29/03/2014
KEITH HARING
GARY BURGER
Originalmente chamados de 5 Torquays, Monks formaram-se em 1964 e eram constituídos por cinco soldados norte-americanos estacionados na Alemanha. Eles no início tocavam em hospitais e casas de repouso antes de eventualmente, bater o German club circuit.
Um promotor musical alemão ficou atrás da banda e convenceu o grupo a adoptar o nome Monks, usavam um traje monástico de vestes negras ostentando tradicionais tonsuras de monge.
A banda passou a abrir para Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks e The Troggs, e logo se tornou numa lenda do rock'n'roll, graças não só para aos seus trajes únicos, mas também pelas estruturas proto-garage/punk selvagens.
Em 10 de janeiro de 2008 Dave Day morreu de um ataque cardíaco.
THE RESIDENTS - ICKY FLIX
There have been plenty of strange and powerful musicians and groups out there for many a long year.Captain Beefheart, Coil, Wesley Willis, Ken Nordine an so forth, each extending the realms of taste and disrupting the boundaries of what exactly constitues music and art . Then there are The Residents.
Through thirty years of wilful obscurity and cutting-edge innovation, they have maintained a largely successful anonymity, one of the features about the group which is at once integral to their mystique and irrelevant. The eminently ridiculous sight of a Resident in a tuxedo with an eyeball for a head is at once silly and sinister, a Situationist metaphor for the spectacle (and spectator) on one hand and a potential distraction from their music, or so it might seem. In fact, their disavowal of persona and biography sets free some key aspects of their appeal.
There could easily be a circulating ensemble behind the years of masks and headset light rigs, screens and paper suits. It doesn’t really matter, but when the member who may be known as Mr Skull puts the gimpish peacock-strut, beaked mask and suit on for the Icky Flix show, it is clear that The Residents have a character unique in the world of (anti-)showbusiness.
The Icky Flix tour is to promote the DVD of the same name, a spectacular use of the global market’s favourite commodity, i.e. one which outstrips and replaces previous technologies with fearsome rapidity and all-conquering ubiquity. Instead of adopting the blatant shovelware approach which a format capable of storing hours and hours of video and music offers, the group have once again taken the chance to push the envelope a little on the disc. Seventeen videos, including their still incomplete Vileness Fats film selected from thirty years of multimedia innovation aren’t just dumped onto Icky Flix with a few biographical details and a Surround Sound makeover.
No, the Residents decided to completely re-record every track, plus make some new films to boot, and then offer the choice between original and all-new music for good measure. Throw in a novel 3D track selection “Flix Cube” and between-film mock (and mocking) adverts, and this DVD is one of the best examples of what the format is capable of at the same time as being thoroughly enjoyable.
The head-scratching, mind-bending fun and frolics take on a new dimension when presented in a live setting. Introduced by a monocular compere, the band take their places behind scrim and concealing lights. The Day-Glo make-up, shlocky wig, platic sunglasses and outragous ensemble of patterned hipster flares and giant flourescent sneakers of Molly Harvey lend a theatrically lysergic aspect to the show, which proceeds with the Flix Cube used to choose each piece following the DVD intro. So the band really do play along to the disc projection, while Harvey and the beaky Resident act out the songs and skits with sub-operatic glee. The capacity for disturbance and hilarity alike The Residents offer on record and video springs to proximate life on stage, their twisted pschyodramas taken way beyond hammy surrealism and in the realms of Dada greatness.
That they make the show flow with childish ease from the hilariously dark video for “Third Reich and Roll”, where a newspaper-suited band jitter in glorious monochrome and revised surral Hitlerian bad taste, to Renaldo And The Loaf‘s distended and awesomely strange mini-drama “Songs For Swinging Larvae”. How many artists get to go on stage and act as weird and goofy as they really feel, and get away with it? It’s entirely possible for The Residents to do so thanks to their wholesale grasp of parallel logic which sevres to engender an entirely willing supension not only of disbelief but perhaps also of disgust in the audience.
Once surrendered to their multimedia world of virtual reality, theatrics and cinema, it’s quite difficult to remember another exists outside the Hall, from the computer-generated gloom of the “Bad Day On The Midway” tour through the CD-ROM of the same name, with its sinister funfair atmosphere, “Harry The Head” from the equally disturbing Freak Showproject and into the ultimately weird landscape of “The Gingerbread Man”.
