TUBA CITY

May 15, 2007

Pykrete Percussion Unit

If you're coming to Local 506 to see TUSSLE tomorrow night, try and get there early-ish. Not only will Tussle be starting right around 11pm, but you won't want to miss my new favorite local band PYKRETE PERCUSSION UNIT. I saw PPU at Signalfest a couple of weekends ago and it was a totally unique experience. Imagine local sound genius Chuck Johnson conducting and mixing (and maybe even processing the audio signals of) a large ensemble of sitting percussionists...including some recognizable faces from bands such as The Nein, Noncanon, Polvo, etc. The various layers of rhythm instruments built up around Chuck's drum machine patterns before collectively forming an awesome batucada-style groove....and then TWEEEEET! Chuck blew the whistle and things began to shift off into a different but equally exciting direction.

Chuck is going to be moving to the Bay Area later this year, so catch Pykrete with or without "The Unit" while you still can!

(Thanks to Matt Routh for passing along these photos that he took of PPU's April 28th performance at Nighlight.)

Posted by Tim at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2007

Tussle Preview

Chris Toenes wrote a lengthy TUSSLE preview in this week's Independent. Check it out for some great background info on the band's North Carolina roots. While you're at the Indy web site, you can listen to "Warning" from the latest Tussle release Telescope Mind (Smalltown Supersound). Mesmerizing minimalism makes for a more mechanical-sounding "Moody"!

Once again, the show is Wednesday night at Local 506. Only eight bucks!

Posted by Tim at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2007

Tussle at Local 506!

Two weeks from tonight, San Francisco rhythm masters TUSSLE will be playing the Local 506!! I've been a fan of these guys ever since I saw a really early incarnation play Club Waziema almost 6 years ago, so it's a privilege for me to have a hand in setting up the band's Chapel Hill debut. TUSSLE just finished opening a bunch of dates on the Hot Chip tour, but we'll get a full-on headlining set at the 506. Chuck Johnson's awesome PYKRETE PERCUSSION UNIT will open up the show with even more multi-layered drumming goodness, while DJ NASTY BOOTS will fill in all the gaps with some of his typically fine selection of electro/disco/italo/house/techno/funk records. Tickets are only eight bucks, so grab the calendar and mark it down!!

Posted by Tim at 06:50 PM | Comments (1)

March 26, 2007

Bonde Do Role: CANCELLED

First Reyshawn, now Marina. Strep throat has struck again, this time causing the Bonde Do Role singer to be hospitalized. Once again the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area will have to wait for something that it really would've enjoyed seeing. Oh well, life doesn't always go like you want. Get well soon, Marina.

The ERECTRO/LOCK guys are troopers, they are still going to DJ at Local 506 tonight. And the show is now free.

Posted by Tim at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2007

Bonde Do Role: Música Novo

A few months ago, BONDE DO ROLE signed to esteemed British indie Domino Records. A BDR full-length will be coming out later this summer...but until then, the band has a couple of great new singles out. Maybe the Domino lawyers spent some time explaining copyright law to Bonde Do Role, or maybe it's just the fact that Diplo took on some of the band's production duties...but to my ears the two new tracks are a significant step up musically from the highly entertaining but very sample-centric songs that Bonde released in 2006.

"Gasolina" is the new 12-inch/CDEP on Mad Decent....it's got Afrika Bambaataa namechecking and some awesome synth tuba oompah-farts. Highly recommended, check it out on the Bonde Do Role MySpace player.

"Solta O Frango" is the forthcoming Domino single with what seems like more of a "traditional" Rio-baile-funk vibe. Equally hot, check out this great video. I promise it's got a lot more than just cows in it...

Bonde Do Role hit the Local 506 stage in less than 24 hours! Yes, it's an earlier show than normal so the band should be playing right around 11PM-ish. The ERECTRO/LOCK guys will get things started with an awesome dance mix.

BRING 'EM OUT!

Posted by Tim at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2007

Battles Hymns

In the midst of my BONDE DO ROLE promo blitz (Monday night! They're from Brazil!), I gotta come clean and confess that at this very moment I am equally if not slightly more excited about tomorrow night's Local 506 show. BATTLES will be playing their first area show in almost two years.

I recently obtained a copy of Battles' forthcoming Warp full-length Mirrored...and it's pretty damn impressive, with all kinds of cool make-the-music-with-your-mouth craziness that I wasn't really expecting. For a sample, check out new single "Atlas" on the band's myspace player, or better yet, check out the awesome "Atlas" video that's bouncing around the internet right now. Dance 'til record skips...

Posted by Tim at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2007

Bonde Do Role: Quem sois vós?

Only 6 more days until BONDE DO ROLE hit the stage at Local 506!!!

Now who the hell are Bonde Do Role, you ask? Good question! Bonde Do Role are two guys and a girl from Curitiba, Brazil. They make a somewhat more self-aware "next-generation" variation of the baile funk/funk carioca sounds that people have been dancing to in Rio De Janeiro favelas for many years now. I think there might be some sort of tenuous "art-school-variant-of-NYC-punk" analogy that could be made here....maybe "Bonde Do Role : Rio baile funk :: Talking Heads : Blondie & Television"??? I'm not so sure, I'm just throwing that out there without thinking it through all the way.

In any case, Bonde Do Role released their first EP on Diplo's Mad Decent label in early 2006. That EP's "Melo Do Tabaco" is still up on BDR's MySpace player, but it was the other cuts that I dug the most. If you got a copy of my 2006 DJ mix, you might have heard the "Summer Nights"-sampling "Funk Da Esfiha" at the beginning of Track # 4.

I will post something about Bonde Do Role's newer 2007 releases later this week, but since I have never posted a YouTube video on here before, I would like to close out this post with an old Bonde Do Role video composed almost entirely of cow footage! The song itself is kinda awesome in its own right....that is, if you're like me and enjoy the judicious use and abuse of AC/DC samples.

Posted by Tim at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2007

Bonde Do Role at Local 506!!

Exactly three weeks from tonight, Tuba Frenzy and Local 506 proudly present the amazing BONDE DO ROLE! The Brazilian trio will be bumpin' the baile funk beats and bringin' the plunderphonic party to Chapel Hill on March 26th. Tickets are a mere 8 bucks 10 bucks, and since it's gonna be a Monday night, the whole affair will start pretty early, with Bonde Do Role going on around 11 o'clock or so.

Our friends in the mighty ERECTRO/LOCK crew will be warming up the crowd with a hot DJ set, so come early and get ready to dance!

Stay tuned to this space for more on Bonde Do Role and other upcoming shows...

Posted by Tim at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2006

The Merch Holiday Party

Local screenprinters/design gurus The Merch are throwing their annual holiday party this Friday night at the Cat's Cradle....and because they are such generous dudes, everyone in town is invited! As was the case last year, there'll be both free T-shirts and free beer while supplies last, so come out early and get in the Christmas spirit. The mighty Black Taj will rock the Cradle stage for the first time in like forever (May 2003?), and I'll be playing all sorts of 2006 dance numbers before and after the rock. LET'S MERCH IT UP, Y'ALL!!

Posted by Tim at 09:33 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2006

Girl Talk at Local 506

Locals have probably seen this show on the 506 schedule for many minutes now....but since we're halfway through November already, I need to go ahead and make some official noise about the fact that Local 506 and Tuba Frenzy are bringing the one and only GIRL TALK to Chapel Hill on Saturday, December 2nd!

Girl Talk, you say? Get familiar if you haven't already. Or check out a track from album-of-the-year contender Night Ripper:

Girl Talk - "Hold Up" (2:50, 5.89 MB)

I've been a Girl Talk enthusiast for pretty much the entire existence of this stupid blog, so I'm psyched to have a small part in making this show happen. Girl Talk mastermind Gregg Gillis doesn't go on regular "tours" so much as he does long weekend jaunts where his work schedule allows. So raise up, North Carolina, this is your one chance to see the notorious Girl Talk live show in a club near you! Advance tickets are only $10 and are available online via Etix. They're moving fairly quickly, so if you really wanna party with Girl Talk, I'd suggest buying a ticket fairly soon-like.

Opening up Girl Talk's 506 show will be local party crews Kerbloki (the full-band version!) and Robo Sapien (who've been working on a brand new set). And our pal Ricky Dollars might be putting in an appearance as well, so come early and get ready to tear da club up!!

Posted by Tim at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

November 03, 2006

Keep Feeling Fascination

The 2006 edition of Da Capo Best Music Writing just came out, and it's got a bunch of recent music writing worth reading and revisiting. Notable inclusions in this year's anthology: Wayne Marshall's brilliant and much-linked-to blog treatise on reggaeton & rhythm, an Ol' Dirty Bastard obit by Jon Caramanica, the hilarious CliffsNotes-inspired study guide for the epic masterpiece Trapped In The Closet, and Nick Weidenfeld's fascinating FADER piece on David Berman of the Silver Jews. The latter article goes into detail about Berman's attempt to commit suicide several years ago...definitely an intense read that answers many questions about Berman's psychology and life philosophy. But I'm gonna have to take slight issue with the assertion that "this is the first extended interview Berman has ever given". Maybe the first in a long while, ahem...

At any rate, as great as many of the Da Capo selections are, I've gotta focus the most fanfare on longtime Tuba Friend and NC native Dave Tompkins, whose Scratch Magazine cover story on Timbaland was also included in this year's edition of the book. "Impression To 'Land" first landed on magazine racks in the early summer of 2005, back when the electroconvulsive "Put You On The Game" was Timbo's hottest but seemingly only beat-of-the-moment. Given all the huge success and exposure that Timbaland's had this year with Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake, this particular Scratch story is now as essential as ever.

This all leads up to the fact that Mr. Tompkins will actually be rolling into Chapel Hill at some point tomorrow...and we're planning on "redistricting" a couple of hours' worth of Saturday night's After School Special at Fuse. This month's After School Special is doubling as DJ Silvaback's official Triple X Throwdown....so Silvaback will be mixing it up at midnight in honor of his personal milestone. And Dave and I will probably be playing music of all sorts before and after....Dave's got some weird rap records to play, and I'm bringing my Human League "Fascination!" 12-inch, among other things. Sadly, Timbaland will not be around to hum the "warbled synth riff", but the super-fresh extended mix of the song ("Fascination-Improvisation") has all sorts of stuttering-beat craziness that Mr. Mosley would definitely double-dig. Take 'em to the chorus!

Posted by Tim at 08:45 PM | Comments (3)

August 16, 2006

Ross is Number One!

He ain't petty, player! As I figured he would, Miami rapper Rick Ross went straight to the top of the Billboard album charts this week with his debut album Port of Miami (Slip N' Slide/Def Jam). Let's be real about this, I totally dig seeing the name Ross at #1, even though I fully realize that dude's government name is actually William Roberts. Of course "Roberts" doesn't really rhyme with "boss"...and you can't stretch it out and enunciate it like "Raaussssss". So Mr. Roberts borrowed a snappier-sounding moniker from a notorious criminal (and definitely not from the more law-abiding Javalobby founder who spoke at a conference I attended in Boston a few years ago).

As both a music trivia freak and a Ross, I would like to note that this week marks the first time in almost 34 years that an artist named Ross has reached #1 on the Billboard Albums Chart. Diana's soundtrack to the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings The Blues hit #1, but somewhat surprisingly, none of her other solo (i.e. post-Supremes) full-lengths topped the albums chart. Not even 1980's smash hit diana, which sold around 6 million copies and featured the #1 single "Upside Down" and the #5 hit "I'm Comin' Out". Such is the strangeness of Billboard chart formulas in the pre-Soundscan era.

I'll have some good things to say about the actual music on Port of Miami when I get around to throwing up my August picks next week. Until then, this post is just a congratulatory shout-out to Rick Ross the chart-topping Boss. You pushed it to the limit, Ross!

Posted by Tim at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2006

Vetiver Revisited

Andy Cabic's Vetiver is playing at Kings tomorrow night. When Vetiver came through this area two summers ago, I took the opportunity to share my general enthusiasm for Andy's various musical projects past and present (Vetiver, Devendra Banhart, Tussle, The Raymond Brake, DJing at El Rio). In that post I also included a link to an MP3 of The Raymond Brake's awesome Cognitive Mapping Vol. II contribution.

This time around, Andy's touring band includes Sanders Trippe (far right in the photo above, wearing the cowboy hat) and Brent Dunn (in the back, wearing the blue jacket), both formerly of the vastly underappreciated Greensboro rock geniuses Rebar. So I'm going to once again use a Vetiver show as motivation for posting a track off of Cognitive Mapping Volume II. Here's Rebar's "Das Math Girl", aka "the pissing-on-the-floor song":

Rebar - "Das Math Girl" (3:03, 4.20 MB)

I posted Dave Brylawski's CogMapII track after UNC won the NCAA Championship last April. So even though I'm the only one counting here, that makes three CogMapII tracks down and twenty-three more to go. At this rate the whole thing will be online by 2029. Or who knows, maybe a lot sooner than that...

Back to Vetiver....the new album To Find Me Gone is shimmeringly gorgeous, a really nice progression from the 2004 debut. The Midheaven/Revolver site has an MP3 of the song "Double" available for download right now. The MP3 file is confusingly mislabeled and mistagged as a Jel track(!), but here's the correct link:. Link has been fixed, MP3 now properly tagged:

Vetiver - "Double" (5:15, 6.01 MB)

One of Vetiver's opening acts tomorrow night is Danny Vaughn's NONCANON project. NONCANON was great as a one-person solo thing before the Analogue reunion at 506 last fall (oops, guess I missed that obvious opportunity to post an MP3 of Analogue's "Goofball"...). Now NONCANON is apparently a two-piece that features the considerable percussion skills of Rob Koegler. Should be worth checking out, for sure.

Posted by Tim at 08:25 PM | Comments (5)

May 23, 2006

Yo, I'll Solve It

I guess all those childhood years I spent reading Games Magazine must've served me well somehow. Today I found out that I won Turntable Lab's first-ever "Rap Pictogram Contest". There was no prize or anything, save the simple satisfaction of being the one to complete the cipher. But it was definitely a fun diversion...and it was way more challenging than the super-simple Sudoku that was printed in The News and Observer yesterday.

Below, for the possible enjoyment of others, is the actual rap pictogram. To solve the puzzle, you just have to figure out which rap lyrics are being pictogrammed.

A hint for those of you who come out to Disco Inferno on at least a semi-regular basis: the solution to the puzzle has been played at several of our parties over the last couple of years, including the recent April bash.

Stumped? The answer can be found in this post on Estoy Con Estupido (the Turntable Lab blog).

I wish I could draw worth a damn, it would be pretty fun to come up with a few rap pictograms of my own. Or maybe Papa D needs to do a special pictogram edition of "Lyrically Speaking" during a future night of Hell trivia...

Posted by Tim at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2006

Count Bass D, Sunday 5/21

Real nice hip-hop show at the Cradle this Sunday night, headlined by Count Bass D. MF Doom aficionados probably know the Nashville, TN rapper/producer from "Potholderz" (off the MM..Food record), but it's the Count's more recent Begborrowsteel that is really worth checking. The completely self-produced (and very well-produced) EP packs 16 creative cuts/sketches into a strangely entertaining 30 minute ride. Definitely one of the more satisfyingly bizarre hip-hop records I've heard in the last couple of years....it should be pretty interesting to see what kind of live show the Count puts together.

Social Memory Complex are one of the openers I want to make sure and catch. Over the last year these dudes have become one of my favorite local acts/bands of any genre. Staj Prezence raps, Modest makes the beats, and DJ Trizzak scratches it up. Check out the fantastic banger "Fantastic Machine" on one of their MySpace pages.

L in Japanese is also on the bill...hopefully he'll bring Crash and Staj on stage for "Yeah" (now playing in L's player), this new-ish jam based around a pretty awesome chopped-up Joan Jett sample. I love rock and roll, yessir!

Posted by Tim at 06:16 PM | Comments (3)

April 22, 2006

A-Trak at UNC, April 2002

In 1997, during what might have been the peak of press hype about "turntablism", 15-year-old DJ A-Trak became the youngest DJ ever to win the DMC World Championship. These days, the 24-year-old turntable wizard tours the globe not as a battle DJ but as the official tour DJ for multiplatinum rapper Kanye West. As a matter of fact, A-Trak and Kanye are apparently rocking a coliseum in Wilmington as I type this. Over the next month, A-Trak will be going solo for awhile, touring in support of his newly released Sunglasses is a Must DVD. And that got me thinking back to a time many years ago when I had just moved back to Carrboro...

Exactly four years ago this weekend, A-Trak came to UNC-Chapel Hill as part of an event put on by the Carolina Electronic Music Symposium. Things got started in the Carolina Union with some workshops/talks. For his part, A-Trak got on the overhead projector and started explaining in great detail the written notation system that he had developed to describe scratching. Talk about takin' these muh-f*ckers back to school!! I certainly hadn't taken the prerequisites for this class (Flares and Crabs 101?), but it was fascinating to see someone put so much thought and analysis into the various noises that a scratch/battle DJ can make and the various ways that those sounds could be structured/organized in a composition.

Renowned bhangra DJ Rekha was also in the building, and after she spent some time discussing her experiences in the NYC bhangra scene, everyone adjourned outside for live DJ sets on the steps of the South Building (of all places!). A-Trak went first and tore it up. I'm not sure what everyone expected from a talented turntable virtuouso who had just finished explaining his own musical notation system, but our little stairstep party got rocked by way more than mere technical trickery. A-Trak used all sorts of records to keep the crowd excited, building one really memorable routine around current Missy and Jay-Z hits. "Come on the track like duh duh da-da!". With some pitch control thrown in to make Jay's singing more, uh, Steve Miller-like. The whole set was just ridiculously good. I stood on the top step with a huge grin on my face, taking lots of pictures and marvelling at the skills of this kid who wasn't even old enough to drink.

It doesn't look like I'll get to see A-Trak on this upcoming solo tour, so Sunglasses is a Must may actually have to be a must. In any case, I gotta say that I think A-Trak totally deserves all of the glitz-and-glamour success that he's been having and Kanye deserves some major credit for specifically choosing the kid to be his DJ instead of simply settling for whatever conventional choice (or DAT machine) the industry execs or tour managers offered up. As the AllHipHop.com interviewer suggests in this A-Trak feature, Kanye having A-Trak as his DJ seems like a bit of a throwback to the days when the biggest rappers often had the best DJs behind them. Here's hoping that A-Trak actually gets to put his own DJ routine somewhere towards the end of Kanye's third album!

Posted by Tim at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2006

Microphone Fiends

L in Japanese totally killed it as a DJ at last Saturday night's Disco Inferno, so I gotta show some love and put in a major plug for the hip-hop showcase that L's putting on this Monday night at the Cat's Cradle. The lineup includes Chapel Hill veteran Kaze, Raleigh's Shelly B, Durham's K-Hill (who was real nice at the 506 three weeks ago), a few other local acts with whom I am not so familiar, and of course L in Japanese himself. As L is wont to exclaim, "SHOW DAT LOVE, Y'ALL!!!".

Posted by Tim at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2006

Blowfly + Kerbloki + Despot + Ricky Dollars

Ricky Dollars graciously dropped some verbal publicity for my monthly Hell party, so the least I can do is try and return the favor by promo-ing his opening slot on the very strange rap show that's taking place at Local 506 this Wednesday. Blowfly is the oldest of old-school cats, a bawdy 59-year-old jokester who is often referred to as "the original X-rated rapper". Local rap stars Kerbloki make ya shit your pants, most definitely. Despot is down with the Def Jux label. And Ricky Dollars kicks things off, apparently at an extremely early 9pm. So skip Lost and come watch the first live performance of "How Dick Cheney Could Just Kill A Man"!!

Posted by Tim at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2006

This Note's For You

It was only a few months ago that Red Hat started using a couple of Jacuzzi Brothers tracks in an online mini-movie about the Red Hat Intern Program. Today the open-source software company announced that revenue had surged by 37%, quarterly profit had more than doubled since a year ago, and earnings per share had exceeded Wall Street's expectations. Coincidence? I think not. Sure, RHAT has already dropped a bit in this evening's after-hours trading, but that's to be expected given the fact that the stock has nearly tripled in value over the last year. Clearly, investors are bullish on the new Jacuzzi-scored ad campaign!

On a related note....about a month ago The News and Observer ran a front-page AP story about independent bands who had refused to license their music for use in Hummer advertisements. Right there in the opening paragraph was the news that our old friends/rock idols Trans Am were offered a jawdropping $180,000 for the song "Total Information Awareness" (from their 2004 album Liberation). Like LiLiPUT and The Thermals, Trans Am stuck to their principles and told Hummer to take a hike. Now I have nothing but love and respect for dem TransAm boys...I'm a huge fan of their music and I admire them for taking the stance that they did. But I couldn't help wondering to myself if I would've done the same thing if I were in their shoes and someone offered me 180K. I mean, unless Hummer wanted my band to make a complete fool of itself by playing in Hummer showcases or appearing in icky print and TV ads, I think that I would've just let them use the song, cashed the check, donated a big chunk of Hummer's money to the Sierra Club, and then chuckled to myself knowing that every meal and every drink that I bought over the next couple of years would basically come straight out of Hummer's bottom line. Who's zoomin' who in that situation? But maybe that's just my hypothetical logic at work. Pitchfork recently published some more extensive quotes about the Hummer offers from Trans Am's Phil Manley and one of the guys from The Thermals. I definitely see their points and I understand their reluctance to go down that slippery slope of selling out.

Regardless of the outcome, however, here's what's truly ironic about the Hummer proposal that Trans Am received:

1. The Hummer brand name is owned by General Motors, and although AM General does much of the Hummer manufacturing, all Hummers/H2s/H3s are marketed and distributed by GM. General Motors also has this little division/brand called Pontiac....and the Trans Am is only one of the most famous Pontiac cars of all time. So it's a good thing that the Hummer proposal never came in the form of a let-GM-use-your-music-or-cease-and-desist letter!

2. Throughout the mid-to-late 1990s, Trans Am released some of the most fun and adrenaline-charged car-driving anthems that record-store credit could buy. 2004's politically-charged and decidedly anti-administration Liberation is a far more "serious" album (check out the Bush-sampling "Uninvited Guest" for an example)...and yet that's the Trans Am record that someone finally wanted for an automobile ad? Too strange.

Of course, a third smaller irony is that at the very moment I type this, Tom Scharpling is probably once again using Trans Am's excellent "Enforcer" (from the band's awesome 1996 debut) as the soundbed for his talksets on "The Best Show on WFMU". Now that's a priceless honor...

Posted by Tim at 10:42 PM | Comments (4)

February 22, 2006

Rappin' Dick

Shortly after news broke about Harry Whittington's birdshot-induced heart attack last week, I emailed a certain Cyrus Hill bandmate of mine and suggested that he record a Dick Cheney rap over the "How I Could Just Kill A Man" instrumental. Given how many times we listened to that "Kill A Man" beat during those three weeks after Thanksgiving, I wasn't really that surprised when Ricky Dollars emailed me back and said he had already thought of the exact same thing! Better yet, the boy actually managed to execute the idea in practically Legendary KO-like time, so go check out his MySpace page to listen to and/or download "How Dick Cheney Could Just Kill A Man". One pellet-sized caveat: the song's got a strange Cheney-imitating first-person thing going on, which kinda creeps me out while also reminding me of Rappin' Duke. Da-haaah, da-haaah....da hah-haah hah-hah haaaa!

In related news, the genius who produced the aforementioned "Tramp"-sampling classic actually hits the Cat's Cradle this Saturday night alongside a first-string Wu-Tang MC. I mean, is there a full-on Cypress Hill revival around the corner or what?!?

Posted by Tim at 08:14 PM | Comments (1)

December 13, 2005

The Phuncky Feel Ones

My battery-drained camera took some pretty hazy photos of our Cypress Hill set at The Great Cover Up a couple weeks back, but the good folks at Tropic of Food posted a nice clear shot of Stingy/Sen Dog and Ricky Dollars/B-Real kickin' that phuncky Cypress Hill shit. Cy Dog and Coffee Muggs are lurking in the background during this particular shot, the ladies from the crowd were not yet dancing onstage, and our secret special guest was probably still hitting himself backstage...

If you missed all of the insanity-in-the-membranity the first time 'round, come on out to the Cradle this Saturday night for the second and final Cyrus Hill show ever! More details later in the week...

Posted by Tim at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

December 10, 2005

We Jam Econo

If you don't have yet another holiday party to attend this evening, consider going to Local 506 to check out We Jam Econo: The Story of The Minutemen. The 85-minute documentary about The Minutemen is making its official Triangle debut at 8pm. Afterwards, at least 9 Triangle bands will attempt to keep the jammin'-econo spirit alive by covering Minutemen songs throughout the night. The list of bands slated to pay tribute includes Cantwell Gomez & Jordan, Hotel Motel, Regina Hexaphone, Dom Casual, The Chest Pains, and the presumably all-female "Minutemaids".

I can't make it to the screening/show tonight, but while I was in Chicago last month, I went with some friends to see We Jam Econo at the Gene Siskel Film Center. The film is really well done, with a truly remarkable amount of footage from live Minutemen shows. And not just later ones from 1984-1985, the film even has video from a November 1980 show! As well as a pretty great acoustic set that was apparently recorded for a public access channel. I'd love to hear the acoustic set in its entirety, maybe the We Jam Econo DVD will come with a bonus audio disc of some sort?

In this week of numerous tributes and memorials marking the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination, perhaps it's worth pointing out in a much less overwrought way that this December 22nd marks the 20th anniversary of D. Boon's car crash. One of my favorite parts of We Jam Econo is the full-band interview (1985?) where you get to hear D. Boon go on some philosophical spiels about the band and what makes them tick. That's him in the center of the film still below.

Posted by Tim at 12:28 PM | Comments (3)

November 30, 2005

The Great Cover Up

By necessity this might be one of the vaguer promo spiels that I have ever attempted, but here goes anyway....

The 7th Annual Great Cover Up is happening Thursday through Saturday of this week at Kings. If you've never been to a night of The Great Cover Up, it can be a lot of fun - just imagine three straight nights of various local musicians performing short one-off cover band sets to a bunch of excited people who don't know what (other) bands they're going to hear when they walk in the door. The wide variety of bands/artists chosen and the whole element of surprise are a large part of the charm....and I frequently hear people recall the brilliant moments that I missed with comments like, "oh man, so-and-so pulled off an amazing set of such-and-such, plus they even looked just like them."

