,” Filter Magazine, Issue 39 2010

View a PDF of this Article from Filter Magazine

Related posts:

1. Dungen – 4
2. Battles: Tonto + EP
3. These Are Powers – All Aboard Future

The shoot is like any other. The craft-services table offers stale bread, a plastic knife juts out from an open peanut butter jar, and the red light of a coffee machine glows. More than 100 extras sit on foldout chairs in the parking lot, all clad in athletic gear from this morning’s K-Swiss commercial shoot. Earlier they had run a minimarathon down Hollywood Boulevard past Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Now they wait. The 5:30 a.m. call time ensured the streets would be as vacant as the extras’ bored stares. One man hangs his head and sighs, “What’s the director’s deal?”A few blocks away, that director, Keith Schofield, looks at a monitor, and politely asks the runners to assemble in front of the camera. There’s not much to see, but a mother and her adolescent son, lost tourists from Florida, stand behind Schofield and watch anyway.

Then through the crowd of extras — some checking their iPhones and others flirting — something happens. “Oh, my gosh, look at that!” the mom exclaims, as a man wearing purple tights and a silver cape strolls through the extras; then a masked Mexican wrestler, a luchador naked at the waist with action figure–size muscles, follows him. The kid’s mouth is open, the mom is smiling.

“Wait ’til later,” Schofield says nonchalantly. “That’s when the tricycles, scooters and fireworks come out.”

It’s not all tricycles and fireworks for the 30-year-old director, but when it comes to non sequiturs, WTFs and moments of wonder, few filmmakers do it better than Schofield. He has directed commercials for A-list clients like McDonald’s, Virgin Mobile and, most infamously, Diesel, for whom he created the successful viral video “SFW XXX” in 2008, featuring comically amateurish animations obfuscating the nasty action of vintage porn. Think ice cream cones, horseback rides and pinball machines drawn with MS Paintbrush over videos suitable only for late-night Dutch television.

His commercial success, he says, comes from his music-video background. Although music is heard through video games and commercials, interactive iPhone apps and ringtones, the music video has returned as a powerful medium in the post-MTV media climate. And Schofield’s videos are tailored to the ADD, concept-starved audience of the Internet era.

His roster is a litany of established and rising artists: the Ting Tings, Death Cab for Cutie, Fatboy Slim, Justice, Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg, CSS, Mims and Supergrass. In 2008, he won best rock video at the U.K. Music Video Awards, for his guitar-smashing, gravity-defying treatment for Supergrass’ “Bad Blood.” Schofield was chosen to speak at the Flux Screening Series at the Hammer Museum in 2008, where he presented a naked-dance-party video (censored with creatively placed black boxes) for Fatboy Slim’s Brighton Port Authority, featuring Dizzy Rascal and David Byrne. He led a PowerPoint presentation of weird Internet photos. His dry sense of humor and simple commentary confused some of the audience as he displayed an astronaut with pancakes for a head, and a skateboard resting on cheeseburgers. A year later, Schofield returned to the Hammer’s film series to debut his Gainsbourg video for the Beck-produced “Heaven Can Wait,” featuring more than 50 live-action reenactments of his bizarre image collection, pancake head and all. He was joined by the visionary director Michel Gondry.

But before Schofield’s awards, speeches and magazine covers, there was 120 Minutes. As a kid in Chicago, he used to tape his favorite video off the MTV alt-rock video show. Schofield grew up in the Golden Age of videos: the 1990s, when video budgets were fat and the spots were more than merely a commercial for a band, or an album. These videos were in fact a short film, a visual poem. It could cover up an unremarkable band or highlight an underrated one.

“I still remember that Spike Jonze video for Wax, the one with the guy running in on fire in slow motion,” Schofield says, “and it was totally unforgettable, even though the band was. But then there’s Weezer, who before that Buddy Holly video, they were just the guys with the ‘Sweater Song.’ ”

In the works of Jonze and Gondry, Schofield recognized the freedom that comes with collaborations. Videos were the haiku of film; they were stripped-down, three-minute bursts of strong concepts. At NYU Film School at the turn of the millennium, he began directing music videos on the cheap; when he moved to L.A., his reputation for microbudget, lo-fi videos with high concepts helped him to connect with other artists.

But midway through the 2000s, the music video died as its main avenue, MTV, shifted from clips into scripted and reality shows. Some cable channels attempted to pick up the slack, but few would ever have the cultural clout MTV had wielded in the 1990s. Internet video was shoddy at best, and any videos worth watching were diminished by slow connections. But as high-speed Internet became nearly ubiquitous on college campuses, the viral video was born. And Schofield was at its forefront.

In 2006, L.A. band Wintergreen approached him for a video — but they had no budget. Schofield’s solution? He recalls thinking, “We’re not going to be on MTV, we don’t have any money, so let’s do a video that will appeal to video-game nerds online.” He capitalized on an Internet urban legend about Atari’s 1982 E.T. video-game flop, and a New Mexico landfill where unused cartridges were buried. With a simple story of Wintergreen setting out on a quest for the cartridges, Schofield released the video on his Web site, presenting a DIY, nerdy narrative that earned him nearly a million online hits, before YouTube was even launched.

Appealing to Web audiences gave Schofield a new philosophy for creating videos in the post-video age. “I wanted to make videos that could never be shown on MTV, using nudity, brand names, drugs, whatever.”

For Wintergreen’s second video, “Can’t Sit Still,” Schofield pushed the drug theme beyond its limit, featuring a how-to guide for making crystal meth, which the band concocts and ingests. The recipes, made from kitty litter, bleach and other household ingredients, were entirely fictional, but the video stirred up serious controversy.

“We didn’t get much reaction at first when we put it on YouTube, but when we titled it ‘How to Make Meth,’ the reaction was crazy. It was featured on a newscast about online meth recipes — even though it was fake.”

Wintergreen singer/guitarist Drew Mottinger witnessed the effects immediately. “Some fans loved it. Some fans hated it. Most people believed it. Some parent coalition started a blog trying to get it banned. My parents definitely hated it. I still get e-mails from kids claiming they made the drugs and that they worked.”

Now, as countless video sites populate the Internet, the computer is the main dispensary of music, and of the images that go along with it. Schofield helped to resuscitate music videos and adapt their content for an increasingly digital age. But for Schofield, it was no big deal.

“I’d hate for people to pretentiously think that there’s some meaning behind it. I mean, it’s not rocket science.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, published March 11th 2010

*

Related posts:

1. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion
2. Anton Corbijn
3. Mr Oizo – Lambs Anger

It’s a hot day in Venice Beach, the hippy stalwart, faux bohemian enclave sitting on Los Angeles’ coast. We’re gathered in this magazine’s American headquarters preparing to photograph the subject, Talulah Riley, along the Venice canals. As the makeup artist curls her eyelashes and paints her nails, Talulah broaches a discussion of dreams.

The actress, who stars in the recent Richard Curtis film Pirate Radio, is undoubtedly a dreamer. Playing the under-aged temptress aboard an offshore pirate radio station, Riley snatches scenes away from her heavyweight co-stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, and Kenneth
Branagh with effortless magnetism. Charming not only the film’s protagonist but also his veteran mentors, Riley manages to blend an ingénue’s wide-eyed innocence with a seductress’ sizzle. It’s clear, she knows what she wants and more often than not, she knows how to get it. But for those things still left undone, she has a list (in descending order): 1. Climb to the top of Macchu Picchu and ride a horse at sunset. 2. Sleep in a bed of caribou fur at Sweden’s Ice Hotel. 3. Swim in a bioluminescent bay at
midnight.

Riley may not have experienced the glowing micro-organisms (Pyrodimium bahamense) of Puerto Rico, but the 23 year-old actress has already checked off some impressive tasks on her to-do list. Star as the lead in the successful redux of U.K. film series, St. Trinian’s? Check. Sign on for Christopher Nolan’s next film, Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Caine? Been there. Get engaged to Paypal founder and multimillionaire Elon Musk, owner of commercial spaceflight and rocket company Space X, and visionary electric car company Tesla? Done that.

