Category: music

The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science Fiction

Music and technology have always gone hand in hand—and the explosive flowering of music as an art form in the last century is also the story of the explosive growth of technology. Indeed, people have recognized the potential of computers to revolutionize music since before there even were computers. In 1842, writing about the theoretical uses of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, computer-science progenitor Ada Lovelace enthused that once the fundamentals of harmony and musical composition were properly understood, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” (And there’s something wondrous about a woman at the dawn of the Victorian Age dreaming of something now commonplace with electronic groups such as Daft Punk.) Like computing itself, electronic music began as the arcane province of technology specialists and slowly became a truly democratic force that put the power to change the world—or at least soundtrack it—in the hands of everyone. And because cutting-edge technology is particularly good at sounding alien and futuristic, it’s meshed perfectly with science fiction as a subject matter. Below is a brief history of the ways those three elements—the music, the tech, and the SF themes—have intersected and influenced each other, in various media, over time.

Originally published Jan. 3 in Clarkesworld Magazine. Read the complete article.

Review: Minnesota Beatle Project Vol. 3

As new local traditions go, few could be better or more welcome than the Minnesota Beatle Project, now in its third year of collecting Fab Four covers to raise money for music and art education. As on previous editions, Vol. 3 is heavy on rootsy folk-rockers and indie bands, with a notable absence of hip-hop. But if the roster could’ve been more comprehensive, the album doesn’t lack for passion, joy, and listenability.

Beatles covers are tricky, since the original songs are both extremely well known and well played—it’s very hard to top John, Paul, George, and Ringo at their own game. Which is not to say that bands shouldn’t try, but it’s risky, and the most faithful covers on Vol. 3 don’t avoid the pitfalls. Pop-punkers Motion City Soundtrack deserve credit for recreating the gentle beauty of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun,” but they don’t put a lot of their own stamp on it—which makes the cover pointless, because Harrison’s version isn’t exactly hard to find. The key to a great cover song is not to hit the target dead-center—that’s for tribute bands—but to make it different. One way to do that is to deliberately wrench an over-familiar song out of its original context, as Solid Gold does on a marvelously reworked version of Harrison’s “Love You To,” translating earthy, sitar-drenched psychedelia into its own icily sophisticated, synth-heavy milieu.

The rest of Vol. 3’s best songs take a simpler approach, choosing songs from the Beatles’ incredibly broad catalog that fit each band’s individual personality but allow for a little wiggle room. Cloud Cult’s version of “Help!” forefronts the pleading in John Lennon’s lyrics, highlighting Craig Minowa’s great gift of capturing emotional vulnerability in his music. Shoegaze/noise duo Red Pens find a perfect match in “Helter Skelter,” giving guitarist/vocalist Howard Hamilton a great opportunity to scream and shred. Duluth bluesman Charlie Parr’s old-school authenticity is a breath of fresh air on Paul McCartney’s “Rocky Raccoon,” and blues-punkers The 4onthefloor deliver a stomping version of “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” that roars with caveman-like lustiness—which is really the only sane way to approach that particular song.

Minnesota Beatle Project Vol. 3 shares its official CD-release show with Minnesota’s other great Beatle-related tradition, Curtiss A’s annual Dec. 8 John Lennon tribute at First Avenue. Bands performing include White Light Riot, Dark Dark Dark And Her Choir, and Me And My Arrow.

Originally published Dec. 5 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Interview: Chris Strouth of Paris 1919

Chris Strouth has been a pillar of the Twin Cities music scene for years, both on and off stage, as a performer, designer, producer, head of Twin/Tone Records, and prime mover of museum-friendly dub experimentalists Future Perfect Sound System, among other hats. His most recent project is Paris 1919, an electronic collective that grew out of his studio-bound, largely solo sonic collages into a live band that includes Boiled In Lead’s Drew Miller, Uzza vocalist Tabatha Predovich, and drummer Eric White. And sometimes many others—at this year’s Art-A-Whirl, Strouth helped mastermind the 30-musician improvisational ensemble project Czeslaw’s Loop. With three albums of moody, post-industrial ambience already under his belt, Strouth is in the midst of signing a deal with UK distributor State 51, home to like-minded experimentalists Current 93 and Throbbing Gristle. At the Ritz Theater on Saturday, an 11-member version of Paris 1919—also including Joe Hastings of Hastings 3000 and Blue Sky Blackout’s Jon Hunt—will spin a live soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 serial-killer thriller, The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog, an excellent early example of the dark, suspenseful, and macabrely funny Hitchcockian sensibility. Strouth sat down with The A.V. Club in advance of the show.