So anyway, I'm performing in The Great Cover Up for the first time this year. My group hits the stage sometime Thursday night, maybe around midnight or so? I cannot reveal who we are going to be, but I will say that we will be deviating significantly from The Great Cover Up mean, if such a thing exists. One of our crew is a Great Cover Up veteran, but his role on Thursday will be nothing like his previous stints as David Yow and Glenn Danzig (see below).

For starters, he'll actually be keeping his shirt on this time!

All proceeds from The Great Cover Up go to benefit Interact and the Wake County Literacy Council, so come on out to Raleigh on Thursday night. And/or Friday. And/or Saturday. I can't get any more specific than that, but I think most Cover Up aficionados would agree that it's those knowable unknowns that help make the event so intriguing...

Posted by Tim at 12:50 AM | Comments (4)

November 25, 2005

Black Taj

A year and a half ago I was idly speculating about if/when a Black Taj album would come out at some point in the future. So now I feel the need to help spread the exciting news that yes, a Black Taj CD has recently been released on New York City's Amish Records. Amish has been very supportive of the NC rock scene over the years, having released records by Pipe, Evil Weiner, and Ivanovich. Now the folks at Amish kindly give us 44 minutes of the Taj. Astute air guitarists are already squealing in delight...and here's an MP3 teaser for the rest of you:

Black Taj - Clover

Read this Independent article for all the juicy details. And for any of you Triangle residents looking for some post-Thanksgiving entertainment of the non-sports variety, Black Taj play Kings tomorrow night with Birds of Avalon. Solid rock, indeed.

Posted by Tim at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2005

Konono N°1

Exactly one week ago, some friends and I got to watch the incredible Congolese group Konono N°1 at Logan Square Auditorium in Chicago. Konono N°1 dish out these epic thumb-piano-and-percussion jams that reach a completely new level through the addition of otherworldly (over)amplification, melodic singing, energetic chanting, and a charismatic leader armed with a traffic whistle and a cool hat.

We had to leave during the 5th song or so, but up to that point it was a pretty amazing hour-and-a-half performance. I'll leave the formal concert review to the Chicago Tribune, but here are a few pictures that I took:

And here's my full album of (mostly blurry) Konono N°1 snapshots.

To hear an approximation of what this live Konono N°1 show sounded like, check out this 1978 Konono N°1 recording that Christopher Porter kindly posted on his blog The Suburbs Are Killing Us. Then go cop yourself a copy of Congotronics (out on Crammed Discs), which Ryko is now distributing domestically to retail outlets big (Amazon) and small (CD Alley).

And look, now we even have a Congotronics 2 CD/DVD comp to look forward to...

Posted by Tim at 12:36 AM | Comments (0)

October 30, 2005

Thee More Shallows

My friends in Thee More Shallows will be haunting the Duke Coffeehouse stage tonight along with fellow Bay Area rockers The Jim Yoshii Pile-Up. Former Tractor Hips drummer Brian "Chavo" Fraser is playing with the Shallows these days, so the show will be a North Carolina homecoming of sorts.

Here's a deep cut from Thee More Shallows' newest album More Deep Cuts (which came out a few months ago on Turn Records):

Thee More Shallows - 2 am (4.45 MB)

Check it out....and come out to this cheap BYOB show tonight if you dig it!

Posted by Tim at 11:31 AM | Comments (2)

October 27, 2005

Now You See Me, Now You Don't

For several hours last night the Cradle was mostly "now you don't" and not so much "now you see me"....but Ghostface finally joined Cappadonna, Trife, and the rest of Theodore Unit onstage at around 1:15 or so. What followed was worth the wait - a set that featured at least as many Supreme Clientele joints as the Ghost/Raekwon gig that I caught in August 2001 at San Francisco's Maritime Hall. We were dealin' with Supreme Clientele, alright..."Ghost Deini", "Nutmeg", "Apollo Kids", "Child's Play", "Cherchez La Ghost" (during an amusing, uh, 'audience-participation' period), "Mighty Healthy", and "One" (a 2:15am closer). If only they'd thrown in "We Made It" or "The Grain"....

Ghostface did some of his newer material, too - "Biscuits", "Holla", and "Run" from last year's Pretty Toney Album, the Queen-quoting "Smith Brothers" from that Theodore Unit album, and "Be Easy", the dope new Pete Rock-produced single from the forthcoming album Fish Scale.

Most memorable "in-between-song" moments:

- Ghost's entertaining tirade about hip-hop getting way too commercial
- A fairly long moment of silence for ODB and the recently-passed Rosa Parks

Hot setlist surprises from back in the 90s:

- "Criminology" to start off the set, followed shortly thereafter by "Ice Cream"
- "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" to break that moment of silence for ODB
- "Triumph" (Forever does seem like a mighty long time...ago)
- "Fish" (perhaps the only Ironman song of the night? That is, if you don't count Cappadonna warming up the crowd with his incredible verse from "Winter Warz"...)

Anyway, that's a quick summary for all my people (where the #*$! you at?) who couldn't make it and/or had to leave early. Maybe Ghostface will come back to NC after Fish Scale comes out. Until then, be easy...

Posted by Tim at 11:55 PM | Comments (2)

October 06, 2005

He Fills His Head With Culture

How does a smart and self-aware music journalist preview the reunion tour of a seminal and much-lauded art-punk band without feeling like he's simply throwing more of the same ol' crit-speak out into the ether? In his Gang of Four preview in the new Independent, Chris Toenes tackles this task by going a little meta and asking around locally. A couple of my personal Gang of Four anecdotes wound up getting printed alongside some excellent rhythm-section talk from the one and only Dave Cantwell.

Unlike Cantwell, I was never very good at drumming in a Hugo Burnham style. Joby's Opinion spent at least one or two practices trying to work out a cover of "Natural's Not In It", since (a) it is an awesome song and (b) we figured we could have a good laugh by playing it immediately after our "Ether"-quoting "Chinese Jet Pilot". On a few occasions we even joked about taking the whole thing to the next level and forming a Gang of Four cover band called "Entertainment!". But I quickly realized that I didn't have the drumming chops necessary to play all of those incredible syncopated beats and rhythms - such a critical part of the Gang of Four sound.

At any rate, Entertainment! is still one of my favorite albums of all time and I happily threw "Damaged Goods" on once again while DJ-ing this past Saturday night. I wasn't exactly sure how Gang of Four would be received at Hell and/or how to mix out of something so fast, so I took the drum break from the middle of the song and whipped up a special "Damaged Goods edit" of Outkast's "Hey Ya!". Yeah, I know a lot of folks probably never need to hear "Hey Ya!" ever again, but maybe it sounds slightly less played with a punchy snare-kick heartbeat behind it? Here's an MP3:

Hey Ya! With Damaged Goods Drums

Incidentally, while mixing these drums in I realized for the first time that "Hey Ya!" has a really weird time signature. I think it's 11/4, maybe? The main phrase is 22 or 11 beats long, depending on how you count it.

Back to Gang of Four....it looks like the Cradle show is finally sold out as of tonight. I've got one extra ticket that I need to get rid of, so holler at me if you don't have a ticket but want one...

Posted by Tim at 01:14 AM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2005

On The Radio

I hadn't done a radio show since the day before Christmas, but it was fun getting back on the WXYC airwaves this afternoon. Here's my tracklist:

Artist	Song	Release	Label
--- 12:00 PM BREAKPOINT ---
Damian Marley	Welcome to Jamrock	12-inch	Tuff Gong
Lloyd and Devon	Push Push
talkset
M83	Night	s/t	MUTE
Hudson Bell	Slow Burn	When The Sun Is The Moon	Monitor
Christian Marclay	His Master's Voice	Records	Atavistic
Himuro	Button of Reset	Mild Fantasy Violence	ZOD
talkset
Minnie Wallace & Her Night Hawks	Field Mouse Stomp	Memphis Shakedown: More Jug Band Classics	JSP
Sonny Terry	I'm Gonna Get on My Feets Afterwhile	Sonny's Story	Prestige Bluesville
Black Sabbath	The Wizard
Karate Party	Feces 111	Black Helicopter	S-S
The Juan Maclean	Tito's Way	Less than Human	DFA
J-Live	Harder	"Harder" 12-inch	FATBEATS
--- 1:00 PM BREAKPOINT ---
Yo-Yo	You Can't Play With My Yo-Yo	Make Way For The Motherlode
talkset
Jason Forrest	New Wave Folk Austerity	Shamelessly Exciting	SONIG
Tenement Halls	When the Swifts Come Home	Knitting Needles & Bicycle Bells	MERGE
Luiz Bonfa (composer)	Manha de Carnaval	Black Orpheus Soundtrack	Fontana
Four Tet	You Could Ruin My Day	Pause	Domino
Afrodisiac Sound System (featuring Raashan Ahmad)	Revolution	12-inch	Kajmere
So Percussion	Track 2	Steve Reich: Drumming	CANTALOUPE
talkset
Basic Vocab	Our Day In The Sun	Our Day in the Sun EP	COUNTERFLOW
J.V.C. Force	Strong Island	Doin' Damage	B-Boy
Ja'afar Hassan	They Taught Me	Choubi Choubi!: Folk & Pop Sounds from Iraq	SUBLIME FREQUENCIES
Etta Baker & Cora Phillips	Carolina Breakdown	Carolina Breakdown	MUSIC MAKER
talkset
Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio	Oof (excerpt)	Live at the River East Center	DELMARK
--- 2:00 PM BREAKPOINT ---

I didn't get any requests except for a joking "Can you play 'Trapped In The Closet'?" call from one of my friends. But I did get a couple of who-is-this calls during Four Tet (playing tonight at 506, aw yeah) and Hudson Bell. I was psyched that someone wanted to know more about the Hudson Bell track, Hudson's actually a good buddy of mine from my San Francisco days. His forthcoming album When The Sun Is The Moon was even recorded/engineered by my main man Chris Palmatier. Palmatier's longtime Brian and Chris collaborator Brian Fraser (formerly of Chapel Hill's Tractor Hips) plays drums on the record, too. When The Sun Is The Moon comes out October 11th on Monitor Records, so check it out if you dig well-written rock songs full of earnest hooks and guitar-pedal goodness.

Posted by Tim at 07:11 PM | Comments (4)

August 30, 2005

When They Play That New Jeezy

A bunch of hip-hop-friendly blogs and websites have been buzzing about Atlanta (t)rapper/Def Jam artist Young Jeezy and his new joint "Go Crazy". Partially because of the hot remix featuring none other than the president of Jeezy's label (which reminds me, cheers and celebratory cymbal crashes to Tono Bungay drummer Tony Cenicola for snapping those eye-catching Hova-photos). The other reason all the so-called "dope boys" seem to be goin' crazy for the Jeezy track is its distinctive beat propelled by those soulful horns and tympani rolls. When I first heard the song a few weeks back it sounded really great but seemed oddly familiar...and not because I was somehow thinking of the original source of the sample, which turns out to be "Man Oh Man" by The Impressions. After a few days I finally realized that "Go Crazy" reminded me a whole lot of a song that local rapper Spectac did last fall during the Bandwidth release party at Local 506. Luckily, WXYC simulcasted that show over the radio and eventually made the audio files available online. So I went back and found the live version of a song called "Pushin'", which at the time Spectac said was "comin' off the new album". Here it is:

Spectac - Pushin' (live at Local 506, November 6th, 2004)

The "Go Crazy" beat is a little more handclappy, whereas the drums on Spectac's tune are a little more sparse and empty. But damn if the sample isn't exactly the same. According to the Thug Motivation 101 liner notes, the Young Jeezy joint was produced by Atlanta DJ/producer Don Cannon. I'm really curious as to whether some version of Cannon's beat might have been spread around or shopped around before Jeezy/Def Jam bought it and released it, or whether this is a strange situation where two distinct producers just so happened to independently use the same opening seconds of a lesser-known Impressions b-side from 1965. I need to email that kid Spectac and see what he knows about this.

For what it's worth, the Young Jeezy album sold very well in its first week (176,000 copies), debuting at #2 on the Billboard album chart. Given that today's highly-anticipated new release features a surefire-single ("Touch the Sky") heavily based on Curtis Mayfield's classic 1970 cut "Move On Up", I suspect that the estate of the late great Mr. Mayfield will be getting some major checks from Def Jam this year. If there's a hell below, maybe it has some ATMs...

Posted by Tim at 11:11 PM | Comments (1)

August 22, 2005

Ricky Dollars - Live On Stage!

Ricky Dollars was living in Brooklyn last fall when I first posted a link to his politically charged take on Jay-Z's "99 Problems". But Ricky D moved back to the Triangle a couple of months ago and that qualifies him to be one of the countless local acts performing in the massive Troika Music Festival that's going on this week. Come see Durham's newest wordsmith at Joe & Jo's this Thursday night at 8pm! It's not the best timeslot or anything, but the Bueno Love Baller Soundsystem will be working the fader and trying to hype up the crowd, so please come out early and catch the madness if you can.

In case you missed it the first time, here's the hit:

Ricky Dollars - 99 Problems

Of course there are a lot of other really good and/or totally-new-to-me bands playing the Troika Music Festival. Check out the full schedule for details. While I am plugging my pals, I should go ahead and mention that Tennis & the Mennonites were great when they opened up for Superchunk last month. Tennis is playing the Duke Coffeehouse on Friday night at 8:30pm. Your serve.

Posted by Tim at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

August 17, 2005

Belly Dancers

If you're looking for something to do in Chapel Hill tonight, come on out to Wetlands Dancehall for what should be a really fun and interesting bill. Sisterna Kali is a local belly dance troupe. I'm not sure how many belly dancers are in Sisterna Kali or how many you need to qualify as a "troupe" (my word, not necessarily theirs), but one of the belly dancers also happens to be the proprietor of one of the area's best-loved hair salons, so you know it's gonna be stylish.

Red Smokes White is the new band led by former Trailer Bride bassist Daryl White. I remember enjoying the band's Wetlands debut back in late June when they opened up for Jule Brown. Daryl's also been working on some long-distance recordings with former Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison, whom he played with in the Bobby Bare Jr. touring band. I'd definitely like to check out those tracks when they come together!

Chachalaca is opening up the show and I know nothing about them except for the fact that I think former Capsize 7 guitarist/singer Joe Taylor is in the band.

I'm going to be spinning records before/between the bands, probably just some hip-hop and dancehall stuff that's a little too chill for Hell.

Things start up a little after 10pm. The cover is six bucks but email me if you want one of my guest list spots.

Posted by Tim at 07:50 AM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2005

Random Notes

Rolling Stone magazine gave Chapel Hill/Raleigh/Durham the #2 ranking on their new list of "Schools that Rock" (er, "areas that rock and have schools"?). I doubt RS really crunched the numbers or came up with the hard metrics that might give their top-10-music-scene list the same sort of official weight as all those oft-cited "Best Places To Work" and "Best Places To Live" studies, but hey, it's always nice to see WXYC and CD Alley get plugged in a big music magazine. Too bad the NC piece had to start off with some out-of-date drooling over Duke's now-scaled-back "free iPod" program.

Local 506 wasn't explicitly mentioned as a factor in the Triangle's #2 ranking, though I vaguely recall the club being praised in a similar 2003 Rolling Stone article that claimed Chapel Hill was "the fourth best college music town in the United States". In any case, I'd like to take the time right now to praise Local 506 for experimenting with a new weekly podcast on which a host runs through the upcoming shows for the week, gives some information about each band, and plays some short musical snippets from some of the bands. I'll have to see how I feel after hearing two or three of these things, but my initial suggestion for improvement might be to try and supplement the informative "concertline"-type summary with periodic podcasts of actual standalone MP3s (legally obtained or voluntarily submitted) from some of the upcoming acts. A full MP3 would allow a curious listener to hear a lot more than a few seconds of a band, and perhaps the MP3 could even be tagged with some sort of "playing at Local 506 on August 4th"-type comment.

I didn't change the tag or anything but I will go ahead and use one of my podcast feeds to send out an MP3 of a band playing Local 506 this Thursday, August 4th. Fan Modine is opening up for the Tall Dwarfs that night, and here's a 1999 single that I found online:

Fan Modine - "Pageantry"

Not sure who is playing on this much older song, but Fan Modine's main man Gordon Zacharias is currently supported by an impressive cast of Chapel Hill rock vets, including Ash Bowie (Polvo, Libraness), Chuck Johnson (Spatula, Shark Quest, Idyll Swords, Pykrete), and Lee Waters (Work Clothes, Lud, Cobra Kahn). Should be a solid opener for Knox and Bathgate.

Posted by Tim at 11:56 PM | Comments (2)

July 13, 2005

Band That Could Be God

And this year's Indie-Rock Reunion "Best in Show" Award goes to...

...Dinosaur Jr. By a mile. And quite a few decibels.

I was a bit too young to go to shows when Dinosaur's Bug tour stopped at The Brewery in 1988, but I am having a really hard time imagining how that particular show could've been that much better than Sunday night's Cradle performance, save for its more authentic Reagan-era post-hardcore context or maybe the sort of revelatory in-the-moment realness that isn't quite as mindblowing once a band's records have been canonized and memorized.

In any case, Dino 2005 was truly awesome. It's been a long time since I geeked out about a show enough to lookup the setlist online afterwards. Incidentally, that version of the setlist is slightly incomplete since it's based on the pre-written band setlist. Folks who stuck around just a little longer were rewarded with a (seemingly unplanned) third encore: an intense version of that amazing noise-dirge "Tarpit". Quite the sludgefeast!

Posted by Tim at 10:30 PM | Comments (2)

July 03, 2005

That's What's Up

Ibiblio director Paul Jones recently discovered that his former student employee Marisa Brickman is the main subject of a new BusinessWeek article about "lifestyle marketing" and hipster-focused "product seeding". When she lived in Chapel Hill, Marisa DJ'ed at WXYC and started up the zine 'Sup. Now Brickman is the director of event marketing and public relations for Cornerstone Promotion, the company that publishes the overly consumption-focused but really well-designed and generally on-point music magazine The Fader.

Someone with a black-and-white worldview that is more purist than mine could probably go on a tirade about Cornerstone's brand of cleverly insidious "lifestyle marketing" or whatever. Personally, I'm not going to go there since I regularly enjoy flipping through The Fader, skipping over most of those ads in favor of the lengthy photo spreads, and reading up on all of the hip new artists that I may or may not actually end up liking. Plus, I entered a Fader contest a few months ago and wound up winning a copy of the new Public Enemy "London Invasion" DVD autographed by none other than Chuck D himself. If Marisa and her coworkers want to regularly send me free stuff like that, they can "product seed" me all day long!

Anyway, the most surprising thing that I learned from the article was not that the ever-ambitious Brickman is now in charge of event marketing for Cornerstone Promotion, but rather that ex-Bitch Magnet guitarist, avid metal fan, and all-around-nice-guy Jon Fine is now writing for BusinessWeek online! Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Man cannot live on music alone...

Posted by Tim at 02:51 PM | Comments (1)

June 23, 2005

Gang Gang Dance

Here are a couple of blurry camera-phone snapshots from tonight's mesmerizingly great Gang Gang Dance show at Local 506.

Rototom-rock rules!

Posted by Tim at 01:35 AM | Comments (6)

June 18, 2005

M.I.A. Remixed

So as I briefly alluded to when posting my M.I.A./N.W.A. mix last week, M.I.A.'s record label XL Recordings made a few M.I.A. acappellas available on their website back in April. Their goal was to kickstart "Online Piracy Funds Terrorism", an "anyone can participate"-type project that invited folks to create and upload their own M.I.A. remixes and collectively build some sort of collaborative online sequel to the Diplo mixtape that did so much to amplify M.I.A.'s buzz late last year.

It's sort of fascinating to watch big record companies and other large corporations attempt to embrace the mash-up craze and other ideas from "remix culture". Because of potential liabilities and other legal concerns, these businesses wind up having to be very careful and calculated...so that they can simultaneously advance their own promotional goals without exposing themselves to any lawsuits. Last spring, DavidBowie.com partnered with Sony and Audi to give away a TT Coupe and a bunch of other prizes to the people who created the best mashups of one old David Bowie song and one new Bowie song from his 2003 album Reality. The mashups couldn't contain copyrighted music from any other artists, though they were allowed to contain various loops and beats from the loop libraries included with ACID, Sony's popular loop-based music production software.

This "Online Piracy Funds Terrorism" project also shows a few signs of having been meticulously cleared by record company lawyers. On the web page where one might upload one's mix, there's a clause that says the remixer confirms that "all rights in and to the remixed versions of the recordings" belong to both Zomba Publishing and XL Recordings. I haven't consulted my lawyer friends on exactly what those various prepositions mean, but I'm 99% sure that this clause nixes the possible use of, say, an N.W.A. track. And unless I finish up a Jacuzzi Brothers/"Bucky Done Gun" remix that I started playing around with, I probably won't be uploading any rights-ceding mp3s to the XL site.

Of course, I'm sure that Diplo never signed off on a similar clause after finishing the original Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1 mixtape. And I doubt that the people at XL/Beggars really care much about the clause anyway, it's probably just a cover-your-ass maneuver while they look the other way. One of the guys behind mashup clearinghouse site boomselection.info humorously described the "Online Piracy Funds Terrorism" project as "a direct invitation to bootleggers everywhere to do the marketing people at Beggar's Banquet a favour".

If that's accurate, I guess that makes me just another remixing cog in the industry's promotional machine. But I don't really mind, 'cause Arular is a really dope album and I think it's pretty cool when any corporation actually seems to want me to rethink or transform its product in some way instead of merely consuming it as-is.

Plus, it's been a ton of fun trying to come up with new ideas for M.I.A. blends. My newest one uses the instrumental track from one of the freshest old-school hip-hop tracks ever: "On The Radio" from legendary harmonizing rappers Crash Crew. You can download it here:

Beats That Made The Crash Crew Bang

When I first tried out this mix, I liked how completely natural the "Pull Up The People" chorus sounded over that funky keyboard line. Those grimy-ass Arular beats are great and all, but I'm finding that M.I.A. rocks equally hard over synth-y 80s-ish funk tracks. Beats that make ya bang bang bang...

Posted by Tim at 04:43 PM | Comments (4)

June 13, 2005

Jugar Por La Playa

Disco Rodeo is a slightly more abysmal place to see a rock show than even The Ritz was. But when the Pixies finally played "Vamos" towards the end of their set tonight, I looked at the Tecate can in my hand and the "Bienvenidos" sign on the balcony ledge and had to smile at the fact that I was hearing all of that Spanglish in a space that normally functions as a cavernous Latino dance club.

Other random setlist-inspired observations:

During the year that my friend Dave and I rode around in his station wagon listening to Surfer Rosa over and over, I'm pretty sure we would have totally mocked the idea of old fogeys paying big bucks to see has-been rock bands play WRDU-sponsored shows at Carter Finley Stadium. Of course, I now realize that by going to see Slint, Pixies, and Dinosaur reunion tours in 2005, I am becoming my generation's underground rock equivalent of that late 80s Stones/Who concert attendee. But I don't really care, tonight was a fun time and a good trip down memory lane.

Even so, death to the Pixies. I'm not going again in 2021...

Posted by Tim at 12:32 AM | Comments (2)

May 27, 2005

But I'm So Fast When I Blow Past

Supergenius beatmaker Just Blaze sewed up my "best audio surgeon of 2004" award when he sliced a melodramatic piano riff from the title cut of Supertramp's Crime of The Century, implanted it with a massive bass-thump heartbeat, administered several doses of adrenaline, and handed the screaming patient over to Fabolous. Earlier in his rap career, Mr. F-A-B-O-L-O-U-S seemed to enjoy few things more than simply spelling out his own name, but this time around, Fabolous rose to the occasion and opted for a 1-2-3-4 counting workout that nicely pumped up an oddly sparse chorus of drum fills.

The resulting hit was "Breathe". And yeah, this is semi-old news 'cause the song came out well over 6 months ago. Only recently, however, did I come to the realization that not only was "Breathe" one of the best bangers of 2004, it's actually one of the greatest jogging songs I've ever heard. That 85 BPM tempo is a really good pace-setter, and those winded count-offs, constant "Breathe!" exhortations, and speed-boasting lyrics help motivate me to jog along at such a brisk pace that I actually do start imagining that "dudes are wheezin' behind me". I'm probably veering dangerously close to Chariots of Fire territory here, but while listening to "Breathe" several times during the course of my jog this past Monday evening, I managed to cut two whole minutes off of my previous route record. And then on Tuesday evening I squeezed in a few more listens while slicing yet another minute off of Monday's time. Perhaps I'm actually just improving or getting faster or whatever, but listening to "Breathe" really does seem to have a noticeable effect on my running pace. I just hope I don't get completely sick of the song anytime soon!

Or at least not until after June 11th, when I'm going to be running in the 9th Annual NC Triangle Race for the Cure. I've run in a couple of loosely organized Chapel Hill "5K"s over the last 8 months, but this will be my first-ever officially sanctioned race that measures exactly 5 kilometers. I think I heard that this is the biggest 5K in all of North Carolina so I'm expecting a race full of hardcore running geeks, the sort of people that worry a lot more about the number of net carbs in a Powerbar than the motivational value of a Fabolous song. In any case, it should be an interesting experience and I'm looking forward to seeing how I do in a real race scenario.

More importantly, though, the race is a huge fundraiser for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. I can't actually claim to have any close friends or family whose lives have been impacted by breast cancer, but I'm guessing that this might not always be the case in the future, unfortunately. So since I'm already participating in this event, I decided to go ahead and set up a fundraising page with a modest goal of $250.00. If you feel like sponsoring my participation in this race and helping me reach my fundraising goal, please make an online contribution here. Any contribution, no matter how small or large, would be greatly appreciated!