In comparison, my dreams seem much more modest.
I tell her of my dream to visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where plastic Biblical figures mingle with pterodactyls, mastodons, and other animals anachronistically coexisting in the seven days of creation. She gets excited and says that she may make an addendum to her list, while looking at the ceiling as the makeup artist draws a thin line under blue eyes.

I tell my vision of Jesus wielding a blow torch and a machine gun, firing indiscriminately in the air while riding the back of a reared up brontosaurus. She imagines Jesus nestled against the bosom (if they have one) of a T-Rex, held lovingly in those good-for-nothing, limp little dino arms. Riley, it seems, is the quintessential 21st century British girl: she’s quick with a joke, holds her own with the boys, and drops names of philosophers easier than shout-outs to Jay-Z. She’s smart, and witty; a girl to share afternoon tea or to get a book recommendation, and as she leaves the room to change into her dress, I think she may just be one of us, a regular person. But when she returns, she stands tall in the doorway in a gorgeous black dress, all leg and long slender arms, backlit blond air glowing in the daylight, the room goes quiet.

Talulah Riley is far from ordinary.

Riley entered the world’s stage as Mary in Pride and Prejudice, having been snatched up almost directly after high school. Her career progressed quickly, jumping from project to project, including stage adaptations with Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic, cameos and starring roles on British television.
“I don’t feel like I’m that great of an actress; all I get to play are British school girls, which, essentially is me.” But in every constrained motion, in those breath-stealing moments before a kiss in Pirate Radio, and sassy quips in St. Trinians, she is a woman in control, an actress on the verge.

A week later we meet for afternoon tea at Musk’s Bel Air estate (Elon is parasailing in Egypt for the weekend), perched upon a hill from which the ocean is a thick blue line scrawled on the horizon. “Sorry for this look,” she says, “I’m auditioning as a slutty secretary in a little bit.” She’s wearing a tight ray skirt and a pinstriped shirt buttoned pretty far down. From where I’m sitting on the couch, catching glimpses of her between sips of tea from a “Late Night with David Letterman” mug, Riley radiates charm. She has an infectious laugh that seems to start somewhere deep inside her, bubbling up long before you ever see or hear it, a slow tsunami that washes over her as she scrunches her nose and as laughter dances out from her coy smile.

Then she talks of dreams again. She was always a dreamer, she says, with her face buried in books or in conversations with the animals at her Gloucestershire family farm. “I’ve always wanted to drive up the coast to Big Sur,” she says, holding the mug tightly. “If you’re going to drive through Europe, you need a VW camper with a mattress in the back; you want to do it old school. America’s big and you want to do it in a big way, in a Winnebago,” she pauses, cracks that slow smile again, and suggests, “or a Tesla.”

We seem to have the same idea, and moments later we head to the garage, past her father, who is reading Harry Potter in the kitchen. “It’ll leave your heart and kidneys behind!” he says about the Tesla Roadster’s rocketlike acceleration while Riley grabs the keys and walks barefoot down the stairs. “Here’s the Batmobile,” Riley says of her future car (“We’re getting another one soon, so this one will be mine”), unplugs the cable and starts it up not with a rumble but a whisper. Riley tears through the Bel Air curves, and I laugh uncontrollably; only on rollercoasters have I felt this velocity. As she presses the gas with her bare foot, and her hair flies wildly, I begin to wonder — she has her dream job, a dream car, and her dream guy, so if all your dreams come true, what do you have left to dream about?
For Riley, the well of dreams is bottomless.

“Elon asked me to go to Mars. I’m thinking about it.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from Intersection Magazine, Winter Issue 2009

View a PDF Tear Sheet of this Article

*

Related posts:

1. Hunter S. Thompson: The Gonzo Tapes: The Life + Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
2. Arabian Prince – Innovative Life – The Anthology 1984 -1989
3. Rudo y Cursi

So much for the Southern California sun. The rain has been pouring for days, clogging the freeways and prompting tornado warnings, delivered awkwardly by local meteorologists. But here at Bethany Cosentino’s home in LA’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, it’s warm. She sits on the couch and pets her Garfield doppelganger, Snacks, while a space heater and two candles keep things toasty. Warmth is important to Cosentino: It’s the reason she left New York City, and it’s the way she describes the sound of her band Best Coast.

“There’s something warm about the lo-fi sound,” she says, clutching Snacks, her wool socks resting on the coffee table near a pair of broken sunglasses (not that she needs them on this gloomy day). Best Coast is the 23-year-old’s sun-kissed fuzz-pop band, her vehicle for resurrecting the 1960s Spector sound, infused with some Sonic Youth. Imagine a Ronnettes record blasted through a blown-out speaker or Kim Gordon if she had the voice of a girl-group chanteuse.

“This is Real” features Cosentino’s oohs and ahhs over jangly chords, in a song fit for Marty McFly and his mom to dance to at the Enchantment Under the Sea Ball. It has fuzzy guitar, soaring vocals, and, yes, analog warmth. But Cosentino’s songwriting process begins digitally. “I usually will bring a guitar out here,” she motions to an empty chair with a blanket adorned with a lion’s face, “and will lay down a few guitar tracks into GarageBand, then I’ll send them to Bobb.”

“My first project sounded like Jenny Lewis meets Tori Amos—y’know, the kind of music a 16-year-old girl makes. Then I got into punk.”

That’s Bobb Bruno, a musician, producer and longtime friend of Cosentino’s (not her former babysitter contrary to popular belief), with whom she crafted Best Coast’s sound. Bruno is a staple of LA’s music underground, performing with psychedelic sage Imaad Wasif and as a solo act opening for Wilco and Fiona Apple—sometimes dressed in a Takashi Murakami-styled bunny suit. Cosentino and Bruno were ensconced in the music scene surrounding LA’s all-ages venue the Smell, where Cosentino played with the drone-y experimentalists Pocahaunted.

“When I was about 16, I started working—at the Hot Topic at the Burbank mall, actually—and I started thinking more about music,” Cosentino says. “My first project sounded like Jenny Lewis meets Tori Amos—y’know, the kind of music a 16-year-old girl makes. Then I got into punk.”

The La Crescenta native’s father was a musician, who, she says, also works at the church Miley Cyrus frequents. He encouraged her to train classically as a vocalist, so Cosentino took opera classes and did session work during her teen years. Then came Pocahaunted, followed by an extended stay in New York.

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, then Cosentino’s year in the chill of Gotham helped her fall in love with California again. “It was too intense there,” she says. “Within two days of coming back to California, I started writing Best Coast songs.” On her MySpace page, written shortly after her return, she sums up her vision: “So, I am back in California, and I thought what could be more fitting than to record a bunch of songs about summer and the sun and the ocean and being a lazy creep? So, this is what I’m doing.”

“When I’m With You,” from her 7-inch on Black Iris, encapsulates the carefree spirit of Best Coast. It feels like summer sunsets in Topanga Canyon, faded ’70s photographs, and slow swaying to Melanie or Janis Joplin. Produced and recorded by Lewis Pesacov, of LA’s polyglot party bands Fool’s Gold and Foreign Born, the song captures a firefly in a Mason jar, creating a single that should glow brighter with time. Pesacov is recording Best Coast’s debut full-length due out later this year.

Music mags and blogs have raved about “When I’m With You,” but Cosentino is wary of the hype. The pigeonholing of Best Coast as purveyors of the “California Sound” has created too many expectations, she says, “Sometimes I’m not in the mood to write something sunny. Sometimes I feel more minor-key.”

As for Best Coast’s subject matter, Cosentino likes to keep it simple: boys. “When I was first writing songs, I would try to find the perfect metaphor for telling a boy I liked him without really saying it,” she explains, “but now I just say it.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from O.C. Weekly, Feb 4th, 2010

*

.

