Just like it says on the tin, rreplay’s first album, rrepertoire, is now available as a CD From Amazonor for download from iTunes.  Still waiting on the mp3s from Amazon, but it is a start.  Even if you don’t buy it, check it out…I just think its cool that its there.

Waiting for the doors to open. Never heard of the Selmanaires. Broadcast does some cool Lo-Fi stuff. I’m curious about Bradford Cox’s Atlas Sound.  He is the singer for one of my favorite bands, Deerhunter.

The venue is a Unitarian church. I’m up in the first pew. Praise the humanistic and benevolent, somewhat secularized deity of the Unis. Hard to believe that they are direct descendants of the Puritans. Put Bradford Cox in a dress (but alas no dress tonight) on your city on a hill and smoke it! Great acoustics, but probably all the natural reverb makes doing sound hard.

The Selmanaires are first up after a long chilly wait for the doors to open. Keys, drum machine with a live percussionist, guitar, serviceable vocals with good harmonies, and bass. Kind of a Syd era Floyd if they had been from eighties Birmingham (England), been signed by Factory Records and had digital stuff.

Atlas Sound’s setup looks like it includes a Super 8 projector at a funny angle, an extension to the stage, and a folding table full of effect boxes off to one side, but maybe that’s Trish from Broadcast’s stuff.  Hmm the thing I thought was a projector is an ancient synth and it appears that Broadcast rather than Atlas Sound will play. And the projector is way better than Super 8. The sound is very loopy sequency psychedelic, as are the visuals. With the vintage gear sound and the trippy visuals, this reminds me of that movie in eigth grade where they tried to to scare you away from drugs by showing a bad trip but it actually looked kinda cool — and this is way better for you than the drugs, and not as campy as the movie. Then out of that comes the semi-sublime (sub-sublime? and what’s so great about lime anyway?) “Corporeal“. Some sound problems are getting Trish frustrated. A little tension in the air. She might smash something. Oddly, you can see the anger in her gestures and hear it in her voice but not from the equipment she hits because all is electronic and the touch never makes it into the sound. Velocity 127 and that’s it. Ahh all seems well again.

Now she has broken out an instrument I’ve only ever seen in my home, a triangular lutey thing tuned and fretted like a plucked dulcimer but played like a guitar. It cuts through a mix like a banjo. I thought they stopped making them, but Trish said after the show that hers was new. They are called strumsticks . The story I heard was that they were made for a few years by a guy in PA who got bought out by Martin Guitars. Martin had made a similarly shaped travel guitar for which they were afraid of getting sued. They took the strumstick thingy off the market and continued to make their not so great sounding travel guitars. All that is hearsay, and Bob McNally, the guy who makes them, doesn’t go into the history on his site, so who knows if I got the story right.  Good to see they are back out. And it appears McNally is making the travel guitars for Martin, so maybe they are not so bad anymore.

Atlas Sound is in fact setting up. It is hard to tell if it will just be him or an actual band or members of the Selmanaires — they are from Atlanta too so maybe they share members. There’ two of them now, Bradford and the keyboard player from the first band. Moody ballad. As usual, interesting words. Uh oh, he’s gotta harmonica. Bad sign. But here comes the rest of the first band to back him. Jury is out…

It seems Mssr. Cox is after a bigger prize than Deerhunter, going for a more Americana, less reverb-drenched psychedelia sound. Oops but now he’s set up a loop on his guitar, a little poppy, a little sickly, and then gone off to play the drums and sing, ending it with a wash of echoed vocals out of which emerged the original guitar loop but backwards. I love when that happens.  More echoey stuff. Ok, now not so Americana as much as Harry Smith weird updated for the new millenium. He does the Juana Molina thing of integrating acoustic and electronica into seemless loopy textures. Maybe he is trying to do the Wilco weird Americana route but starting from weird instead of Americana. Oh, and the music and words are several shades darker, like when he says “this is the last song,” followed by a pregnant pause before letting out “tonight.” Phew, I was a little concerned.