Posted by Tim at 10:26 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2005

Smokin' Joe's

Spurred on by some early 90s nostalgia in the comments section of my last post, I've decided to continue revisiting the stranger musical moments of the ramshackle three-storied edifice located at 157 East Rosemary Street in downtown Chapel Hill. Starting with the extremely short-lived Smokin' Joe's, a rock club that was located in the basement of that run-down building, in the exact same space that Hell has occupied for these last 8 years. I'm pretty sure that Smokin' Joe's started having shows in October 1993. The 206 W. Franklin Street incarnation of the Cat's Cradle had shut its doors in May 1993, and while the relatively new Local 506 had started bringing in some amazing shows courtesy of the adventurous musical inclinations and booking talents of one Randy Bullock, there was still this general vibe around town that Chapel Hill was in desperate need of another larger venue where both touring acts and local bands could play. Enter Smokin' Joe's. I don't know who owned the place, it might've even been the same people who owned Troll's, the fratty bar that previously occupied the space. But as I recall the club was booked by Kelley Cox - founder of Moist Records (aka Moist/Baited Breath), the idea man behind 1992's much-ballyhooed "Big Record Stardom Convention", and a one-time Poindexter Records clerk. Cox knew a lot of bands/label/industry people and had good taste to boot. My concert-date memory isn't nearly what it used to be, but I was able to reconstruct a partial Smokin' Joe's schedule from some listings in old issues of Trash and Stay Free! and a bunch of scrawlings in my old Carolina Week By Week:

Thu. 10/14/93 - Beatless
Fri. 10/15/93 - Small 23, Crowsdell, Orangestone
Sat. 10/16/93 - Blue Green Gods, Vineland, Shiny Beast
Sun. 10/17/93 - King Kong, Bicycle Face
Sun. 10/31/93 - Rodan (reportedly w/ special guests Lulu Spagoo!)
Tue. 11/02/93 - What Peggy Wants, Truck Stop Love
Fri. 11/05/93 - Orifice, Queen Sarah Saturday
Sat. 11/06/93 - Half Japanese, Family Dollar Pharoahs
Tue. 11/09/93 - Picasso Trigger, Slug, J. Church
Wed. 11/10/93 - Voodoo Birds
Thu. 11/11/93 - Jack O'Nuts, Capsize 7
Fri. 11/12/93 - No Safety, God Plow
Sat. 11/13/93 - Small 23, Mousetrap, Sunbrain
Tue. 11/16/93 - Lud, Greensect, Channel
Wed. 11/17/93 - White Buffalo, Post
Thu. 11/18/93 - Grifters
Thu. 12/02/93 - Blue Green Gods, New Radiant Storm King
Fri. 12/03/93 - Chew Toy, Raymond Brake, New Radiant Storm King
Fri. 12/17/93 - Analogue

I can't vouch for the completeness or accuracy of most of these lineups...bands could've been dropped or added from some of these bills, and a few shows might've been cancelled. I missed the Louisville heavyweights on the schedule (Kink Kong, Rodan) but I remember going to the Half-Japanese/Family Dollar Pharoahs show (really great), the Grifters (pretty much my favorite non-local band in 1993), and the Small/Crowsdell show.

As I recall, the bands played in the far back corner of the club - the area diametrically opposite from the main door/stairwell, not the less-visible corners where Hell's foosball and air hockey tables live. And in case anyone was wondering how Hell's men's room got to be the luxurious suite that it currently is, just check out the "His" section of Stay Free! #5's "Local Restroom Reviews". Not a lot has changed.

I'm not exactly sure why Smokin' Joes stopped having shows but I daresay it probably had a lot to do with the fact that the Cat's Cradle reopened at its current Carrboro location on November 29, 1993. That first night was a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion/Jesus Lizard/Brickbat show and the new Cradle was understandably packed. My Kentucky connection tells me that Kelley Cox moved to Louisville at some point in 1994 and probably still lives there. If anyone out there has any corrections or additions or memories to contribute to this somewhat hazy history of Smokin' Joe's, please make a comment.

Next up: Transmissions 001 invades Bub O'Malley's...

Posted by Tim at 10:25 PM | Comments (12)

May 08, 2005

Wetlands Dancehall

Ron Liberti designed and screenprinted this poster for the Kerbloki dance party that I DJed a week and a half ago at Wetlands Dancehall. This coming Saturday night, Ron's own band The Ghost of Rock will be playing at Wetlands on a bill with Greg Barbera's new punk rock trio The Chest Pains. I'll have to ask Ron if he remembers performing at this exact same Treehouse/Wetlands space a very long time ago during one of its earlier pre-Cheap Shots incarnations: a sports bar called Rosey's Good Times. During the summer of 1992, WXYC started sponsoring some cheap live shows at Rosey's, and I remember there being a Pipe/Archers of Loaf show there at some point. I didn't make it to that show or the even odder-for-a-sports-bar bill of Smog and Royal Trux (oops!), but I did manage to catch Shrimp Boat when they played an ill-timed Rosey's gig during the middle of the 1992 World Series. Shrimp Boat captain Sam Prekop is actually coming back to town on Thursday June 9th. I'm sure the Carrboro Artscenter will be a fine venue for him and Archer Prewitt, but it's almost too bad that Prekop isn't playing Wetlands Dancehall, since I'm sure that this time around he could get it specified in his rider that no Braves/Blue Jays games could be broadcast during his performance.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about Chapel Hill/Carrboro's live music clubs/venues and how they've changed over the years. When I first started loading my records into Wetlands Dancehall for that Kerbloki dance party, I looked over to the right half of the club and was very surprised to see a freshly constructed stage completely surrounding the DJ booth. It was at that moment that I finally started thinking of Wetlands Dancehall not just as "The Treehouse with a new name" but as a completely new venue capable of hosting a whole new lineup of rock shows, live performances, DJ nights, etc. Making even a partial transition to "live music club" is obviously not going to be an easy task, but one thing Wetlands Dancehall has going for it is the fact that it can hold a ton of people.

Perhaps more importantly, the place has a good downtown Chapel Hill location. Ever since the Lizard and Snake Cafe closed up in 1998, the vast majority of cool live music shows in town have taken place in either Carrboro (Cat's Cradle, Go!) or the very-close-to-Carrboro edges of West Franklin and West Rosemary (Local 506, Nightlight, The Cave). As a proud resident of Carrboro, this is totally cool by me and convenient to boot. But I can't help thinking what a shame it is that the East Franklin stretch of downtown Chapel Hill (the part of downtown that is closest to the UNC campus) can't seem to get any more interesting or happening than it is. During my freshman and sophomore years at UNC, I lived all the way across campus in Morrison Dorm but I still wound up walking to Cat's Cradle shows all the time....'cause back then, the Cradle was located at 206 W. Franklin, currently the site of Buffalo Wild Wings. That incarnation of the Cradle shut down in May 1993. When Frank Heath reopened his club at its current Carrboro location in late November of 1993, the geographical center of Chapel Hill's live music scene was almost a mile west of where it used to be. Which may not seem like much unless you're a student living on campus without any sort of automobile at your disposal.

Luckily for campus dorm-dwellers, the live music scene seems to be slowly creeping back downtown. I think it's kind of interesting that for probably the first time since the Lizard and Snake closed in 1998, "underground"-type local bands are playing at downtown locations like Wetlands Dancehall and The Library. I shouldn't saddle Wetlands Dancehall with too many expectations or more significance than it deserves, but I'd really like to see the place succeed in its new and more interesting post-Treehouse incarnation. The folks that work there are awesome and the place seems to have a lot of possibilities given its location and vast square footage. And with Hell down below it's got a great companion bar with which to trade patrons back and forth. If I had the ear of one of those urban planners working on Chapel Hill's downtown redevelopment projects, I'd suggest that they find a way to support venues like Wetlands Dancehall and stop pinning all of their revenue-generating hopes on mall-type stores like Rugby and Sephora. Such a strategy seems to have worked quite well for Carrboro over the last decade.

On a less serious note, am I the only one who thinks that "Wetlands Dancehall" almost sounds like it could be the name of a ridiculously narrow micro-genre a la "sino-grime" or "Rio baile funk" or "Swedish glitch" or whatever? Like, you know, there's all the new dancehall riddims coming out of Jamaica, and then there's this new weirder wetlands dancehall shit that people in the Florida Everglades are starting to make...

Posted by Tim at 11:11 PM | Comments (9)

May 01, 2005

Prefuse 73 live at Local 506

When I was joking about how Prefuse 73 and Battles were going to have to fit all of that gear into the back corners of 506 last night, I didn't even realize that Prefuse would be coming with the full rhythm section and the periodic double-drummer attack! Awesome. It's always a treat to hear a great drummer pound out hip-hop beats live. I forgot to ask who that gentleman was....so if anybody out there knows, please say his name.

Battles brought the heat as usual. On paper they originally seemed to be a bit of an odd choice to open for Prefuse 73, but after the night was all over it seemed to make a lot of sense. Battles' rhythmic noise-rock has a lot of really nice looped-out Steve Reich-y repetition in it, and Prefuse 73's instrumental machine-funk and deconstructed hip-hop aren't quite so abstract-sounding when anchored by the full force of live bass and drums. I'm a little surprised that Ty Braxton never joined Prefuse onstage for one of those Surrounded by Silence collabos, but maybe there just wasn't enough room up there...

Posted by Tim at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2005

Our Band Could Still Be Your Life

This is a reunited Dinosaur Jr. performing on last Friday's episode of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. The trio played a pretty blistering version of "The Lung" from one of the greatest albums ever recorded, You're Living All Over Me (SST, 1987). And despite what some of us may have been jokingly predicting, the band members did not actually "live all over" each other on stage. There were no fistfights or displays of passive-aggressive behavior. No one called anyone else an asshole. And J. Mascis never tried to hit Lou Barlow with his guitar.

By this point in 2005, I shouldn't really be surprised at any rock reunion, overground or underground. And yet the Dinosaur Jr reunion still strikes me as just weirder than weird, given the band's acrimonious split and all those Mascis-hating Sebadoh songs that Barlow wound up writing. I guess time can heal the deepest of wounds. Er, maybe time and a good booking agent. Dinosaur will be touring the US in July, hitting the Cat's Cradle on Sunday, July 10th. In May 1991 I was extremely thrilled about getting to see a Dinosaur Jr./Finger bill at the old BW3 Cradle....but that was a post-Barlow Dinosaur, performing a pretty Green Mind-centric set. I'm guessing that the 2005 Dinosaur simulacrum will stay very focused on the first three Dinosaur albums, which have just been reissued by local label Merge Records.

I'm probably a bit of a sucker for buying these Dinosaur albums for the 2nd and 3rd times, but once I saw that they were remastered and that there was a $33 package deal, I couldn't resist plunking down the cash. From a bonus cut/rarity standpoint, there's very little extra audio to be had. And even though it makes total sense in terms of quality control, the chronological completist in me is somewhat troubled by the fact that the hilariously bad cover of Peter Frampton's "Show Me The Way" was dropped from the You're Living All Over Me disc in favor of the far-superior-but-released-after-Bug cover of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven". Oh, and that Last Rights tune from the "Just Like Heaven" EP? Forget it! In all seriousness, Merge did a great job with these reissues and the B-side questions are a very minor nitpick. I'm guessing that Mascis and company probably chose what B-sides they did and did not want people to hear in 2005, and that was that.

The real draw of these reissues is the amazing music from the original albums, but there are some nice non-audio extras included. Byron Coley wrote some extensive liner notes for all 3 discs, and the Bug and You're Living All Over Me discs each have two Quicktime music videos apiece. If you've never seen the classic "Just Like Heaven" video featuring stuffed animals hilariously rocking out and bowing down to the sludge-rock breakdown, well, now's your chance. Oscar the Grouch in a Deep Wound shirt, can't front on that!

Posted by Tim at 05:40 PM | Comments (5)

April 11, 2005

What's Up With Dante, 1 for 8?

It's been exactly one whole week since Carolina beat Illinois for the NCAA Championship, but I'm still not quite ready to get off the cloud, so to speak. As a ball bearing salesman named Stan once said, "We're just floating over here". Mr. Rawls just tipped me to an entertaining Carolina basketball-themed interview that fakejazz.com recently did with longtime UNC fan and stringed instrument enthusiast Dave Brylawski (Polvo, Idyll Swords, Black Taj).

As Polvo fans surely remember, Brylawski was often quite vocal in his support for UNC hoops during shows, sometimes going so far as to dedicate songs to various players and the like. My favorite story about Brylawski's Carolina fervor dates back to February 5th, 1992. #1 Duke was playing #9 UNC at the Dean Dome on the exact same night that Polvo (Chapel Hill's top-ranked band at the time, at least in my poll) was returning the home/away favor by playing an "away" show over at Under The Street in Durham. While watching the extremely close game at Under The Street, Brylawski proclaimed to everybody that Polvo wasn't going to play if Carolina lost. Luckily, this threat never had to be acted upon. UNC beat the defending/future national champs 75-73 and the rock show went on. I imagine that it was probably a really great Polvo set, but I can't say for sure, since I opted to stay at home and watch the basketball game instead. I'm sure Dave would've understood such truancy, especially since I never missed another local Polvo show after that one.

Really glad to see Fake Jazz writer Jim Steed dig deep and mention the basketball-themed track that Brylawski recorded for the Cognitive Mapping Volume II compilation that my Friction Media cohorts and I put together a whole decade ago. The CD is long out of print, so below is an MP3 of a song that references both Dante Calabria's poor shooting in the 1995 Final Four (actually 1 for 10, even worse than 1 for 8!) and the early exits that Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace made for the NBA after that same season.

Dave Brylawski - "Fairweather Fan" [1.89 MB]

As one of my friends pointed out, UNC's blistering second half during the Michigan State game nine days ago helped vanquish many of those Final Four Saturday demons that consistently plagued UNC from 1995 through 2000. Demons that come up in the Brylawski interview. Now that the Heels have finally won it all again, maybe Brylawski will be inspired to pen some basketball-themed lyrics for a triumphant rock anthem instead of sad words for a melancholy Oriental-tinged folk song. I plan on finding out on Saturday June 4th, when Black Taj comes back from what seemed like a grave to play Local 506. If you live in NYC, you can actually find out much sooner - the Taj is playing with The Fucking Champs at The Knitting Factory on April 22nd. The F'n Champs (now featuring Phil Manley of Trans Am fame) will also be rocking Kings in Raleigh on Tuesday April 19th. It's a little hard to pass up an Out Hud/Hella show at 506 on that same night, but I don't think The Champs have come through NC since 2002. And that band name is just sounding especially appropriate right now.

Posted by Tim at 11:51 PM | Comments (5)

March 31, 2005

Slint Reunited

Amongst a few other things keeping me from posting here of late, last weekend I took a trip to Chicago so that I could hang with my Illinois pals for a few days. On Friday night we all went to The Metro to catch one of the last of the Slint reunion shows. I'm not usually that big on the idea of broken-up bands getting back together for reunion tours, but since Slint never really got to tour in the wake of Spiderland, the whole reunion thing seemed less like a cash-in and more like a way-overdue tour in support of one of my absolute favorite albums of the early 90s.

And indeed, Slint played all six songs off of Spiderland, as well as a few songs off of Tweez and the first non-"Rhoda" song from the posthumous EP. The songs and the sounds were all technically dead-on, with those instantly recognizable guitar tones/noises and that unmistakably great Britt Walford drum sound. Throughout the set there were a few strange breaks and gaps in between some of the songs that had me wondering how such a dynamically gifted band could allow the energy to dissipate during those multi-minute lulls used for guitar-tuning and instrument-switching. But that's really a very minor complaint and I guess it makes sense if Slint's top priority was exactly practiced perfection. Which was pretty much what we got. The show ended the only way a Slint show should ever end, with the Spiderland closer "Good Morning Captain". Other shows on the tour have apparently had "Captain" near the start of the set, but somehow I can't really imagine Brian McMahan returning to a fragile whisper after shouting "I MISS YOU!!!" over and over.

I couldn't get any decent pics from where I stood down below, but above is an overhead photo that I snapped during my brief balcony visit. Left to right, that's Brian McMahan at the microphone, his brother Michael filling in on guitar (during a few songs where vocals & guitar would've been too much for Brian to pull off), Louisville musician Todd Cook filling in on bass, Britt Walford on the drums, and Dave Pajo on guitar. Cy Rawls told us that Pajo was wearing a Voivod shirt...I couldn't see it myself but Cy would definitely know!

Hard to believe that it's been almost 10 years since I took a 15-hour car trip to Chicago in order to spend a weekend at the Lounge Ax watching Gastr del Sol and the recently modified incarnation of Tortoise that had just added Dave Pajo as a replacement for Bundy Brown. Note to self: Please get some of those Tuba Frenzy # 2 interviews posted online at some point before the Tortoise reunion tour of 2015 gets booked...

But back to the present...big ups to Eric B. for scoring our Slint tickets when they went on sale last December and for Tivo-ing the UNC-Villanova game that was going on at the exact same time as the show. The most unpleasant part of this otherwise enjoyable evening may have been unintentionally learning that the Heels were down 21-9 early in the game. We went home after the show and nervously watched the entire game from start to finish without knowing the then-decided outcome. Whew...good thing McCants switched those sneakers and had a second half that was sufficiently "smoother than moves by Villanova"!

If you didn't manage to catch one of the recent Slint reunion shows but are interested in hearing a live recording, just download this entire March 3rd show that took place in Reims, France. And here's a live MP3 of "Rhoda" for you podcast subscribers or single mp3 folks:

Slint (live in France, 03.03.2005) - "Rhoda" [5.70 MB]

Posted by Tim at 01:18 AM | Comments (6)

March 19, 2005

It's Spring Again

Three timely hip-hop hits for these past few days:

Kurtis Blow - "Basketball"
Biz Markie - "Spring Again"
House of Pain - "Shamrocks and Shenanigans"

The Federal has supposedly installed a new and improved soundsystem with much better bass, so I'll be testing it out tonight with these songs and more. Boom sha lock lock boom!

Posted by Tim at 12:59 PM | Comments (3)

March 14, 2005

Parts & Labor

Went to check out Parts & Labor at Nightlight last night. Moments after the band finished up their set, Randy Bullock came up to me and said, "We are living in a post-Lightning Bolt world." Which was a really good way of succinctly summing up not just the super-kinetic Parts & Labor but also the entire evening, given that the two opening bands (In The Year of The Pig, Dave Cantwell and Scotty Irving's duo The Whole World Laughing) were both rockin' drums-and-bass duos that definitely had their own fair share of pounding, prog moves, distortion, etc.

After the show, I belatedly picked up Parts & Labor's 2003 CD Groundswell and have really enjoyed listening to it at work today. Most of the newer stuff that Parts & Labor played last night was accompanied by some anthemic and indecipherable yelling, but Groundswell is all instrumental. Here's a self-titled "theme song" track that has many of the same fuzzed-out, punked-up, and damaged-electronics vibes as my favorite Lightning Bolt jams:

Parts & Labor - "Parts & Labor" (5.31 MB)

Posted by Tim at 08:01 PM | Comments (7)

March 12, 2005

These Are The Breaks

Thanks to everyone who downloaded my year-old "The Beats Go On" track that was posted here last week. For those who are interested, here are the answers (in sequential order) to "Name That Beat":

1. "Scorpio" by Dennis Coffey & The Detroit Guitar Band

An instrumental Top 10 hit in 1971, "Scorpio" has a really hot drum break that served as the source of that funky fill in Young MC's "Bust A Move". Incidentally, the song's guitar hook (not used on my track) was sampled for LL Cool J's "Jingling Baby".

2. "Amen, Brother" by The Winstons

I can't hear the "Amen" chorus without thinking of Lefty Driesell-era Maryland basketball and that end-of-game singing that they used to do at Cole Field House. The "Amen" break, on the other hand, is pretty much the most (over)used drum-n-bass/jungle break of all time. I love the way that NWA slowed it way down for "Straight Outta Compton".

3. "Shack Up" by Banbarra

In my humble opinion this breakbeat might be the hottest of the six listed here, though the others are probably a little more famous. An awesome break that was put to very good use on Divine Styler's "Ain't Sayin' Nothin" and Dr. Octagon's strangely guitar-heavy "I'm Destructive". These days the song "Shack Up" seems to be more frequently associated with A Certain Ratio, who did a nice cover of it on their 1981 Do The Du EP.

4. "Apache" by Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band

Like "Scorpio", "Apache" was one of the original breaks that Kool Herc played at block parties back in the early-to-mid 70s. A classic percussion jam and a really important record in the early history of hip-hop. Kudos to MOD for naming that beat.

5. "Take Me To The Mardi Gras" by Bob James

Long after recording a "difficult listening" album for ESP and shortly before composing the theme to Taxi, Bob James released a series of numerically titled CTI albums that would later be sampled on a ridiculous number of hip-hop records. "Mardi Gras" is from Two and it's the bell-heavy break that absolutely made Run-DMC's "Peter Piper". Score a beat-recognition point for Jesse P.

6. "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" by James Brown

"Funky Drummer" is definitely the more classic break, but it was way too slow to match up with the Sonny & Cher song, so I used a similarly inclined "James Brown grunts over Clyde Stubblefield drums" section from this speedier JB jam. With its driving groove and awesome Bobby Byrd organ lines, this song was quite the early b-boy anthem.

So there they are. Not really my "Top 6 Breaks of All Time" or anything, but 6 classic beats that fit well with the general theme and also with the tempo of the Sonny & Cher tune. Thanks for playin'...

Posted by Tim at 05:32 PM | Comments (3)

March 03, 2005

Uncle Woody Sullender

The last time I saw Chicago musician and former WXYC dj Woody Sullender back in Chapel Hill, his politically charged post-hardcore band Service Anxiety was rockin' the basement of the old Mallette Street house, with each of the band members wearing matching work-shirts. That was in April of 2002.

Almost three years later, Sullender is returning to his old stomping grounds once again, this time with a banjo on his knee. Uncle Woody Sullender (his current stage moniker) plays at Nightlight tonight along with Spacelab and Cantwell Gomez & Jordan. Chris Toenes wrote a great preview for this week's Independent, and if you want an audio preview, you can download a few excerpts of Uncle Woody's banjo improvisations here.

I like the moments of frenetic picking and strange contact-mic drones but I'm especially partial to the pastoral finger-picking beauty of "Papa, Help Me Across" (2.13 MB), a song that got played on WXYC a lot last fall when Sullender's Nothing is Certain But Death CD was first released. (Which reminds me...although this really doesn't mean anything at all, I would like to point out the odd similarity between the title of Sullender's CD and the "nothing in life is promised except death" line that another Chicago musician used at the start of his incredible Grammy acceptance speech a few weeks ago.)

Back to podcasting for a bit - by intentionally linking to one of Uncle Woody's mp3s in this post, I have just podcasted someone else's content to anyone who happens to be subscribed to my main podcast feed. I'm not really sure how ethical or proper that is, but I like the idea of aggregating already publicly available mp3s for automatic download - pushing them instead of waiting for a pull. In this particular case, I know Woody wouldn't mind since (a) I'm promoting his show and his album, and (b) my very small podcast isn't going to put any serious dent on his bandwidth usage. But I probably shouldn't make a habit of this, especially if I'm adding to someone's bandwidth usage while removing their context. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know.

Posted by Tim at 01:27 PM | Comments (3)

March 01, 2005

The Beats Go On

After rambling on about copyright law and sampling last week, I realized that it had been almost exactly one year since I had put together a short audio track based around a copyright/sampling theme. In late 2003, the record label Illegal Art (a different entity from the online exhibit/website illegal-art.org) announced that they were accepting submissions for a compilation CD called Sonny Bono is Dead. The project was intended to be a protest against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that had prevented all sorts of 1920s-copyrighted works from falling into the public domain as they were supposed to after being copyright-protected for 75 years. As such, Illegal Art was looking for submissions that sampled either "works that would have fallen into the Public Domain by the year 2004 had the Sonny Bono Act failed" or the actual artistic output of Sonny Bono and/or "other artists who embraced the notion of copyright lasting forever".

Nothing on the would've-been-Public-Domain list really grabbed my imagination so I decided to go for the Sonny Bono angle. I took Sonny & Cher's big 1967 hit "The Beat Goes On" and looped the chorus ad nauseum while accompanying it with a succession of several of my all-time favorite hip-hop breaks/drum samples (beats that I may or may not have ever heard had certain copyright owners been a lot more aggressive or protective way back when!).

Philo at Illegal Art seemed to like my track when I first submitted it. But several months later he told me that things with the comp were up in the air and that they weren't sure about releasing it. I haven't heard anything about the compilation in the last few months, so I'm assuming that it probably won't be coming out soon, if ever. So here's an MP3 of my submitted track for anyone who wants to hear it:

The Beats Go On (4.43 MB)

If any music geeks or hip-hop heads out there feel like playing a fun little game of "name that beat", just use the comment section to name whatever characteristics you feel like naming: artist, song, most popular uses of the break as a sample, etc. Or if not, I'll just come back in a week and list these six ultimate beats that really do go on...

On a related note, the U.S. Copyright Office is currently asking the public to comment about "orphan works" - copyrighted works where the owner cannot be found. In contrast to the Sonny Bono-enabled extensions of copyright, this actually seems like a great chance for copyright to be made more sensible and less cumbersome for potential users of copyrighted works. The comment period goes until March 25th. Check out eldred.cc for all sorts of additional information about this.

Update: Here's an easy comment-submission form provided by the EFF, PublicKnowledge, and freeculture.org.

Posted by Tim at 01:48 AM | Comments (4)

February 25, 2005

Waxing Poetic

The quarterly publication Wax Poetics is almost like an academic journal for beat junkies, crate diggers, and other funk/soul/jazz aficionados. Issue # 11 just came out a couple of weeks ago and it's stacked with some serious history, including lengthy features on Charles Wright, John Klemmer, Jimmy McGriff, and CTI art director Bob Ciano. Towards the back there's even an impressive Stax-related double-shot: a continuation of Issue #10's feature on the legendary 1972 concert/film Wattstax as well as a collection of interviews with various soul musicians who lived in Memphis during the turbulent 1960s.

What really makes the new Wax Poetics for me, however, is the fact that my pal Bret Dougherty contributed a fascinating piece on Bill Adler. Adler was the publicist at Def Jam from 1984 to 1990 and he's currently running/curating the Eyejammie Fine Arts Gallery in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Dougherty gets Adler talking about those golden years at Def Jam, politics in relation to hip-hop, and Adler's passion for being a true preservationist/archivist of hip-hop culture. Like most Wax Poetics articles, the piece is accompanied by some incredible photos, including a few taken by legendary hip-hop photographer Ricky Powell. Oh snap, indeed!