Related posts:

1. The Mountain Goats
2. Motion City Soundtrack: ‘Nerds at Heart”
3. Dungen – 4

Motion City Soundtrack have a confession to make. “We’re just a bunch of nerdy kids who are old,” says lead guitarist/co-founder Joshua Cain. He and longtime friend and lead vocalist/guitarist Justin Pierre started touring the world after leaving their respective Minneapolis homes more than a decade ago. Though, as they’ve matured, some things stayed the same. “We’re still playing video games and love pop culture,” 33-year-old Cain says.

Despite their adolescent sensibility, Cain and his hyperkinetic, power-pop cohorts have encountered the very adult challenge of identity as they face a crossroads in their personal and professional careers: joining a major label. For five years, Motion City Soundtrack (MCS) were signed to seminal label Epitaph (NOFX, Rancid, Pennywise), founded by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz. For their just-released record My Dinosaur Life, MCS moved to Columbia Records, where their label mates include AC/DC, Beyoncé and Susan Boyle.

As Cain talks on the phone while walking between tour buses before a show in Cincinnati, he sounds confident that the quintet’s new label will be a good move in the rapidly changing music business. “After being on a great label like Epitaph, we didn’t want to sign something that wasn’t as good of a deal,” he says. “We had so much control of what was going on for us. We haven’t lost much of that, and [Columbia] is more supportive of us because they know everyone is trying to make ends meet. It’s a different culture now than it was 10 years ago.”

For their major-label debut, MCS enlisted some music-industry heavyweights to craft their album in the studios of North Hollywood. With legendary engineer/producer Andy Wallace (Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Nirvana) helming and Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus helping out, they forged a sound that was familiar but more accessible. “This new album was such a heavy record that we wanted to try Andy Wallace out,” Cain says. “The past few records were catchy, maybe the lyrics were dark. But for this album, it’s dark songwriting and dark lyrics. It felt like a straightforward rock record.”

Hoppus provided a much-needed outside ear to help shape the record. MCS took finished tracks to him, and he would then assist in fine-tuning their big-guitar aesthetic for a broader audience craving sweet hooks. “Mark came out to rearrange songs and told us to rewrite parts,” Cain says. “He comes from the same school of thought that we do most of the time; he knows what we’re looking for.”

“[Columbia] is more supportive of us because they know everyone is trying to make ends meet. It’s a different culture now than it was 10 years ago.”

That said, Cain insists the sun-soaked, pop-punk style of Blink doesn’t dominate the record. “I wasn’t influenced by Southern California music; we grew up in Minneapolis, so Chicago bands were big for me and that DC sound, not the pop-punk thing of Southern California.”

Even with the high-powered producers behind them, Cain says there’s no formula for the perfect pop song, no matter how hard they try in the studio. It just happens.

“Sometimes we’ll be writing a song, and you just know, ‘This is it,’” Cain explains. “I’ve tried to analyze it at times, but it’s just a moment when something sounds different from anything you’ve heard before. Some songs are just magical, and there’s nothing to do about it.”

My Dinosaur Life pushes the band’s sound past the Rentals-influenced, synth-nerd style that earned them attention in the early 2000s. The new disc is fuller and edgier, but it’s never harsh or alienating. “We’ve heard a lot of moms tell us, ‘I got your CD for my kid, but I ended up listening to it all the time.’ But I still see myself in a lot of the kids who come to our shows. We’re still nerds at heart.”

As MCS embark on their first tour of the new decade, they face serious questions and an uncertain road ahead. How do they go mainstream without compromising their confident, carefree sound? Can the band—and their friendship—withstand such pressure?

Cain’s not too worried about it. “We don’t try too hard to do anything, really,” he says. “The key is we’re going to be ourselves. We just do what we like and hope someone else likes it, too.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from O.C, Weekly, Issue February 11, 2010

*

Related posts:

1. Daft Punk Pull Back the Curtain on ‘Tron: Legacy’ Soundtrack
2. Death – …For the Whole World to See
3. In Sounds from the Far Out: Riding with Night Horse, Spindrift, and Tee Pee Records

Trepanation, as the procedure is called, is an ancient medical maneuver that’s been chronicled in 16th-century German engravings and found in unearthed skulls dating back to prehistoric France. Medieval doctors believed trepanation — drilling a hole in a living person’s skull — was a way to get demons out, and early 20th–century neurologists prescribed it as a cure for mania.

In 2007, the very nonmanic French singer-actor Charlotte Gainsbourg sustained a head injury while waterskiing. Persistent headaches prompted her return to the doctors, who, after conducting neurological tests and an MRI, discovered a massive brain hemorrhage that was caused by the accident. The prognosis was serious, Gainsbourg explains: Blood clots, and a small hematoma, had gathered around her brain, “like the one [late actress] Natasha Richardson had,” threatening her life. To save her, the doctors drilled a small hole into her skull in order to release the blood.

The procedure worked, and in coping with the shock of it all, the singer learned that maybe those medieval doctors were on to something. “[My realization] wasn’t that dramatic as the surgery itself,” she qualifies, “but I was very, very close to death. I thought I was very courageous toward life and death, and I didn’t really care, but when it happened, I realized how scared I was.”

A native French speaker, in English, Gainsbourg saunters through sentences, tiptoeing from word to word like she’s crossing a creek one stone at a time. Twenty years passed between the creation of her first and second albums, and she rarely performs live. But then, she’s never had to make music in order to eat. During those two decades she was busy becoming an A-list celebrity in France where, as the daughter of beloved late crooner and mischief-maker Serge Gainsbourg and French actor/chanteuse Jane Birkin, she has been in the spotlight for much of her life. She’s steered that good fortune in fascinating directions. As an actor she’s worked with a long list of esteemed directors: Michel Gondry, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Todd Haynes and Lars von Trier. “I’m not an artist,” she protests. “I’m not even a musician. I can play the piano, but I’m not that good, anyway.”

Still, while getting her MRI and lying in the tube, Gainsbourg started to think about songs. “When I was inside that machine,” she says, “it was an escape to think about music. It’s rhythm. It was very chaotic.”

She stored the memory away, and after she recovered, serendipity put her in the path of Beck Hansen, whom she met at a White Stripes concert in L.A. She and the singer-songwriter had a brief conversation, initiated by their common bond, producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, U2, R.E.M.), who had worked on Gainsbourg’s 2006 return to music, 5:55, and three of Beck’s most critically acclaimed records, including Sea Change. Gainsbourg and Beck met again, backstage at a Radiohead show in Paris, which prompted her to explore the possibility of making a new record. She called Beck and was soon working with him in his Silver Lake home studio. Casually, the two began to record, minus any concrete expectations.

“It wasn’t planned that we’d do a whole album together,” she explains, “but Beck was inspired by my accident.”

He worked the instrumentation and co-wrote the lyrics, and Gainsbourg provided the inspiration by explaining what she’d experienced in the hospital. “Take my eyes and paint my bones/Drill my brain all full of holes,” she breathily whispers on “Master’s Hands” over Beck’s lurching guitar rhythms, producing what would become the first track on IRM (or imagerie par résonance magnétique, the French translation of MRI).

In the same session, they recorded “In the End,” a stripped-down acoustic ballad that layers Gainsbourg’s wafting hums and smoky vocals over glockenspiel and strings arranged by Beck’s father, David Campbell. But the sound, as with many of IRM‘s string pieces, faintly resembles the sensual, warm string sections of Gainsbourg’s father’s. (Beck, in fact, sampled Serge’s “Cargo Culte” on his track “Paper Tiger,” on Sea Change.) “I think they use strings in an entirely different way,” she says of her father’s propensity to use arrangements as a punctuation, as opposed to the Beck family’s more atmospheric runs.

