Love and death: these are the only themes. So it’s been in SIMON JOYNER’s twenty years of making records—from 1992’s Umbilical Chords cassette to his most recent double LP, Ghosts. JOYNER’s music gathers acolytes rather than casual fans, contributing to his “songwriter’s songwriter” status and inspiring comparisons to other artists like Bill Fay, Townes Van Zandt, David Blue, and Leonard Cohen.
It’s minimal, it’s trance, it’s blues… it’s Jayle time! JAYE JAYLE play songs inspired by traveling, being disconnected, and being in love. Restlessly, yet relaxed, JAYE JAYLE rides up and down and boogies around in a vortex furnished with sandy desert dreams. Saddle up or pull up a chair, either way would be and will be just fine.
Watch the video for Jaye Jayle‘s “Pull Me Back to Hell” here:
UPDATE, 12/9/2013: Louisville, Kentucky’s finest JAYE JAYLE have been added to the show! See details above.
UPDATE, 12/14/2013: There will be DOOR SALES tonight at the show, starting at 7 PM, cash only! However, space is still limited to 40 people total, so to be sure you can attend, it is highly encouraged that you buy your ticket ONLINE to guarantee admission! If Greenhaus hits capacity, there will be NO tickets available at the door. Thanks!
Lou Reed, a massively influential songwriter and guitarist who helped shape nearly fifty years of rock music, died today. The cause of his death has not yet been released, but Reed underwent a liver transplant in May.
Needless to say, Reed’s adventures with the Velvet Underground, as well as his many solo outings after their dissolution, were very crucial to our musical development. Another anti-hero of the 1960s Lower East Side joins Jack Smith, Angus MacLise, Sterling Morrison, and many others on whatever Heaven’s version is of Ludlow Street. (Just kidding, we don’t believe in Heaven.)
The New Media Project and The Other Side of Life are proud to present:
NATHAN BOWLES/SCOTT VERRASTRO DUO (Members of Pelt, The Black Twig Pickers, and Kohoutek; from Blacksburg, Virginia and Philadelphia, PA) mAAs (Louisville, KY; duo of Tim Barnes and Connor Bell)
Sunday, November 10th
at DREAMLAND FILM CENTER
810 E. Market Street (behind Decca Restaurant)
7 PM, $5, ALL AGES WELCOME!
Polar Satellites is the stunning collaboration by NATHAN BOWLES (Pelt/Black Twig Pickers) and SCOTT VERRASTRO (Kohoutek), released in early July, 2013 on LP and digitally by MIE. Polar Satellites is a mesmerising collection of percussion improvisations performed in duo by Nathan and Scott deep in the winter of 2009 and 2010 with absolutely no overdubs. Building on the starkness of last years Effigy by Pelt, (recently repressed on MIE), the duo have recorded an even bleaker, more minimal and hermetically vibed record together. Unnerving and hypnotic, Polar Satellites is an intense journey into the unknown, awash with uncategorisable percussive instruments, kalimbas and banjo. Nathan and Scott first met in Washington D.C when Nathan would sit in on Kohoutek sets. They were brought together as a duo on a track recorded for Three Lobed Records’ Jack Rose tribute album and were so struck by the results that they went down to Black Dirt Studios and laid down these tracks with Jason Meagher on engineering, recording and mixing duties.
mAAs is the duo of Louisville musicians Connor Bell (also of Shedding) and Tim Barnes. Louisville resident and drummer extraordinaire, the list of Tim Barnes‘s collaborators is too long to list here, but it includes Jim O’Rourke, Silver Jews, Neil Michael Hagerty and the Howling Hex, The Tower Recordings, and countless others. Most recently, Tim Barnes played drums with the resurrected lineup of The For Carnation, as well as with MV+EE at Cropped Out in November, 2011. Connor Bell has released several items over the years under the name Shedding, available at Ocio and Hometapes, all of which is meditative and still, eerie and unsettling — yet with a spectacular sense of melody.
(a scene from “The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda”)
IRA COHEN (February 3, 1935 – April 25, 2011) was an American poet, publisher, photographer and filmmaker. Cohen lived in Morocco and in New York City in the 1960s, he was in Kathmandu in the 1970s and traveled the world in the 1980s, before returning to New York, where he spent the rest of his life.