You can get a copy of this new Wax Poetics from Dusty Groove, Turntable Lab, Fat Beats, or The Giant Peach. And if you absolutely can't wait until your order is shipped, just read the version of the Bill Adler interview that Bret posted on his web site.

Speaking of Bret D., he will be spinning some wax of his own tomorrow night as he joins me for a special edition of Sureshot. This was actually supposed to be my week off from The Federal but there's a big party goin' on. So we're going to be bringing the funk and maybe even doing a dry run of the Iron Dog/Tuba City mixtape that should be coming to fruition sometime in the next couple of months. Things start up at 9pm, a little earlier than normal. Don't sleep!

Posted by Tim at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2005

Copyright Criminals

M.I.A.'s Arular full-length was supposed to drop earlier today (er, "yesterday"), but as Pitchfork reported last week, the album has been postponed/delayed indefinitely due to some sort of legal issue related to the clearing and/or paying for a sample. I haven't heard any details on which M.I.A. song is causing the problem or what the specific sample is, but I did find it interesting that the day after Pitchfork's story came out, music journalist Sasha Frere-Jones followed up his own earlier comment/query about M.I.A. and songwriting credits with an extremely insightful note from DJ/producer Diplo regarding the various sources/inspirations for "Bucky Done Gun" (which is straight heat, by the way....if you haven't heard it, check out the minute-long snippet still available over at Soul Sides).

There seems to be something slightly ironic about the M.I.A. album getting postponed due to last-minute sample clearance problems, at least when you look at the big picture and compare Arular to its immediate predecessor, the M.I.A./Diplo promotional mixtape that came out last fall. The remarkably successful (and humorously named) Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 was chock full of M.I.A. mixes and blends, several of which used copious portions of huge 80s hits from artists like Prince, The Bangles, Madonna, The Eurhythmics, and Salt-N-Pepa. Of course, mixtapes of this sort generally fly below the corporate radar and play by a completely different set of unwritten rules - rules that don't involve accountants or lawyers. But Piracy Funds Terrorism blew up way beyond small-time "underground" status - it wound up being the #23 album on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll and #12 on Pitchfork's best-of-2004 list, simultaneously fueling and riding the M.I.A. hype wave (a wave onto which I gladly throw a few more drops of water as I impatiently wait for it to finally hit shore...).

For me, part of the initial thrill of lisetning to Arular in its entirety was simply getting to hear all those familiar-sounding M.I.A. bits in a pure and undiluted form - unmixed and unblended. As if that sample-heavy mixtape had been completely cleaned, sanded, and refinished so that nothing was the left but the raw vocals and the real deal beats. So I had to chuckle and sigh when I found out that a legal problem with some small sample was going to delay and maybe even change what had already seemed like a newly realized version of M.I.A., one refinished with an awesome Pledge shine. I probably ought to hold off on the full-on editorializing until I know what specific M.I.A. sample (or musical interpolation?) is causing such a stir...but it's hard not to see this as yet another case of copyright laws rearing their ugly head and interfering with the creative process.

It'll never ever happen, but I'd love to see current copyright law amended so that there was some sort of compulsory or mechanical license for sampling, maybe something similar to the various mechanical licenses that allow artists to record songs written by other people. Granted, I think some of those "I'm covering this song" deals still wind up being negotiated with the copyright holder....but even those negotiations seem to be a formality, with set statutory rates. I mean, Creative Commons is a very cool utopian idea and all....and I certainly hope it has some positive effects in the long run. But let's face it, CC doesn't help at all if what an artist wants to sample isn't already licensed in that way. If only there were some sort of compulsory sample licenses and various statutory rates to fairly compensate for different levels/types of sampling, then maybe "permission" could be taken out of the equation and the arbitrators and accountants could figure out how to crunch the numbers after the fact? Of course, I am not at all knowledgeable about copyright law so perhaps I am missing some obvious points here. And like I said, it will never happen....since copyright owners have little incentive to weaken their own grip on their copyrighted works.

Back to M.I.A. for a second, I assume XL probably cleared "Sunshowers" with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band back in early 2004 before that single first came out. I wonder did they have to then re-clear the song for re-release on Arular? And if so, were the negotiations for that much tougher once M.I.A. started blowing up and looking like an artist that could sell a crapload of records? Hmm, maybe they could've looked to Tony Starks for advice based on his own Dr. Buzzard experiences....

Anyone who has read this far probably likes thinking about sampling and copyright issues almost as much as I do...and thus might very well be interested in checking out the new trailer for Copyright Criminals (found yesterday via BoingBoing), a still-in-progress documentary about sampling and how copyright affects music. The trailer's a meaty 10 minutes long and features excerpts from interviews with everyone from Pete Rock and Matmos to Lawrence Lessig and WXYC alumna/Stay Free! publisher Carrie McLaren. Much like Lessig, McLaren has been all over this whole copyright issue for awhile now....if you haven't already seen it, check out her great illegal-art.org exhibit with all of its multimedia goodies and links to more information about copyright issues and related matters.

Posted by Tim at 02:24 AM | Comments (5)

February 15, 2005

Losing My Edge & The Indie-Rock Crowd

The debut album from LCD Soundsystem finally hits American record stores tomorrow (er, make that "today"). I really like the first single "Movement" with its whole The-Fall-covers-"Ghost Rider" vibe...as well as the song's cool video. But I was a bit underwhelmed by some of the other tracks that my import-buying friend was playing for me over the holidays. Of course, such cursory listens aren't always so telling, and I'm eager to hear the whole thing in its entirety a couple of times before making any rash judgements. If nothing else, the CD comes with a bonus disc compiling all of the LCD Soundsystem singles and b-sides from the past few years - so necessary!

The January issue of The Wire had a pretty fascinating LCD Soundsystem cover story. If you're interested in the band but didn't get a chance to read the print article, you might as well do yourself one better and just read the full unedited interview that Peter Shapiro did with LCD Soundsystem frontman and DFA production guru James Murphy. It's pretty long and quite informative. I hadn't read any interviews with Murphy before, but I was a tad surprised to discover how completely earnest and genuinely forthcoming he was about his music, his life, and what he's trying to accomplish. Somehow I didn't quite expect that out of a person who has thrown so much sardonic wit and irony into his song lyrics, specifically those hilarious lines from the music-snob parody anthem "Losing My Edge". His honesty and straightforwardness aside, there are a couple places in The Wire interview where Murphy almost slips into the role of the "Losing My Edge" protagonist with some elitist-sounding comments. My personal favorite was his humorous if unfair dismissal of the Stone Roses ("I remember hearing 'Fool's Gold' and thinking it was really likeable and that a lot of college kids would like it, but it was like 'Vitamin C' to me without the weird, crazy Japanese guy.").

But enough with the personality analysis. The thing in the LCD Soundsystem story that surprised me the most was the fact that Murphy drummed for the early '90s indie-rock band Pony under the alias "Jimmy James". I hadn't thought about Pony in ages...and I dare say that I probably wouldn't remember them at all were it not for the fact that I actually reviewed their 1994 Homestead album for Stay Free! #9. The Stay Free! archives didn't have all of the contents of that particular issue online, so I dug up a print copy and uploaded a scan of my decade-old review here. (Note: This was one of the first-ever pieces that I specifically wrote for printed publication, so please cut me some slack for actually starting off a record review with the ludicrous declaration that "To have any chance of being able to rock in the nineties, a band must either have smarts or intensity.").

As I mentioned in my review, Cosmovalidator was recorded by none other than Bob Weston...and in the interview Murphy talks a bit about how he learned a just-the-basics approach to recording and miking instruments from Weston and Steve Albini. That seems to have certainly served him well as a "dance music" producer. No wonder so much of the DFA stuff sounds so interesting and organic, it seems that Murphy and his DFA production partner Tim Goldsworthy have taken a few pages out of Albini's no-frills "live band" soundbook and applied the lessons learned to the much more synthetic world of "dance music".

Murphy was Pony's drummer (that's him with the long hair in the middle of the Pony album cover), but he also wrote and sang the hilarious last song ("Gimme") on Cosmovalidator. In fact, this song comes up during The Wire interview because of its mockery of indie-rock crowds standing still and friends wanting to be on guest lists. Here are the full lyrics of "Gimme":

Hey Dallas, we're going to your show
I sure hope your band's good, if not we're gonna blow....early
It's three bucks a head, but I'm bringing seven friends
And well if the other bands suck, we'll leave before the end...comes
So put me on your guest list, 'cause I've known you for so long
I'll act like I enjoy it, might even sing along...with you
Just stick names on a paper and fatten up your crowd
Just promise me, promise me you'll play something hip and loud.

Stand around, stand around, stand around
Stand around, stand around, stand around
Do the indie-rock crowd

Fold your arms, fold your arms, fold your arms,
fold your arms, fold your arms now
Do the indie-rock crowd

After I went back and listened to this song, it all made total sense that this was the exact same guy who could sarcastically sing "I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know" before rattling off an amazing laundry-list of music-geek faves ("This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars...") at the end of "Losing My Edge".

I'm not a regular MP3 blogger or anything, but given the buzz that LCD Soundsystem is getting right now and the fact that Cosmovalidator is out of print, I'm sure that there are some people out there that would be interested in hearing "Gimme", the first James Murphy-penned song to appear on a record. So here it is, a 1994 example of Murphy's acerbic wit and songwriting abilities:

Pony - "Gimme" (4.02 MB)

Lest I be accused of falling into the role of the "Losing My Edge" hipster, posting rare mp3s from one of my oh-so-out-of-print CDs, let me just admit that while I do like the Pony CD, I seriously doubt that I would own it were it not for the fact that I happened to get a free review copy way back when...and I'm a bit of a packrat that rarely purges anything from my record collection. Besides, anyone who wants to get their own copy can currently get one used on Amazon for the not-so-premium price of $1.74.

Of course the LCD Soundsystem double disc will cost you a little bit more than $1.74. But, you know, I heard that all of the cool kids are gonna be buying it...

Posted by Tim at 01:38 AM | Comments (3)

February 14, 2005

Addicted To Roses

"My name is Cupid Valentino, the modern-day Cupid. And I just want to say one thing: Happy Valentine's Day. Every day the 14th!"
    - Andre 3000, Outkast's "Happy Valentine's Day"

Last year's Grammy for "Album of the Year" went to an album that I ended up using several times during Saturday night's pre-Valentine's dance party at Hell. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for this year's "Album of the Year".

Of course, six tracks after wishing everyone a happy Valentine's Day, Andre 3000 sang a much more memorable line that fits the current holiday quite nicely: "Roses really smell like poo-poo." That's right, florists!

For Saturday's party, I worked out a short blend of Outkast's "Roses" and Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love" to use as a transitional device between full chunks of those two songs. For someone's potential Valentine's Day amusement (hopefully), here is a slightly different version of that idea that I assembled with my digital audio editing and mixing programs:

Addicted To Roses

Just playin'!

Posted by Tim at 02:49 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2005

Federal DJ Nights

Mad props to Mark Weddington (aka DJ Marco) for designing this brand new flyer promoting all three of the DJ nights at The Federal. Looks like Mark also gave The Federal website a nifty re-design and much-needed overhaul. Now it's even got an events page that has the exact dates of when any of us are DJing. Which will hopefully clear up any possible scheduling confusion now that we're all DJing biweekly and not weekly.

I'm back at The Federal this Saturday night (02/05/2005), from 10pm until 2am. Contestants, please come on down!

Posted by Tim at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)

2004 Favorites, the WXYC Version

Just to follow up on my own "favorites of 2004" list, here is the recently unveiled composite list of "WXYC's Favorite 20 Releases of 2004", as determined by the votes of 72 different WXYC DJs:

1. The Arcade Fire - Funeral (Merge)
2. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs (Fatcat)
3. Madvillain - Madvillainy (Stones Throw)
4. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City)
5. Iron & Wine - Our Endless Numbered Days (Sub Pop)
6. Brian Wilson - Smile (Nonesuch)
7. Devendra Banhart - Rejoicing In The Hands (Young God)
8. Elliott Smith - From A Basement On The Hill (Anti)
9. Various Artists - Bandwidth: Celebrating 10 Years of Internet Radio on WXYC-Chapel Hill (WXYC)
10. The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade/Sanctuary)
11. Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles (5 Rue Christine)
12. Shark Quest - Gods and Devils (Merge)
12. Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose (Interscope)
14. Destroyer - Yr Blues (Merge)
15. Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News (Epic)
16. Dungen - Ta Det Lugnt (Subliminal Sounds)
17. Mirah - C'mon Miracle (K)
18. The Foreign Exchange - Connected (BBE)
19. The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike (Memphis Industries)
20. Various Artists - Goodbye, Babylon (Dust-To-Digital)

It should be noted that this list is entirely based on DJ votes and is not in any way determined by actual airplay statistics, though there are probably some significant correlations between what DJs liked the most and what actually got played the most. Sometime soon I will calculate an actual "WXYC's Most Played Releases of 2004" list and see how it compares. I know right off the bat that such a list will have Bandwidth as #1 and not merely #9.

Some observations on this composite WXYC list:

- It was quite a year for local label Merge. 3 releases in the Top 15!

- It was quite a year for folky-type releases, "oddball" or otherwise. They absolutely dominate the WXYC Top 10. On the other hand, "non-rock" releases (hip-hop, electronica/techno, world music, etc.) did not fare nearly as well as one might expect given WXYC's diverse format.

- The WXYC Top 10 is remarkably close to the Pitchfork Top 10 Albums of 2004. Seven releases appear on both Top 10 lists...and then WXYC's list has Iron & Wine, Elliott Smith, and Bandwidth where Pitchfork's list has Ghostface, The Go! Team, and The Streets. I must confess that I like Pitchfork's Top 10 a little better!

- While I'm on the subject of Pitchfork's list...the remarkable similarity between Pitchfork's list and the WXYC list raises some questions in my mind about whether Pitchfork's influence has gotten a bit out of hand. I mean, I enjoy looking at their "Top Whatever of Whatever" lists as much as anybody else, but I'm starting to wonder if "Pitchfork-think" has been taking hold in an unhealthy way. Pitchfork is a valuable information source, to be sure, but they shouldn't be defining the college-radio/hipster musical canon all by themselves. Especially when a website like Dusted Magazine covers a lot of the same sort of music, without paid writers or advertising of any sort....

Posted by Tim at 02:05 PM | Comments (5)

February 02, 2005

2004 Favorites

Just as it is with employers handing out year-summarizing W-4 forms, January 31st is the de facto deadline by which WXYC djs are supposed to submit their "top releases of the year" lists. One brave DJ then undertakes the thankless task of tallying up everyone's votes, calculating the overall ranks of various releases, and coming up with a composite WXYC "best of the year" list. No one knows what this list looks like at the moment, but soon all will be revealed: the top 20 releases will be counted down tomorrow night on WXYC's Thursday Night Feature. So if you're interested, tune in to 89.3 FM (or listen online) from 9pm to 12 midnight EST for a fun 2004 retrospective...as well as a chance to win one of the top 2 vote-getting releases (whatever they may be).

Personally, I don't always find it to be an easy or enjoyable task to try and numerically sort records based on exactly how much (or let's face it, exactly when) they blew me away during the previous year...but I really enjoy getting an intriguing glimpse into the collective hive mind of the radio station. Whether or not I wind up being all that surprised by some of the "broad consensus" picks that will make up the overall WXYC Top 10, I really like reading other people's lists and seeing various records that I either never listened to or never even knew existed. The whole sharing of "best of" lists creates an instant blueprint for musical catch-up. And catchup can be extremely rewarding...if past years are any indication, I may very well discover some of my favorite 2004 releases during the next few months. Anyway, enough with the chatter, here are my 15 favorites of 2004 as submitted to WXYC a few days ago:

1. Jay-Z - special acappella edition of The Black Album
2. Scharpling & Wurster - New Hope For The Ape-Eared
3. Various Artists - Bandwidth: Celebrating 10 Years of Internet Radio
on WXYC-Chapel Hill
4. Battles - EP C; Tras; B EP
5. Girl Talk - Unstoppable
6. Diverse - One AM
7. Devendra Banhart - Rejoicing in The Hands; Nino Rojo
8. DJ/Rupture - Special Gunpowder
9. Madvillain - Madvillainy
10. The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike
11. Ghostface - The Pretty Toney Album
12. Tussle - Don't Stop EP; Klingklang
13. Murs/9th Wonder - Murs 3:16, the 9th Edition
14. Lali Puna - Faking The Books
15. M.I.A. - "Galang", "Sunshowers", Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 mix (w/ Diplo)

While I'm at it, below are a few notes/explanations/observations...

#1 - Maybe this is a gimmicky choice for #1 but I didn't have another clear favorite and no other 2004 release dominated my year like this one did. The underground wax versions were circulating in late 2003, sure, but the official 2004 CD release (of just the acappellas, mind you!) took it into places like Best Buy. Of course, that only happened after all the derivative works started flying around the Internet in early 2004. I will surely hit a point where I never want to hear this again (much less use it), but the whole acappella push was a genius marketing move and a 2004 musical milestone. Props to Danger Mouse and a few other folks for taking these acappellas and making great new music out of them and taking the whole thing to a new level...my #1 vote definitely factors in the genius of The Grey Album and the out-of-control-ness of what followed.

#2 - I think the only 2004 things that made me laugh harder than this album were Chappelle's Show and The Daily Show. I already wrote about this double disc back in May. The fact that it's two guys doing comedy over the radio means that I have voice-only releases as my top 2 picks of 2004. I should've bought that Bjork album with Rahzel all over it, maybe I would've liked it enough to put it as #3.

#3 - I wrote way too much about this CD over the last three months. You can still download it in its entirety for free, though! (Weird, I just now noticed while uploading the album covers above that Casey Burns designed the art for my #2 and #3 albums...a completely accidental segue!)

#4 - Three EPs that total 66 minutes in length. Not an album you say? Well, Ian basically admitted that Battles was strategically avoiding the idea of an official debut album. Which probably disqualified them from getting as much notice as they should have. I wrote about Battles here and took pictures here.

#5 - I think this Girl Talk album is genius and I wish it would find it's way out of the plunderphonic/avant-garde ghetto and into the hands of everyone who copped the Hollertronix Never Scared mix (which was red hot in its own right, don't get me wrong). I can definitely see why some computer-based "audio art" and digital-detritus-type releases (like Wobbly, for instance) wouldn't fly with the mixtape/DJ/hip-hop crowd. But this album is an on-the-one party-rocker. And people who dig the vocal studies of Prefuse 73 would be crazy not to like "Keeping the Beat" and the way it totally chops and shreds the vocals to "Uptown Baby" by Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz while everything keeps on bouncing.

#6 - The Diverse album came out in late 2003 and I'm pretty much cheating by even putting it on here...but WXYC had it on the playlist for all of January and that's when I bought it. Definitely a solid early 2004 favorite for me, so on the list it goes.

#7 - Within the span of a single month this summer, I saw Devendra Banhart play live on both sides of the Atlantic. Both shows were pretty incredible but in very different ways. I really like both of these 2004 albums that he released...as well as his contributions to the Vetiver disc. Rejoicing... is probably my favorite of the two, though I like Nino Rojo's "At The Hop" so much that I played it at a wedding last fall.

#8 - DJ/Rupture's Special Gunpowder = my favorite album cover of 2004. Hot album, too.

#9 - A likely contender for the composite WXYC Top 5, and with very good reason. Madvillain fans who've already acquired many of the countless other releases featuring Madlib or MF Doom may want to check out the Stones Throw 101 DVD in order to see two hot Madvillain videos ("All Caps", "Rhinestone Cowboy").

Whew, I've already rambled on for quite a bit here so I won't keep going with these notes except to acknowledge that my #15 choice was also a bit of cheating, except in a pre-2005 instead of a post-2003 direction. I made it a policy not to consider mix CDs (or reissues) for this list, but I consider the Diplo/M.I.A. mix to be more of an artist-centric release that quelled some of my pent-up demand for more M.I.A. hits in the wake of "Galang" and "Sunshowers". I think individual tracks from this CD sound a bit silly sometimes when they're played out of context on WXYC, but as a whole the mix works really well. Today I actually managed to lay my hands on a copy of the Arular advance...so I'll have that to listen to while I sit around and ponder the extent to which M.I.A. is about to blow up beyond the DJ/music critic/hipster circles that she's already won over.

At the end of 2004 I made a year-end mix CD that features songs from most of the releases mentioned above....as well as a few other songs (non-jamz) that I really liked. I'm guessing that a decent percentage of the people who regularly read this blog may have already received one by now....but who knows. I finally have a new batch of printouts of Golfing Bush from Fahrenheit 9/11. And I would love to mark 'em up and turn them into CD covers....so shoot me an email at tubacity [at] gmail.com if you would like one.

Posted by Tim at 01:24 AM | Comments (4)

January 30, 2005

After The Show It's The After-Party

I was too slow on the ticket-buying draw to make the Friday night Arcade Fire show that lots of my friends seem to have thoroughly enjoyed. But I had quite a blast DJ-ing the "day-after" party that Merge threw at Moshi Moshi tonight. The Arcade Fire had an off-date before their next show in Washington, DC....so some much-needed Chapel Hill downtime was apparently in order. Icy weather didn't seem to put any damper on the evening festivities, everyone seemed ready to dance and throw down...and that always makes me really happy as a DJ. I told Spott towards the end of the night that I knew things were probably going to go pretty well when one of the guys in the band came up on separate occasions to request both "Drop It Like It's Hot" and "I Want You Back". Strangely enough, it was that same band member who exhibited some really uncanny similarities to former-Chapel-Hillian Floyd Utschig, the current Gifu resident who once taught me how to properly say "Moshi Moshi" ("Moshi Mosh") when answering the telephone in Japan. It is true that "Moshi Moshi means hello", but they don't really pronounce that extra "ee" sound in Japan...at least not on the phone.

But enough about pronunciation, Moshi Moshi was a really great space for a party and that hardwood floor is an awesome dancefloor, definitely a nice change of pace from the concrete slab in Hell. I even did the worm across the floor at the end of the night...and without injuring or dirtying myself! Arigatô to Moshi Moshi for being so hospitable and big thanks to Merge for everything else.

This afternoon I threw together an Arcade Fire "remix" (ahem) that I was gonna try to make the centerpiece of one of my sets tonight. But I didn't wind up playing it while the Arcade Fire was in the building, partially just out of respect and partially out of fear of further freaking out a band that is already a bit overwhelmed by their newfound success and sudden popularity. But I went through too many takes of this thing for it to just die a quiet death....so here it is, another ridiculous "mashup"/blend that I put together on my computer:

"Neighborhood # 5 (Milkshake)" [4.09 MB]

Yes, it's a bunch of Arcade Fire loops synched up with Kelis' "Milkshake" acappella. Please forgive me, I've been listening to far too much of DJ P's hot new "Suck My Mixx" CD, which could be considered the long-awaited sequel to 2001's amazing Z-Trip/DJ P collaboration Uneasy Listening, Vol. 1. And on that note, hurry up with my waffle!

Posted by Tim at 04:25 AM | Comments (7)

January 21, 2005

That's Right, Put In Work, Move Yr Ass, Go Bezerk

Three months ago Mark D. and I were throwing around potential dates for the next round of Hell dance parties...and I remember thinking that January 21st might be perfect for a big post-Kerry-inauguration party with a Gerald Ford-derived "our long national nightmare is over" theme. But alas, we just inaugurated the wrong dude again. So I will have to settle for remembering 01/20/2005 as the date of WXYC's "Best of 2004" dance party at Local 506. Which isn't such a bad thing. I was worried about how last night's weather was going to impact the turnout but the crowd was bigger than I expected and I think the whole thing went pretty well. Kudos to my fellow DJs and big thanks to everyone who came out to dance on a wintry Thursday night!

I never post my DJ setlists online for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I never write them down and it would be way too hard to remember a multi-hour set. But I was only on for about 50 minutes last night and I put a lot of advance thought and work into this one-night-only 2004-themed set. So here it is, an odd assortment of body-movers from the past year:

• Ciara/Petey Pablo - "Goodies"
• Usher/Lil' Jon/Ludacris - "Yeah!"
• Franz Ferdinand - "Take Me Out" (sans pre-groove intro)
• Ghostface/Missy Elliott - "Tush"
• N*E*R*D - "She Wants to Move" (DFA remix)
• DJ Zeph - "Floorwax"
• The Go! Team - "Bottle Rocket"
• Elephant Man (w/ Twista, Youngbloodz, Kiprich) - "Jook Gal (Wine Wine)"
• Nina Sky - "Move Ya Body"
• Jacuzzi Brothers - "Bright Tiger"
• Kanye West - last part of "The New Workout Plan"
• Girl Talk - "Touch 2 Feel"
• Lil Wayne - "Go DJ"
• Jay-Z - "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" acappella excerpt over "Go DJ" instrumental
• DJ N-Wee - "Zurich Your Shoulder" excerpt
• Jay-Z - "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" excerpt
• Federation - "Hyphy"
• J-Kwon - "Tipsy"
• M.I.A. - "Galang"

I had a lot of fun with this set of music, it was a definite challenge to try and figure out how to fit certain "puzzle pieces" together. I was most psyched to find a way to drop a Bandwidth track in the midst of some jamz with which it could actually be beatmatched. Since I never blogged about this Jacuzzi Brothers track last November while I was hyping various Bandwidth cuts, I will take this opportunity to encourage people to download "Bright Tiger" (5.95 MB) to their new iPod Shuffle or whatever. And to all you advertising agency creative types out there in the digital ether, you gotta check out the Jacuzzi Brothers. If Four Tet can appear in luxury watch ads on cable TV and as theme music for an NPR show, then maybe a hot Jacuzzi Brothers track could serve as the driving-around-curvy-roads soundtrack to a Mazda ad or some such thing? C'mon, t-shirt sales alone are not going to send Jacuzzi's newborn son to college!

Posted by Tim at 04:24 PM | Comments (1)

January 18, 2005

Best of 2004

No, this isn't my Top 10 or 20 records of the year, though I'll probably post that list sometime in the next couple of weeks. This is a plug for the WXYC "Best of 2004" Dance that is taking place this Thursday night (1/20) at Local 506.