I got to talk with Bradford after the show for a minute. He reassured me that Atlas Sound was in addition to, not instead of, Deerhunter. Phew, I was a little concerned. Great show, in the opinion of someone who started out skeptical.

If you are interested in digital guitar, check out the Digital Guitarist YouTube Channel. Subscribe here.

Just got David Vien’s obssessive labor of love, brand new from over at Plogue.com, Chipsounds. David has been messing with computers and sound since the early 80s and was missing his early love, all the various 8 bit sounds built into the computers, gaming consoles, and arcade games of the day. To work within the limits of the chips, programmers had to resort to a number of musical hacks to get things done, and operating within those limits, they invented a bunch of techniques that were original but tied to the limitations. When the limits went, so did the chip sounds and along with them, many of the techniques. Vien’s has gone through his collection of vintage chips and reconstructed the sounds and some of the techniques, even including chip fails, or the sound of a cartridge when it was only partially plugged in.

Chip sounds are going through a retro hip phase. The first I heard them was in a Beck song, I think “Girl” and then in a couple of great songs by Broadcast, whom I am going to see, along with Atlas Sound, in just a few minutes.

Now I got my first computer only in 1989, and I did not get one with a sound card til 1995, so I’m not a chip geek. Let’s just say I wasn’t doing computers in the early 80s. I’m also a guitarist away from home with just my trusty Godin guitar with a built in synth controller, so I don’t play synth’s quite the same way as a keyboard player. And I am quite certain I break several 8-bit “rules” before I even plug my guitar in.  That said, I kinda like the tune I’m putting up today.

I recorded this song, “phillies in seven not this year” using seven tracks of nothing but Chipsounds played from my Godin guitar’s synth pickup. The only cheat was to run the Chipsound drums through Mokafix’s Mutine and CacoFx’s deceased AffectedME. Its is recorded and mixed in Bidule, although looking back it would have been easier to do it in Sonar, which tends to deal with standard multitracking better. Bidule’s real strong point is as a live instrument with lot’s of routing possibilities. Just for kicks is another version, “phillies in four maybe next time,” also all guitar (except for the drums) and all through Bidule. I’m in Philly for a few months, what can I say! The groovy guitar controlled organ, and the bass, are presets from Cakewalk’s excellent Dimension synth. The drums are from Nusofting’s DK+, an excellent and very reasonably priced drum sequencer/synth. If you listen carefully, both versions borrow changes from an old Gun Club hit, and the Chipsounds version borrows a well-covered Monkees song as well as a little surf rock for the bridge. Can anyone name the three songs? If you name them I’ll post versions of them.

Chipsounds costs a few bucks ($75) and has no demo version, but I have been a happy Plogue customer for a while. Bidule is one of the better few bucks I’ve spent. The plugin is just at 1.0, but plogue supports its flagship project, Bidule, quickly, thoroughly, responsively, and with lots of updates, so I expect some of the clumsiness of the interface will be worked out and a few more features worked in before long.

If I get the time, I will go over the pros and cons of some other chippy Lo-Fi plugins that are free so that the poor can fell the LoFi love too.

Remember if you are on Facebook that you have to come to way music to listen to the songs. And for everybody, don’t forget to check out the rest of the blog and way music. Off to the show, which I also went to last night when it wasn’t!

We’ll be back in Hawaii August first at long last! Come celebrate at Anna Bananas, where I’ll be playing as BeepLab (Bengali for revolution!).  I’ll be going on some time after 10:30. It’ll be all instrumental from me. Here is some of the stuff I’ve been playing lately:

. . . and below is the poster with the details. I hope you all who are in Honolulu can make it!

My woman of color partner had an allergic response to Wilco live the other night and claims chronic ankle pain from standing around all night to add injury to her insulted ear drums. She more or less agreed with the Village Voice’s recent savaging of the band as insipid white suburban angst, with no edge or danger — “nice” and safe. Admittedly, her presence accounted for about a third of the people of color we saw at the concert, but I think the Voice mistakes suburban and white for actual rather than discursive safety. While the two-kids-two-cars-and-a-dog-go-to-college-get-married-get-a-job types do more or less prevail, there are a whole range of folks who fall through this seive-like stereotype that few hear or talk about.