Finally, Gainsbourg and Beck pieced together “Heaven Can Wait,” a poppy piano-driven stomp that would become IRM‘s first single. (Its bizarre, wonderful companion video is by Los Angeles director Keith Schofield.) When these initial songs were complete, Gainsbourg and Beck parted; he needed to finish his own album and she was working on film projects, most notably her shocking, award-winning performance in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

As she let those initial sessions breathe, the singer decided she wanted more and asked Beck if he’d do the whole album. The phone call didn’t surprise the musician. He’d been continuing to write music with Gainsbourg in mind, and in the next 18 months, they built IRM‘s stylistically disparate but impossibly cohesive vision. So she returned to Silver Lake.

“[Beck] wakes up with a new idea every day,” she says. “Beck wrote all the music and most of the lyrics, but I was reacting to what he was doing. I could have continued forever, but we stopped when the album made sense.”

The function of IRM, like that of the machine that inspired it, was to penetrate her head, Gainsbourg explains. “It was a chance to look at memory and looking into the brain in a more abstract, more poetic way.”

The album avoids the kitschiness of Beck’s genre chop jobs and funky electro-soul breakdowns but maintains his style throughout. Like the best producers, he helps Gainsbourg to speak for herself.

“My creativity comes out with others,” she acknowledges. “That’s why it is such a pleasure to be involved with Beck. I can’t do anything on my own. I like the idea of entering someone else’s world. I find more freedom inside someone else’s work rather than being completely free, and able to create anything.”

Yet, with the album complete, Gainsbourg faces a new obstacle: her first-ever American tour. Since that first time she sang with her father 26 years ago, on the notorious hit single “Lemon Incest,” she has rarely performed live. She says her father and mother, actress and “Je t’aime … moi non plus” singer Birkin, only performed after many years of commercial success. “My mother was my age when she went onstage,” she says. “She had about 10 albums by then. Even then, I saw her terrified backstage.

“It’s very disturbing, in a way, to put yourself out there. One side of me wants to be daring and wants to do it, and to be able to do it. Another part says, ‘You don’t know how to do anything.’ ”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, January 27, 2010

*

-

Related posts:

1. Cobra Commander: Dissecting the Improv Music Sessions at Machine Project
2. Images for the Post-Video Age
3. New Music Tuesday: Adanowsky, Can’s ‘Tago Mago,’ and David Lynch

Yaghmai strummed the guitar chords and sang the opening lines of “Biss”: “They say he’s coming back again/he’s coming for the rest of us.” His delicate voice shifted to minor key and wavered like Antony Hegarty’s falsetto as Larroquette looked down, tucked his dark hair behind his ear and triggered a cymbal-smashing beat punctuated by synths. A chopped-up, robotic vocal sample fell away, leaving Yaghmai’s multilayered vocals as a centerpiece.

Jogger’s cut-and-paste aesthetic aligns jagged beats with Yaghmai’s precise harmonies. The latter’s guitar, violin and vocals are fed through Larroquette’s effects pedals, samplers and laptop, where he tweaks the incoming sounds live. In essence, Larroquette helms the digital sphere and Yaghmai handles the organic analog. No two performances are the same, and much is done on the fly as the pair creates songs, some of which are narratives, others musical movements, hulking like icebergs as guitar finger-picking melts away and rolling snares emerge and coalesce into a driving beat. The audience members nod their hats and hoodies, some tapping feet next to backpacks, obviously approving of the relatively new addition to L.A.’s eclectic-electronic underground milieu.

Jogger put in their time in the scene’s crown jewel, the Low End Theory club at Airliner, and developed the complex technology of their live show during a European tour with Daedelus. Their debut full-length album, This Great Pressure, is the first release on Magical Properties, Alfred “Daedelus” Darlington’s new label.

“This Great Pressure captures the best of Los Angeles’ sprawling, many-limbed scene,” Darlington says. “It isn’t from anyplace, and yet it whispers, as much as it yells somewhere.”

“For each new segment of a song, we’d essentially create a new band for it,” Yaghmai said

A few weeks earlier, Larroquette and his cohort were sitting in lawn chairs in Yaghmai’s West L.A. home. Construction workers moved two-by-fours from tables, cleaning up sawdust from the studio-in-progress. Fog rolled in from the ocean, touching the treetops with mist. “Thanks for your help, guys,” Larroquette yelled to the workers as they left for the day.

Both men grew up in L.A., and the musical roots of Jogger were laid down in living rooms, garages and homes across the city over the course of their long friendship. Like Jogger’s dual-digital and analog dynamic, the pair comes from different backgrounds. Larroquette is the outspoken, free-spirited son of actor John Larroquette (best known for his character Dan Fielding on the sitcom Night Court), while Yaghmai is a lifelong instrumentalist with a well-studied, understated demeanor. He’s also a working musician who recently toured Europe with Charlotte Gainsbourg, played with the Bird and the Bee, and has done session work on various film scores. He once had a run-in with pop queen Shakira at the Latin Grammys. “It might have been a Shakira look-alike,” jokes Larroquette.

“It was a Gypsy number,” Yaghmai explains. “There were wagons around and I was lying on these stairs. Then, as she comes down the stairs I would stare at her. I was supposed to serenade her, then salsa away while flames shoot up over my head.”

The gig never happened, though. They canceled the performance because of 9/11. Larroquette explains: “Apparently, they hate us for our freedom, violin serenades and pyrotechnics.”

Since 2005, Larroquette has hosted a successful comedy podcast, Uhh Yeah Dude, with friend Seth Romatelli. The two provide dramatic readings of craigslist casual encounters, hilarious personal stories, and offer, says Larroquette, a “weekly roundup of America through the eyes of two American-Americans.”

Although his musical background involves 100 percent less Shakira than Yaghmai, to Larroquette, music is no joke. He is self-taught (“I was the worst guitar student ever,” he confesses) and gleaned programming and synth experience from working in a keyboard shop with a loose lending policy.

“A lot of our music was driven by the gear we would get from that shop,” Yaghmai says. “We’d get a new piece just to see what it did.”

“Then we were, like, ‘We need this in our lives,’ ” Larroquette adds.

Yaghmai: “For each new segment of a song, we’d essentially create a new band for it.”

Jogger was born from this spirit of experimentation. They perfected the technological aspects of live mixing and guitar integration and began recording material. Larroquette’s meticulous attention to detail helped to create the frenzied beats driving the duo. “Sometimes I’ll even make the beats by programming everything one note at a time,” Larroquette says while pointing to notes on an imaginary musical scale in front of him.

It wasn’t until Yaghmai’s high school friend Daedelus gave them a nudge that they began to get serious. In early 2009 he invited them to put some tracks on Friends of Friends Vol. 1, a compilation of experimental digital sounds, then took them on an international tour. From those beginnings came This Great Pressure.

“They have been making this record (or some version of it) forever, and just needed someone to impose deadlines to force their completion,” Daedelus says.

Jogger isn’t just all over the musical map; the duo redraws it completely, delineating a new sound for a future L.A.

Daedelus sums it up best: “Kids should be growing up with these sounds.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Weekly, December 9, 2009

*

Related posts:

1. Punks Jump Up
2. Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump
3. Arabian Prince – Innovative Life – The Anthology 1984 -1989

Inside the Ethiopian Merkato, everything smells like sage. The market sits in the middle of Little Ethiopia, a half-mile stretch of Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants, Jewish thrift stores and an erotic-cake shop. Along the Merkato’s walls, DVDs and CDs showcase the profiles of African pop stars, and baseball hats emblazoned with green, yellow and red decals of the continent are stacked neatly against a shelf. The aroma of curry greets customers as they walk in the door, and, for a moment, the sage mingles with the restaurants’ scent wafting down Fairfax Avenue.