This will be WXYC's second annual "Best of..." dance. Last year WXYC tried adding a "Best of 2003" dance alongside the big-cash-cow 80s Dance and the rising-in-popularity Early 90s Dance. And I think it worked really well as a meaty and detailed "year-in-review" counterweight to the retro decade dances with their broadly-brushed strokes of crowd-pleasing nostalgia. No matter what type of music it was, if it was from 2003 and it was danceable, we were encouraged to play it in da club that night. I have fond memories of trying to figure out a way to work up a single set that contained Outkast, The Rapture, Fannypack's "Cameltoe", !!!, and some hot Crydamoure Records techno from France. And some more popular jamz, of course. I think I'm starting to re-engage in my own weird bout of short-term micro-nostalgia for 2003...a year when 50 Cent ruled the charts, when that Diwali beat was everywhere, when a milkshake brought all the boys to the yard and when Junior Senior became global pop stars...

But all that is (literally) "so 2003". 2004 is actually behind us now and that's the year that Thursday night's dance will be covering. Come move ya body and drop it like it's hot as several other WXYC djs and I mix up some of the most danceable records of 2004. Sure, there will probably be some Usher and Kanye but I'm also planning on playing the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Girl Talk, and The Go! Team. I suspect that XYC faves like M.I.A.'s "Galang" and the other "Yeah" might even be played more than once. It was a very good year...well, except for that whole election thing.

Timely costumes aren't encouraged for the 2004 dance the way they are for the decade dances...but maybe they should be. I think there are actually a bunch of interesting options for people who either have the will and/or a houseful of 2004-themed relics. A daring couple could go as Justin and Janet. A less daring person could probably find one of the many Kerry/Edwards t-shirts out there that could stand to be worn one final time. Someone who had a microphone could go as a state-name-screaming Howard Dean. Someone without a microphone could go as a jig-dancing Ashlee Simpson. As for me....well, I decided that I'm simply going to roll with two of the more unbelievable sports moments of Fall 2004:

Don't Step to Artest!

Posted by Tim at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2005

It's The Sureshot

Well, it's a new year and that means it's a time for a new start. Or maybe it's just time for things to get back to normal now that the holidays are over. Hmmm. I suppose there's a little bit of each of those competing cliches at work with regard to my Saturday night DJ residency at The Federal, which finally starts back up tonight. Despite the "every Saturday" plug in Rick Cornell's brief but much-appreciated survey of a few random area "bar DJs" in The Independent last month, I've only been able to DJ at The Federal every other Saturday (more or less). And while the other DJs who have been taking the other weeks have been great, it hasn't always been easy for me to organize and schedule the whole thing so that every Saturday is always covered. So The Federal and I have decided to just formalize my biweekliness. Saturday nights will be going the same biweekly route that DJ Marco's Thursday night "Federal Soul" residency has recently gone. And with this new arrangement comes a (new) name: Sureshot (gracias, TI). Which is oddly appropriate for the hoops season that is kicking into full swing before my very eyes. Starting tonight, Sureshot will be happening every two weeks...January 8th, January 22nd, February 5th, February 19th...and ya don't stop. Except you should stop....stop by anytime between 10pm and 2am!

Posted by Tim at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 25, 2004

Christmas Rappin'

"'Twas the night before Christmas...and all through the house..."
"Hold it now, wait, hold it....that's played out!!"
    - vocal exchange at the beginning of Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'"

Last Saturday I DJed a Christmas party at the very swank La Residence. Whenever I'm DJing some sort of special event, I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself and I wind up doing more advance prep work than I do when I'm just DJing in a bar/club. Since this particular party was Christmas-related, I spent part of the the preceding week choosing a few good danceable Christmas tunes to play and trying to work out some ways to mix them into my whole set of music.

Along with classic Xmas tunes by Run-DMC and The Waitresses, "Christmas Rappin'" by Kurtis Blow was an obvious choice for the occasion. The interesting thing about "Christmas Rappin'" is that it wasn't just a typical Christmas record released by an established recording artist looking to capitalize on the sales of previous albums and singles. "Christmas Rappin'" was actually Blow's historic 1979 debut single, released only a mere few weeks after a song called "Rapper's Delight" took the world by storm. If "Rapper's Delight" had come out just a tad bit later than it did (in October 1979, only 4 months after "Good Times" was released!), "Christmas Rappin'" might be famously known as the "first" hip-hop record instead of just a Christmas novelty tune that gets broken out once a year and winds up fulfilling the prophecy of one of its own lyrics: "Every year just about this time, I celebrate it with a rhyme."

I'm not afraid to publicly admit that another one of my favorite Christmas jams is actually a certain million-selling single that was released 20 years ago this month. Yes, that guilty pleasure known as "Last Christmas" by Wham! Sure, those cheesy heartache-y lyrics are saturated with sappiness, but it's a really catchy song and I love the way that those synths bounce up and down on top of the primitive and gritty early-80s drum-machine beat. While listening to "Last Christmas" again a couple weeks ago I was struck by how the song might potentially mix well with some of the sparse 808-based hip-hop from the early Def Jam era. But I didn't really think that I ought to be busting out "Sucker MCs" or "It's Yours" at a nice Christmas party. So I just worked out a way to blend "Last Christmas" into the end of Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'", since the latter song is only a little bit faster tempo-wise.

And once I started counting the beats per minute for these songs, that's when the ridiculous idea hit me. "Last Christmas" is right around 107 BPM, and the damn thing is way too long - it's almost 7 minutes! So I pulled out my acappella copy of Jay-Z's "The Black Album" and tried mixing in the rap from "Encore", an uncharacteristically fast Jay-Z song that I remembered being in that same BPM range. And the damn thing fit almost perfectly. And I thought it sounded pretty good and pretty funny. So I did a primitive mix of it and I played it at both the Christmas party and another party that I DJed the next night. I think it went over pretty well but the sound quality was really bad and I wasn't at all happy with the mix. So I coughed up the license fee for Goldwave's Multiquence (screw ACID!) and spent much of yesterday mixing together a Wham!/Jay-Z mashup...with a little bit of "Ho Ho Ho" chanting at the end to accompany those Christmas sleigh bells. The MP3 version is 5.0 MB and you can download either the regular or curseword-free versions here:

Christmas Encore

Christmas Encore (clean edit)

Let me preemptively state for the record that I fully realize that the Jay-Z remix craze is pretty played at this point, and I'm sure that someone out there might scream and groan about this. Whatever, if you don't like my mashup, you can press fast forward. Or the back button. Don't worry, I have absolutely no intention of making "The Wham Album" or "Black Christmas" or anything like that. Consider this a one-time Christmas-themed encore to cap off 2004, which really was the year of Jay-Z remixes, for better or for worse. C'mon, this is Young H-O....one last time, make some noise!!

Besides, if any Scrooges out there really need something to hate on, they should be throwing lumps of coal at that godawful Jay-Z/Linkin Park crap that somehow made it to the top of the Billboard album charts....

Posted by Tim at 02:19 AM | Comments (3)

December 15, 2004

I'm With The Band

A big drum major salute to Christa for posting a link to mp3 recordings of the University of Arizona marching band performing a whole routine of Talking Heads songs! And extra flam paradiddles for the fact that she simultaneously ignited a welcome thread of band geek nostalgia. I too count myself among those whose high school social life and developing musical taste were immeasurably improved and expanded by the whole marching band experience. During my three-year stint, the Jordan High School Marching Band never performed anything nearly as cool as a Talking Heads routine. Actually, I can't even really remember what specific music we marched to other than Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition", which I remember really liking, partly because it had a lot of cool tuba parts in it.

[SIDE NOTE: Since I have just used the terms "tuba" and "Arizona" in the same paragraph, I should probably clarify a few things for future Googlers of "Tuba City, Arizona" while explaining a little personal etymology in the process. I have briefly visited Tuba City, AZ but this blog has nothing to do with that fine place. I just really like the name "Tuba City", partly 'cause I played tuba for 6+ years. As you might see from the domain name where this blog is currently parked, I also like the sound of the name "Tuba Frenzy". But that was the name of my long-defunct music zine, and I wanted a new name for this very different online creature. Hence, "Tuba City".]

Back to marching bands....the most memorable tuba part that I played during my sousaphone-wearing years was not anything from the likes of Mussorgsky but rather a simple and powerful 4-bar bassline that wasn't even part of our official on-field routine. In fact, we never would've even played it at all were it not for a bit of tuba rebellion led by two of my fellow squad members. William Clapp and Shawn Bradsher must've done their share of hanging out at Hillside High School football games, because they had witnessed the swingin' glory of Hillside's marching band in action...funkier, more flamboyant action, that is. I guess William and Shawn must've resented having to constantly play their sousaphones in the more rigid and "white" Jordan High School fashion, 'cause whenever there was some sort of downtime during marching band practice, they started playing what I would later come to understand was the bassline of "Paid in Full" by Eric B & Rakim. "Paid in Full" had apparently been a Hillside marching band staple, and William and Shawn took the time to work out the exact fingering for it so that they too could play it. Once the notes had been worked out, it was easy enough to learn and really addictive to play....and before long, all four of us tubas were playing that awesome bassline over and over again. Eventually, the much-repeated tuba riff had picked up the accompaniment of the drum section....and within a month or two "Paid In Full" was no longer just some unsanctioned playing that annoyed the band director during practices. It had been fully transformed into an impressive crowd-rallying jam that the whole band played at football games while sitting in the bleachers. I doubt that our version of "Paid In Full" could've held a candle to Hillside's, but by then they'd probably moved on to something more current anyway. Looking back, I am really glad that I had that song burned into my skull as a 15-year-old. And I remember being happy about the fact that the sousaphone section had become a center of marching band attention for cool reasons and not just because we carried big funny-looking instruments that were easy sources of comic relief. For some of that comic relief, however, check this yearbook photo....yes, that's me as a 10th grade tuba player.

Popular music crosses over into the world of marching bands all the time, but these days, it's the marching band that's crossing back into the world of hip-hop and R&B. In the last few months alone, the glorious sound of marching bands has been featured prominently in songs like Yung Wun's "Tear It Up", Yin Yang Twins' "Halftime", and of course the Destiny's Child hit single "Lose My Breath", which has got to be the hottest slab of marching-band-pop since....uh, Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk". In a Village Voice column last month, my man Dave Tompkins reviewed the Destiny's Child and Yin Yang Twins singles. Amidst all of his marching band and football references, Dave managed to throw in a brief rimshot about Destiny's Child getting booed during a halftime appearance at the 2001 NBA Finals. Which was definitely in the back of my mind when I saw Beyonce and crew perform "Lose My Breath" alongside a full marching band during the recent Cowboys/Bears game on Thanksgiving Day (see BBC photo above/left).

I'm not sure what's up with this recent trend of marching bands crossing over, but I definitely approve. And I'd have to guess that it's maybe some sort of after-effect of the success of the 2002 film Drumline, which was directed by Charles Stone III - the guy behind the famous Budweiser "Whassuup" ads and the son of none other than retiring UNC-CH professor Chuck Stone. I was in Circuit City a week or so ago and was thrilled to see that they had that middle-of-the-field drum-battle scene from Drumline on a repeated loop in the special acoustic chamber that contains one of those $3500 televisions attached to a ridiculous arrangement of surround-sound speakers. I usually scoff at the idea of materially-obsessed people trying to turn their houses into mini-THX-theaters, but I couldn't help but enter the chamber and appreciate the fact that this equipment allowed me to soak in the Drumline scene in its entirety. Every snare tap, every rim shot, every tom roll...

Posted by Tim at 01:03 AM | Comments (6)

December 09, 2004

A Big Shout Out to 89.3

If you missed or simply want to re-experience the WXYC "10 Years of Webcasting" concert that took place at Local 506 last month, there are finally some mp3 recordings of the show available on the WXYC website. And I never actually blogged anything about the show at the time, so I'll provide some details as an incentive to check out the live mp3s.

eNtet was the first act of the night and were probably missed by many of the more late-arriving showgoers. But those of us who fit into that category (ahem...) can now listen to the final 35 minutes of the eNtet set (32.3 MB), including a nice rendition of Charlie Haden's classic composition "Song For Che". This 506 concert happened only 4 days after the election, and as eNtet leader Ian Davis explained from the stage, "It seemed appropriate, with the outcome this week, that we play a little 'revolutionary dirge' for you this evening." Indeed....give me liberation music or give me death! An older and more "macro" version of eNtet appeared on the Bandwidth CD as the Micro-East Collective. MEC's "Cells - One to Many" (3.32 MB) is a short and concise exercise in building cacophony out of nothing. This track almost never gets played on the radio, which is kinda too bad, because I think it would make an interesting transitional cut between other less-experimental tunes.

The Moaners were next up after eNtet, and while their set was quite rockin', WXYC is not making the recording available online out of respect for the wishes of the band's record label. The Moaners' new CD Dark Snack is coming out next month and I guess someone must see this live show as a threat of some sort. Personally, I don't understand why people aren't fully embracing the promotional spread-the-word value of sharing and downloading, even in its most limited form. But whatever. You can still freely download "Everybody Wants My Baby" (4.92 MB), The Moaners' contribution to Bandwidth.

Next on the bill was Spectac, who really got the crowd all hyped up. Accompanied by DJ Bumrush of WKNC and WXDU fame, Spectac blazed through a quick 23-minute set that featured several of his new 9th Wonder joints (including "War of the World", also featured on the new DJ Chela mixtape) as well as his upcoming single "One Day", which features a guest appearance by none other than current Durham resident Big Daddy Kane! Nobody's equal, Kane himself wasn't in the building that night, but Spectac more than held things down on his own, going off on a couple of hot freestyles amidst his other tracks. Spectac has some serious freestyle skills, he's one of those guys that can actually spout off all sorts of spontaneous rhymes from the top of his head and not just from the memory bank deep inside the brain. You probably can't as easily tell without actually seeing the visuals along with the audio, but trust me, the dude was clearly free-associating based on whatever he saw in front of him. I should know, as I happened to be bopping along right up by the stage...and on a couple of occasions, my shaved head and I somehow became sources of lyrical inspiration! Download the Spectac set here (21.5 MB) and listen at the 1:45 and 18:00 marks if you want to chuckle at the first-ever and last-ever times that my name gets checked-in-rhyme.

Jett Rink headlined the evening's concert and put on the sort of rousing live performance for which they have become so locally renowned. Viva once again proved to be an amazing frontman and they even did a righteous space-funk-y cover of "White Horse", that classic early 80s electro-disco hit by Danish duo Laid Back. The sound quality isn't always so great on this recording of Jett Rink's set (51.0 MB), but the considerable energy on display should be enough of an incentive to make sure and catch one of the band's shows sometime soon. And/or to download "Born Hungry" (2.75 MB), their hot slab of taut art-punk that opens up Bandwidth.

Here's a picture of Jett Rink in action, with Viva hilariously using a WXYC banner as a cape/scarf:

Posted by Tim at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2004

Flash is Fast, Flash is Cool

This past Thursday afternoon, 48-year-old Joseph Saddler came to UNC-Chapel Hill as part of a lecture tour of 30 college campuses across the country. Who is Joseph Saddler, you ask? Well, he's one of the key early pioneers of hip-hop and inarguably one of the most innovative, influential, and important DJs of all time. Joseph Saddler, you still ask? At this point, music scholar Charles R. Martin might snobbishly clear things up by saying, "Oh, you know him as Grandmaster Flash". I can't front and try to play it cool, though...as soon as I heard about this event, there was no way I was going to miss a single beat!

Flash's afternoon lecture/workshop was supposed to begin at 3:30pm but a flight delay bumped everything back by about an hour. A bunch of us packed into the Cabaret in the basement of the Carolina Union and Flash finally came out around 4:30. He started off with a point that he would repeatedly emphasize throughout his UNC visit - that hip-hop truly began in 1971, way earlier than the release date of "Rapper's Delight" and other commonly cited beginnings of the hip-hop era. Over the next hour Flash gave us a verbal quick-mix of all sorts of historical facts, personal breakthroughs, and DJ-ing anecdotes by answering a series of pre-written questions posed to him by one of his deep-voiced associates. It was almost something of a reverse-Socratic-Method...and probably a great way to lecture without notes! Throughout we got to hear Flash talk about things like:

• "the get-down part" (i.e. the break) of records and how he wanted to make those parts longer
• his "peek-a-boo system" for cueing records via a mixer and external preamps hacked together with a single-pole double-throw switch
• his "Quick Mix Theory" for cutting short sections of records back and forth on time (something Kool Herc wasn't doing)
• his "Torque Theory" of turntable mechanics and the discovery of his first Technics turntable
• how the shape of needles impacted whether they stayed in the groove
• soaking records in the bathtub so he could exchange the labels between a "hot record" and a "wack record" and fool all the DJs who were trying to cop his material
• how he would keep dating girls whose parents had huge unwanted record collections
• his "Clock Theory" of how to calculate how far back he needed to spin a record
• details about the Bronx block party and club scene during the 1970s

...and ya don't stop. Except he did eventually have to stop due to time constraints. But not before demonstrating some of his innovations by cutting two copies of "Good Times" back and forth. Seeing Flash's legendary Chic quick mix recreated before my eyes was a pretty amazing experience, even if one of the turntable needles kept accidentally coming out of the groove during some rapid-fire cuts. Actually, the fact that Flash was not immune from DJ error was not only oddly reassuring, but it helped underscore a point that hip-hop fans and DJ historians have often made: that while other DJs went on to surpass Grandmaster Flash in terms of absolute skill and technical virtuosity, Flash was the true innovator that came up with so many of the ideas and concepts that are so fundamental to hip-hop music and the art of DJing. And he was the true scientist that was able to implement these ideas given extremely limited technical equipment and monetary resources. Hearing Grandmaster Flash talk about all of these things in person was inspiring....and even a bit humbling. I'm probably going to feel spoiled and unworthy the next time I use the seamless looping feature on my CD mixer, since except for the need for the DJ to still be able to feel the tempo/rhythm of a song and count beats, seamless looping is basically Grandmaster Flash's innovative brain and quick hands manifested in software.

After taking a few questions from the audience, Grandmaster Flash signed a few autographs and posed for some pictures with admiring fans. One of which was me:

I'm holding a copy of the excellent Rap Attack 2 by David Toop...I geeked out and got Flash to sign a full-page picture of him DJing at Bronx nightclub Disco Fever. I've been re-reading Rap Attack 2 of late and I highly recommend it (or I guess the new edition Rap Attack 3) to anyone interested in learning more about Grandmaster Flash and the early days of hip-hop. And for a rich history of all sorts of DJing (not just hip-hop), the extremely comprehensive Last Night a DJ Saved My Life is utterly indispensable. The authors of that book (Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster) also penned the extensive mini-book liner notes included in the soon-to-be-out-of-print CD The Official Adventures of Grandmaster Flash that came out on the now-defunct Strut label a couple years ago. Cop that one while you still can!

Anyway, back to Grandmaster Flash's UNC visit...he went on to perform later that night at "A Tribute to Hip-Hop" in the Great Hall. After a bit of a breakdancing battle between a Greensboro crew and a UNC crew, Flash came on and started with a "historical" set where he cut some of those ultimate breaks and beats back and forth as if it were back in the day. Then, as if to prove that he was still a living entity and not a museum piece, he hyped up the crowd and started spinning a lot of post-80s hip-hop classics, all of them veritable "get-down parts" for the students of today. I had an awesome time, though I learned how exhausting it can be to "jump around" when you're holding a messenger bag with a bike helmet attached. But hey, at least no one convinced me to do the worm...

Posted by Tim at 01:32 AM | Comments (9)

December 03, 2004

Some Kind of Federal Program

No, this is not a belated rant about Bush's infamous Social Security comment during the 2000 campaign, but rather an update on the weekly DJ nights that I've been scheduling at The Federal. Only 3 more Saturdays before Xmas, damn! These Saturday night things have been happening almost every week since early July...and I'm really not sure if we're going to be able to keep up that pace (or any pace) in 2005. So if you get a chance, please come out this month for some festive beats and good times....while there's still a chance to do so! While I'm at it, big thanks to anyone and everyone who came out to this particular weekly during the last several months. The other DJs and I definitely appreciate it. Now on to the upcoming schedule...

This Saturday December 4th, my boy Todd will be mixing it up. This may be his last time DJing at The Federal, as the law books are calling his name and there ain't no half-steppin' when it comes to the bar exam. Come out and hear selections from Todd's ridiculously deep crates. Which reminds me, these crates have started to ooze out onto the Internet via a couple of hot new mp3 blogs that Todd is involved in: his own Right and Exact, and the hip-hop-producer-focused Can I Bring My Gat?, which currently features some great tracks from the likes of Prince Paul, Large Professor, and Clark Kent. If last month's Spin article is any indication (or even a catalyst), MP3 blogs are continuing to blow up, like slow motion rarities-focused radio shows with detailed hypertext-enhanced talksets. It'll be interesting to see how and when some of my favorite MP3 blogs start to integrate podcasting and/or some sort of next-generation version of automated time-shifting technology. 'Cause I'm already a bit tired of desktop file (un)organization and constantly right-clicking to "Save-Target-As"!

But back to The Federal business....I'm going to be back there on Saturday, December 11th. I'll be ramping up for the upcoming holiday party season, so no one should be surprised if the tunes that night are a little more geared towards getting people onto the dancefloor. It'll be a Festivus for the rest of us!

On Saturday the 18th, The Federal will be graced by special guest Yugen, a frequent DJ at numerous clubs and bars around town: Ringside, Fuse, Nightlight, Tallulah's, etc. Yugen will not only be wrapping up an unprecedented three-week-sequence of SILS-enrolled DJs, but he'll also be closing off our 2004 Federal schedule in style. That's right, no Saturday night DJs on Xmas or New Year's. Happy Chrismukkah to all and to all a good Saturday night.

Posted by Tim at 08:45 PM | Comments (2)

December 02, 2004

Totally Crashing and Stunned In Bright Lights

A couple of amateur photos taken of Battles at Tuesday night's show at the Cat's Cradle:

Gotta love a that band uses both an 8-foot-tall crash cymbal and two laptop computers...

Posted by Tim at 01:19 PM | Comments (1)

November 27, 2004

The Clarion Call of Rock 'n' Roll's Everlasting Triumph

Recently heard busting rhymes over the "99 Problems" beat, Richard Allen just popped up on the McSweeney's website with a humorous piece called Seven Questions for the Guitar Solo From "Stairway to Heaven." As interviews go, I'd have to say that's quite a 'get'. I can only dream that Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer might one day fight it out for the chance to interview the thunderous drum intro from "When the Levee Breaks". (Q: "How did it make you feel when you heard "Rhymin' and Stealin'" for the first time?")

Speaking of rock 'n' roll's everlasting triumph and people who love Led Zeppelin, the Black Taj song "Woke Up Tired" (6.99 MB) is one of the hottest things on Bandwidth, so download that monster jam already. Sadly, we may never hear another recording from this particular incarnation of Black Taj, which consisted of Dave Brylawski (Polvo, Idyll Swords) on guitar and vocals, Grant Tennille (Idyll Swords, Jimi Hendrix Inexperience, Prayer Flags, Kinko's) on guitar and backup vocals, Steve Popson (Polvo) on bass, and Thomas Atherton (Jimi Hendrix Inexperience) on the drums.

Black Taj is not the only track on Bandwidth to feature a Polvo alumnus, as there's also a track from Libraness, aka Ash Bowie (Polvo, Helium). "Sykes Temple Lane" (7.56 MB) is a really nice instrumental that starts innocently with warm pitch-bending bluesiness before taking some dark and unexpected turns over the course of 5 and a half minutes. I'm a big fan of most any song that features trombone, so I give this Libraness track even more points for the sliding horn sounds. If you like this Libraness track, I highly recommend the Libraness full-length Yesterday...and Tomorrow's Shells that came out on Tiger Style in 2000. It's got some vocals and a little more song structure to it...and the whole thing has a really great early 90s Polvo feel to it.

Posted by Tim at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2004

Back From Holiday

I didn't intend to take a two-week holiday from this blog but it was a nice break all the same. But now that all of the entries have fallen off of my main index page, I guess it's time for the holiday to end. I'll pick up pretty much where I left off, by briefly plugging the fact that I'm once again DJing at The Federal tomorrow night, and by continuing to hype the WXYC webcasting anniversary. Local NPR station WUNC gave a good bit of airtime to the WXYC webcasting breakthrough on Wednesday's episode of The State of Things, and if you missed the radio version, you can listen to the archived show online. The show featured 20+ minutes of webcasting/technology chat with David McConville, Mike Shoffner, and SunSITE/ibiblio head Paul Jones, who blogged about the live radio experience here.

The second half of Wednesday's The State of Things focused on local hip-hop MC Phonte Coleman (Little Brother) and The Foreign Exchange, Phonte's trans-Atlantic Internet-enabled collaboration with Dutch producer Nicolay. Oddly enough, just last month NPR's Renee Montagne did a Morning Edition story about The Foreign Exchange. I guess Connected is sufficiently smoothed-out and R&B enough to appeal to the typical NPR demographic? Hey, more power to local hip-hop artists for making things happen. I like the way the cover of Connected kinda looks like a still from a Michael Mann movie. It's a wonder that Trans Am never used such an image on one of their album covers.

To tie this all back to WXYC's free Bandwidth compilation CD, one of the guest MCs on The Foreign Exchange's Connected album is Median, who also guests with Spectac on "Life Ain't Easy". Up-and-coming local producer Khrysis did the hot horn-laden beat for "Life Ain't Easy", so download it here (5.07 MB) if you haven't already. Spectac and Khrysis are also some of the many artists featured on a relatively new Neblina Records compilation called Definition. And if you're looking for more to read, both Phonte and Spectac took part in a post-election "hip-hop conversation" that appeared in last week's issue of The Independent.

Posted by Tim at 06:36 PM | Comments (2)

November 12, 2004

Federal Reserved

I'm DJing at The Federal once again this Saturday night. Without Halloween or an election or a WXYC webcasting anniversary as a tie-in, I may feel oddly theme-less. But perhaps that's for the best, it'll be nice to try to get back to basics. In lieu of any specific music/DJing details, I'll use this space to plug the new menu at The Federal instead. They just put in a brand new stove a few weeks back and from what I hear their new chef Andy Magowan has been going to town with it. A couple weeks back I had a plate of tasty fried green tomatoes as an appetizer and a pretty amazing main dish of shrimp & tasso (spicy Cajun ham). It was almost as if Crook's Corner had found its way to downtown Durham!

