In 2005, after years of collaborating with pals like Peaches and Broken Social Scene, the spotlight finally fell solely on Leslie Feist-her voice and charm so powerful that nobody cared that most of the songs on Let It Die were covers. On The Reminder, which she recorded with a gaggle of dudes (including Julian Brown, Mocky, and Jamie Lidell), everything’s her own, barring a raucous take on Nina Simone’s “Sea Lion Woman.” Again, Feist’s eclectic tastes make for a giddily schizophrenic album. As she jumps from tender ballads (“So Sorry”) to BSS-fevered pop jams to torch songs, she sets herself up for another runaway success. “I feel it all,” she sings, and you will too.
Busdriver
We catch up with indie hip-hop’s most hyperarticulate MC during his recent tour with Deerhoof. Busdriver, aka Regan Farquhar, may be known for searing wit and educated prose, but these days he’s all about having fun and playing “for the children.” In this Audiofile, recorded live at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, the L.A. know-it-all dryly pinballs between serious and silly, a sober backstage demeanor and high-energy onstage spazzing.
Interview: A Touch of Class
Oliver Stumm and Domie Clausen began their career as A Touch of Class by churning out mixes of off-kilter disco and outlandish electro-rock. Nearly 10 years later, the duo has remixed The Gossip, Scissor Sisters, Le Tigre, and A.R.E. Weapons, and released a hefty catalog of singles along with two full- lengths. All of these releases have blasphemed the beat-defined conventions of the dance-stratosphere. XLR8R sat down with Oliver recently to hear dish the dirt on shitty MySpace bands, the asexual nature of digital DJs, and why no one should remix Bob Marley.
A Touch of Class Still Sucks is out now on A Touch of Class Recordings.
XLR8R: How did A Touch of Class come into existence?
Oliver Stumm: I was in New York and Dominick (Domie) was in New York doing an internship for his graphic-design studies. I invited him to work with me–that’s how we formed A Touch of Class. We were discussing the problems with the dance field in the late ’90s–we were tired of the beat-defining genres… tech-house this, vocal-house that. We thought one should create something that isn’t defined by the beat. We wanted to make something that was about the attitude and approach of things.
What separated your songwriting from the beat-defining producers?
We were dabbling in different fields, intuitively. We produced a record that people would refer to as a mash-up. We made an Italo-disco mix–at the time nobody would even talk about Italo-disco. We created songs that had pop appeal–just getting away from the dance structures of the late ’90s.
People did not understand what we were doing. Distributors passed on our stuff, passing it off as unsellable. DJs would ask us, ‘Why should we play something like this? It doesn’t fit in with anything.’ We were like, ‘That’s the point. You should play something that doesn’t fit.’ You would walk into a club and hear two minutes of a DJ, and you knew how it was going to sound for the next five hours. Shouldn’t dance music be about new directions? New things? Be more experimental?
Do your remixes reflect that attitude?
Yes. We love working with bands like The Gossip and Services. A lot of bands we see look like high-school projects. It’s like in high school when the art teacher says, ‘Alright, you have two hours’ time. This is the topic. Come up with something.’ That’s how these bands sound. Then you hear a band like The Gossip or Services. It’s talent and substance. When we saw Services for the first time, there was so much charisma. It’s an honor to work with bands like that.
How do you feel about remixes you’re not too psyched on?
Sometimes you get a request to remix Marvin Gaye. We’re like, ‘No. Leave them alone. Some songs should not be remixed.’ And why? What’s the purpose? A remix of Bob Marley? The production is still outstanding today. Why make an abstract, dancey tune out of a Bob Marley song? Just make a new tune!
How do you feel about the whole “MySpace Revolution” in electronic music?
It’s not helping music that much. It’s funny these new developments seem great at first. Bands that are virtually unknown can become big through these channels. But then, all of a sudden all of these, what I like to call, “promotional bands” pop up and overshadow everything. They invest 99.9% of their time in promotions. Most of [them] are horrible, and they have 10 times more friends than a very good band. So, yeah, they’re great promoters, but great promoters don’t always make great musicians.
There is so much junk, you can’t see through it anymore. We get so many messages and requests–“Listen to our music…” and “Feedback would be welcome…” Even if the success rate would be 1%, I’d do it. But the success rate is less than 1%. I go on these sites and it has nothing to do with us or with what we do. It’s not similar. It’s not interesting. Even you guys have to sift through this crap. It’s insane.
Like with DJing?
