“Oh wait, was she a great-big, fat person?”
Evolve
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Cerebral and euclidean, Vienna born deep house producer John Tejada is at the top of his game, hitting the sweet spot between lush ambient and unforgiving four on the floor mainstream. His latest release, the Our Gigantic Mistake EP with fellow house heavy hitter Justin Maxwell is trademark Tejada.
The three tracks crunch and evolve with his signature geometric sound. Punchy, square beats merge and bark as periodic hook patterns bend and loop together on the highs and mids. Per usual, the genius of his work is in the unexpected transcodings. Lines of scale and perspective shift in his music creating bonds and relationships between the otherwise irreconcilable sharp and smooth elements in the mix.
This July marks the hundredth anniversary of humanitarian balladeer and social crusader Woody Guthrie’s birth. In his journeys across this molted country, Guthrie developed an acute sense of music’s place as a weapon of advocacy. Culture was, to the prolific songwriter, an honorable site of strength and possibility. In the inherent authenticity of music, the voices of the neglected, the cast off and the disenfranchised could find a mighty pulpit from which they could foil the plans of any interest who sought to remove their dignity, their wealth or their individuality.
At Club Nokia on April 14, a motley band of musicians gathered to pay their respects to a preeminent voice in folk. The ensuing hootenany united the likes of Jackson Browne, Tom Morello, Dawes and many more in a tribute to a culturist who upon once seeing a homeless man in the streets of New York offered that the pariah wasn’t unlike a man from Galilee who once sought to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Strange then that on the very night dedicated to commemorating the enduring concept that music could be a voice for empowerment, a mere hundred miles east in the Coachella Valley an age old conflict between authenticity and profitability manifested it self in two very different music festivals.
Each April there is something of a monstrosity in American music that boils and festers into a vacuous wound in Indio, California. The tastemakers unite and for an exorbinant amount of money, you, the average work a day music consumer can purchase a ticket for a weekend of music with the tacit promise that by attending you will be made cool, hip, trendy or somehow in the know.
Coachella has become a cruel caricature of alternative culture. Since its appearance a culture demarcation label in the 1990s, alternative has served to indicate a living, breathing antithesis to mainstream trends, beliefs and sensibilities. Alternative culture is where the afflicted go for comfort. For most Southern California concert-goers, Coachella is a viable alternative.
But an Alternative to what? The trendy bands are often accessible and light-hearted, the women attractive, the celebrities copious and experience unparalleled as a showcase for shabby fashion. In its first year as a two weekend event with identical line ups and costly tickets each week, Coachella is a mainstream as it gets. Somehow the promoters have craftily been able to brand the festival as an alternative, where one can buy an authentic experience under the false notion that they are rebelling against something.
This year there was an alternative. A true alternative to a co-opted, mainstream festival where popularity equates to merit and what you wear is more important than what bands you see.
For 11 days at dingy Dillon’s Roadhouse in dismally scenic North Palm Springs, Moon Block Party’s Desert Daze festival hosted over 100 bands in a disproportionate but fervent middle finger to the corporate giant across the 10 freeway. Funding from indie sponsors helped facilitate full lineups on an outdoor and indoor stage each day. It was small, it was dusty, it was bootleg at times, it was honest, it was vocal and it was memorable.
This was the place where the afflicted were to be comforted. For every fashion plate at Coachella dressed up in a long dress and face paint, harkening to the hippies of yore, there was a perfectly flawed moment at a shitty road house that embodied all of their hopes and dreams for what Coachella was supposed to be.
This was for the dirty, the dark, the cast-off and the thoroughly independent. This was a place for people to be heard, not seen. This was going to make no one rich.
If you could safely negotiate the nail-strewn dirt parking lot and paid the suggested donation of five dollars, what was there was yours for the taking. Better yet, what was there was so sparse and undefined that the value of the festival was yours to decide.
Thank you Moon Block Party. Looking forward to it again next year.