Speaking of Andy Magowan, music fans who were around this area in the mid 1990s may remember him not as a chef but as the bass player for Chapel Hill bands June and The Starry Wisdom Band. Magowan is still playing bass, now with local instrumental sextet Malt Swagger. Malt Swagger's contribution to the new WXYC compilation Bandwidth is one of my favorite songs on the whole CD. "Binger" is a strangely haunting soundtrack-y groove distinguished by its eerie violin sounds and mysterious vibraphone. Download this free mp3 (5.79 MB) and check it out for yourself. I am told that Malt Swagger have a really great double album in the works for next year....if "Binger" is representative of what's to come, I'll definitely be watching out for it.

Posted by Tim at 01:37 PM | Comments (1)

November 11, 2004

10 Years and Streamin'

(L to R: John Streck, David McConville, Mike Shoffner, Paul Jones)

This past Sunday, WXYC put on a panel discussion in honor of the 10th anniversary of the first-ever webcast by a radio station. I had very recently (re)discovered much of the WXYC/SunSITE-specific history while researching my In/Audible article, but even with this fresh familiarity, I still found Sunday's conversation to be really enlightening and eye-opening. The talk started with the 1994 webcast but gradually bounced around a broad array of topics related to technology and media and all the ways in which they intersect. Paul Jones and David McConville told some fascinating tales about the very early days of the World Wide Web, John Streck from NC-ITEC and NCSU explained the genesis and benefits of Internet2 & IPv6 (on which WXYC and WCPE are now streaming), and before long we were all talking about podcasting, disruptive technologies, low-power FM, Creative Commons, etc.

The UNC Production Services folks completely dropped the ball by not showing up with a PA for us to use, so we almost had to scrap all of the plans to simulcast the panel over the radio and record it for posterity. But luckily Brian Russell of audioactivism.org had shown up to say a few words about podcasting...and within moments, audio activism was happening in front of our very eyes via one portable digital recorder, two small mics clipped to upside-down coffee cups, some sound cables, a laptop, and an internet connection that streamed the sound over to the WXYC studio on the other side of the Student Union. When we realized that this last-minute setup was actually going to work, we had a collective chuckle about how appropriate it was that this webcasting panel broadcast would be just as creatively jury-rigged as the initial 1994 webcast (in which the output from a yard sale radio was sent into a Mac soundcard, which then converted the sound into a digital signal, which was then sent to a Solaris box running a videoconferencing/chat "reflector" capable of multicasting the audio to any videoconferencing software clients wishing to receive it).

Since the panel discussion was recorded as it went out over the airwaves, we wound up with a copy to archive online. And while I'm mp3-blogging audio files about streaming audio (the early MBONE users would probably feel right at home with this meta-ness), I should also plug the full version and partial transcript of the early 1995 DRS-3 report about the WXYC simulcast. A partial excerpt of this report wound up being the first track on Bandwidth, but I prefer the full version of Swiss people talking in German, typing away at a keyboard, and debating the future of radio while listening to a really choppy WXYC signal. Name That Tune buffs, take note: those two chopped (not screwed!) songs being heard via the WXYC simulcast are Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two's "Get Rhythm" and MC Ren's "Mayday on the Front Line". If you were forced to try and capture WXYC's musical format in a mere two songs, you could do a hell of a lot worse....

Posted by Tim at 12:17 AM | Comments (1)

November 07, 2004

Bandwidth

Today is the 10th anniverary of the WXYC webcast (the first-ever by a radio station), so this morning we made the commemorative Bandwidth compilation available for free download. You can download the individual mp3s via the links in the tracklisting, but why not just grab the whole thing with cover art and liner notes included? Casey Burns did an amazing job on the cover (pictured above), and the CD has a ton of great local music: Black Taj, Jett Rink, Work Clothes, Shark Quest, Etta Baker, Spectac & Median, Shallow Be Thy Name, Jacuzzi Brothers, Protean Spook, Hotel Motel, and I could go on and on.

If you use BitTorrent, you can download Bandwidth via this torrent file. It's funny...if I recall correctly, the name Bandwidth was chosen in large part because of its reference to the early challenges of online streaming and because of the whole "band" connotation....but now that we've stored all of these large music files on the ibiblio servers and enlisted their help in packaging the whole thing up as a bandwidth-saving torrent, the title is that much more appropriate.

The weekend's other big webcasting anniversary events were fun and insightful...luckily, both of them were recorded for posterity. I'll write more about them later on...or maybe once we make the sound files available online. Until then, consume Bandwidth and think back to the days when you were really cooking with gas if you merely had a SLIP/PPP connection.

Posted by Tim at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2004

In Cyberspace, Everyone Can Hear You Stream

Speaking of streaming screaming, I have some thoughts about the election and what appears to be rampant voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement, but I will save those thoughts for a post to come. This upcoming weekend is all about WXYC and its "10th Anniversary of Webcasting" celebration. On Saturday night, Local 506 is hosting a party/concert to celebrate the release of WXYC's brand new local music compilation CD, Bandwidth: Celebrating 10 Years of Internet Radio on WXYC-Chapel Hill. The show should be pretty great, it features eNtet, The Moaners, Spectac, and Jett Rink....with Billy Sugarfix MCing the proceedings. And then a few hours later on Sunday, the full contents of the CD will be available for free download at wxyc.org. How's that for experimenting with new means of distributing and transmitting music?

Sunday is the actual 10th anniversary date, and from 3 to 5pm that afternoon there's going to be a great panel discussion in Room 3203 of the UNC Student Union. Panelists will include Paul Jones of ibiblio, as well as two of the folks that did the most to get the WXYC stream going back in 1994, David McConville and Mike Shoffner. John Streck from NC-ITEC will also be present to talk about Internet2 and the brand-new IPv6 streams for WXYC and WCPE.

As I mentioned last week, I wrote an In/Audible article about the story of how WXYC became the first radio station in the world to simulcast its radio signal over the internet. The In/Audible PDF is still available here, but I thought there should be an easier-to-read HTML version online so I've reformatted it and pasted it below. Read on if you enjoy stories about technology and innovation and people who were "thinking outside the box" way before that phrase got ruined by business coaches and dotcom execs.

In Cyberspace, Everyone Can Hear You Stream
(or "How WXYC Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Webcast")

On November 7th, 1994, WXYC 89.3 FM became the first radio station in the world to continuously simulcast its signal over the Internet 24 hours a day. While this in itself is an impressive milestone, what really makes the accomplishment worth revisiting in detail is the fact that it happened solely as a result of the creative thinking and persistent work of a group of people who simply wanted to do something for the sake of doing it…and doing it first. In the wake of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the late ‘90s dotcom-fueled stock bubble, it's easy to forget that there was once a time when the Internet was not dominated by corporations, venture capitalists, copyright holders, advertisers, spammers, and other moneyed interests. The 1994 Internet was still an exhilarating and promising world where the prime time players were technologists, academics, hackers, and students. And it was during that time, almost a year before RealAudio even existed, that a group of technology geeks in the basement of UNC's Phillips Hall managed to harness their ingenuity and technical know-how on behalf of a free-form college radio station that approached its main focus (music) with a similar passion for pushing the boundaries and experimenting with possibilities.

In the beginning, there was the Sun. SunSITE, that is. In early 1992, Sun Microsystems put out a formal request for grant proposals from institutions interested in creating and maintaining an anonymous FTP archive on the Internet. UNC's Office of Information Technology (aka OIT, later known as ATN and now melting into ITS) submitted a proposal to not only establish an FTP archive but to enhance the archive/collection with early search technologies like WAIS and Gopher. UNC's proposal was accepted, and SunSITE was born later in 1992. Sun Microsystems provided computer hardware and funding, and UNC ran SunSITE out of offices in the basement of Phillips Hall. Later known as MetaLab and now known as ibiblio, the digital archive is one of the Internet's oldest and largest collections of free information and software.

SunSITE director Paul Jones started with a small staff consisting mainly of part-time students who were passionate about the promises and possibilities of technology and the Internet. One of SunSITE's early hires was Doug Matthews, an avid local music fan who would later start the alt.music.chapel-hill newsgroup and help create some of the earliest local-music-related websites. Several months later in the summer of 1994, SunSITE hired David McConville, a new graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. McConville would soon become a key player on a lot of SunSITE projects, including the WXYC webcast.

David McConville: I met Paul Jones and we immediately hit it off talking about the Clipper Chip proposals. I'd finished getting a BS in Audio Engineering the year before, and I had used the Internet enough to think I knew something (I'd actually had an account on LaUNChpad - the pre-SunSITE bulletin board system). I had researched a lot of the 3D audio processing techniques as an undergrad in classes with Bob Moog and I'd done some video editing, which made me familiar enough with digital media tools that Paul made me the "multimedia researcher" or somesuch. I was really interested in online audio/video/3D distribution, and he let me do basically whatever I wanted to as long as I kept up some of the funded tasks (running an online educational archive paid for by Sun and Cisco).

McConville and Matthews quickly became co-conspirators on a wide variety of projects dealing with music and the Internet.

David McConville: I worked with Doug Matthews quite a bit early on, scheming up all kinds of experiments. We contacted Negativland and made a site for them, putting the “U2” single online in MP2 compressed audio format as an experiment to see what kind of response Island Records might have. I called up the Church of the Subgenius and worked with Ivan Stang to create the almost indefensible "SubSITE". I created an audio archive of some NC sermons from tapes and transcripts at UNC's North Carolina collection.

Simply putting digital audio files online was pretty cutting edge for the early 1990s, but Internet technology was beginning to change very quickly. Prior to 1992, there was no acceptable way to "broadcast" sound on the Internet so that it reached multiple recipients at once. Sending a digital sound file to ten different computers required ten distinct unicast transmissions of the file, and such an inefficient use of bandwidth was completely impractical for sending out real-time audio. All of this began to change with the early 1992 advent of the MBONE, a virtual overlay network built on top of the existing Internet. MBONE stood for "multicast backbone", and the multicasting protocol used on the MBONE allowed high-powered Unix workstations to send information to multiple destinations in the most efficient possible way.

The MBONE was used to audiocast a 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, and much of the audio content being transmitted over the network tended to be technical jargon and/or meta-discussions about the MBONE itself. One of the more notable uses of the MBONE was Carl Malamud's "Internet Talk Radio", an internet-only "radio station" that multicasted the "Geek of the Week" show at a specific time every week. Clearly this new technology held great promise for the future, but in 1993, things like Internet Talk Radio were only available to a select virtual few.

In early 1994, researchers at Cornell University released version 0.7 of CU-SeeMe, a piece of video-conferencing software that would drastically expand both the reach and the potential use of real-time multimedia on the Internet. The free downloadable software was named CU-SeeMe as a reference to both Cornell's initials and its video-conferencing capabilities. CU-SeeMe allowed users to both send and receive small grayscale video feeds (including optional audio) to any other computer that was running the software. What made CU-SeeMe such a milestone was that it could run on most any System 7 Macintosh computer that had a full (non-dialup) internet connection. All of a sudden, functionality that was once limited to those with extremely expensive hardware was now available to a lot more people.

Doug Matthews recalled his initial excitement upon the release of CU-SeeMe version 0.7.

Doug Matthews: I remember getting the email when CU-SeeMe was released and thinking, "Alright, this is gonna be really cool". We installed it right away. CU-SeeMe was basically a multimedia chat tool. It was essentially a half-duplex walkie-talkie model. You would say something, and then when you stopped talking, you could start hearing again. The original CU-SeeMe chats I remember having were almost turn-based in the same way that chat rooms are turn-based, where you can't type over someone else's chat. It was basically a "push-to-talk" interface. You pushed to talk, and no one else could talk while you were pushed down.

The entire SunSITE crew took part in CU-SeeMe chats with people from around the world.

David McConville: All of us were were experimenting quite a bit with the MBONE and audio/video conferencing using CU-SeeMe. We ran a CU-SeeMe "reflector" at SunSITE thanks to Jon Magid's technical wizardry, meaning that people would log in from all over the world to videochat. I even got to see an IRA ceasefire that was blacked out by the British media through a web cam sticking out of a guy's window in Northern Ireland. It was all so new and strange and seemed to hold so much promise. Paul just let the entire crew experiment, which of course forced me to learn much more than I was learning in classes. Paul's amazing like that.

Suddenly able to exchange audio and video feeds with people from around the world, McConville and Matthews started thinking about other ways in which the CU-SeeMe software could be used. Matthews couldn't recall exactly who came up with the idea to use CU-SeeMe to rebroadcast a radio signal, but he credits McConville for being the one to develop the idea and run with it.

Doug Matthews: A lot of stuff that we did came up in "Wouldn't it be cool?" conversations that we had. Like putting the Negativland thing online. We're sitting there wondering, "if it's illegal to distribute, is it illegal to download?" I'm pretty sure that the idea for simulcasting the radio station was similar to that. I remember one of the two of us casually saying, "I wonder if we could drag a speaker up to this microphone?" But in terms of actually turning the idea into a production affair, it was 100% David. I was just involved in the brainstorming phase.

McConville was extremely interested in media and intellectual property, and he was excited by the opportunity to meld theory with practice.

David McConville: I was thinking of writing a paper about the legalities of re-transmitting radio online. I had to take media law classes in JOMC, which was not exactly my thing, so I figured I'd focus on all of the online innovation going on at the time. Folks had been experimenting with broadcasts on the MBONE, and we'd been working with CU-SeeMe to better understand the social and copyright implications of online audio/video distribution. There was a lack of understanding about the difference between streaming and downloading at the time, and I wanted to explore the distinction from an analysis of legal history. I was interested in media history, and I wondered if early radio history might repeat itself (i.e. the takeover of the ether by commercial interests via very anti-free-market regulations created by cronies of the corporate interests). I knew that we were in a position to do more than theorize, and that Paul and the SunSITE crew would be into the challenge. Since I was as much hands-on as I was theoretical, I figured we might as well rebroadcast a station 24/7 to find out for ourselves!

McConville started investigating what type of audio frequency range could be transmitted using CU-SeeMe. The software wasn't designed to stream anything, much less audio that was richer and fuller than a simple human voice. But that didn't stop the SunSITE crew from making plans to attempt to use CU-SeeMe to continuously rebroadcast a radio station.

Doug Matthews: The way we used CU-SeeMe was a total hack, it was not what that software was supposed to be used for. Basically what we did was we said, "Well, we've got this thing that can make sound go from Point A to Point B and because it's a chat-room-type environment, lots of people can listen to it and all we have to do is be the only one talking all the time." We totally bastardized the software, because there was no streaming software at that point. None of the stuff that actually did live streams came out until probably 1995.

As the nearby college radio station, WXYC was the obvious choice for the webcasting project. Matthews had started working there as a DJ in early 1994, and McConville himself had become an avid WXYC listener.

David McConville: WXYC was by far the best radio station I'd ever heard at the time. Aphex Twin, Faust, AND Yma Sumac - it made my time in Chapel Hill most bearable.

McConville chose WXYC to be the subject of his Internet rebroadcasting project, but it was the WXYC disc jockey who worked in the office next door who did the most to coordinate efforts between SunSITE and the radio station. Hired at WXYC in 1993, Mike Shoffner worked for OIT as a part-time systems administrator.

David McConville: I knew Shoffner through Doug, and we started throwing the idea around, working with Jon (Magid) and Paul (Jones) to figure out the logistics.

While McConville and the SunSITE crew started working out some of the technical issues, Shoffner began selling WXYC on the project. WXYC managers were intrigued by the idea of the webcast, but on the whole they expressed a much more cautious and hesitant attitude than that which was exhibited by the gung-ho experimenters at SunSITE. Several WXYC higher-ups expressed valid concerns about whether the simulcast would be violating any laws or FCC regulations. Since WXYC was in the middle of plans to petition the FCC for permission to move its transmission tower, there were worries that even the slightest violation might lead the FCC to either fine WXYC or consider the station's tower-modification application in a negative light.

Shoffner refused to let WXYC's caution stop the project, however. He realized that a remarkable opportunity was knocking on WXYC's door, and in a series of September 1994 emails to the WXYC powers-that-be, he passionately pleaded with his fellow DJs to do whatever they could to answer the knock. This excerpt from a September 15th message is indicative of the colorful nature of Shoffner's fervor-filled emails:

What is being jeopardized is our chance to DO THIS FIRST, IF ONLY FOR A SHORT TIME. FIRST. FIRST. US! Not NPR (affiliates), with all their goddam money/pretensiousness. Not MTV, with all of their corporate "alternative". UUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSS! This is the INTERNET, folks, and no matter how many times Floyd says "the internet sucks" on the air, IT IS THE BIG SHIT. And we are ONE SOUNDCARD ($100 - i'll buy it myself if needed) away from eternal salvation and the bountiful reward of our righteousness and long suffering.

In hopes of addressing and appeasing some of the concerns, Shoffner urged the station to find out the exact whats and whys surrounding possible legal issues with the webcast. Luckily, the WXYC staff at that time contained several current and former UNC Law students, two of whom - Jeff Robins and Jay Huber - started immediately applying their legal knowledge to the situation. In a September 16th, 1994 email to various people privy to the simulcast idea, Robins attempted to clarify the general framework of the legal questions that would need to be addressed in more detail:

As far as some of the legal issues that are concerning some of us, there seem to be two types:

1. Communications Law issues (i.e. those issues related to our FCC license and anything else related to the FCC Regulations)

2. Copyright Law issues (i.e. the ASCAP/BMI stuff, which deals with the dissemination of the 'intellectual property' of others, particularly musical artists, composers, and publishers)

For the most part, these are two separate areas. As we continue this dialogue and as some of us continue to do further thinking and/or research, it might be helpful not to confuse the two types.

Robins and the other XYCers all agreed that as far as Communications Law issues were concerned, WXYC was legally in the clear. The FCC had no legal jurisidction over the Internet, and the only worry was that the FCC might potentially look at the webcast as "behavior unbecoming a licensed radio station" when considering WXYC's eventual request for permission to move its transmission tower. WXYC did not have a history of run-ins with the FCC, however, and Robins pointed out that FCC’s approval of tower modifications was largely based on engineering specifications (tower location, wattage, signal direction, other radio stations, etc.) and not on a "radio station's behavior as citizen-of-the-airwaves". Only if another radio station decided to fight WXYC's application-for-modification would there be any real trouble during the FCC approval process.

The more difficult legal issue surrounding the internet simulcast had to do with copyright and intellectual property. Like all radio stations that play music, WXYC has licensing agreements with music publishing giants ASCAP and BMI. These agreements allow the station to broadcast copyright-protected music over the radio airwaves, but did WXYC have the right to transmit that same music out into cyberspace? In order to try and answer this key question, Jay Huber sought advice from Susan Olive, a noted Triangle attorney who specialized in copyright law. After consulting with Olive, Huber and Robins began searching the Federal Copyright Act for information that might apply to the unprecedented webcast scenario. Huber soon struck gold with Section 111(a)(5), a statute about secondary transmissions that indicated that the proposed Internet simulcast would be exempt from copyright law as long as it was not done for commercial advantage. Huber summed up the statute in this email from 9/21/1994:

1) Copyright: we are (jeff and i) quite confident that sec. 111(a)(5) of the copyright code allows a nonprofit entity (SUNSITE) who wants to retransmit the broadcast of a primary transmitter (WXYC) for a noncommercial purpose to be EXEMPT from the copyright laws. no infringement will follow from such a transmission. even if some infringement could be argued, that infringement would fall on SUNSITE, not us. however, SUNSITE is still on pretty solid ground. and, as has been previously mentioned, if ASCAP/BMI got pissed, they'd send at least three letters before doing anything serious.

again though, the copyright code seems to allow us to do this with no risk of infringing on ANYTHING.

further research this evening, relatively comprehensive research, found NOTHING to contradict the above statement.
proceed with all haste.

With all of the station's legal concerns adequately addressed, WXYC station manager Jame Lathren gave his official approval for the webcasting project. And Shoffner resumed his quest for the holy soundcard, which was needed for the Macintosh computer that would convert an analog radio signal into a digital bitstream capable of being transmitted via CU-SeeMe. In addition, the simulcast crew needed to figure out a way to actually get that analog radio signal from WXYC. For the current WXYC webcast, this analog/digital conversion takes place in the radio station itself – an analog signal comes straight out of the control room board and gets encoded into bytes by a nearby Linux machine. But in 1994, the radio station didn’t have computers capable of performing such operations; the analog/digital conversion would have to take place at SunSITE. So once again, the crew got creative.

Michael Shoffner: We had no AD converter and we had no tuner to pick up the signal to feed into the converter. So David specified and I bought an external card for the Mac to do the conversion. Then I begged a "yard sale" radio off of my kid sister and we put in right beside David's workspace, tuned in the station, and plugged it in.

This cheap radio tuned into 89.3 FM would soon become the input source for a webcast that could be heard around the world. But first, the SunSITE staff had to overcome several technical hurdles. Paul Jones wanted to make sure that the bandwidth used by the experiment would not impact the UNC network in a negative way. So a trial run was scheduled for late September 1994. Network load was monitored over a 24-hour period and no major issues were discovered. Plus, since SunSITE had its own T1 connection to the rest of the Internet, connections between SunSITE and off-campus hosts throughout the rest of the world would not need to be routed through the same pipes as other UNC traffic.

A separate technical issue arose because Jones thought that the rebroadcasting should be done from an underutilized machine that would be more capable of handling multiple connections at once. The CU-SeeMe software actually allowed clients to directly connect to each other (a model now referred to as “peer to peer”), and some of the early tests of audio quality and bandwidth usage had been performed with clients connecting directly to McConville’s Macintosh. But SunSITE had a Solaris server named president that had been used to put presidential library material online. And if a new CU-SeeMe reflector could be installed on this server, the WXYC signal could be multicast from president in a more robust and scalable fashion. Unfortunately, this caused a significant delay of the project.

Michael Shoffner: The major problem was that the "reflector" wouldn't compile under Solaris, which is where it needed to go in order to scale to the public. The "reflector" was the thing that broadcast one input signal out into multiple output signals. David had it running on his Mac. The fact that we had to get it running under Solaris just about killed the schedule.

SunSITE employees Chris Colomb and Jon Magid helped McConville out with the Solaris/reflector issues, and by early November, the problems were solved. The webcast was finally ready to go. After some additional testing on November 6th, the WXYC simulcast went live on November 7th, 1994.

Traditional media did not pick up on the simulcast story immediately, but news spread pretty quickly via the Internet. Over the next several weeks, responses came in from other parts of America (Nebraska, Arizona, Idaho…) and from countries all around the world (Norway, Poland, Mexico, Northern Ireland…). The sound quality was not at all ideal (some listeners reported that the already lo-fi signal was cutting out every so often), but the mere idea of making a radio station’s signal available to the rest of the world was nothing short of revolutionary. And both McConville and SunSITE director Paul Jones were well aware that the concept itself was way ahead of the technology.

Paul Jones: We knew what we had sucked but we were willing to try anyway…we’re talking low low bandwidth in those days.

David McConville: We were actually using a little $10 radio plugged into the back of a Mac for the off-air signal. It was pretty pathetic, but it worked. It was reassuring to think that we were somehow carrying on the gonzo traditions of Tesla and Marconi with a station as incredible as XYC.

Shoffner, who described his role as “cheerleader and catalyst”, was just relieved that SunSITE and WXYC had pulled off the feat before anyone else.

Michael Shoffner: The biggest fear I had the whole time was that we would get scooped. You had to assume that somebody else had thought of it because it's almost never do you think of something and execute before anybody else in the entire *world* does. So David and I were pretty much sweating the whole time - trying to get around the problems, light a fire under everybody else, etc.

As it turned out, other stations had thought of it. Bellingham, Washington’s KUGS (another 89.3 FM!) started webcasting their signal via CU-SeeMe a couple of weeks after WXYC’s official announce date. And Kansas University’s KJHK followed in early December, also using CU-SeeMe. And Georgia Tech’s college radio station WREK deserves extra credit for actually webcasting via their own self-written audio-encoding and webcasting software. WREK successfully beta-tested their internet simulcast in early November 1994, but they did not go into official release until early 1995.

Doug Matthews: This was definitely one of those independent discovery things where a lot of people all at once said, "Hey, wait a minute - I can make noise all the time!"

It’s true. In cyberspace, everyone can hear you stream.

Posted by Tim at 02:32 AM | Comments (2)

October 30, 2004

Media Notes

The new issue of the WXYC publication In/Audible (see description here) is now available as a downloadable PDF file. Warning, it's a bit large at 6.3 MB...but hopefully worth the wait/bandwidth!

Speaking of WXYC, I'm going to be filling in as the Halloween night DJ on the New Science Experience, this Sunday night from 10 pm to 12 midnight. If you want to hear a slimmed-down, beat-centric version of my Saturday night trick-or-treat set, tune into 89.3 FM or try listening to one of WXYC's new MP3 or OGG streams online.

Many thanks to Chris Toenes for his overly kind words in this week's Independent regarding my lazy-ass agit-vampirism. I never thought I would see the name "Joby's Opinion" in print again!

I'm noticing that this blog has sort of morphed into a promotional vehicle for my DJ gigs and other minor media appearances...and that isn't really the only thing that I intend for it to be. But I'm not much of a diary keeper and these are the bits that happen to be spilling from my brain right now. I'm hoping that everything will shift gears a bit after the election and the WXYC Webcast Anniversary Celebration.

Posted by Tim at 12:05 AM | Comments (3)

October 28, 2004

This Year Halloween Fell on a Weekend...

...me and The Federal are trick-or-treatin'. On the night before Halloween, Saturday October 30th! It's going to be a full-on party with a costume contest, a raffle, and all sorts of valuable prizes. If you're planning on dressing up for Sunday anyway, go ahead and dress up twice and come spend your Saturday night in downtown Durham.