The accessibility of the digital revolution has destroyed a lot. This whole laptop-DJing, Serato thing is amazing. You can walk into a club with 10,000 songs ready to play. That would be a busload of vinyl! But then, what’s the result? All these half-ass, wannabe DJs don’t know the ABCs of how to get a dancefloor going. Everything sounds crappy, because it’s all free downloaded MP3 crap, mixed together in their playlist they made the night before. It’s unsexy. Now, DJs look like two accountants in the club. They’re staring into their screens. Everybody’s playing the same stuff again. We’ve done blindfold tests. You can tell when an MP3 is playing–it’s one big squashed-up thing. I don’t hear good quality music anymore.
Would you consider yourselves minimal in the studio?
Ableton and so forth have really great instruments. You can edit yourself to death, but the quality of Ableton is already a little squashed and you can hear the difference. We try to not go through too much digital processing. We still use analog synthesizers and live instruments. We record them through tube compressors, and then through expensive analog-to-digital converters, then into Logic. I was working with a veteran producer once and he was hooking up all of this stuff and I told him, ‘I can’t tell the difference.’ He said, ‘You’re too young, you can’t hear it yet. Just wait a few years.’ He was absolutely right.
If you could eradicate any musical genre, what would it be?
Trance. There’s no substance to me. It’s really formulaic. I don’t really know it that well, to tell you the truth. It’s just something I don’t like. But I also don’t like liver. Some people may like it, but…
Explosions in the Sky: Hazy Shades
Fans–whether of sports or music–say a lot of things, not all of them nice. They say the second title is the toughest, that the hardest thing is a repeat. And they repeat these axioms ’til they hammer harder and heavier than any linebacker.
Some teams flare up and out, achieving a pyrrhic victory. Then there are countless tales of bands and ballplayers sacked just short of expectations, no matter how many two-a-days they ran.
There are no such tales starring Explosions in the Sky. Since forming in the summer of 1999–to fireworks blasting, both literal and musical–the Austin, TX quartet has accrued increasing acclaim for their cathartic instrumental rock, which lies somewhere between the epic shoegaze soundscapes of Mogwai and the dirgy sturm und drang of Metallica. All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (Temporary Residence), their fourth album (amid several soundtracks and an EP), finds the band again doing what it does best: personalizing melancholy, and soundtracking the ‘almost,’ the ‘yet,’ and the ‘what might be.’ All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is the state championship for this year’s senior class of transcendent indie rockers, cementing Explosions as anything but the underdogs.
A Sound Track
“There haven’t been any catastrophic deaths among our family or friends in the last few years,” assures drummer Chris Hrasky by phone, when asked about the poignant title of the record. “But, when thinking of writing the album and what it should sound like, a person lost and isolated with memories swirling around them was the basic idea. All of a sudden a person realizes, ‘Jesus, where did the people go I’m supposedly close to?’ For me it’s meaningful because there are friends I lost touch with and I’m not as close with family as I’d like to be.”
The band members themselves have been neither disassociated nor dormant in the interim since 2003’s The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. In 2004, the group–whose music was already often described as “filmic”–scored the high-school football drama Friday Night Lights, the movie adaptation of Buzz Bissinger’s book chronicling the failed 1988 attempt of the Permian Panthers to win the state championship. The Panthers hailed from Odessa, TX, near Midland, where Explosions’ three guitarists grew up. (Hrasky is from Rockford, IL, and connected with the guitarists through a flyer in a record store.)
The Friday Night Lights score (which has been partially reprised in episodes of the NBC TV series) exemplifies Explosions in the Sky’s command of wordless narrative. The silvery guitar palpitations of Munaf Rayani (“anthemic,” assigns Hrasky), Mark Smith (“melodic”), and Michael James (“all-around anything”) would be plaintive, were it not for the drums coming in so steady as to not give up. The musical themes don’t instruct you to feel sorry for the town or root for the kids; they just cue the possibilities.
Several of the non-musical influences this foursome has in common also fit this profile. Whether it’s the Wes Anderson film Bottle Rocket or Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, Explosions in the Sky is drawn to allegories of marshalling faith, to works of gentle sadness that contain occasionally violent flares.
Golden Brown
On All of a Sudden, there are some notable new emulsifiers streaking the band’s progressive arcs. Produced in a rural setting (with John Congleton), Explosions has finally achieved the “live, blistering sound” toward which the band had been striving. The album also sees the group introducing instrumental aphorisms into more “ashen” landscapes. “I use color to describe the sound I’m going for,” reveals Hrasky. “I told the engineer I wanted the record to sound ‘brown,’ though at first no one understood what I meant.”
Hrasky cites Weezer’s Pinkerton as an archetype, and not just because the album’s cover is brownish. Hrasky thinks it sounds like a frustrated, exaggerated live set. The boxy drums and raked emotions speak to Explosions in the Sky’s instrumentals, which were recorded directly, with few overdubs, to analog tape for the first time (a brownish coincidence there).