In front of a case of glass pipes and fake gold jewelry, Luke Top and Lewis Pesacov kneel and rifle through a bucket of cassettes. Top wears a fedora and Pesacov’s sunglasses rest upon his head. The two members of Los Angeles musical collective Fool’s Gold carefully inspect the Merkato’s choice collection of African hits. A young black child leans on the display, and stares at them, mouth slightly ajar. “Are you guys,” he starts, stops, squints his eyes suspiciously and continues, “famous?”

“Not quite yet,” Pesacov says, smiling, hands still full of tapes.

“We’re in a band, and we’re just trying to sound like this guy,” Top adds, holding up a tape with an African man, whose white robe fades into a cloud scape. “We’re not there yet,” Pesacov tells the boy, “but we’re getting there.”

As a matter of fact, Fool’s Gold’s self-titled polyglot pop album does sound like Mahmoud Ahmed (“Nadine”), the beloved Ethiopian soul singer on the cover of that tape. But their sound also gleans the rolling congas of Cuba (“Poseidon”), the guitar gymnastics of Mali’s Tinariwen (“The World Is All There Is”), and the saxophones from Detroit soul (“Night Dancing”).

“Some of our songs are a heartbeat, some singing and a melody, it’s so simple,” Top tells me over a lamb plate at Messob Restaurant, across from Merkato. “Purely visceral and emotional.”

The band members, a 10-person collective of friends and neighbors, represent a cultural cross-section. Some come from L.A. bands, including drummer Garrett Ray, guitarists Matt Popieluch and Pesacov of eclectic rockers Foreign Born; Brad Caulkins, saxophonist from Jail Weddings, and flutist Mark Noseworthy of Pink & Noseworthy; and Mike Tapper, ex-drummer from We Are Scientists. Keyboardist and backup vocalist Amir Kenan immigrated from Israel when he was young, and became friends with Top at a summer camp in Reseda when they were 10. The percussion team adds international flavors to the musical gumbo, with Argentine pop star (and Latin Grammy nominee) Erica Garcia, Ghana-trained percussion leader Orpheo McCord (who also plays with Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros), and Brazilian/Mexican visual artist Salvador Placencia.

“Some of our songs are a heartbeat, some singing and a melody, it’s so simple. Purely visceral and emotional.”

“It comes from the same place, you know, the slave trade brought people from all different cultural points, like West Africa, Cuba, to Louisiana, to Brazil,” Pesacov says. “And there’s a point where they all overlap. Music from the Congo was really influenced by Latin music. So there is a place where African drumming overlaps with drum-line music in New Orleans, and where that overlaps with Samba in Brazil.”

Fool’s Gold is an extension of this cross-pollination, but not a means of culture-vulturism purveyed by other musicians, looking to capitalize on the next big craze, Top says. “It’s not like Diplo just playing a sample. We’re actually playing this music and digesting this music through our bodies,” he explains, diffusing the authenticity argument waged by so many music writers upon American bands with African influence.

“Ethiopians are influenced by Western music,” Top says, “and we’re bringing it back here, redigesting it into Western music. It’s a cycle.”

“It’s a dialogue. We’re praising it, and lifting it up. Through learning to play it, living and breathing it,” Pesacov says.

Pesacov’s musical background is far more heady than the others’: He studied under American avant-garde composer Mark Randall Osborn in Germany. “I’d spend seven months just writing one piano piece,” Pesacov says. When Randall Osborn died in 2002 in a traffic accident, Pesacov picked up his guitar again. “I haven’t figured out how it informs what I do now,” he says. “When I’m onstage [with Fool’s Gold], I’m not thinking. It’s coming from the body, not the mind.”

“That music lives in the brain, whereas Fool’s Gold lives in the heart,” Top interjects.

Top plays bass and sings lead vocals. His voice soars high or wavers like a shaking leaf as he sings in Hebrew. Like Mariah Carey, Ahmed and, more recently, Dave Longstreth from Dirty Projectors, Top practices melisma, the vocal act of singing a single syllable and extending it over many notes. This vacillating vocal style appears in African-American gospel and R ’n’ B, but is largely absent from most American music, especially rock. It’s the sound, to reduce it to its barest element, that sounds “foreign.”

“Ethiopian pop and Eritrean pop? I don’t know why I love it so much or identify with it, but I just do,” Top says. “Why do I feel this shit, why do I have to do this shit?”

Here, in the idea and culture of Ethiopia, Fool’s Gold takes root. After all, Ethiopia is a land of origins and sanctity. It is the cradle of civilization, home to Lucy, the 3.2 million–year-old Australopithecus skeleton, and early–20th century Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, exalted as god incarnate by Rastafarians.

Top’s mother, he says, thinks he has a spiritual connection to Ethiopia’s Jewish heritage. The Beta Israelites of Ethiopia believe themselves to be the lost tribe of Israel, and Emperor Selassie traced his lineage to King Solomon. Though many Ethiopian Jews were airlifted back to Israel in Operation Moses in 1984, and Operation Solomon in 1991, Top and Pesacov dream of going back and playing Hebrew Ethiopian soul for those left behind.

The decision to sing in Hebrew was natural and unexpected, says Top. “When we started the band,” he explains, “[we] just jammed with no vision. Then it just seemed organic to sing in another language, because the music we were listening to [at that time] was in another language. So I was, like, BTW, I know another language.”

Top was born in Israel to an Iraqi mother and a Russian father. He came to California at 3 years of age, and lost the connection to his Israeli roots. “I grew up thinking I had no home,” he says, “and I didn’t really identify with the people here. Singing in Hebrew now helps me explore this side I barely know. It allowed me a freedom. There was a bit of a security blanket in knowing that people couldn’t understand what I was saying. They were connecting with the pure sound of my voice.”

Fool’s Gold aren’t world music, but they are worldly. They represent real stories of L.A., about immigration and assimilation, outcasts and innovators, co-existence. “Growing up with this strange duality maybe led me to seek out different [cultures] to identify with. I really identify with this meld of Eastern and Western music, it’s everything I am. I think we’re punk.”

Photos and Test by Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, October 9th 2009

*

-

Related posts:

1. Mulatu Astatke, Godfather of Ethio Jazz
2. Death – …For the Whole World to See
3. Best Coast Forward

The pop music of Iceland has, more often than not, reflected the starkness and beauty inherent in the frigid climate and craggy terrain. For the music and arts collective múm, its folk-infused glitch-pop has gleaned influence from its surroundings. The 2002 album, Finally We Are No One, was even recorded in a lighthouse. On the newest album, Sing Along to Songs you Don’t Know, however, múm has pulled its influence from the political landscape that erupted recently during Iceland’s financial meltdown. During this period of upheaval, múm created Sing Along to Songs you Don’t Know as a respite from the protests on the streets of Reykjavik; the peacefulness of the music, the group’s most subdued album to date, was a space of quiet amid the political clamor. Here, Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason, one of the band’s principal members and multi-instrumentalists, speaks about the album, language, and what the world needs to learn from Iceland.

What are the major differences between Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know and your other albums?

Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason: It is by any stress-o-meter our most tranquil album, it’s simpler and from some angles it’s almost transparent—but only from some angles. This is what is most sets it apart. Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy was probably the most complex of all our albums because of the shear amount of instrument tracks, but making albums like Summer Make Good were just as draining process. No album has flowed as easy for us as this one.

In the past you’ve recorded albums in both English and Icelandic. What language do you think better conveys the emotions in your songs?

We seem to reach more people with english lyrics, so we have scrapped the Icelandic lyrics for a while at least. But actually I write much more in Icelandic than in English: poetry, lyrics and fiction. It’s obviously a whole different thing for me to write in my mother tongue.

What kind of commonalities have you heard coursing through Icelandic music, both contemporary and traditional?

I’m not sure, but I think there is a strange balance of people taking their music very seriously and very lightly at the same time, which is something I have noticed running through it all. Other than that I can’t really think of any threads that run through Icelandic music, it’s very open and very diverse whatever way you look at it.

Why did you decide to record some of this album outside of Iceland?