About IRA COHEN‘s 1968 film “The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda” J. Hoberman wrote the following in the Mar. 16, 2006 Village Voice: “Part ‘Dr. Strange,’ part ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome,’ [‘The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda’ is] so High ’60s that you emerge from its 20-minute vision perched full-lotus on a cloud of incense, chatting with a white rabbit and smoking a banana…. ‘Invasion’ is a languidly opiated costume ball in which an assortment of masked and painted bohos, some sporting outsize elf ears, loll about a candlelit, Mylar-lined set, blowing soap bubbles and nibbling majoon. …In lieu of action, Cohen uses all manner of superimposition and prismatic image-splitting; his big effect, however, is the deliquescent Mylar reflection. What saves ‘Invasion’ from preciosity is the vague menace of Angus MacLise’s improvised pan-piping, tabla-tapping, creature-yipping score. Although this masterpiece of Tibetan-Moroccan-Druidic trance music was reissued on CD several years ago, it truly blossoms in conjunction with the exotic smorgasbord served at Cohen’s psychedelicatessen.”
The soundtrack to “THE INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA” by Angus MacLise has been remastered by Tim Barnes for reissue on his newly-resurrected Quakebasket record label.
It’s kinda crazy how quickly September has flown by — in a flash! Well they say time flies when you’re having fun, but we haven’t even gotten to CROPPED OUT yet! That’s right, the fourth installment of Louisville’s best DIY-n’-weird-stuff weekend is back, taking place mainly at the American Turners Club on River Road, and this year promises to be the best ever. As always, we’ve checked out the schedule (you can too, here: http://croppedoutmusic.com/cropped-out-2013-schedule/), and here’s your “Picks to Click” in bold, with some additional commentary…
FRIDAY, SEPT. 27
5 p.m. — White Reaper (Turners Tavern stage): Louisville’s latest garage rock sensation, catch them before they’re either huge and/or move to Nashville/Memphis/anyplace else.
5:25 — Spelling Bee (Goosebump Galley stage)
5:55 — Tweens (Phreedom Hall stage)
6:20 — Promised Land Sound (Turners Tavern)
6:45 — Tyvek (Turners Tavern): Detroit’s finest stop-on-a-dime-and-give-you-change rock band, in probably their millionth configuration. Who will be in the band this week? Find out!
7:15 — Spray Paint (Phreedom Hall)
7:40 — Salad Influence (Goosebump Galley): Lexington main man Mikey Turner’s side gig, when he’s not rocking in CROSS or making sweet solo tapes.
8:00 — Blues Control (Goosebump Galley): Our pals Lea and Russ, we go way back, and there ain’t nothin’ bad we could ever say about this dynamic duo!
8:35 — Juanita (Phreedom Hall): Long-running Louisville underground mavens, featuring some people that go back to first-wave Louisville punk and the 1069 House scene that spawned Babylon Dance Band, Endtables, and more.
9:00 — Hair Police (Turners Tavern): Lexington “noize dudes” in a rare Louisville performance — probably the first time in a decade!
9:25 — Shit & Shine (Goosebump Galley): One of the highlights of Cropped Out II: The Search for Curley’s Gold, S&S occasionally feature King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers, as well as bunny masks.
9:55 — The Endtables (Phreedom Hall): First-wave Louisville punk! Okay, maybe Southern Indiana. Either way, they rule, and this is the first time they’ve played here in over 35 years!
10:20 — Steve Gunn (Turners Tavern): East Coast guitar-slinger with a killer new album, Time Off, that you should check out pronto!
10:55 — Bill Orcutt & Chris Corsano (Goosebump Galley): Orcutt slayed solo at Cropped Out II, this is his first Louisville trip with drumming octopus and handsome man Chris Corsano. Hide your (fancy) bourbon!
11:40 — Endless Boogie (Phreedom Hall): The last time EB graced Louisville was over two years ago, so it’s safe to say you shouldn’t miss them this time!
2:00 p.m. — Asm A Tik (Turners Tavern): I’ve been dying to see this new Louisville trio, as supposedly they are prog-tastic. Come get progressive, early!
2:25 — Neighbor (Goosebump Galley): One of Louisville’s heaviest current groups, we gotta say, these neighbors are much cooler than one of our neighbors who cut down a tree last year. Boo!