It was only after listening to Bear Cub’s B-side EP Shades of Cub: Volume 1 that the full dimensions of my hatred for country music became readily apparent. Touted as a musical form to help simple folk appreciate the simple things in life during hard times, country comes off like a full fucking dose of false sanctimony. The grandstanding, the huge hair and cowboy hats, the histrionics “I love you, I need you, oh baby, oh baby” bull shit: they all paint a portrait of a contemporary American music form that appeals to a musical sensibility that can best be described as the lowest common denominator.
I say fuck that. Surely the American heartland can produce an authentic statement of sonic reason that captures the plight of the average man with roots instrumentation that harkens to a musical tradition centuries old.
Yes. Yes they can. Bear Cub would you please take a step forward? Thank you.
Alt folk, indie country or Nashville progressive…whatever you want to call these guys, they get it. If the essence of country music is to draw you in with warmth and prop you up, Bear Cub does it with a style and authenticity that is visionary. Crooning, slide guitar, whiskey references, lovers laments—all the tropes are here, but they’re wrapped in a refreshing ideological standpoint. What if simple ain’t so simple anymore? What if the simplest way to move forward in a strange world is to simply accept that everything is complex?
In four B-side tracks, Bear Cub plots a course that is both warm and ponderous, welcoming but meditative. From downtempo country traditional “Patsy Cline” to spooky “I Just Don’t Think I’ll Get Over You” Bear Cub harnesses a remarkable breadth of influences. Neither insular nor loose, their EP belies a wealth of perspective largely lacking in modern peripheral country.
Maybe the secret is that these boys are from up north. Based out of Pittsburgh until 2010, Bear Cub’s initiation into the Nashville scene runs counter to the dominant myths of country music. For every Alan Jackson out there clinging to country as if it were some promised land of morality and virtue to be defended at all costs, we deserve a Bear Cub who had to find the heart of American music and cherishes it not as a birthright, but as a found truth that is profoundly useful and soothing.
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“Give us your huddled masses yearning to be punk.”
The amount of restraint audible in The Hunting Accident’s latest EP Trees and Parks is remarkable. Globbed together from fragments of early 2000s pop-punk bands Piebald and Arlo, The Hunting Accident’s noodling guitars and frenetic backbeat sound like they want to be free to roam amongst the hardcore influences of their youth.
Nay, it is not to be. The year is 2012 after all and Indie is king. The Los Angeles based band is the clearest indication of things to come for the great post-hardcore/pop punk wave of circa 2004. The years of West Coast and East Coast scenes are over. The world has gotten smaller and now the place to be is the realm of production-wise, subtle recordings and the coolest scene of all: the interwebs.
Enter The Hunting Accident. Looming organ accompanies punky growling bass as token guitars and mic-grabbing/cord wrapped around neck vocals play it cool in a strange mix of roots and futures. There’s a Puckish sensibility behind the whole thing. As if they’ve grown up but are still little deviants on the inside.
Case in point: their Trees and Parks Ep is straight up sophisticated songwriting/palette rock, but dig those lyrics on the R. Hitchcock Cover. You’re perverts and we appreciate that.
More power to you guys. It’s some fun shit. The Hunting Accident.
Such a pity that livin’ in the city is like livin’ in the times of Frank Nitti…
(Source: jamjars, via jeannettenguyen)
It’s a sky…get it dumbass?
(Source: alecshao, via jeannettenguyen)
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Aussie sound manipulator Kane Ikin took a break from his collaborative project Solo Andata to offer up a bit of noisy ambient. In this solo space, dissonant sonic scapes blend and meld in a-periodic patterns of disturbingly soothing sound.
Ikin’s great talent is capturing an abstract portrait of the intensely rich modern sonic environment filled with 60 cycle hums, digital bleed and oft-tuned-out environmental wash.
The songs never quite find a satisfying end or labor on one motif too long. They bleed and swirl like drops of food coloring dissipating into murky water. The objective seems to avoid a complete arc or a pleasing dynamic, and instead embraces the essential wonder of watching (or in this case hearing) a chaotic system bend and rush together only to fall apart.
Wonderfully ponderous, vaguely sinister, a-melodic and all-encompassing—it’s all well worth a listen.
Special love to Document10 for finding this gem and many others.
Kane Ikin