Originally published Nov. 10, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Interview: The Cloak Ox

After the implosion of his highly regarded but underheard experimental indie band Fog in 2007, it took a couple of years for Andrew Broder to chart a new course as a musician. That’s not to say he didn’t keep busy, releasing nearly seven hours of ambient Fripp/Eno-style instrumentals in 2009, recording the soundtrack for Alan Moore’s audiovisual project Unearthing last year, and touring as part of Anticon indie-rap group Why? But with his new band Cloak Ox, he’s laying down the most straightforward and hard-charging indie rock of his career, backed by three longtime friends and former Fog compatriots, bassist Mark Erickson, guitarist Jeremy Ylvisaker, and drummer Martin Dosh. Cloak Ox plays a CD-release show for its debut EP Prisen Sept. 30 at Loring Theater. The A.V. Club met with the band after one of its weekly morning jam sessions—where the Creedence Clearwater Revival covers were the biggest clue how different this band is from Fog—to talk about the joys of keeping it simple.

Originally published Sept. 29, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Interview: Dead Man Winter

Trampled By Turtles’ 2010 album, Palomino, was a well-deserved breakthrough hit for the Duluthian bluegrass band, but that doesn’t mean bandleader Dave Simonett is shackled to a single style. With Dead Man Winter, a side project also featuring fellow Turtles Ryan Young and Tim Saxhaug, Simonett explores his country-rock side. The band’s debut disc, Bright Lights, echoes the rootsy, world-weary vibe of predecessors like Neil Young And The Band, as well as a more homegrown strain of Minnesota heartland-rockers like the Gear Daddies and the Glenrustles. It’s certainly not a drastic shift from the Turtles’ music in either sound or spirit; instead the new band’s sound is compellingly different but complementary. Bright Lights even shares a version of the song “New Orleans” with Palomino. The A.V. Club talked with Simonett in advance of Dead Man Winter’s show tonight at First Avenue about balancing his two bands.

Originally posted on avclub.com Sept. 16, 2011. Read the complete article.

Review: Ladytron, Gravity the Seducer

Like a modern-day, gender-flipped answer to Roxy Music, Liverpudlian electropop quartet Ladytron has a taste for gorgeous synthesizer melodies and a romanticism that manages to be heart-on-sleeve and icily detached at the same time. (Ladytron even winked at the influence on the cover of 2003’s Softcore Jukebox, in which co-lead singers Mira Aroyo and Helen Marnie posed in swimwear in a PG-rated nod to Roxy Music’s Country Life.) Gravity The Seducer, the band’s fifth full-length and first new album in more than three years, is more atmospheric and wistful than 2008’s Velocifero, but stays well within Ladytron’s firmly established framework of chilly but hooky baroque-pop.

Given that the catchiest song here, “Ace Of Hz,” was first released on last year’s career-retrospective Best Of 00-10, the lack of a propulsive single to match earlier gems like “Destroy Everything You Touch” and “Sugar,” as well as an overabundance of instrumentals, suggests a band that’s spinning its wheels. Still, while Gravity is a bit cold to the touch, that wintry feel is also a big part of Ladytron’s charm. The group’s love songs have always embraced metaphors suggesting a lingering fear of the inability to connect emotionally, an android-like anxiety that pops up again repeatedly on Gravity, especially on the elegantly beautiful “Mirage” and “Melting Ice.” So what if they aren’t moving forward, when holding their ground sounds this good?

Originally published Sept. 13, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Review: Peter Wolf Crier, Garden of Arms

On their 2009 debut album Inter-Be, Twin Cities duo Peter Wolf Crier put an appealing spin on indie-folk thanks to the orthogonal approaches of its two creative halves, with the downcast, Nick Drakean songwriting and high-pitched, haunting vocals of Peter Pisano sent off in unexpected directions by the refreshingly experimental production of percussionist/engineer Brian Moen. Since it worked so well the first time, it’s good to find the duo doubling down on its collaborative technique on Garden Of Arms. Moen deepens and expands on Inter-Be’s rich palette, building out Pisano’s meditative and even somber songs into complex, layered creations spiced with surprising fills, melodic touches, and glitchier elements that keep the mood from ever settling in one place. It’s clearly a more polished piece of work than its predecessor, but never slick or lacking in personality, and never dull.