2:55 — Todays Hits (Phreedom Hall)
3:20 — Mote (Turners Tavern)
3:45 — Quail Bones (Goosebump Galley)
4:15 — Connections (Phreedom Hall): New Columbus, Ohio band features members of Times New Viking. Remember them? They were great, so these guys are probably at least half as good, right? Just kiddin’, they are pretty great!
4:40 — Tom Blacklung & the Smokestacks (Turners Tavern)
5:05 — Running (Goosebump Galley)
5:35 — Rinehart (Phreedom Hall)
6:00 — New England Patriots (Turners Tavern)
6:25 — Thee Open Sex (Goosebump Galley)
6:55 — Montag (Phreedom Hall): Rare appearance by this Louisville super-phenom! Must be seen to be believed!
7:20 — SKIMASK (Turners Tavern)
7:45 — Jaye Jayle (Turners Tavern): Mysterious Louisville folk rock funsters, JJ have been awesome every time we’ve seen ’em.
8:15 — Mayo Thompson and the Corky’s Debt Band (Phreedom Hall): YES! Corky’s Debt to His Father is one of our favorite albums of all time, and though we’ve seen Mayo kill it with his main concern, The Red Krayola, we never thought we’d see the day we’d see/hear songs from Corky live. And on our 38th birthday, no less. In our hometown. Thank you, Cropped Out!
8:55 — Kal Marks (Goosebump Galley)
9:20 — Borbetomagus (Goosebump Galley): New York trio (2 saxes, electric guitar) are an acquired taste, but what a taste it is! We’ve been long-time fans, without ever having the chance to see them live, so this is another one-in-a-lifetime experience as they rarely play off the East Coast.
10:00 — Wolf Eyes (Phreedom Hall): Quite possibly the best band Michigan’s produced since the Stooges. Really, I believe that!
10:35 — Human Eye (Turners Tavern): Second-best Michigan band after Wolf Eyes! What is it with Michigan and eyes anyway? The dang place looks like a glove!
11:05 — CAVE (Goosebump Galley): One of the highlights of Cropped Out #1, along with a chaotic drunken Oaks night two years ago, Cave brings some sorta kraut-y dance party for yo’ dome.
11:45 — Matt Sweeney & Bonnie “Prince” Billy (Phreedom Hall): We’ll be honest, we haven’t been a huge Billy fan, but Superwolf, the album these two geniuses recorded over five years ago, was a damn fine moment. Everybody rub your belly!
At midnight Saturday night, our Stop Drink Listen friends will be hosting an after-party with Endless Boogie’s Paul Major, also at Seidenfaden’s (more information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/594751607224434/).
SUNDAY, SEPT. 29
9 p.m. — Freakwater (Phreedom Hall): C’mon, do I really have to tell you anything about Freakwater? Sheesh, I’m tired already.
10:30 — Lambchop (Phreedom Hall)
If that wasn’t enough information for you, you can find out more at www.croppedoutmusic.com. And you can download a really great mix of this year’s artists there! And buy tickets, if you haven’t already. What are you waiting for?
OH YEAH! Cropped Out REALLY starts on Thursday, if you’re so inclined, with the BEER & VOODOO Wild & Woolly/Cropped Out 2013 Pre-Party with Sublime Frequenciesat the Dreamland Film Center! Filmmaker/documentarian/world traveler Hisham Mayet will be presenting two films, Vodoun Gods on the Slave Coast (at 7:30pm) and The Divine River: Ceremonial Pageantry in the Sahel (at 9:00pm). More information is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/504642746296711/.
Whew! Now I gotta go take a nap so I have enough energy for this weekend…
UPDATE, 9/27/2013: THE CORRECT SET TIMES ARE NOW UP! For some reason, we “copied” the scheduled published in the LEO Weekly, which was inaccurate. We regret the error. Always on time, peoples!
Thursday, August 29th at GREENHAUS 2227 S. Preston 7 PM, $6
DAVID GRUBBS is an associate professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing. He is the author of the forthcoming book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press). GRUBBS has released twelve solo albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially released recordings. He is known for his cross disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Cosima von Bonin, and Stephen Prina. His work has been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. GRUBBS, a Louisville native, was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and he has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, among many others. He directs the Blue Chopsticks record label and is a member of ISSUE Project Room’s Board of Directors. Grubbs was a 2005-6 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and was recently featured in Augusto Contento’s documentary film Parallax Sounds.