“I like records that don’t feel dirty in terms of noise, but it sounds like they’re made by people,” muses Hrasky. “You can hear fingers on the strings, things like that. I didn’t want the record to sound shiny. I wanted it dusty and ragged, and I like to think it turned out that way.
“The last record I liked, but… there was a weird sort of distance in the recording,” Hrasky continues. “We’re happy with it but maybe happier with this one. It sounds like four guys with huge amps and drums banging away in a room and that’s how we wanted this record–a lot more aggressive’ guess.”
As if borne from a brownout, the dynamics of Explosions in the Sky flicker and spurt from a bristling current choked with potential. The tones are more cloistered, but no less capable of leaping from corpuscular and contemplative to a mercurial deluge. With its gripping grit, All of a Sudden is less akin to Godspeed You! Black Emperor; it’s more like the stampeding parts of Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack meeting up with Metallica’s arid riffs on …And Justice For All, with a hint of Slint in its freshly caked clusters. Don’t expect violins or blitzkrieg riffs; Explosions may use tools similar to other bands, but they use them to transcribe their own incandescent vistas.
Long Journey Home
As a complement, a limited-edition two-CD version of All of a Sudden comes packaged with a free track-for-track remix album, featuring contributions from Four Tet, Eluvium, and Adem, among others. These remixers take seriously the ghosts hinted at in the album’s six songs and their titles (“The Birth and Death of the Day,” “It’s Natural to Be Afraid,” “Catastrophe and the Cure”). Cascades of hums and crackles submerge fret flurries, adding some grey snow to the oxidized sandstorm.
“Mountains [who remixed ‘What Do You Go Home To?’] gave the track this really lovely and dark spaciousness, letting the piano melodies develop over a far longer time than we would ever dare,” surveys Mark Smith by email. “Plus they added this short but sweet sample of what sounds like someone sweeping a porch as children play nearby, which is about as thematically perfect as a sample can be for that song. Jesu’s version of ‘The Birth and Death of the Day’ has this swirling repetition that gives the song a trancelike quality, and creates entirely new melodies from our melodies. I love to see which parts/melodies/moods the remixers chose to emphasize.”
While initially hesitant to have remixes–eyeing them as filler–Explosions feels energized by care and thought poured into these new versions of their beloved tracks. It’s another example of this band’s willingness to fluidly adapt its game plan.
“On this album we may have had a general idea of what we wanted, but we didn’t set out with an idea of where we were heading in the end,” says Hrasky. “I like the songs where there is a gentle wave goodbye. I think I like that more than just bombs blowing up. Our songs have no advice, no lesson to nail home hard. But I hope people have some sort of personal attachment to the music… It certainly consumes us.”
Score Board: Explosions in the Sky Describes the Movies They Would Most Like to Soundtrack.
Guitarist Michael James
“I’m gonna say a Terrence Malick picture also, but it would be his film adaptation of The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. I think his directorial style could perfectly capture the power of that book, and I think our music would go well with the setting and atmosphere. And, as payment, Mr. Malick would have to attend one of our shows.”
Drummer Chris Hrasky
“I would like us to score a Terrence Malick movie that doesn’t exist. It would flow and have a similar tone to all of his other movies, but it would take place in sprawling suburbia: Schaumburg, IL circa 1997. Not sure what the story would be, but I would like a scene with a bird flying around inside a Best Buy. As far as recording’ would like us to sit down to a late-night dinner with [Malick] every night in the studio and then record until dawn.”
Guitarist Munaf Rayani
“At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I think maybe I would like to score a funeral. Now, while I understand that death is not such a joyous topic’ wouldn’t want to approach it with a morbid frame of mind; rather, with a soft, gentle, embracing tone. In the cycle of life, we will all check out one day, and I hope that when I go, it is with a kind sound.”
Guitarist Mark Smith
“The film Koyaanisqatsi once blew me away and I’ve always felt like we could make a score similar in scope and technique. I’m not sure about the imaginary movie’s theme (A world absent of humans? A triumphant rejoicing of the human spirit? A celebration of the animal?), but I’d like to think we could match the images. I think it would be interesting trying to make unbroken, long-form music that doesn’t necessarily conform to our familiar song structures. Available only in IMAX theaters and virtual-reality helmets.”
Daily Download: !!! “Heart of Hearts”
While the press may classify !!! as a dance-punk outfit, one need only listen to the octet’s Warp debut, Myth Takes, to see that these Brooklyn dudes can also make a wild breed of vocal house. Employing funked-out, jangling guitars, live drumming, soulful vocals, repetitive basslines, and percussion from all angles, !!! has become synonymous with the word party, whatever style of music it may play. “Heart of Hearts” is just further proof of this.
Download this song as an MP3, or preview a week’s worth of tracks at the XLR8R Podcast. Subscribe using iTunes, or with an RSS reader of your choice.