At the same time, the sometimes-confounding complexity also means the album lacks Inter-Be’s immediate charm. Sometimes the commendable desire to keep the sonic environment unpredictable and engaging gets in the way of a potentially great song, as on the lovely, lonely ballad “Having It Out,” whose abrupt finish undercuts the impact of its soaring, Arcade Fire-like emotion. But far more often, the constantly evolving layers of drum riffs and harmonies galvanize the material into something that practically demands repeated listens to savor its piquancy. “Right Away” and “Hard Heart” prove how compelling the band’s approach can be on more uptempo numbers, but the ethereal “Wheel” keeps the multi-faceted production in full spin without sacrificing its quiet and contemplative beauty.

Originally published Sept. 6, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Interview: Roe Family Singers

Quillan Roe has always loved country and folk music, first making his name in the Twin Cities music scene as leader of ’90s alt-country combo Accident Clearinghouse, which blended alt-country with a healthy strain of traditional bluegrass. In the Roe Family Singers, Roe and his wife Kim have embraced old-school folk with genuine joy. For proof, just stop by the 331 Club on any Monday night, where the Roes have held court for more than six years. “We’ve only missed twice,” notes Quillan with pride. “One year it was Christmas, and the next it was Christmas Eve.”

The weekly gig began as an open stage, says Roe: “We didn’t know enough material to fill even the hour and a half we were booked for, so we put out a call to pretty much any musician that we knew.” But it’s since solidified into a loose-knit nine-member combo of considerable verve, shaking the roof of the cozy Northeast bar with Depression-era blues and gospel tunes. The band takes over the 331 this weekend to release its sprightly second album, The Owl And The Bat And The Bumblebee, headlining Friday night with Lisa Fuglie & Mark Anderson and The Cactus Blossoms, and Saturday night with the Como Avenue Jug Band, as well as performing an all-ages in-store at the Electric Fetus on Saturday at 3 p.m. The Roes sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about balancing murder ballads with kids’ lullabies, and winning the Stanley Cup of waffle irons.

Originally posted on avclub.com June 17, 2011. Read the complete article.

Interview: Little Man

Little Man’s new six-song EP might be called Orbital Amusements, but it’s grounded in swampy, earthy riffage like nothing the band has done before. That’s neither a bad thing, or an unrecognizable shift: The crunchy, swirling, and psychedelic ’70s sound of T. Rex and Led Zeppelin is still there in guitarist and songwriter Chris Perricelli’s playing, and the George Harrison-esque, Zen Buddhist-inspired spirituality in his lyrics is as strong as ever. But Amusements thunders in a whole new way, thanks to the the jolt of creative electricity Perricelli got when his restless muse found a new way to make noise via—technical guitar-geekery alert—a new set of custom-made guitar pedals. With a new, more propulsive rhythm section in bassist Brian Herb and drummer Sean Gilchrist, Little Man’s sound is now flavored with a thick grunge-metal that Gilchrist jokingly but memorably describes as “dirty rumble beefy.” Little Man plays an album-release show for Orbital Amusements at the Turf Club on Friday, May 27 with Red Pens and The Rockford Mules—and onstage accompaniment by, appropriately enough, a pair of hula-hooping dancers, The Cosmonettes. Before the show, The A.V. Club talked with the band about how the new songs grew out of both cutting-edge tech and old-school spiritual symbology.

Originally published May 26, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Review: Minor Kingdom, Don’t Worry Baby

Music doesn’t necessarily have to strike you like lightning in order to work its way into your heart. The songs of Minor Kingdom will never inspire anyone to reckless abandon or lead to a mass outbreak of dancing in the streets. And that’s okay—that isn’t the point. Like Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, and Bon Iver before him, songwriter Kristian Melom is after a more introspective, unhurried and thoughtful kind of beauty. Don’t Worry Baby, his second album after 2009’s My Back Will Bend, is a carefully crafted set of slow, somber indie-folk ballads shot through with a tinge of mournful alt-country and grounded by Melom’s serious, pensive vocals—perhaps too grounded.

This is a record that needs a little time alone in order to win you over, working its mojo in the background during a quiet evening at home, curled up with a book. That intimacy is the album’s most charming element, but also its Achilles’ heel: Don’t Worry Baby is so soft-spoken and unprepossessing that it’s in danger of being overwhelmed like a spiderweb caught in a strong breeze, and the subtle qualities that are the album’s strengths are too easily drowned out. And there are plenty of delightful touches throughout Don’t Worry Baby, like the wash of shoegaze-y guitar that floats through “Sweet Emily,” the gossamer acoustic filigree in “Crazy Charlie,” and the wistful angelic chorus of “ooohs” on the album-closing “Good Luck.” But it’s a fine line between introspective and enervating, and a little more oomph would not have gone amiss here.

Originally published May 12, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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