That wasn’t really a decision we needed to make, we will record anywhere that suits us, anywhere that’s beautiful, where it is quiet and we can relax while we work, eat, sleep, read and drink. And I think this is what we will keep on doing and we are really open to coming and recording anywhere that chance will take us. If someone wants to lend us their house, we will be there.

You’ve recorded in many different environments, including a light house during the recording of Finally We Are No One. Describe the locations where you recorded this album.

Most of it was probably done at home in our bedrooms. Quite a lot of it was recorded in Gunni’s parents summer house, which is in a very quiet place about two hours from Reykjavík. We recorded quite a lot in the week we spent in a 14th century house in the Estonian country side surrounded by lakes. Most of the drums were recorded in Finland, where our drummer lives and bits and bobs were recorded in Berlin and upstate New York.

In what ways does your living and studio environment color the sound of your albums?

We don’t really think about what influences the music that much, dissections and autopsies like that aren’t really apart of any creative process. So we let others think about stuff like this. But we very rarely record in conventional studios, except when we really need to or when they are exceptional studios. Things tend to get much more stressed in recording studios, simply because there, time literally seems to be money. That’s not healthy, time shouldn’t really equal money, especially not when creating music.

Between the release of Go Go Smear the Ivy in 2007 and this record in 2009, Iceland has undergone a great deal of change. Economic and political strife have become part of the island’s landscape. In what ways did these events hinder or help your creative process?

Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason: Through the collapse of the financial system and the government there was an amazing eruption of energy in the people here and we feel blessed to have been witness to it, even though as time passes there hasn’t been as much change as we had hoped for. Far from it. But times of turmoil always release creative powers, so I think it influenced everyone in Iceland. Staying out in the streets, banging pots and pans, screaming and protesting will bring out the best in anyone.

How has the collapse of the Icelandic government affected the funding for the arts? What kind of affect has it had on small music acts and larger bands there?

We have never really had a proper art funding system here in Iceland, at least not for “pop” music. múm has really only once received a grant from the government and it was unsubstantial, so I think it won’t have much affect on the bands around us. Some of the banks started sponsoring the arts in one way or the other, but we steered clear of that.

Apart from sharing the same throw-away culture, I think Iceland and the US couldn’t be more different and I don’t think there are many lessons a confused ex-colony can give a morbidly obese super-power.

You recorded this album partially in Finland and Estonia, two countries that are quickly becoming innovators in technology. In the few years since Estonia shed its Russian occupancy, it has seen an incredible rise in living standard and industrial importance. Its path seems similar to that of Iceland after its independence. What can Estonia learn from Iceland’s current political and economic strife?

Not to trust the hypnotized disciples of Friedman and not to give in to the sirens of mass privatization. Icelanders got charmed in to a trance like state where nothing mattered more than owning the newest things and the biggest cars and when they woke up from the trance, they felt violated and hurt, but had no idea who to blame. We lost so much to liberal economic vandalism, but the biggest thing we lost was our self-respect.

What can America learn from Iceland?

Apart from sharing the same throw-away culture, I think Iceland and the US couldn’t be more different and I don’t think there are many lessons a confused ex-colony can give a morbidly obese super-power. Everyone living in the west have many lessons to learn and the best way to do so is being open to new ideas, new feelings and emotions. We probably won’t get anywhere by dictating morals or lecturing each other.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Filter Magazine Online 09.24.09

*

-

Related posts:

1. New Music Tuesday: Adanowsky, Can’s ‘Tago Mago,’ and David Lynch
2. Cobra Commander: Dissecting the Improv Music Sessions at Machine Project
3. The making of ‘Inglourious Basterds’

“My life is an open book,” she says, pouring soy milk into her drink.

“My childhood, like most people’s, molded how I view the world and how I create,” Lov says, instructively, before opening her metaphorical tome and reading from it. Lov was 4 when her mother won custody of her and her older brother after a bitter divorce. Lov’s father fought hard to get them back, even threatened to kidnap the children if he had to. Lov’s mother, she says, warned the court that her father was volatile, but he found a sympathetic judge and finagled five visits with his children during their preschool recess. After the fifth visit, he earned time alone with the kids — and made good on his threats by kidnapping the two children and leaving for Israel.

“I remember being in the airport and he told us, ‘If for some reason I’m not on your flight, just find someone official in the airport, and they will take care of you,’ ” Lov says. “We freaked out and prayed: ‘Please, God, let him get on this plane.’ Then he went up to the stewardess and charmed them into helping my brother and I onto the plane. Once onboard, he left us and sat in an empty seat. We saw him sit down and we cheered.”

As a 5-year-old, Lov couldn’t process what had just happened; this was her father, the man she trusted. When they landed in Tel Aviv, her life was uprooted. “We were immediately put into first grade, and I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew,” Lov says. “I was very isolated. I hated school, but music was my thing.” Her father introduced her to the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, and Lov would record entire radio shows with a tape recorder and sing along. “Besides my dad being a criminal, he was the one who encouraged me to be creative,” she says.

“He said I was funny, and that my voice was good,” Lov continues, while sipping her iced coffee. “But that other side was terrible.” She and her brother bore the brunt of his temper and physical abuse. He couldn’t stay out of jail, and the women in his life were not the matronly type.

When Lov was 11, her father met a woman who convinced him to return to America — Minnesota. After six years abroad, Lov had to relearn English and integrate herself into school; she had to relearn how to be an American kid.

But her father became more erratic, and her isolation grew. “Everywhere he went, he’d leave a path of destruction,” she says, “but music was my sanity. It was the thing I could turn to to escape.”

She and her brother eventually moved in with her uncle in California, leaving her father behind for good. “My uncle saved my life,” she says, “going from chaos and welfare to a stability that I never knew existed.”

Lov first gained attention for her songs with the Devics, which she founded with Dustin O’Halloran in 1998. When he became involved with solo piano projects in the mid-2000s, Lov forged her own path. too. With the help of Zac Rae, who produced Fiona Apple and Annie Lennox, she began work on her solo album, Seasoned Eyes Were Beaming, a melodic musical diary enriched with swaying string sections (“Fountain”) and tinkling toy pianos (“Touched”), all sewn together with Lov’s simple strums and bittersweet lyrics. The album, re-released by Filter records in late August (after a false start from her former label Nettwerk, which first released the album earlier this year), will literally accompany Lov as she tours with indie crooner and sometime-collaborator Sea Wolf. She plans to take the stage with only a guitar and a record player, which will provide the backing tracks. These minimal, intensely intimate shows don’t scare Lov — nothing seems to shake her. Instead, she thrives on baring her soul. “I always feel vulnerable onstage, but that’s the beauty of it,” she says. Then again, she’s had some experience with difficult emotions.

At 15, Lov reunited with her mother after 10 years. By this point, her mom was a stranger. It was difficult, Lov says, but they grew closer as time went on. When she was 16, her father killed himself. “But I’ll save that story for the book,” she backtracks, perhaps after seeing that I’m a bit exhausted.

Lov smiles and jokes while cleaning our coffee cups. “I was never that kid in all black, writing-poetry-in-the-corner girl,” she explains. Instead, Lov’s music cuts through the fog of isolation and sends out hope with each song, like messages in bottles. “When I was a kid, listening to the Smiths helped me know that others could feel [like I felt], and that I was okay. Now, I feel that I need to give back to what was given to me and balance darkness with hope.”

*

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, September 09, 2009

Related posts:

1. How Do Children Process, Learn About Race?
2. Emmanuel Jal
3. Interviews: Julian Schnabel and cast of “Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

Quentin Tarantino has never been one for subtlety. His over the top, explosive films have stirred up audiences and pushed the envelope for nearly two decades. With “Inglourious Basterds,” opening Aug. 21, Tarantino continues his legacy of genre smashing in an epic about Nazi-scalp-hunting, Jewish soldiers in World War II.