Let me demonstrate with some examples from the suburb I cleared the hell out of the moment I turned 16. In the family a few doors away, one went to jail, one is a quadrapalegic from a car accident, one committed suicide. Down the street, “Joe” flipped his souped up Charger, killing himself and injuring as well as traumatizing his girlfriend who was sitting next to him. “Mike” used to like to park his car on the railroad tracks and party. One night he went by himself and got hit. I could go on, and myself, I’m lucky to have survived my teens. I could also recount the quiet desperation many of those outsiders live in as adults.

Not much in the way of guns and gang-banging and urban “dangerous” rap fodder like I guess the Voice author respects, but still pretty lethal. A few of us get out somehow, becoming rock stars or college professors, in spite of long odds. And white privilege certainly offsets the loss of more marketable urban survivor stories (no one wants to admit that there is an underside to suburbs any worse than a little anomie and boredom, part and parcel of the denial and empowered ignorance that makes whiteness so weird and powerful). So when Tweedy sings about ghosts being born and other more or less veiled references to lethal suburbia it only seems safe if you pretend it is all symbolic and mere angst. In other words it seems safe if you never lived there.

I was going to write a review of Yo La Tengo and Wilco at Coney Island the other night and I guess I sort of will but I think a theme will emerge and take over.

Let’s start with Yo La Tengo, the Hoboken three piece noise pop outfit. I love their recorded work, and I discovered why: I can pick which pieces to listen too. When they manage to balance the noise with the pop, doing both, they are incredible. But the pop just by itself is just pop, no bite or edge. It’s — nice. And the more experimental noise pieces lapse into self indulgence. Sonic Youth have made a career of occupying the noisy side of the street and in recent years have developed a vocabulary — even a language — of noise through which they talk to each other and us.  Ira Kaplan just wailed when he went off on noise excursions, supported –but not really in conversation with — YLT’s great rhythm section. But he wasn’t really talking. And when the pop happened it was good and fun, but it didn’t really engage with their experimental side. The two aspects met and passed each other by without much in the way of engagement. I feel bad saying it cuz I really like the band.

Wilco tries the same move but coming from a different place. Starting out as alt country pioneers in the late nineties, they developed an edgier sound as they grew. At a crucial juncture, after firing the late and talented Jay Bennett, they could have retreated and consolidated, like the Replacements did after having to fire Bob Stinson and that would have probably finished Wilco same as it did the ‘Mats. Instead they took on experimental guitarist Nels Cline and asked him to play as a band member, not just a lead guitar dropping in every four or five minutes from space. This unlikely match produced the album — or more particularly, the song — that hooked me on Wilco. Along the way I discovered Jeff Tweedy’s fairly poetic songwriting, in the reverse order to what I suppose is the usual route of discovery.

The album, A Ghost is Born, is uneven, largely marred by a pointless, formless fourteen minute excursion into hum and static. But on there lay a gem of a song, “Handshake Drugs,” with its wonderfull pre-recovery lyrics like “if I ever was myself I wasn’t that night.” But the hook for me was the way it started out as a catchy but standard piano, bass, and drums song only to be gradually, almost imperceptibly, invaded by Cline’s insect buzz guitars taking over and consuming the song, transforming it into something wild and altogether other by the end without the listener ever quite knowing how it happened.

“Handshake Drugs” is a version in miniature of what my favorite radio show, Boston’s “Eric in the Evening” does with jazz. We would often times flip through the stations in Boston before dinner and land on some cosmopolitan sounding bebop to eat to only to land somehow invariably in Ornette Coleman/Sun Ra territory before dessert, moving there so sneakily as to never notice until it was too late to ever go back. Unfortunately, the subtle takeover was lost live as Cline dive bombed with squall right at the start of the second verse.