!!! “Heart Of Hearts (Radio Edit)”
While the press may classify !!! as a dance-punk outfit, one need only listen to the octet’s Warp debut, Myth Takes, to see that these Brooklyn dudes create a wild breed of vocal house. Employing funked-out, jangling guitars, live drumming, soulful vocals, repetitive basslines, and percussion from all angles, !!! has become synonymous with the word party. “Heart of Hearts” is just further proof of this.
XLR8R TV Episode 5: Busdriver
Indie hip-hop’s hyper-articulate MC Regan Farquhar–known to his fans as Busdriver–recently toured cross-country with Deerhoof. XLR8R cornered him on the San Francisco leg of the tour to chat about having fun and playing for the kids on Episode 5 of XLR8R TV. Here, the L.A.-based know-it-all pinballs between serious and silly, with a sober backstage demeanor and some high-energy onstage spazzing.
Watch This Episode
Be sure to head over to the XLR8R TVforum to discuss this episode.
Previous Episodes
Episode 1: DAT Politics, Zion I
Episode 2: Carl Craig
Episode 3: SXSW Part One
Episode 4: SXSW Part Two
Other Music Opens Digital Store
New York-based record store Other Music–a longtime haven for the city’s crate diggers–recently joined the ranks of the digital music world. The store proper was born in 1995, coincidentally the first year mp3s became more widely available. But, as even the casual music fans know, times are a changin’, and the decision to swing open its digital doors was an effort to prove, according to the store, that “real record stores run by real music fans can still survive and thrive.”
The assortment of tracks and albums is hand-picked by Other Music employees, and the site features a quality standalone player for previewing music. For the moment, tracks will only be available to those living in the States. All songs will be sold as DRM-free mp3s, of premium quality (320kbps). So if you’re looking for the latest from Tujiko Noriko or Terry Riley, or even Bloc Party, check out the catalog.
Cameron Octigan
Girl Talk Quits Day Job, Gets Congressional Love
Pittsburgh-bred Greg Gilles (a.k.a. Girl Talk) had a frantic 2006. The mash-up kingpin juggled life as a biomedical engineer, remixer, and consistently touring party-crusher for the better part of the year, not to mention gave countless interviews for a mass of magazines and probably answered a heap of love letters via Myspace as well.
But 2007 is a new day and Gillis has decided to hang up his biomedical engineering hat in favor of pleasing the kids and focusing on his sample-laden tunes. The poor guy has been traveling incessantly on weekends, rocking everything from Senior proms (this actually happened last weekend in San Francisco) to the upcoming Coachella Festival in Indio, CA. He’s also turned over a remix for Beck, which means he won’t have much trouble getting requests for his controversial copyright-cracking jams in the future.
Gilles is kicking so much ass, he’s got Congressmen giving him big-ups, as is evident in the following statement from Pittsburgh-democratic Congressman Mike Doyle:
”I want to tell a little story about a local guy done good. His name is Gregg Gillis and by day he’s a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh. At night, he DJs under the name Girl Talk. His latest mash-up record made the top of 2006 lists from Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and Spin Magazine, among others. His schtick, as the Chicago Tribune wrote about him, is quote ‘based on the notion that some sampling of copyrighted material, especially when manipulated and re-contextualized into new art, is legit and deserves to be heard.’ In one example, he blended Elton John, Notorious B.I.G. and Beyonce, all in the span of 30 seconds.”
Not only is Gillis winning the hearts of teenage girls, but he’s also getting love from the man. Is it really that serious? We don’t care as long as homeboy keeps ripping away at the night.
Tourdates
04/28 Indio, CA: Coachella
05/04 Providence, RI: The Living Room
05/11 Millvale, PA: Mr. Smalls
05/25 Denver, CO: Bluebird Theater
05/26 Salt Lake City, UT: Urban Lounge
05/31 Barcelona, ES: Primavera Sound Festival
06/09 Vancouver, BC: Richards on Richards
06/16 Manchester, TN: Bonnaroo
06/28 Winnipeg, MB: Pyramid Cabaret
06/29 Ottawa, ON: Babylon
07/15 Chicago, IL: Pitchfork Music Festival
k-the-i??? Broken Love Letter
One of the strangest hip-hop records ever, Broken Love Letter isn’t an album so much as therapy for a man traumatized by relationship problems. k-the-i???’s creepily obsessive digs at the fairer sex are spit in a manic-panic state, his pained urgency negating any sense of familiar flow. k’s literally off-beat style is distinctive, but it’s an acquired taste. Much better is the music, which juxtaposes subliminal snippets of easy listening with the sort of chaotically teeming, cacophonous funk that makes El-P’s joints sound like P.M. Dawn. Think: Bomb Squad producing cLOUDDEAD, with a romantic loser on the mic.