We caught up with Tarantino, and some of movie’s stars, Eli Roth, B.J. Novak, Diane Kruger and Christoph Waltz, to chat about propaganda, German movie stars, and the best ways to scalp.

Brad Pitt was probably busy babysitting
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quentin Tarantino on his relationship to violence in movies…“Basically the violence that I like makes me laugh. In a particularly savage scene where a character takes another character that I don’t particularly like and bashes his head into the table five times, that totally cracks me up.”

Quentin Tarantino Reflects on Violence in his Films with Drew Tewksbury

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Christoph Waltz on the universality of the film…“You can transpose it to ancient Greece or the Thirty Year War, and it will perfectly hold up. These clashes of forces and these armies trying to undermine each other, and politics being played and vicious people trying to pull all their magic and stunts.”

Christoph Waltz Talks to Drew Tewksbury about seeing himself in a Nazi uniform

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Diane Kruger on seeing the film the first time…“I was surprised how funny it was. I knew that there were some funny moments in the script, but I truly laughed out loud at Cannes, and thought, ‘it’s so inappropriate to laugh right now.’”

Diane Kruger Talks about acting influences with Drew Tewksbury

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quentin Tarantino on the origins of the script…“I started by wanting to make a movie about a bunch of guys going on a mission. But I want to go beyond it, I want to redefine it. It’s this big group of characters, these historical characters, who mix it up with my characters.”

“I did have a story but the story was too long, it could have been a 12 hour mini series. Then I had to go through these questions: Am I an artist too big for movies? I can never deal with that puny canvas the 3-hour movie… Then I had to get over myself.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quentin Tarantino on Brad Pitt’s character Lt. Aldo Raine…“The whole idea was that this hillbilly is against the code of being a redneck. He’s truly against fascism. He was trying to be an Apache resistance against the Nazis. Where he’s coming from, he wants [Jewish] soldiers because he wants them to enact intense payback. He tells them, ‘we have to be warriors because we’re fighting a holy war against an enemy that wants to wipe your race of the face of the earth. So here we go.’”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Hostel” director Eli Roth on being directed by Tarantino…“I had done acting here and there, but it was always a bit part in my own movies or a joke. In ‘Death Proof,’ Quentin’s direction to me literally was ‘We have 2 minutes to lunch, don’t f-it up.’”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quentin Tarantino on his influences from war movies…“I got rid of the stuff I never really liked from war movies and kept the stuff I really liked. No tanks, no battle scenes. None of that. I was much more drawn to the cloak and dagger element where people were hiding in Nazi occupied countries and pulling stuff behind the scenes.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

B.J. Novak on scalping…

“No one would expect me to know how to hold a gun or scalp anybody. That includes me. So when I got there, I tried to own the moment. I looked up ‘how to scalp’ online. I did my homework, and I proved myself as one of the better scalpers.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quentin Tarantino on casting Diane Kruger…“She brought a genuine German movie star quality. You can buy that she starred in a whole bunch of German movies and was a big star. And that’s a big deal, because you don’t just find people on the street that look like old time movie stars.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Quentin Tarantino on staying true to history…“The movie is about propaganda and maybe my own movie is propaganda. They were rewriting history, and I am rewriting history.”
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

By Drew Tewksbury

from Metromix, August 21, 2009

*

Related posts:

1. Iceland’s múm Talks Music Making During Economic Collapse
2. Sukiyaki Western Django
3. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About his Father

Tonight Diplo is unveiling Major Lazer–his pseudonymous collaboration with London based DJ Switch–to a crowd of music insiders. The opening track “Hold the Line” begins with low, surf-rock strumming, followed by the playful, schoolyard singing of Santigold layered over a stomping beat. Santigold (aka Santi White) stands behind him, sipping a drink as her own voice soars from Diplo’s turntable. He wipes his brow and turns up the bass on the mixer. It’s time not only to be heard, but felt. And bass is what Diplo does best. His signature sound is culled from rapid-fire Miami bass and Brazilian baile funk, a largely unheard-of scene that Diplo excavated and served up on club-thumping mix tapes in 2004. Major Lazer’s Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do marks a return to original music for Diplo (aka Wes Pentz) since 2004’s Florida. Not that Diplo hasn’t been busy. In the five years since, he was professionally and romantically linked to M.I.A., produced her Grammy-nominated track “Paper Planes,” founded the label Mad Decent, and helped put Philly’s music scene back on the map. Tonight, Diplo is a hustler.

But 24 hours ago, Diplo was a dork.

Or so he tells me. “Sorry man, I look like a total dork. I was about to go for a run,” Diplo (looking a lot like just Wes Pentz now) says as he stands in the living room of a loft-style house, clad in an inside-out orange shirt and basketball shorts, with iPod in hand. His arm displays a tattoo of the gigantic Jurassic-era sauropod called a diplodocus (get it?). On the balcony overlooking the hills of Silver Lake—the Los Angeles enclave of hipsters and working-class Latinos—is Pentz’s Philly cohort Spankrock (aka Naeem Juwan). Juwan talks on a cell phone, leaning way back and super-slouching in the chair, looking bored as hell. Somewhere upstairs is Switch (aka Dave Taylor)–the house DJ, M.I.A. and Santigold producer, and owner of U.K. label Dubsided. Switch is asleep. It’s 2 p.m. “You know that one movie where the guy alien gives birth to a baby alien?” Pentz asks. “Alien Nation,” I suggest. “Yeah, well, that baby is what Dave looks like when he first gets up.” So we decid not to wake him, but I will catch up with Taylor a week later in New York City.

Far from the complementary drinks and morsels at the Marmont, the sparse kitchen at the rental house (“Pssh, you think we own this place?” Pentz admits) contains only a box of Clementine oranges (affectionately known as Cuties) and a seemingly unused George Foreman grill. Apparently, the lives of globetrotting DJs leave little time for culinary pleasures or a permanent residence.

Diplo and Switch are no strangers to the road, especially to locales traditionally off the beaten path. In 2004, Diplo traveled around Brazil to experience the flavor of the favelas, which he developed into an explosive underground mix CD Favela on Blast. Around this time, he also created the Hollertronix crew in his hometown of Philly. In the mid-2000s, Philly’s scene became a polyglot of names to watch (Amanda Blank, Spankrock, and Santigold) with Diplo at the center. The throwback ‘80s aesthetic—neon, Ray-Bans, white pants—was only beginning. Steve Aoki, DJ Z-Trip, and A-Trak became famous for playing other people’s music, but Diplo created some of his own. He mashed it up.

“I wasn’t making mash-ups for the sake of mash-ups,” Pentz says, while we sit on the porch, Spankrock reclining on the couch inside. “I was interested in doing everything. We just found a way to do it, to make sense, instead of being just iPod DJs. That was so punk rock to me, to loop up some rock and rap all ghetto over it. Now it seems so commonplace, like Jay-Z over Linkin Park or something.”

The mash-up of beats was jarring and a perfect extension of the cross-pollination of musical genres in the late 1990s. Rap and rock were paired in countless excruciating permutations then, but when Diplo mixed Southern-fried crunk (a favorite of the native Floridian) with Brazilian beats and ragga vocals, nothing sounded more natural.

While DJing in London, his beats garnered the attention of then-underground artist, Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A. They eventually became a couple: she was a socially conscious Sri Lankan artist-turned-electro-pop star; he was the white party boy who loved being in the bad part of town (or world). “We were into the same music and movies,” Pentz recalls about her, as the sun bakes us on the balcony. “Except she is a Sri Lankan who grew up in England, and I’m a white guy from Florida.”

M.I.A. was in America finishing up recording sessions for her yet-to-bereleased debut album, and they tried unsuccessfully to make some tracks. Then Diplo decided to just take the a capella tracks, which were later held up for over a year in legal strife, and mash them over beats ranging from baile funk to The Bangles. The underground mix tape, Piracy Funds Terrorism, was America’s first introduction to M.I.A., before her (musically and politically) revolutionary album, Arular dropped in 2005.