I've got a lot of great thematic music planned for this evening before All Hallow's Eve: death jamz, Halloween dub, monster-mashups, Whodini hits, horrorcore hip-hop, John Carpenter's famous film soundtrack, "I Put a Spell On You", some song called "Thriller", copious portions of DJ P's awesome Hell on Wheels mixes, seasonal tunes by Sonic Youth and the Spinanes, and much more!

Here's a Thriller trivia question while we're on the subject:

Q: Three very famous people made notable guest appearances on Michael Jackson's album Thriller. Name them. (And no, Quincy Jones doesn't count.)

A: Paul McCartney (the execrable "The Girl Is Mine"), Vincent Price ("Thriller"), and Eddie Van Halen ("Beat It").

Posted by Tim at 06:22 PM | Comments (2)

In/Audible

In/Audible is a sporadically published WXYC newsletter/zine, and the first issue in two years finally hit the streets this past weekend. As a contributor to this particular In/Audible, I might be a bit biased...but I've really been enjoying reading other people's articles over the last few days and I highly recommend picking up an issue. It's action-packed! Funk archaeologist Jason Perlmutter wrote a fascinating article about little-known NC soul/funk/R&B acts from the 1960s and 1970s, and Todd Ito put together a great and eye-opening list of "15 Slept-On Hip-Hop Albums", respectfully raising the ante on a similar "slept-on" list that the Ego Trip folks published many years back. Jessica Kem reviews an interesting-sounding book that critically reexamines the prevailing Robert-Johnson-centric ideas about blues history while also finding enough space to tip us off to the online audio exhibit Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip. And I could go on and on....there's also a whole bunch of record reviews and thought-provoking essays about various music-related topics.

My article is a detailed and quote-centric account of how WXYC became the first radio station in the world to simulcast its radio signal over the internet. The 10-year anniversary of that groundbreaking event is coming up in just a week-and-a-half, and within a few days I will be putting my article online and hyping the anniversary celebration as much as I can. Until then, you can read about the 1994 WXYC webcast in this swank-looking issue of In/Audible, which is probably available in local independent record stores (Schoolkids, CD Alley), local rock clubs, and hopefully a few other places. Out-of-towners (especially you WXYC alums) who are interested in a copy can just email me a street address or PO Box....and I will do my best to grab one and send it your way.

Posted by Tim at 01:27 AM | Comments (1)

October 20, 2004

Before We Throw Out The Devils...

That's right, it's a big pre-Halloween, pre-election dance party this Saturday night at Hell! And if you like this flyer, The Merch also printed up a batch of orange T-shirts that sport a slight variation of this same demons/devils design. The shirts will be available at Hell from tomorrow through Election Day. Or if you are out of town and would like to nab one, email me and we'll work out some sort of quick mail-order transaction.

Last week, someone suggested that I start up some sort of mailing list to let people know about our various DJ nights at Hell and The Federal. I'm not sure that anyone who reads this blog is lacking in information about such events, but I decided to go ahead and start up a Yahoo group to help me promote DJ gigs via regular emails. The list will be super-low traffic, no more than one message a week, if that. So sign up here if you want my occasional DJ spam to come directly into your inbox.

Go Sox!!

Posted by Tim at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

Futuremusik

Right on, this is the kind of thing I like to see going on in town on a Saturday afternoon. In conjunction with its first annual Indy Music Awards festival taking place later that night, The Independent is sponsoring a free panel discussion this Saturday from 2 to 4 pm at the Century Center in Carrboro. Titled "The Future of Music in the Triangle", the discussion promises to address that fascinating and ever-changing intersection of some of my favorite topics: music, technology, copyright, media, etc. Looks like a solid panel, featuring the likes of ibiblio's Fred Stutzman, drummer extraordinaire Dave Cantwell, local rapper Cesar Comanche, and Yep Roc Records/Red Eye Distribution head Tor Hansen (who, incidentally, ran both of those businesses out of his home at 202-A Maple immediately before some less competent record label proprietors moved in and started using the house for more festive purposes...). The panel moderator is Indy writer Fiona Morgan, who routinely does a great job of addressing music+law+technology issues in her Indy columns.

I'm DJing at The Federal yet again this coming Saturday night, so unfortunately I won't be able to make any of the Indy Music Awards or the musical events going on after dark. But if you have the night off and are in the vicinity, I would highly recommend going to see the short film of Protean Spook that is being screened at The ArtsCenter at 9:00pm that night. It's a live show/performance that Tom Laney filmed at the Penland School of Crafts sometime last year and it's a pretty mesmerizing glimpse into the musical genius of the late Randy Ward. Check out this 2 minute excerpt for a preview.

Oh, and on a completely different but equally mesmerizing musical note....the third part of the debut Battles trilogy is finally out on Dim Mak. This summer's opening salvos left me wanting more, but this new B EP has just about everything that I was hoping for. And at a fuller 30 minutes, it's not over so damn quick...

Posted by Tim at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2004

You Crazy For This One, Rick!

A few of you who know former Chapel Hill resident Ricky Dollars may have already seen/heard his highly politicized "99 Problems" freestyle....hell, you may have been fortunate enough to catch him and Jesse P. doing "99 Problems" at Bub's karaoke a couple of months back! Sadly, I wasn't there to see it. At any rate, RDA's reworking definitely deserves a listen. Check it out right hurr...or click on the image to the right. My favorite couplet from the NYU creative writer's latest work:

I don't think I can help you...well, perhaps I can.
Hot Tip: Bin Laden's in Pakistan

I'd love to see Kerry turn to Bush on Thursday and use something on the order of the "hot tip" line. Which reminds me, the Slam Bush promo video is pretty funny if you didn't see it when it came out. Nice lyrical counterpoint: "Problems evolving, partial involvement could solve it if you weren't golfing so often."

I'm really not sure why videos like the Slam Bush promo and the Will Farrell "White House West" clip and the MoveOn 10Weeks ads and all of the Errol Morris "Switch" ads never showed up repeatedly in my email inbox the way that stupid JibJab cartoon did. Too blatantly partisan for mass-forwarding?

I doubt it'll be done anytime soon, but a couple months ago I started working on a track that uses the other part of "99 Problems", the part that Ricky Dollars discarded. Yeah, I know the world doesn't really need any more of those things...but man is it fun to mix-and-match with "The Red Album"!

Posted by Tim at 06:10 PM | Comments (1)

September 17, 2004

Them Wild Saturday Nights

John L. says I should post more....someday soon I may return to the longer ramblings about music and politics and whatnot but I'm trying to juggle way too many activities at the moment. So I'll compromise by using this blog to promote one of those things that has been eating away little bits of my time: Saturday nights at The Federal in Durham! I'm not DJing there every Saturday night, but if it's not me, it'll be one of my highly recommended DJ pals spinning records/CDs from 10pm until a little after 2am. Not in an all-out dance party fashion a la the Bueno Love Baller Soundsystem parties at Hell, but a more eclectic and less commercial smorgasbord of hip-hop (all eras), dancehall, ragga, post-rock, avant-disco, electronic, other beat-centric stuff, etc. The style probably varies depending on the week, the DJ, the crowd, etc. But if you like any of the above genres, you might very well enjoy hanging out and having a few microbrews, of which the Federal has an excellent selection. Still trying to come up with a name for this "weekly", but in the meantime, the schedule rolls on:

9/18 - DJ Twombly (aka yours truly)
9/25 - Cannonballz (Merch mastermind and major record aficionado)
10/2 - DJ Twombly with special guest DJ Bret D

Incidentally, Bret D. is probably the only person on this planet submitting articles to both Tarheel Daily and Wax Poetics! That Saturday night should be feelin' kinda sporty. Which reminds me....I probably shouldn't jinx this before it's planned, but our boy Tompkins is threatening to come back to North Carolina for a visit next month....and like any good airline, we at Tuba City are hoping for a Saturday night stay. Federal requirements!

Posted by Tim at 01:25 AM | Comments (1)

August 26, 2004

Join The Party

Posted by Tim at 12:03 PM | Comments (5)

July 30, 2004

Pogo In Your Head, Everybody

At last night's Merge 15th Anniversary show, Superchunk finished off their reverse-chronological-order setlist with a smoking version of "Precision Auto", the venerable "Throwing Things", and a few of their early 7-inch classics: "Fishing", "Slack Motherfucker", and "What Do I". Unless I was hallucinating, "Fishing" seemed to feature some additional and very timely "dirty little war" lyrics borrowed from John Prine's "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore"! But the biggest surprise was getting to see the Chunk do covers of two other very memorable songs from that same 1990-91 era...featuring the original vocalists, no less! Superchunk started their first encore by bringing Ash Bowie on stage for a rousing rendition of Polvo's "Can I Ride". And they closed that encore off with their patented rocked-up cover of Sebadoh's "Brand New Love", with new Merge signee Lou Barlow doing the vocal honors on the very song that he wrote.

The Merge anniversary celebration setting and the fun of the surprise covers had me reminiscing about Polvo's amazing 1994 show during the 5-year anniversary Merge It Up showcase. Exactly 10 years ago today (7/30/1994), Polvo capped off the night and the festival with Husker Du's "What's Going On"....but their set-opening versions of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" and Erectus Monotone's "Hummus" were the real mindblowers. A couple of years ago while browsing a filesharing network, I stumbled upon a live mp3 capturing this magic moment. Since there may be some Polvo fans out there that would love to hear these covers for either the first or second time, I've uploaded the mp3 here.

While I'm talking about Superchunk and dabbling in the art of Merge-inspired mp3 blogging, I might as well go ahead and share an mp3 of that infamous Superchunk bonus track for which I am partially responsible. Over 8 years ago, a couple of other WXYC DJs and I got on the air and jokingly took the art of deconstruction and lyrical overanalysis to absurd new heights by talking about Superchunk's "Hyper Enough" single for an entire hour. We had a really enjoyable time doing it, and the band thought the show was funny enough to warrant tacking it onto the end of their next EP, titled "The Laughter Guns EP" in reference to our mistaken version of the lyrics. This one's a really huge file because it's 42 minutes long.

Interestingly enough, things came full circle with this incident earlier this week. During the special 3-hour Merge feature on WXYC this past Monday, one of the trivia questions that Spott asked was "What was the name of the WXYC radio show where the DJs talked about 'Hyper Enough' for an entire hour?". "Into the Ground" was the answer that they incorrectly gave, but our show had actually been called "Into the Groove" in reference to its music talk show nature and as a play on the very different WXYC show "Into the Ground" (off the air by that point). Spott had called into that "Laughter Guns" show to let us know that we were getting certain Superchunk lyrics wrong...so it was only fitting that I finally got to return the favor by calling up the Merge feature and clarifying certain words on WXYC's behalf. Lofty currents, indeed...

Posted by Tim at 04:53 PM | Comments (5)

July 26, 2004

Merch It Up!

It's every 5 years instead of every 4, but the Merge Records anniversary showcases are probably the closest thing that the Chapel Hill rock scene has to a festive, once-in-a-blue-moon, bring-on-the-out-of-towners political convention. This year the official Merge festivities have expanded to include not only the Sunday show at the Carolina Theatre in Durham but also a free Wednesday night show at the Local 506 and a free Friday afternoon screening of Looking For Leonard at the Carolina Theatre in Chapel Hill. But every good political convention has unofficial events and parties that spring up around it, and as someone who once helped plan such a Mergefest-timed event, I feel that it is my duty to help try and get the word out about "Merchfest", a free show that my friends at The Merch are putting on tomorrow night at the Local 506. I'm hoping that there will be some free or very cheap T-shirts available, maybe even a new one with the word "Merch" in that familiar Merge font...

Posted by Tim at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2004

Audio Files

Via the worth-checking-regularly Notes From a Different Kitchen (a blog with a cool mix of some of my favorite topics: music, hip-hop, politics, culture, etc.), I stumbled upon USA Today's publication of a recent Reuters article on mp3 blogs. It's really interesting to see these mp3 blogs break away from the illusion of relative obscurity and enter a big huge grey area of legal considerations and a possible frightening future as promotional/marketing tools. I've been eagerly downloading mp3s from O-Dub's Soul Sides mp3 blog for a while now and it's been really fun hearing (and keeping) some great tracks that I probably never would have discovered otherwise. When done in this fashion, an mp3 blog can almost start to resemble a really good radio/mix show, one that's DJ-ed in extremely slow motion by someone with deep crates who gives you some good factual info and a decent amount of time to "tape" what you're hearing. On the flip side, one of the other mp3 blogs mentioned in the USA Today article (Royal Music) has been posting some very readily available tracks from the Beastie Boys, the Grateful Dead, and DJ Shadow. I guess the purchase-encouraging "Buy...." links to Amazon atone for any illicit uploading of copyrighted mp3s (which are all available on filesharing networks anyway), but I really wonder if a line is going to be drawn with regard to this sort of mp3 blogging. Clearly, posting all of the tracks of an album would be frowned upon, as would posting a very popular new single. But in between "that" and "this", there's a pretty big grey area and I don't see how the RIAA will be able to cleanly distinguish between the various cases should they decide to take any action.

Of course one way around all of this is to only post mp3s that aren't from purchasable releases or that have been OK'ed for posting by the original artist. Getting permission seems to be the modus operandi for Douglas Wolk (proprietor of the Dark Beloved Cloud label and a regular music journalist for the Village Voice, Slate, Spin, etc.). Wolk's blog Lacunae has been regularly featuring mp3s of songs from older (80s/90s) indie-rock 7-inches, all posted with the permission of the original artist. Despite helpful mp3/audioblog tips like these, I probably won't be starting my own full-fledged rip-and-upload mp3 blog anytime soon. I do, however, enjoy linking to existing online mp3s in order to provide some samples/context for whatever band/artist I happen to feel like posting about. I am often pleasantly surprised by how many legal mp3s are actually available via label and band web sites. For instance, the first five really great My Dad Is Dead albums are posted here in their entirety!

A few months back I was reading about a service called Webjay that allowed people to set up easily streamable playlists of online mp3s. I finally did some playing around with it and managed to come up with "Tuba City Radio", an hour-plus-long set of several of the artists that I've mentioned on this blog over the past few months...plus a few other online mp3s that I like thrown into the mix for good measure. What's pretty cool about this service is that I didn't upload a thing...I just typed in the mp3 URLs, specified the artist and song title, and arranged the order of the mix. Programmers, take note: this type of DJ-ing is pass by reference, not pass by value! Of course that means that my playlist is dependent on these other web servers (1) to remain up and running and (2) to continue offering the given mp3. But unlike most other streaming audio services, a Webjay playlist gives the listener the ability to go back and download specific mp3s that they may have liked. Webjay actually supports video files too, though I haven't played with that part yet. According to this recent NYTimes article, people are already using the service to do some interesting things with combining video and audio, making video "mixtapes", etc. Distributed real-time mash-up culture, here we come!

Update: Just found an mp3 blog "meta site" via Fluxblog: an mp3 blog aggregator called mp3blogs.org

Posted by Tim at 11:10 AM | Comments (5)

July 21, 2004

Go! Stops

Just got back from seeing David Grubbs at Go! Studios. I must admit that I haven't really kept up with much of Mr. Grubbs' more recent releases but Gastr del Sol were one of my favorite bands of the 90s and I've really been digging this song "Knight Errant" off of Grubbs' new Drag City album A Guess at The Riddle. Plus it's always a treat to see such a talented guitarist play in a fairly intimate setting. Grubbs sang and played acoustic guitar and was accompanied by Greek cellist Nikos Veliotis. Opening up the show was Chuck Johnson's newest solo project Pykrete - a mesmerizing array of warm drones and sporadic beats yielded by Chuck's astute sound-generating, knob-twiddling, and effects-processing maneuvers. Definitely check out these sample Pykrete mp3s if you're into that sort of music.

Sadly, tonight's show could wind up being my last-ever show at Go! Room 4. The club is shutting down after August 15th and due to another obligation this Saturday night, I'm not going to be able to make the first post-wedding Work Clothes show (also a CD release party for North Elementary). It's a real shame that Go! is going to disappear, the club has been a real asset to the area for the last 6 years. But as this N&O article points out, it's not easy paying all the bills with just a small percentage of the door money and not as much in beer sales as most 21+ rock clubs. I'll probably write some more Go! thoughts and reminiscences on here in a few weeks, but for now let's just pour out a little PBR for a small club that tried to make it.

Posted by Tim at 01:04 AM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2004

Saturday at the Federal

If you're anywhere near Durham this Saturday night (July 10th), consider coming by The Federal for a drink or two. I'll be DJing from 10pm to 2am, playing hip-hop and some other beat-centric music. It'll be less overtly commercial and dance-party-oriented than the typical crowdpleasing Hell fare, definitely a nice change of pace for me.

Never heard of The Federal? It's a very cool new bar that opened up about four months ago in downtown Durham. It's on West Main Street, right next to its sibling bar James Joyce and across the street from Brightleaf Square. Lots of harder-to-find beers on tap, and plenty of wine & liquor options too. Instead of a jukebox, they had the foresight to build a little DJ area....and they've already got some cool DJs spinning on other nights - WXDU roots music DJ Steve Gardner on Wednesday nights and DJ Marco of the Solid Soundsystem every Thursday. If things go well, Saturday may turn into a regular DJ night for me and some of my DJ-ing pals, so come out and support!

Posted by Tim at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)

July 07, 2004

Riddim Nation

Last week I stumbled upon Sasha Frere-Jones' new singles column in The New Yorker via O-Dub's blog Pop Life. Frere-Jones used to play bass in the post-rock double-bass trio Ui and has consistently been one of my favorite music writers over the last several years, partly 'cause he tends to review popular/commercial releases in an intelligent and analytical way, placing them into a larger musical context and pointing out how simultaneously innovative and enjoyable some of them are. In this particular column, Frere-Jones makes a good jam-of-the-summer case for Nina Sky's "Move Ya Body", currently #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. As Frere-Jones points out, one of the most interesting things about this very catchy song is that it is one of several new tracks that use the "Coolie Dance" rhythm/riddim created by Jamaican producer Cordel Burrell. I haven't yet heard the Pitbull track that Frere-Jones mentions, but the hot new Elephant Man/Twista remix of "Jook Gal" is yet another jam propelled by the bouncy Coolie Dance beat. We played the "Jook Gal" remix twice at last Friday's Hell party and it's definitely a dancefloor burner as far as I'm concerned.

I'd love to learn more about any licensing/marketing/copyright details and processes surrounding these Jamaican rhythms, because there's something fascinating about the way many of them end up being used on so many different tracks. Of course, this sort of versioning has been going on in Jamaica for decades, but the recent explosion of Jamaican influences in American hip-hop/R&B has had me thinking a lot more about what appears to be an alternate economic model for, uh, "information exchange" (for lack of a better vague term). This seemingly viable model appeals to me in much the same way that open source, open standards, and open access do. Instead of the more closed American model, where a producer like The Neptunes or Timbaland typically sells a beat exclusively to one particular artist, a Jamaican producer like Burrell releases a hot rhythm out into the world, where singers, toasters, and rappers all have the chance to take it and use it ("improve upon it", if you will). If one or more of these tracks succeed in the competitive marketplace, both the producer and the singer/toaster/rapper reap the rewards. Because even with the imperfect open source analogy, I don't mean to suggest that Burrell is not getting paid....or that he didn't work out some arrangement with the artists using his rhythm. After all, this Billboard chart lists "C. Burrell" in the songwriting credits for two of these Coolie Dance tracks. Perhaps this Jamaican/American dichotomy is a bit of an oversimplification, since there are definitely some American breaks/beats records out there and American tracks can definitely pop up in remixes and subsequent samplings. And I admit that I don't know much about how the Jamaican tracks are actually distributed or licensed. Regardless, these Greensleeves rhythm albums remind me that I'd still love to see some sort of variation on this Creative Commons license that would encourage the creation of derivative works for commercial purposes, with the stipulation that the license-holder got a proportional piece of the action should the derivative work become commercially successful in some regard. Oh, and a Neptunes rhythm record would be nice, too.

Posted by Tim at 05:24 PM | Comments (3)

July 06, 2004

Here's Johnny...

Congrats to John Kerry for proving that not only can he make a really smart decision that may not exactly jive with his personal preferences but that he can very competently and discreetly control the flow of information so that it doesn't leak out early or come back to bite him on the ass. That alone shows that he'd be a much better person to have in charge of things like the names of CIA agents or shady characters like Ahmed Chalabi.

In reaction to Kerry's picking Edwards, Howard Dean's former "chief blogger" Mathew Gross says that "North Carolina has suddenly become a battleground state". Interestingly enough, Gross is actually a former and now once again an NC resident himself - he played drums in the Chapel Hill pop band June for a couple of years before the band's John Howie/Beggars Banquet era. But yeah, I like this battleground-state line of thinking. The conventional wisdom about Edwards as VP has tended to be that he can't carry NC but that he'll be a huge help in the Midwest states and that he'll help Democrats win some of the crucial toss-up Senate seats in Southern states like NC, SC, GA, FL, and LA. But I think it's time to throw out the pessimism and start thinking about and working towards a blue NC. After all, Edwards always closes well and he's risen rapidly in polls before. This American Prospect article from last summer points out that with 6 weeks to go before the 1998 election, Edwards was behind Faircloth by 10 points in at least one poll. Nothing will be determined until November, of course, but I can't wait to see the NC polls that come out in the next few weeks so that we can see what sort of bounce Kerry/Edwards might get.

The other day I was reading this News & Observer article about that other famous North Carolinian who spent the weekend restlessly figuring out his place on the national stage. And I was struck by one Dook fan's comment: "It's actually pretty exciting that somebody from N.C. is making it all the way to LA. Maybe he'll put Durham on the map." As wide-eyed and hillbilly-ish as that quote may sound, I bet a lot of North Carolinians are now feeling this same sort of positive sentiment in relation to Edwards and his own potential big-time job. When he was ambitiously seeking the top job for himself against unfavorable odds, some folks probably thought he was too-big-for-his-britches, foolishly trying to be above himself. But when the nominee chooses you and says that you're ready for prime time, then it's much more acceptable and everyone else can happily identify with you and your success. This is all baseless theorizing, but I do think that Southern attitudes about modesty and achievement are somewhat weird like this.

When John Edwards suspended his own presidential bid back on March 3rd, I drove over to Raleigh to see his concession speech at the Broughton High School gymnasium. Since the whole thing was a last-minute decision following the Super Tuesday primary results, there hadn't been much advance publicity for the event and it was surprisingly easy to get in. A short line, no metal detectors, no frisking, no questions. I was curious to see if Edwards was really as electrifying in person as all the news media folks had been saying. To be honest, it didn't seem appreciably different from the impressive stump speeches that I'd already seen on TV, but it was still cool to go and see folks swarm Edwards with post-speech autograph requests while his modest parents casually stood outside on the Broughton lawn. I took a bunch of photos, but except for the one above, they're are all fairly blurry and crappy due to the dark room and the bad camera angles. Oh well, it's not like Edwards is going to be lacking for media coverage anytime soon...

Correction in red added above, Mathew Gross apparently moved back to NC after the Dean campaign shut down.

Posted by Tim at 08:55 PM | Comments (3)

June 30, 2004

Wet Hot American Summer Dance Party

It's back. Yes, it's finally time for another Hell dance party. Friday, July 2nd, from 9pm until 3am. Since we're about to kick off both a patriotic holiday weekend and the hot-as-hell month of July, the good folks at Hell wanted everyone to be able to revel in this wet hot American summer. So they joined forces with your friends in the Bueno Love Baller Soundsystem....and together we proudly present: The Wet Hot American Summer Dance Party. With no apologies to the Janeane Garofolo movie, since each of the words in that title will accurately describe this event in no uncertain terms.

Anyway, I'm especially amped about this particular dance party because we will be debuting my brand new pair of enormous JBL speakerboxxxes, reported to have "extra low-end punch". Can you feel that B-A-S-S bass? Come on Friday and find out.

Oh, and a shout-out to our easily aroused pals at The Merch for designing and screenprinting the flyers!

Posted by Tim at 10:44 PM | Comments (2)

June 26, 2004

A Sort of Homecoming

I'm pretty excited about tonight's show at Go! Room 4. Opening up for psych-folk genius Devendra Banhart and Drag City harpist/songstress Joanna Newsom is the San Francisco folkie band Vetiver (pictured to the right, photo by Christoper Woodcock). Vetiver actually includes Banhart as a member but the band is headed up by former Greensboro, NC resident Andy Cabic (third from the left in the picture), who locals might remember from his days in The Raymond Brake. This particular show will be a bit of a homecoming for Andy - it's his first North Carolina gig since The Raymond Brake broke up in 1998. In my biased book, The 'Brake were one of the brighter lights of the mid-90s NC rock scene, a perfect amalgam of catchy pop, frenetic punk, and screwy Polvo-ish/Grifters-y guitar rock. I listened to their 1995 album Piles of Dirty Winters the other day and it's still a great listen. Not sure if the album is out of print or not, but since the Cognitive Mapping Vol. II CD comp is now completely unavailable, here's an mp3 of The Raymond Brake's "Sentiment" for anyone who's interested in (re)hearing a pretty invigorating slice of melodic mid-90s indie-rock.

Andy moved out to San Francisco in 1998 and this SF Bay Guardian article has some good info on his two current SF bands Vetiver and Tussle and even Vroom, the weekly multi-genre DJ night at El Rio where he often spins records. I think that first Vetiver show might have been at an Adobe Books art opening, as I vaguely remember standing next to some snack-hungry 16th Street winos while seriously digging the skinny motherfucker with the strange high voice. Vetiver's come a ways since then, they've fleshed out into a "string quartet" and their extremely pleasant new album on DiCristina even features guest spots from MBV's Colm O'Ciosoig, Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval, and Nick Holdzkom of Bevel (the early 90s Bevel from Chapel Hill, not the newer Bevel). Midheaven/Revolver has kindly posted an mp3 of Vetiver's "Farther On", as well as snippets from the rest of the album tracks.

Andy's other band Tussle is 180 degrees away from Vetiver but pretty awesome in its own right...totally tripped-out dub-rock with big loping basslines and lots of percussive dancy beats. Similar to Liquid Liquid in many ways but without the vocals or all the metallophones. Tussle's Don't Stop EP is one of my early 2004 faves and I can't wait for their full-length to come out on Troubleman Unlimited this fall. Some album excerpts and unreleased recordings can be streamed and/or downloaded here.