This latter has to rank as one of the crowning achievments in edgy fairy-tale dissonance that The Residents have delivered to an equally deranged world, as the Gingerbread Man struggles with reflective existential questions of an ageing star as his sweetmeat avatar strides across a gloaming landscape and around an endless treadmill of misfortune from disappointment to disheartening observations of shallowness and Rock’n'Roll despair in Doug Carney‘s visceral blend of computer and cut-up animation.
This bitterness and barbed venom directed at themselves, the audience and commercial music in general is even more apparent in the stunningly vicious “Just For You (Transfigured Night part 7)”. With typical inverted logic, this piece was originally recorded as part of an hour long live broadcast on German TV, and the video shows the male and female Resident singers clasped in bizarre fluffy-suited embrace before a bemused studio audience. Now it appears as a recursive backdrop to the same (probably) pair on stage, twisting the original manic cover of saccharine charity plea “We Are The World” into even more unsettling dimensions.
“I am a fake/I am a ripoff” croons the man to an increasingly bombastic electronic backing, becoming more impassioned and disgusted as the song reaches an intensity of loathesome ire. “I am unreal/I am pretenentious/I am definitely far beyond redemption” he admits, and “I’ll make a perfect turd and sell it/Just to you” isn’t just a threat, it’s a promise delivered with an implied rictus grin of fake sincerity. The Residents may not take themselves too seriously, but they have something pointed to say in the sinister interface between whimsy and bilous cartoon humour, and it seems that the audience take their part in the self-aware disdain with a hint of squirming disquiet too.
Despite a playful hint at playing the Vileness Fats film following a break during which the band mill about onstage sharing chit-chat and cups of liquid, the live Icky Flixshow gets in most of the DVD videos, and more. The beaky man delivers a honking, stuttering sax solo during “Constantinople”, while he and Molly Harvey sweep through the mini-playlets of “One Minute Movies”, swapping roles as the cowering, ape-like man becomes a vile, ranting tyrant and Harvey changes from submissive to self-obsessed as the films flick by on the screen behind.
The “thank you” whined out at the end of the strangely wistful “Act Of Being Polite” has a particularly gruesome quality, while The Residents’ new take on “Stars & Stripes Forever” is even more scathing these days, giving Sousa’s patriotic march a thoroughly discordant mauling of swoops and whoops, keyboard arpeggiations and a searing guitar solo worthy of the late lamented Snakefinger himself which scorches with a large dose of gleeful disrespect for the original and what it has come to stand for.
The encores bring the only top-hatted and eye-balled Resident to the keyboards through various soaring instrumentals and Electro stomps fromFreak Show as the singing duo perform a series of intense stop-start domestic tableaux in song and posture front of stage to complete the evening’s remarkable entertainment. From the moments of interplay between the pitiful man and his shrewish partner via the electric almost-Rock-out into rausous discord and roars of pain and feedback which disgorge into a blast of incrementally stepped-up rhythm an exhortations to “Follow that dream” and a final fade to the Icky Flix outro tune, the evening shows that even when running through the films in a PA to promote a release, The Residents are really without compare.
As mentioned before, the DVD itself is a wholly remarkable example of what a little imagination can bring to this format which is only beginning to start being used and abused in innovative ways. Add in two soundtracks for the price of one, and the disc can provide oodles of stunningly sick watching and re-listening, even if this may be at the expense of appreciation of other more normal forms of music and film which somehow seem at once tamer and so much safer after a session with this collection or in the presence of the band themselves. It’s entirely worth the expenditure on obtaining a player just for the sake of Icky Flix alone, with bonus moments and the enhanced Surround Sound for those with even more splashed out on the Dolby 5.1 decoders and so forth.
For those without the technology required, the soundtrack featuring the new performances ofVileness Fats and the highlights of the new video songs is also available as a stereo CD for listening pleasure and discomfort. Whatever the chosen mode of appreciation, there is so much to tweak the darker recesses of humour on Icky Flix to please and disturb at one and the same time.