Back then, I told people that I produced [Arular], to get them to know who I was, but that was a total lie, – Diplo

“With M.I.A., we made a pop song totally by accident,” Pentz says. “We didn’t aim to have a big record. But she’s so cool, and that resonated with people.” He loaned a baile funk beat for her song “Bucky Done Gun” and got much of the credit for producing the whole album, which he says isn’t exactly the truth. “Back then, I told people that I produced [Arular], to get them to know who I was, but that was a total lie,” Pentz says.

Just another Diplo hustle.

M.I.A. didn’t seem to mind at the time, but presaging her second release, Kala, she set the record straight about Diplo’s participation. The media deemed Diplo the “mastermind behind M.I.A.,” but she says he had little to do with Arular. When pressed to name a chief collaborator, she credited Switch.

For the record, Switch is still asleep.

Of course, M.I.A. went on to become one of the most lauded musical artists in the world, and Diplo went on to create a small empire for himself, including the label Mad Decent, home to his Brazilian sexlectroclashers, Bonde De Role, and other artists from his neighborhood in North Philly.

Then came the Lazer.

For Major Lazer, Diplo and Switch decided to explore the music of Jamaica that inspired them. The album takes cues from dancehall and dubstep, featuring some of Jamaica’s finest and grimiest, including Vybz Cartel, Mr. Vegas, and Einstein. Major Lazer reverse engineers the mash-up and filters Jamaican music through the lens of Diplo and Switch’s production. “I’m interested in taking those genres we used to fuck with, and go deeper into them,” Pentz says, “What we’re doing with Major Lazer is taking those influences and trying to flip them.”

The project began in 2007, when Pentz ditched a “cheesy jam cruise” to stay in Jamaica. There he began to network with Jamaican artists, and convince them that he, a smaller name in Jamaica, could keep up with the established acts he wanted for Major Lazer. With cold hard cash and some powers of persuasion, Pentz got them on board.

Hustle, hustle, hustle.

“Really, [Jamaica] was an indulgence for us,” Switch tells me the following week, traffic streaming past as he stands outside a New York City recording studio, while the Beastie Boys work inside. “When you go somewhere like India , and especially Jamaica , it puts you in a different train of thought , outside of your usual working conditions . They use music as their voice ; they use it for politics , for religion. So, I think for people that are struggling , they can use it to vent frustrations , or to celebrate.”

“When you go somewhere like India , and especially Jamaica , it puts you in a different train of thought , outside of your usual working conditions . They use music as their voice ; they use it for politics , for religion. So, I think for people that are struggling , they can use it to vent frustrations , or to celebrate” – Switch

Major Lazer isn’t necessarily another colonization of Jamaica, and Pentz is all too aware of the effects of his musical tourism. Like the gentrification of the Philly neighborhoods around him, “the Diplo phenomenon” has the ability to gentrify an entire musical scene, as Internet-trawling culture conquistadors snap up the latest flavors from foreign lands. In the way Elvis gentrified the blues, Diplo has been accused of exploiting music scenes, like baile funk, for his own good. But he says it’s different with Jamaica. “[Jamaican musicians] steal from cultures more than anybody,” he says, referring to dub, the prototypical remixing method that originated on the island. “We’re way past the arguments of me being a culture-vulture guy. As long as you pay respect to the artists and keep things right, everything falls into place.”

Everything is falling into place for Diplo. His label is successful, he’s working on a documentary about baile funk, he’s leaving for Angola to record with Buraka Som Sistema, and he’s “doing way better than when I was working at Subway six years ago.” Hip-hop hipsters dance awkwardly to his beats, and in Japan, he says, they don’t dance at all. He’s a hustler. He’s a dork. He’s a hustling dork. But right now, there’s no food in this house, Spankrock is hungry, and Diplo is going out to lunch.

Photos by www.EvanKlanfer.com.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Flaunt Magazine, Issue 104 2009

View the Printable PDF of this Article from Flaunt Magazine

*

View my photos and blog from Major Lazer’s opening night at L.A. Weekly’s West Coast Sound Blog

Major Lazer – “Hold The Line” ft. Mr. Lexx and Santigold from Downtown Music on Vimeo.

Related posts:

1. Télépathique – Last Time on Earth
2. Interview: Cameron Diaz in London
3. Mr Oizo – Lambs Anger

Frohawk Two Feathers is a man at the nexus of many truths. On one hand, he’s an alchemist of visual art who turns dull history into golden narratives rich with beautiful subversion. On the other, he’s a performance artist who experiments with music, poetry and alter egos, including the psychedelic sexpot Kent Cyclone. Then there’s Umar Rashid, the mastermind behind it all who percolates the creativity that keeps his many artistic endeavors running.As a visual artist, the Lincoln Heights resident creates evocative illustrations and paintings of fictional aristocrats that take stylistic cues from post-colonial era portraiture. These colorful works — which glean the outsider-art aesthetic of murals and public art — explore the intricacies of race, the malleability of class and the fragility of how history is constructed. Although his characters are fictional — some are absurd inhabitants of the imagined country of Frengland — they are abstractions of a real ruling class that present a visual dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed.

“He is constantly redefining himself and therefore redefining the traditional idea of the artist as someone who makes work solely to be exhibited,” says Heather Taylor of Taylor De Cordoba, the gallery exhibiting his work in 2010. “His whole life is really his art.”

Whether he’s challenging expectations with his personas or rewriting history in his paintings, Frohawk embodies the peripatetic Los Angeles art scene, where genre-obliteration reigns supreme and one medium is never seems enough.

Brand X: What’s the meaning behind ‘Frengland’ and the revisionist history you present in your illustrations and paintings?
Umar Rashid: Frengland is a place I created that presupposes that 18th century England and France never were at war with each other and that they merged into one huge, unstoppable colonial empire. Imagine all the countries they conquered put together. They’d put a flag in most of the world. [For a recent New York show] I made 10 large portraits of people directly and indirectly involved in the 50 Years War (1742-1790), between Frengland of Francis III and numerous belligerents.

Brand X: How would America fit into this picture? We’d never colonize like that, right?

Rashid: Ha. Yeah. Let’s not even talk about Iraq.

Brand X: You also keep a menagerie of personas. There’s Kent Cyclone, the saucy nouveau-griot who spouts truth on Silver Lake stages. Then there’s your “Friday Night” concept album, which extols the activity of a night on the town. Sometimes actors and performance artists can feel spread too thin by having multiple identities. In what ways have you experienced a loss or complication of your own identity?

Rashid: My father was an actor, so I grew accustomed to seeing him as many different people. I would see him fall in love or die on stage over and over again. It put the seed in my head. But sometimes I feel a little spread thin. I’ve been out around town and someone will yell, “Hey, Frohawk!” at me, and it’s at that moment that I, Umar, have to reconcile with it.

Brand X: Music plays an important role in your personas. What are you experimenting with now?

Rashid: I’m writing a treatment for a folk album I’m working on with an old friend, tentatively titled “Crocodile Company.” It’s about a Frenglish soldier in the Compagnie Crocodile who comes back to his island homeland after years of wars to find his town overrun with brigands and his sister kidnapped. He is then elected by the townspeople to exact Rambo-style revenge on the thugs.

Brand X: You’re pretty busy — and you and your wife have a kid on the way too.

Rashid: Soon you’ll see a golden light coming from Lincoln Heights. That means I’ve become a dad.

Brand X: Your greatest work of art?

Rashid: For sure.

Photo credit: Colin Young-Wolff / For The Times.
Painting, titled “Amir” of Sakamoto, Daigoro, Japanese Ambassador to Frenglish Occupied Ottoma and Leader of the Clandestine Yellow Dragon Society, Istanbul, by Frohawk Two Feathers. Courtesy Taylor De Cordoba.

By Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Times’ magazine Brand X Innovators 2009 issue

*