Comprised of electronic drums, keyboards, bass, and effected guitar, VISITING NURSE features long time collaborators Jon Hill, Mike Seymour, and Syd Bishop creating music that seems to somehow straddle the gap between the organic and inorganic, a cyborg pastiche of jazz influenced composition, and rigid structures. For fans of Boards of Canada, Clams Casino, and Biosphere.
Reports across the internet indicate that Walter De Maria has died. He is one of my favorite sculptors and musicians of all time, his most famous works being the installations “Lightning Field” (in New Mexico), “The New York Earth Room,” and “The Broken Kilometer” (both in New York). He also briefly played drums in the Primitives, a precursor band to the Velvet Underground. Back in 2005, I wrote a review (for Swingset Magazine) of his self-released compact disc Drums and Nature, containing two pieces of his from the 1960s, in contrast with then-new works by Watersports:
Painting, sculpture, hell even being in a regular rock band wasn’t enough for Walter De Maria. After moving to New York in 1960, hobnobbin’ and theorizin’ and fluxus-izin’ with crazyman composer La Monte Young, playing drums for a stint in The Velvet Underground, and establishing himself as one of the prominent sculptors in the emerging “minimalist” scene, De Maria looked for – and found – the ever-larger gesture. In search of an art that was more than just “art,” De Maria in 1968 filled the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich with dirt, kicking off the whole earthworks movement. That same year, he recorded “Ocean Music,” which along with “Cricket Music” (from 1964) is available for the first time on Drums and Nature. “Ocean Music,” recorded with the help of rediscovered minimalist badass Tony Conrad, is a meditative piece beginning with – you guessed it – the sound of waves crashing along some shore somewhere. Some heavy solo tribal drumming eventually mixes in, then subsumes the ocean sound, and what we’ve got is something akin to New Age if New Age wasn’t fucking lame. That is, a perfect representation of the “natural,” but with an acknowledgement of the “human” (incidentally, La Monte Young also recorded a vocal piece with the ocean off Long Island as his backin’ band around the same time for Columbia, but it has yet to see the light of day). “Cricket Music” is less meditative, but no less amazing (and no less truth-in-advertising, title-wise). Listening to these compositionally simple, yet striking pieces, it’s too bad that De Maria hasn’t seemed to have done much since, musically…
I have to admit, last year’s CROPPED OUT Festival would be difficult for anyone, much less our fearless friends and heroes, to top. Jandek, Eugene Chadbourne (yes, people born after 1970 know who he is), Neil Hamburger, The Ritchie White Orchestra, Merchandise, Papa M, and Wooden Wand were just some of the many, many memorable performances of the weekend (and by memorable, I also mean I won’t ever forget seeing that naked guy from Guerilla Toss, no matter how much I try!). Following up last year’s fest is on a magnitude with winning the NCAA basketball tournament two years in a row…
So it’s even more surprising that not only did our CROPPED OUT pals not blow it this year as the musical equivalent of the first round of the NIT (heh heh), but, to mix sports metaphors, they knocked it OUT OF THE PARK yet again this year! This year’s CROPPED OUT lineup (with picks to click in bold):
Mayo Thompson And The Corky’s Debt Band performing Corky’s Debt To His Father Endless Boogie
Lambchop The Endtables Wolf Eyes Blues Control Shit And Shine Bill Orcutt/Chris Corsano CAVE Connections Montag Hair Police Human Eye
Spray Paint Watery Love Steve Gunn
Cop City Chill Pillars
Running Salad Influence
Rinehart Jaye Jayle
Skimask Juanita Neighbor
Kal Marks Asm A Tik
Tom Blacklung & The Smokestacks Thee Open Sex
Today’s Hits
New England Patriots
Quail Bones
Tweens White Reaper
Spelling Bee
I’ve been assured that plenty more surprises are on the way, so vote early, vote often! Er… buy your tickets now! Here’s the details:
Two-day combo passes (which include Friday and Saturday, but not Sunday’s separate closing party) are on sale now at Astro Black Records and online. There will be a limited amount of combo passes available for the almost inconsequential amount of $35, and once those are gone, you can still purchase them in advance for the very reasonable price of $40. Day-of-show combo passes are $50, so save a few shekels and purchase them now!