-Linus Tossio-
THE RESIDENTS - SHADOWLAND
PAREDES DE COURA 2014
O Vodafone Paredes de Coura prepara-se para ter James Blake - que no ano passado esteve no Optimus Primavera Sound, no seu cartaz e de duas formas diferentes. O vencedor da edição 2013 do Mercury Prize apresenta-se no certame em dose dupla: atua, a 23 de agosto, no Palco Vodafone do certame, estando, no mesmo dia, também responsável pela curadoria do After Hours, no Palco Vodafone FM, acompanhado pelos companheiros do projeto 1-800-Dinosaur Os norte-americanos Three Oh Sees e os britânicos Cheatahs foram hoje confirmados para o Vodafone Paredes de Coura 2014. Mick Turner, da banda Dirty Three, também vai actuar mas a solo. Há mais de vinte anos que o festival Paredes de Coura mexe com a música e em 2013 cresce ainda mais com o patrocínio da Vodafone. Esta aposta da marca reforça a sua ligação à música fora dos grandes centros urbanos e conta com um cartaz criterioso, alinhado com o posicionamento musical da rádio Vodafone FM, que se associa ao festival. 21 de agosto: Franz Ferdinand, Chvrches, Mac DeMarco, Yuck, Cheatahs 22 de agosto: Cut Copy, Black Lips, Buke & Gase, Seasick Steve, Thee Oh Sees 23 de agosto: The Dodos, Goat, Kurt Vile, Mick Turner (Palco Jazz), James Blake, 1-800-Dinosaur
OPTIMUS ALIVE 2014
Nicolas Jaar é a mais recente confirmação do Optimus Alive 2014. O músico nova-iorquino irá actuar no festival no dia 12 de Julho no Palco Heineken. O Optimus Alive'14 decorre nos dias 10, 11 e 12 de Julho no Passeio Marítimo de Algés. Os bilhetes do festival já se encontram à venda nos locais habituais. Nomes confirmados? Au Revoir Simone, Arctic Monkeys, Bastille, Ben Howard, Buraka Som Sistema, Caribou, Cass McCombs, Chet Faker, Chromeo, Daughter, Elbow, Foster The People, Interpol, Imagine Dragons, Nicolas Jaar, MGMT, Parquet Courts, PAUS, SBTRTK, Temples, The 1975, The Black Keys, The Lumineers, The Vicious Five, The War on Drugs e Unknown Mortal Orquestra.
SUN RA ARKESTRA - PORTUGAL- SERRALVES
É a notícia do dia e do ano: a Filho Único acaba de anunciar a visita da Sun Ra Arkestra a Portugal ainda este anos. Os concertos são dois e até já estão marcados: o primeiro acontece a 1 de junho, no Serralves em Festa (Porto) e o segundo terá lugar no B.Leza (Lisboa) logo no dia seguinte. Os concertos acontecem numa altura em que se celebram 100 anos sobre o nascimento de Sun Ra (1914 - 1983) e os 90 anos do actual líder Marshall Allen. OBRIGATORIO. Sun Ra abandonou há duas décadas, no dia 30 de Maio de 1993. Na introdução de “Space is The Place – The Lives and Times of Sun Ra”, John F. Szwed escreve: «Há alguns anos, um jornalista alemão abria a sua crítica a um concerto de Sun Ra com a questão “génio ou charlatão?”. Ele poderia ter acrescentado “louco” à sua pergunta, porque esses são os papéis que foram atribuídos a este lendário e semi-recluso músico de jazz americano e que fazem parte do mistério de um dos mais estranhos artistas que a América já produziu.» O triplo CD que a Fantastic Voyage – editora cujo nome de baptismo bem poderia ter sido inspirado pela vida de Sun Ra – acaba de dedicar ao homem do leme da mítica Saturn, “A Space Odyssey – From Birmingham to the Big Apple: The Quest Begins” é uma excelente porta de entrada no, de facto, estranho e talvez por isso mesmo fascinante universo de Herman Poole Blount, o homem que o mundo recorda como Sun Ra. Kris Needs, responsável pela selecção do material presente neste álbum, começa, nas suas notas de capa, por enumerar alguns dos pilares do estatuto que a história consagrou a Sun Ra: «Ele foi o primeiro músico a declarar que o espaço era o lugar, passando a sua vida a trabalhar para criar pinturas tonais que traduzissem o que o espaço poderia ser. Foi também o primeiro a encorajar a improvisação colectiva no contexto de uma “big band” e a usar teclados electrónicos no jazz. Ele antecipou o psicadelismo e o afro-centrismo, usando bailarinos e roupas exóticas para amplificar os seus conceitos do outro mundo. Criou a sua própria etiqueta para operar nas margens da indústria discográfica, editando prensagens rudimentares e extremamente limitadas em capas feitas à mão, o que fez dele um pioneiro das editoras independentes de espírito “faça você mesmo”».