I have to admit I still liked some of the music, especially the guitars, both Tweedy’s and Cline’s, not to mention the occasional third one from one of the keyboard players. And the band is at the top of its game. And Tweedy writes compellingly. But still…

Caught the end of Fucked Up at East River Park in Brooklyn. Suitably fast and loud with lots of mosh action and crowd surfing. They have some pretty nihilistic politics and a history of wild shows but nothing too outrageous today. I’ not too sure what to think of them politco-punkwise. They used some Nazi shit on a split release but then Jello Biafra, author of “Nazi Punk Fuck Off,” came onstage to join them for an encore at one show. Still poking around teh interwebs for their 2004 “clarification” concerning the Nazi crap.  Maybe Jello’s gone soft?:)

Waiting for Mission of Burma to come on, Boston’s seminal contribution to postpunk. Never fails — the two tallest people at the show walk up and stand right in front of us. They were actually cool and when I asked they swapped spots with us (otherwise there would be a pic of a hairy back below instead of MOB).

I know MOB are pioneers in bringing interesting rhythmic changeups and tape looping to punk, but I never really got into their records the first time around even though they sounded interesting on paper. It all seemed a little busy and noodly, kind of the antithesis of the punk aesthetic.

Live is a different story though. They were incredibly tight as a band in a way that only people who are quite serious about their music and have been playing together for thirty years can be. And loud. And fast then slow then fast. All in all, they were way more musical than the last seventies vets I caught, the Damned, who were sloppy as hell but still fun. MOB reminded me of a guitar-driven punk-fueled version of XTC. The effects were seamlessly woven into the music. The guy doing the effects is the only non-original member I think, and he was back at the sound board, but he fit right in.

I really enjoyed the show but Monisha put on headphones and listened to Ozomatli on the train ride to Queens to wash the noise out of her head. She appreciated that they were technically very good but they were just not her cup of tea even though she quite liked Sonic Youth when we caught them last summer I’ll have to go back and give MOB’s recorded work another spin.

Ambient/found sound at the fake palm hothouse that is Winter Garden at one Financial Center in NYC…

Caught the last note of the Mountains‘ set. That note lasted about ten minutes. I’m sure it was meaningful in context.

Scanner started with a John Cage silence joke. Then some swirly organish synth string fairly cheesy with some perhaps backwards operatic singing, voice ehoed and reverbed a bit.  Second piece: one note guitar with scanned voices.  Acid washed b&w film bass clicks — dah da da dah vocal refrain thru harmonizer set off kilter. 3rd piece. Film now in color. Abstract patterns from real life. Pounding drums peeled back reveal gentle acoustic beat underneath. Phone machine messages, almost a cliche by now. Equipment malfunctions. Intended? Film laterally along some coast from above. Cobalt water: beautiful. polluted? Beside blue, bands of tan sand, green forest. Bluetanyellow bands pass by like typewriter ribbon or magnetic tape. Rest: more but different. Minimalism fun.   More here. Next.

The Kolkata monsoon, promised weeks ago, may have finally arrived this evening with the first rain in some time. In honor thereof, please cool off a few degrees by listening to the following, in no particular order, except you must listen to the new cut from rreplay, “Wash Away,” first last or in between.

• Rreplay, “Wash Away,” from our most recent sessions, this one on June 9.
• Jimi Hendrix, “Rainy Day, Dream Away.”  Jimi, with killer sax over jazzy organ…sit back and groove on a rainy day.
• Velvet Underground, “Hey Mr. Rain (version 1),” Where John Cale gets it all to himself.
• Beatles, “Rain,” psychedelic classic, backwards guitar, how can you go wrong?
• Robert Johnson, “Come on into my Kitchen,” You can feel the humidity and the vague sense of threat in this one.
• Elmore James, “The Sky is Crying,”   Listen for “and I WUNDAH,” one of the greatest single vocal phrases in the blues.

Back to Boston tomorrow night…not sure if I’ll get another Kolkata post in before returning to the states.

OK, so I’m probably not the first to think of that pun but I could not resist. Monisha and I made a side trip to Shantiniketan, the rural retreat founded by Nobel-prize winning poet Rabinranath Tagore. It is a wonderful break from the Kolkata chaos. I was a bit disappointed as far as my quest for original and edgy music because the biggest original music event of the year was taking place the day we left and we could not make it.