The closing party, which will be headlined by Lambchop, will be a more intimate affair, and located off the festival grounds at the incredible and historic Workhouse Ballroom, a semi-secret, pre-Civil War manmade cavern. Referred to locally as “The Cave,” it once served as a debtor’s prison, and is a wonderous place to see a musical performance. Consider it a kind of wind-down from the insanity of the weekend. It’s ticketed separately, so if you want to catch Nashville’s finest, along with a TBD support act, be sure to pick up a ticket.
Cropped Out and The Other Side of Life are proud to present:
INSECT FACTORY(Silver Spring, MD) mAAs (Louisville, KY; duo of Tim Barnes and Connor Bell) PUBLIC SPEAKING(Brooklyn, NY)
Wednesday, July 24th at GREENHAUS 2227 S. Preston 7 PM, $6
INSECT FACTORY is music from Silver Spring, MD musician Jeff Barsky. INSECT FACTORY focuses on texture and mood, building layers of dense sounds that slowly evolve into hypnotic and atmospheric drones. Since the 90’s, Barsky has continuously played in bands and improvisational collectives, and has performed frequently on the east coast of the U.S., and also in Canada, throughout Europe, and Japan. Barsky’s projects have shared the stage with acts as diverse as Richard Pinhas, Nels Cline, Lungfish, and Carla Bozulich, and he has performed at the Suoni Il Per Popolo festival in Montreal, Terrastock ’08 in Louisville, KY, and D.C.’s Sonic Circuits, Queering Sound, and Fringe Festivals. In later 2011, INSECT FACTORY released a split 7″ with RST (New Zealand), and followed it up with the Melodies from a Dead Radio LP (Fabrica/Insectfields) in early 2012. Most recently, INSECT FACTORY appeared alongside Six Organs of Admittance and Charalambides on “For Lee Jackson in Space”, a gargantuan online compilation benefitting ALS Research. “Music that evokes the feel of a plane ride through the clouds and the
surreal world of dreams…INSECT FACTORY‘s music grows with repeated listens.” – The Wire.
mAAs is the duo of Louisville musicians Connor Bell (also of Shedding) and Tim Barnes. Louisville resident and drummer extraordinaire, the list of Tim Barnes‘s collaborators is too long to list here, but it includes Jim O’Rourke, Silver Jews, Neil Michael Hagerty and the Howling Hex, The Tower Recordings, and countless others. Most recently, Tim Barnes played drums with the resurrected lineup of The For Carnation, as well as with MV+EE at Cropped Out in November, 2011. Connor Bell has released several items over the years under the name Shedding, available at Ocio and Hometapes, all of which is meditative and still, eerie and unsettling — yet with a spectacular sense of melody. This performance marks their debut as mAAs, an electronic duo.
PUBLIC SPEAKING is the music of Brooklyn solo artist Jason Anthony Harris. Utilizing found objects, radio, tape recorder, and vocoder, he pores over pedals to loop, warp and augment these sources. He sings on his knees, in a semi-circle of these devices and percussive clutter. The result is a soulful and rhythmically dense experimental music. His performances are highly improvisational, with an emphasis on immediacy and site-specific actions.
Yes. ThatWIRE. The seminal English band that influenced everyone from the Minutemen to My Bloody Valentine, from R.E.M. to Minor Threat. From their 1977 debut album Pink Flagto the band’s most recent album, 2013’s Change Becomes Us, legendary art-combo WIRE have created a unique body of work. Subverting genres, Colin Newman, Graham Lewis, Robert Grey and Matthew Simms continue to work on new material, regularly confounding expectations. The Louisville stop on their summer tour will be their only appearance in the region, as well as their first time playing anywhere in Kentucky. If you’re at all a fan of music in the post-punk era, you won’t want to miss this!
NATIVES are a catchy, tough, psychedelic punk band from Louisville, KY. This is their second show with a new, powerful lineup. You can listen to their self-released debut from 2011, Loose Secrets, here: http://ntvs.bandcamp.com/.