02/03/2014
R.I.P. PACO DE LUCIA
Paco de Lucia, nome artístico de Francisco Sánchez Gomes, o guitarrista espanhol influente que expandiu enormemente o público internacional para flamenco e fundiu-a com outras sonoridades musicais, principalmente com o jazz ou a bossa nova, embora os blues, a salsa, a música hindu ou a música árabe também o tenham marcado. fundiu-a com outros estilos musicais, morreu repentinamente de um ataque cardíaco na terça-feira à noite, no México.
A solo, com o seu sexteto, ou em colaborações, o guitarrista espanhol universalizou o flamenco, recriando-o e mesclando-o com outras sonoridades, mas sem nunca perder de vista a raiz fundadora do género.
R.I.P. BOB CASALE - DEVO
Devo, cujo nome é uma contração de " de- evolução", foi formada em 1972, em Akron, Ohio, e mais tarde mudou-se para Los Angeles.
Num comunicado, Gerald Casale, vocalista e baixista dos Devo e irmão de Bob disse:
"Como um integrante original do Devo, Bob Casale estava lá nas
trincheiras comigo desde o começo. Ele era meu irmão equilibrado, um
performer consistente e um talentoso engenheiro de áudio, sempre dando
mais do que recebia. Ele estava empolgado com a possibilidade de Mark
Mothersbaugh permitir que os Devo fizesse shows novamente. A sua morte
repentina devido a problemas que levaram a uma falha cardíaca veio como um choque total para todos nós".
O guitarrista esteve presente nas principais fases da banda, como no final dos anos 1970 e início dos anos 1980, quando lançaram discos como "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" (1978), "Freedom of Choice" (1980) e "Oh, No! It's Devo" (1982).Ele também co-produziu The New Romantics, 1981.
Bob Casale tocou ainda em "Something for Everybody", nono disco dos Devo, lançado em 2010.
O
grupo que explorou a new wave, com um pé no punk e outro na eletrónica,
surgiu em 1972 com os irmãos Bob e Jerry Casale e Bob e Mark
Mothersbaugh, que batizaram o projeto de Devo (abreviatura de
D-Evolução) por causa da morte de estudantes em manifestações
anti-guerra.
Devo também gravou covers off-beat dos Rolling Stones (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction e de Allen Toussaint's Working in the Coal Mine.
Brian Eno produziu-lhes o álbum ‘Q: Are we not men? A:
We are Devo!’, de 1978, mas o sucesso viria anos depois com ‘Freedom of
Choice’ (1980), disco do qual faz parte o tema ‘Whip it!’
GALAXIE 500 - DEAN WAREHAM
 |
| (“Black Postcards: A Roll & Roll Romance”, 2008), |
A couple weeks ago, inspired by a discussion of Dean & Britta’s “You Turn My Head Around” Lolita. It’s showed up in a couple paper magazines over the years. At that time, we had no idea he was working on a memoir about the music he was making in the ’80s and ’90s, dramatically titled Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance. But he was. In this Sunday’s NY Times Liz Phair weighs in on what sounds like a really interesting read: via N.Y. T.
one ’Gummer was talking about Dean Wareham’s literary bent. There are plenty of examples, but the thing that came up was one of those “What Are You Currently Reading?” blurbs, which Wareham (or a publicist) had written about Vladimir Nabokov’s
Freddie Mercury once said, “I want it all and I want it now.” This appetite might aptly be called the rock ’n’ roll disease, and Dean Wareham seems to have caught it. Or is in recovery. Or is somewhere along the road. Part confessional, part unsentimental career diary, Wareham’s Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance reads like good courtroom testimony: to the point, but peppered with juicy and unsolicited asides. Dominick Dunne would make sure his seat was saved before excusing himself to use the restroom.Then she talks about that juiciness…
He portrays himself as a surprisingly unsympathetic character. He visits a prostitute. He makes people angry. He follows girls home after the show. He snorts coke. No apologies are made because this is, after all, a rock ’n’ roll autobiography. Late nights, a lot of drugs, a little infidelity (well, maybe not just a little, but I won’t give away the ending) — that’s par for the course, right? His honesty is challenging and humbling. Yet, for an egghead (Wareham is a graduate of both the Dalton School, the progressive and prestigious Upper East Side preparatory academy, and Harvard) with an elective reading list to rival Art Garfunkel’s (Thomas Mann, Mark Twain, André Malraux, Nietzsche, to name a few), he seems perfectly happy to partake in whatever recreational opportunities come his way, with enviable disregard for the consequences. Guilty? Not guilty? What are we as a jury to think?On top of a hilarious mention of Shimmy Disc dude Mark Kramer, Galaxie 500 in-band issues, a moving bit about Wareham and his son, and etc., she has an interesting insight regarding Dean’s prose style.