I was not expecting any consolation from the home of the poet but we were in for a treat. While there, we had several encounters with Bauls, mendicant mystics of Bengal who follow a way of life based on the pursuit of divine madness or frenzy. They mix elements from Tantra, Sufi Islam, Vaishnavism and Buddhism into a practice based in the body with the goal of reaching a union with the divine on earth through love.

The earliest textual traces of the Bauls date back to the fifteenth century although some posit a relationship to Persian Ba’als, wandering minstrels who can be documented as far back as the eighth century. They interpret the lack of documents as an indifference to leaving anything behind, and when I interviewed Binod Das Baul, he said the sect was as old as time. At any rate, by the mid eighteenth century it was well documented as a major sect. Baulism was probably in part an answer against the inroads made by Christianity and Islam into Bengal. Membership is by initiation and one must be of the right temperament to even be considered by a guru. Once in, it seems they live on donations for their singing and playing. There is a Baul festival every year, and Bauls come from all over. It has a bit of a reputation, as one of the things they are known for is their ganja use, which I can witness to (but of which I did not partake). Apparently a lot of city guys go to the Baul festival in mid-January, the Jaidev Kenduli Mela, to get high. It is supposed to be a pickpocket’s paradise, with lots of city dwellers involuntarily donating their wallets, too stoned to notice the absence or care.

The Bauls sing and play instruments associated with their way of life. The most common is the one-stringed ektara, which acts more like a drum. It is designed along the lines of a tiny washtub bass. A string passes through the inside of a gourd resonator and is attached to a tuning peg at the end of a piece of carved bamboo acting as a neck. The bamboo is cut so that two thin, flexible pieces surround the string before terminating at the top of the gourd. You pluck the string rhythmically and squeeze the two bamboo pieces to lower the note. There is a variation on this favored by the musicians we heard which dispenses with the bamboo neck altogether. The singer holds the gourd under one arm and the string with a metal or stone ball at the end is pulled taut with the hand of the same arm. The string is plucked with a pick made of water buffalo horn held in the free hand. Another common Baul instrument is a four-stringed lute with no frets played by pressing the fingers on the neck like a guitar or violin. They also use a two-headed drum, the khol, sort of like a set of tablas attached end to end and played on the lap. Bells attached to their ankles jangle in time to round out the sound. In indoor settings, harmonium is often used as a drone and melody instrument. The introduction of this latter instrument made it so Baul songs began to be in set keys rather than set to the singer’s voice.

The singing is ecstatic, reminding me of Sufi music. Our first encounter was at a market called the Haat and a Baul group led by singer Tarun Khyapa had set up shop and were singing and playing. As they were playing, another group of three Bauls, all dressed in orange like the first, arrived on a single motorcycle, instruments and all. This caused a moment of consternation among the first group, but they recovered and began a new piece, in which Khyapa declares he has not found the mad person he longs for. This is funny as his last name (which is an honorific) means “crazy” in the sense of divine frenzy. The desired one is left ambiguous so it could be a lover’s or the divine madness he wants. Toward the end, you can hear a sharp upward swing in the effusiveness and energy. That was right after I dropped a tip in the hat and bought their CD. The iPhone recording quality was accidentally set to low for this one so it is not so good sound. In addition, the crickets in this and the next piece are overbearingly loud even after I equalized them out as best I could.

Tarun and company had reason for concern. The second group of Bauls, led by singer Lakshman Das Baul really got the instruments and singing rocking. Just watch out for that ambassador car that nearly drove through them while leaving. Lakshman’s voice gets tangled up with the instruments as the whole ball of music got worked into a multilayered frenzy with voice, string, and percussion all beautifully interleaved. Give it a listen. I bought CDs from both musicians, but the CDs are much more polished and less ecstatic than the live recordings.

I had an encounter with another Baul a few days later which I’ll write about in its own post, as I have to sort through over an hour’s worth of recordings.