…But his supreme interest is clearly and purely music. It is the scaffold on which he hangs most of the feelings and fragments included in the book. Even his writing style has a rhythm to it: passages move rapidly back and forth between incident and impression, creating a kind of (I’m not kidding) rock ’n’ roll. If the writing suffers from a tone of detachment throughout, the author is well aware of it. In fact, the long journey to inhabit the present is the book’s crowning sentiment.So, two things we’ve taken away from this review: 1) We really want to read Black Postcards and 2) Though Phair’s last couple of albums have really sucked, maybe she’s found a second calling. Top job, Liz. Definitely more refreshing than another Michiko Kakutani piece.
Extracto do livro: Damon and Naomi , were graduate students at Harvard , were spending the summer in New York and went with the intention of making music together.
Galaxie 500 was born on the day that Naomi offered to play bass . Damon and Naomi dating school .
Naomi had seen all concerts Speedy And the castanets , and was commissioned to design the scenery and playbills of our actions . Now studying architecture at Harvard University , and Damon had a graduate degree in Comparative Literature .
Mary Harron wrote the e rock'n'roll " is the only form of music that can be improved if the artists do not master their instrument. " I do not know how you fit in the Jimi Hendrix Experience in this theory , but it is true to some extent . What is clear is that it is not necessary to be a virtuoso. The world is full of great players . But sometimes its limitations as a performer that make you stand out .
Besides learning how to play bass , Naomi was becoming a graphic designer with an extraordinary talent , and a graphic design group is at least as important as the bass. Naomi was always thinking in visual terms . If I saw a gas station , she saw something completely different . Took pictures of ugly things , but your photos have been converted into beautiful things .
Damon and Naomi were explorers . Liked nothing more than to get in his little yellow Fiat and travel to Concord to Walden Pond or Plum Island .
Our first experience was on May 27, 1987 . Our plan was to prepare some versions and act in Washington Square Park . Naomi proposed " Where Have All The Flowers Gone ? " . The best known version is that of Peter , Paul and Mary , but my favorite is Marlene Dietrich with the Burt Bacharach and support your band . We also tested "I Can See Clearly Now " by Johnny Nash , " Just My Imagination ( Running Away With Me) " by The Temptations and " Knockin 'On Heaven's Door " by Dylan . No group not tested this theme Dylan . It is easy to play and is perfect for stretching . And Axl Rose had not come to hate .
We rehearsed all summer . Sometimes , Damon and stayed for lunch . That summer was studying Damon surrealist poetry and occasionally had to stop walking down the Bobst library. In late summer , which gave a concert at my apartment on Front Street . Naomi designed some flyers for the event . It was the best show of my life . No, not me rope broke and I did not forget any lyrics . We played 20 minutes and everything went well .
In August we caught studies in 6/8 in Cable Building at the corner of Broadway and Houston to record the first demo of Galaxie 500 . There were two sessions, one Thursday and Saturday night with a technician named Perkin Barnes . Seven songs were recorded .
My favorite song of this session was " The Other Side " composed by Naomi . He sang with insecurity ( like me) , but it looked good . The best music moment is when I 'm wrong chord and slide to the right . I sat on the wrong track when we started playing live accordingly. If you make a mistake , repeat it for everyone thinks you did it on purpose .
I took the tape home and put it nonstop . Sometimes , if you hear something often , you just look better . This was not the case this tape . Clearly it was mediocre . I only had two guitar sounds : coward ranger . Some singing lessons , I would not have been bad . As always rehearsed without a microphone , I had never heard him sing . When I stood before the microphone in the studio, I heard very well. Shame give me my cards , so that the air and then performed the voice buried deep in the mixture.
What I did not know is that we on the right track . We were an early version and make the middle group that would become later. Our surround sound was repetitive , with simple chord progressions , which reached a climax and then diluted. We were not good , but they were different .
I could not get the head of Claudia , but trying to date other girls . The Thursday night in June, there was a party on an expedition from New York University . Drank more than usual and ended up kissing a girl . A week later, I stayed with her and took me to her apartment in Greenpoint . The walls of his room only had a crucifix . We made love right then and told me he loved me .
But hey ! I did not know that these things are not spoken on a first date ?
When September arrived , I realized that I had no reason to stay in New York . Damon and Naomi resumed his graduate studies in Boston and decided to go with them to see how far we could get with the group
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