But back to tonight's show....local rock connections aside for a moment, I'm most looking forward to Devendra Banhart himself. On our last night in London several weeks back, my friend Todd and I went to see him play at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, a pretty amazing space perfectly situated on The Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace. Devendra's UK press has been pretty gushing and the show was totally sold out...but somehow we lucked our way in, mostly due to the kindness of some incredibly nice British ticket-takers who offered us some unclaimed will-call tickets at the last minute. After a very cool set of loud, hyper-raw stomp-blues from Baltimore's Entrance, Devendra Banhart assumed a lotus-like positon on stage and wowed both the Brits and us with that amazing, otherworldly voice. And on his birthday, no less! Andy Cabic accompanied him on several songs and Devendra closed out the set with an intense cover of Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory". No, I guess you can't, but I'll remember that show for quite awhile....a great last hurrah before heading back home to the States.

Posted by Tim at 12:18 PM | Comments (6)

June 13, 2004

Soulful Strut

Damn, I'm behind the curve on this months-old news but I just learned that the awesome Strut Records label shut down operations last year. What a shame, Strut released some amazing records over the past several years...stuff like vintage 1970s Afro-funk, archaeological glimpses of the seminal work of early hip-hop and disco DJs, reissues of bands who became better-known through hip-hop's use of their breakbeats, and those excellent Disco Not Disco comps. I guess the label's demise helps explain why we saw a bunch of Strut CDs on sale for 1 to 3 pounds each at the FOPP store in Edinburgh. I bought a second copy of the great Blo CD reissue Phases 1972 - 1982 and will gladly trade it to someone for that Black Rio comp or something else I don't have. Actually, it looks like Dusty Groove has several of the Strut CDs on sale at cheap $6.99 - $8.99 prices. Anyway...rest in peace, Strut. Hopefully Soul Jazz and Stone's Throw will keep rockin' the groove-centric archivist beat in your absence.

Given all the music giants that have died during the last month, maybe I ought to be writing tributes to human beings instead of a record label. But others have written those obituaries in a more detailed and eloquent way than I ever could. Additional rest-in-peace shouts to Ray Charles, Robert Quine, Steve Lacy, and the one and only Elvin Jones.

Posted by Tim at 08:44 PM | Comments (5)

May 09, 2004

The Music Comic

OK, enough with the politics for now. I start getting madder the more I think about everything that's going on....and that's not nearly as fun as laughing my ass off, which is pretty much what I've been doing ever since this past Tuesday, when I picked up New Hope For the Ape-Eared, the new Scharpling & Wurster 2-CD set on Stereolaffs. Tom Scharpling is a DJ for the very fine WFMU station in northern New Jersey and Jon Wurster is a comic genius who also happens to be the talented drummer for Chapel Hill's very own Superchunk. Many years ago, these two guys started doing fake telephone interviews/scenarios over the WFMU airwaves during Scharpling's show....not trendy Jerky Boys/Tube Bar/Crank Yankers-type prank calls but rather lengthy and fully developed phone call skits that might almost sound real if they weren't such outlandishly hilarious examples of radio satire. Like many of the other Scharpling & Wurster skits that I've heard, the most hysterical parts of ...Ape-Eared are the ones in which Wurster plays ludicrous music industry characters, like the deluded lead singer of a generic modern rock band named Mother 13 or an overconfident songwriter who is convinced that his absurdly bad tune "Rock and Roll Dreams'll Come Through" will lead his nonexistent band The Gas Station Dogs to superstardom. I think my favorite skit on the new double disc might be the one involving a super-lame audiophile who has an "audio gu-ru" named Heinrich. Everything about it is just perfect...the delivery, the voices, the details, the surprising plot of the skit....it even yields the "ape-eared" reference used in the disc title. Throughout all these skits, Scharpling consistently plays the logical straight man and Wurster's characters just get to bounce off of him with their ludicrous ideas and stories. All of it is genius as far as I'm concerned, and I bet most any music aficionado would probably double over laughing to any of these skits or the older skits "Rock Rot & Rule" and "The Music Scholar".

Jon Wurster actually did a brief stand-up comedy performance at the Cat's Cradle about a week ago and I really enjoyed it. You could tell that he was probably a lot more comfortable doing his thing over the radio instead of in front of a live audience, but he still told a bunch of really funny jokes about things like a sorority girl trying to "drop science" at a Jurassic 5 show, the fashion sense of South by Southwest attendees, a "YYZ" drum clinic as performed on a single highhat cymbal, etc. I really think Wurster could successfully carve out his own niche of music-related comedy, because he knows music well enough to riff off of and extend the really funny and absurd truths that exist in the world of musicians, music critics, music fans, record labels, radio stations, etc. Personally, I enjoy Scharpling & Wurster's radio skits so much more than most of the generic and supposedly universal "what's-the-deal-with-cereal-boxes"-type comedy....and that's recently had me thinking about how much the underlying context and subject behind a joke can effect whether or not someone likes it. I'm still really big on Dave Chapelle these days and I finally plunked down the cash for the Season 1 DVD. But with a couple of exceptions, I think that most of my absolute favorite Chapelle skits are not the race-related ones (which are definitely funny) but rather the hysterical send-ups of R. Kelly, Rick James, Prince, and Lil' Jon. I don't know, maybe I just think about music too much and any jokes that play along those lines are that much more likely to tickle my funnybone.

After Jon Wurster finished his standup routine at the Cradle, he was followed by former Wilkesboro, NC native Zach Galifianakis, who's made appearances on all sorts of late-night TV shows and even Fox's Tru Calling. Galifianakis did a somewhat deadpan Steven Wright-esque thing where he plucked a lot of brutally funny one-liners out of his dogeared joke notebook. Really funny shit...I need to catch this guy on TV next time, though I guess he would be more tame and controlled in that sort of environment. Though maybe just as hilarious? Carolina comics represent!

Posted by Tim at 02:53 AM | Comments (4)

May 03, 2004

La La La La Means I Love You

Back in January, Kelefa Sanneh wrote an interesting article in the NYTimes about the recent trend of "bad singing" in popular hip-hop and R&B. "Bad singing" as in all of the charmingly off-key and often very likable sing-songiness from "untrained" singers like 50 Cent, Lumidee, Kanye West, Pharrell, etc. "Bad" is almost too strong a word - I actually prefer "imperfect" or "amateurish". My man Todd pointed out that Kelis is a great "bad singer" who wasn't mentioned in the article. And now that I've spent many hours listening to Ghostface's Pretty Toney (currently the #6 album in America!), I can't help but think about how criminal it is that Ghostface was left out of this article. He's been doing some crazy-ass karaoke on top of his own songs for years - long before 50 sang one of his own hooks or anyone had even heard of Kanye West. It would be interesting to try and go back through the Wu catalog and find the beginning and rise of Ghostface's inspired warbling. Anyway, there's a lot on Pretty Toney to love, but right now it's "Biscuits" that I can't get out of my head. Man, that absurd sing-song chorus...it's not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.

Update: I missed this last week, but Kelefa Sanneh actually reviewed a Ghostface show in the NYTimes last Thursday, so credit due. Some amusing anecdotes about Ghostface, Rakim getting arrested, and DJ Kayslay getting booed!

Posted by Tim at 07:12 PM | Comments (7)

April 30, 2004

Thong Songs: A Brief Appreciation

Some friends of mine are having their 2nd annual "underwear party" this weekend and they asked me to be one of the DJs. I had the honor of DJing their first underwear party last July and it was a ton of fun, a really crazy good time. I won't delve into the whole psychology behind underwear parties and who attends them and what they decide to wear, because that might take the fun out of it and I'd rather concentrate on the topic of underwear-themed dance music, since that has been occupying my head all week. So...live from the home office in Carrboro, NC, here is my own personal "Top 10 Songs to Play at an Underwear Party":

10. Justin Timberlake - "Rock Your Body" - Maybe a little overexposed at this point, but this song was transformed into an underwear party must-play the second it became associated with that one infamous act in which clothing came off and people were shocked. Plus, the beat has that undeniable Neptunes bounce to it. "....have you nekkid by the end of this song"? Hmmm, how about "by the start of this song"?

9. Jay-Z - "Change Clothes" - Another hot Neptunes jam, this one an ode to high fashion. Features the undies-centric lyrics "No bra with that blouse, it's so necessary. No panties and jeans, that's so necessary." Too bad the chorus is not "Remove clothes and go".

8. Kool Keith - "Photo Session" - This unlisted hidden track at the end of Sex Style has the inquisitive chorus "Can I see your panties, girl?". Almost a tad too slow for a dancefloor, but Kool Keith gets a bonus point for having the guts to actually sport some oddly colored bikini briefs on his own album cover.

7. Cymande - "Bra" - OK, so there's not even a mention of "bra" in the lyrics, but this incredible early 70s jam just has to be included on the list. Cymande was a 8-piece funk band whose members hailed from various Caribbean islands and "Bra" is a percussive-funk masterpiece that was heavily sampled in De La Soul's "Change in Speak". "It's alright", indeed.

6. Trina - "No Panties" - One of the filthiest songs on this list, but what else would anyone expect from Miami raunch-rapper Trina? The troubling chorus seems to advocate prostitution: "No panties comin' off, my love is gonna cost. 'Cause ain't no way that you gonna get up in this for free." Um, I guess she deserves some sort of credit for full disclosure.

5. J-Kwon - "Underwear" - This jam was just released and it's surprisingly topical. The chorus has the line "I'm in my underwear" and the lyrics actually describe hanging out at an underwear party. I guess that's what 17-year-olds do in St. Louis when it gets really hot.

4. Morris Day - "Fishnet" - This 1988 homage to a type of black pantyhose may not have stood the test of time the way other Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis productions have, but I'm starting to think it might be a slept-on classic. "Fishnet....black pantyhose! Pink lace....shoved through the holes!"

3. Jermaine Stewart - "We (Don't) Have To Take Our Clothes Off" - Sure, Jermaine Stewart's 1986 smash actually advocates taking things slow and drinking "cherry wine". But a quick and well-timed edit gets rid of that pesky "don't" and turns this into a pro-stripping anthem. Trust me, people at an underwear party love hearing a party-justifying chorus like "We....have to take our clothes off to have a good time."

2. Adina Howard - "T-Shirt & Panties" - One of the sexxxiest of slow jamz. Adina answers Jamie Foxx's what-are-you-wearing telephone query with a simple and sultry "I got my t-shirt and my panties on". Bonus points for the hot remix with Cam'Ron, who confusedly boasts, "I'm naked wit' my boxers on". And this brilliant tune even spawned a response/variation from Lil' Flip, whose cough-syrupy joint "Boxers" celebrates the uniting of condoms and underwear with a "Horses wit my boxers on" chorus.

1. Sisqo - "Thong Song" - With its unforgettable "Thong th-thong thong thong" chorus, this 2000 hit unabashedly sings the praises of a turn-of-the-century underwear fashion craze. Sisqo barely nudges out "T-Shirt & Panties" for the #1 spot, partially on the basis of the superior remix with Foxy Brown. When Foxy raps "Ass so phat that it look like I got long johns on", she slips in a different type of underwear reference, thus demonstrating that she has a total appreciation for undies - one that transcends mere exhibitionism!

I'm sure there are some ghetto-tech or booty bass anthems that might be a little more topical than the Neptuneage at the beginning of the list, but such songs tend to be more about booty/ass, and DJ Assault's "Drop Dem Panties" is just all-out lame in my opinion. Other suggestions are highly welcome!

Posted by Tim at 09:15 PM | Comments (10)

April 28, 2004

Live on Stage

Despite what my last two posts might imply, I don't always leave live shows wishing that I had been watching the performer 9 or 20 years earlier. Last Wednesday I actually saw not 1 but 2 hot shows featuring artists who are making their musical mark right now. I'm starting to realize that for me, that sort of currency ("current-ness") carries more weight than I thought it did. I meant to write about these 2 shows last week but I got caught up in other deadlines...damn, I guess I'm already starting to have backblog!

Duke had their annual outdoor "Last Day of Classes" concert last Wednesday, and this year they lined up the chart-topping "College Dropout" himself, Kanye West. I was already in a great mood before I even got to campus, but man....throw in some perfect weather, a lax alcohol policy, and Durham's 9th Wonder DJ-ing a set of great hip-hop (including some of his own Jay-Z remixes), and the stage was set. UNC baller Rashad McCants made a foray into enemy territory and my pal John blogged some good anecdotes about Rashad and the other b-ballers who came to see the show. Dilated Peoples didn't play for some reason, so Kanye came on earlier than expected, maybe around 9pm or so? The sound wasn't very good (though it wasn't nearly as bad as Prince), but it didn't seem to really matter. Kanye performed most of his album, of course, but he also threw in many fragments of the hits that he's produced (Ludacris - "Stand Up", Talib Kweli - "Get By", that Alicia Keys song, Jay-Z - "Encore", etc.). That really helped pump the crowd and it got me thinking about how hip-hop producers are pretty much the chart-dominating rock stars of today. In addition to his DJ, Kanye also had some live musicians accompanying him...one of them was this really talented singer/keyboardist named John Legend. Man, what a soulful dude. I looked in the Black Album credits and found out that Legend is the one playing on "Encore". He's apparently got his own full-length coming out this fall...if that album has its share of Kanye beats and hip-hop guest stars on it, I wouldn't be surprised if Legend blows up and becomes the D'Angelo of 2004....uh, or something like that. One of my favorite parts of the show was when Kanye got John Legend to play instrumentals of hip-hop hits for the crowd to try and sing along to. After singalongs of both the Fugees' "Ready or Not" and Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop", Kanye got in a sarcastic jab about Lauryn Hill! It was pretty humorous payback for Hill not allowing him to sample her song for "All Falls Down".

As the concert started coming to a close, my friends and I high-tailed it back to Carrboro to catch Four Tet at Go! Studios. I got inside just as the big-afroed genius behind Four Tet was building up a swell of noise on his multiple laptops. This went perfectly into this awesome song off Rounds (track 2?) where it sounds like a distorted guitar keeps cutting in and out because of some cable malfunction. From there on out Mr. Four Tet kept rocking the beats pretty hard and the whole set was a lot harder and crunchier than I would've expected based on the pleasant folkiness of much of the albums. One of those beats was so sinister and forceful that I swear it sounded like it could've fit in on a Wu-Tang record! The whole set was fantastic and Mr. Four Tet (OK, his real name is Kieran Hebden) wasn't able to escape without doing an encore, even though he had already closed those laptops. There was apparently a live Four Tet CD-R for sale earlier in the tour....before the show I wouldn't have thought that such a thing was necessary, but I'd really love to hear it now.

Posted by Tim at 11:53 PM | Comments (4)

April 27, 2004

Movin' Like a Tortoise

I've been on a rare show-going streak of late....on Sunday I finished up 90% of my last remaining assignment for school this semester, so I decided to go check out Tortoise and Beans at the Cat's Cradle. There was a time in my life when I would actually travel to far-away metropolises to see Tortoise, but I must confess that I've only heard a couple of tracks off their new CD and neither of those really grabbed me that much. But since it's not every day that one gets the chance to see one's former "favorite band" play a mile away from one's house, I suppressed any hints of "Tortoise-is-so-mid-90s" cynicism and entered the Cradle for what might've been the first time in....several months? Long enough to forget about the fact that it became a smoke-free club last fall....that was a nice surprise all over again.

I missed Ex-Models, but Beans (formerly of Anti-Pop Consortium) was pretty entertaining for a one-man hip-hop show. It finally hit me during one of his odder songs that his whole nonlinear poetry-slam rap style has an almost cartoonish Fat Albert/Mushmouth element to it that kinda saves it in some places while also making it wear thin over the course of a whole set. I tried to remember when I've seen another single solo hip-hop artist manage both the mic and the beats onstage for an entire set....I remember J-Live did it (quite spectacularly) for a single song ("Braggin' Writes"), but an entire set? Hmmm. As he did last summer when he opened up for Prefuse 73, Beans proved that the best way to deal with potential on-stage loneliness while completely entertaining your audience is to do your fusty old-man dance! The merch booth had free copies of the "Mutescreamer" video, which features Beans doing variations of this same dance in a snowy forest.

Tortoise started really strong with "Seneca", that perfect opener from Standards that starts with a blaze of guitar noise and free drumming and ends with a syncopated handclap jam. McEntire, Herndon, and Bitney all took turns behind the two drum kits and there was plenty of the double-drum action that I enjoy so much. Throughout the show, the background digital images/patterns were really great. But as far as song selection goes...almost everything Tortoise played was from TNT or after, and presumably much of it was from the new disc since I didn't recognize it. The one exception was a cool and significant reworking of "Magnet Pulls Through" (or so it sounded)...and then once all of the jam-band kids raucously demanded an encore, Tortoise came back and did the classic epic "Djed". I normally don't love Jeff Parker's guitar stylings, but he added some nice King Crimson-y touches to the early krautrock section of "Djed"....and then later in the song, a hot beatbox rhythm segued nicely into the closing mallet section.

All in all, the show was a bit unsatisfying....the rest of the encores (two!) seemed a bit lackluster, as if Tortoise really just wanted to quit and get back on the bus. I left thinking that as much as I had tried to be open-minded about newer material, I couldn't really get past the overwhelming obstacle that Tortoise and their new stuff just aren't very exciting to me right now, especially in comparison with how completely fresh and exciting and "now" they used to be in my eyes. I'm actually glad that the jam-band kids discovered them, because musicians that are that talented deserve an enthusiastic audience. And I don't begrudge them that one bit. Next time, though, I'll probably just keep myself at home and throw on "Gamera"....

Posted by Tim at 01:54 AM | Comments (6)

April 24, 2004

Me and My Friends vs. Prince & the NPG

The man in the picture above is performing in Raleigh on Sunday and Monday. The man he is caricaturing performed in Raleigh last night. Yeah, I plunked down $58.75 to see Prince at the RBC Center but now I kinda wish I could've had the chance to spend that same cash on a dinner/ticket package combo for one of the Chapelle shows at Charlie Goodnight's instead. But, alas, those were all completely sold out very soon after they went on sale.

Everyone I know who went to see Prince in 1997 talked about it like it was a religious experience...and the reviews of shows on this current Musicology tour have been pretty gushing for the most part. But from where I sat up in section 317 of the upper deck of the RBC Center, last night's show had a fatal flaw - the sound was absolutely terrible, really muddy and muffled and far-away sounding. Rawls tells me that the sound on the floor was pretty good and that some of these new basketball arenas are intentionally designed to trap the noise down in the bottom half. I would've figured they might've been acoustically designed so that "there's not a bad seat in the house" a la new movie theaters and the whole "stadium-seating" idea. Anyway, I probably shouldn't whine too much about this since I didn't exactly rush to buy tickets on the on-sale date.

As widely reported, Prince does trot out a lot of his old hits on this tour (which is supposedly the last time he'll play them). Unfortunately, many of them tended to be strung together in a megamix style....which I might not have minded so much if said megamix wasn't being played by the New Power Generation and its surplus of unnecessary horn players. Sure, it was kinda cool that one of the guys playing saxophone was legendary James Brown sideman (and NC native!) Maceo Parker....but to me, Prince's 80s hits just don't sound nearly as good when they're rendered as a continuous stream of horn-funk. The band would shift from song to song while the drummer kept on playing the same fixed backbeat....and to me it sounded like what a "Hooked On Prince" album might sound like if it was recorded by a very competent JBs-like funk band.

Overall, it definitely wasn't what I had hoped for, but I'm not completely sorry I went...some great moments included a seated acoustic interlude (featuring "Raspberry Beret" and "Little Red Corvette") and the encore with its sparser hornless ballads ("Nothing Compares 2 U", "Purple Rain"). And at least I finally saw the man, even if he was about a quarter mile away. Bonus points for the fact that immediately after Prince said farewell to a screaming audience, he seemed to be removed from the arena floor in a box a la Harry Houdini! Game, blouses...

Posted by Tim at 06:59 PM | Comments (3)

April 20, 2004

Slinged and Blinged

Yeah, the Grey Album media frenzy probably poured a little too much kerosene onto the already blazing Jay-Z Black Album remix craze. I'm all about sampling and amusing mashups and willful copyright violation and even just gimmicky ideas with overly clever titles. But The Double Black Album is just kind of monotonous and The Black and Blue Album is worth a few good novelty laughs until you realize how badly off-time some of the mixes/mashups are. So I thought I'd reached my saturation point with all of these Black Album offspring, but then I was skimming through Royal Magazine, which pointed me to a brilliant idea that actually seems to be implemented pretty damn well: The Slack Album!

From what I can tell, this DJ N-Wee guy actually knows how to make hip-hop beats and it's great to hear him chop up unlikely candidates like "Zurich is Stained" and "Here" and give them a clipped almost-Prefuse-73-ish bounce. And the one straighter mashup that I heard ("Encore"/"In The Mouth a Desert") is just genius with the way the "HO-VA" chant comes on top of those high squealing Pavement-y guitar bits.

While I was thinking about Slanted and Enchanted, I remembered that it actually came out about this time of year...so I did some quick research and found out that today (4/20) is the 12th anniversary of its release! In tribute, I listened to Luxe and Reduxe a couple of times today....and enjoyed every minute of it.

Posted by Tim at 06:56 PM | Comments (5)

April 18, 2004

That Summer Jam Screen

Finally, it's here - the day when a very important question will be answered. Yes, the day when we find out what the "Jam of the Summer" is going to be. Meteorologists and other weather-obsessed folks have their Groundhog Day ritual with Punxsutawney Phil, but for those of us who love the jamz and live in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, there is "After Chill", the massive bumper-to-bumper cruising spectacle/traffic jam that holds it down on West Franklin Street for a good 4 to 6 hours after the end of the officially sanctioned (and much tamer) Apple Chill festival/streetfair. Perhaps I shouldn't use the Groundhog Day analogy, as there is not a single revelatory "Here is the Jam of the Summer" moment, and of course there is no official ceremony with the mayor or anything. But what there is is this: hundreds and hundreds of cars from all over North Carolina, cruising up and down the street at 1 MPH, car stereos blaring with blazin' hip-hop and R&B, most of it precisely chosen to win the approval or attention of fellow drivers and the hundreds of spectators on the side of the street. Now imagine how easy it would be for a single pedestrian to sample hundreds of 5-to-10-second jamz fragments and start forming a good picture of what song was going to be the hottest, flyest, most popular and inescapable jam of the summer. It's almost like a "Caucus of the Jamz", a bacchanalia-cum-focus-group.

This listen-to-Apple-Chill method chose the Jam of the Summer with stunning accuracy for three years straight, even when I foolishly questioned its choice at the end of the day. Its dead-on predictions from 2000-2002:

2000 - Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'"
2001 - Missy Elliott - "Get UR Freak On"
2002 - Nelly - "Hot in Herre"

Last year I went much later than normal and only caught the 9:30pm after-dark contingent....traffic was still bumper-to-bumper, and perhaps the musical mood had changed. As I biked by car after car, the song that I heard the most was 50 Cent's dour "Many Men". Not exactly the jam of summer 2003....and yet the first half of 2003 was clearly 50's time, so perhaps this was just a ratification of that fact. I think my methodology (the bicycle factor, the late hour) was a little off last year and I'm hoping for much better results today. My personal predictions? Well, I don't want to wind up being the weatherman who screwed up and called for an early spring, but I'm betting on either Usher/Lil' Jon - "Yeah!" or maybe some undeniable jam that hasn't graced my ears just yet...

Posted by Tim at 01:50 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2004

Something for the Radio

Some of my pals post the playlists from their radio shows on their blogs. I never thought I would wind up doing that, not because it's not a cool idea (it is), but because I never really do radio shows anymore. But tonight I filled in at the last minute....I think it was my first show in maybe 6 months?!? Anyway, here goes a rare radio playlist from me:

WXYC 89.3 FM
Wednesday, April 14th, 10pm - 12mid.

Trans Am - "Uninvited Guest" from Liberation (THRILL JOCKEY)
Magical Power Mako - Track # 12 from Cozmo Grosso (NOVEL SOUNDS)
N.E.R.D. - "She Wants To Move (DFA remix)" from 12" single (EMI/VIRGIN)
Hieroglyphics - "Love Flowin'" from "Make your Move" 12-inch (HIERO IMPERIUM)
Murs - "Freak These Tales" from Murs 3:16 - the 9th Edition (DEF JUX)
------ talk set ------
Anderson Moss & Group - "Zydeco Pas Sale" from V.A - Deep River of Song: Lousiana (ROUNDER)
Billy Childish & The Blackhands - "Chatham Jack" from The Original Chatham Jack (SUB-POP)
Arthur Russell - "The Platform on the Ocean" - from Calling Out of Context (AUDIKA)
Fennesz (feat. David Sylvian) - "Transit" from Venice (TOUCH)
Manitoba - "I've Lived On A Dirt Road All My Life" from Up In Flames (DOMINO)
Mikronytes - "Xeh" from live_src (CRANK AUTOMOTIVE) (by request!)
------ talk set ------
Otilio Portal - "A Romper El Coco" from V/A - Las Fabulosas Orquestas Cubanas De Los Anos 50 (ARTEX)
Ray Barretto - "Together" from V/A - Nu Yorica Roots! (SOUL JAZZ)
EPMD - "So What Cha Sayin'" from Unfinished Business (PRIORITY)
The Lafayette Afro Rock Band - "Darkest Light" from Malik (HI & FLY)
15.60.75 - "About The Eye Game" from Jimmy Bell's Still in Town (HEARTHAN/MORPHIUS)
Dead Moon - "Dawning of the Dead" from Dead Ahead (TOMBSTONE)
------ talk set ------
Battery Operated & Made - "Idrolyse Crac" from Aprotic (COCOSOLIDCITI)
Girl Talk - "Keeping The Beat" from Unstoppable (ILLEGAL ART)
Kenny Dope feat. Screechy Dan - "Boomin' In Ya Jeep" from V/A - Nice Up The Dance (SOUL JAZZ)
UK Apachie/Shy FX - "Original Nuttah" from V/A - Jungle Vibes (SSR)
Sixtoo - "Storm Clouds and Silver Linings" from "Boxcutter Emporium" 12-inch (NINJA TUNE)
Tortoise - "Five Too Many" from It's All Around You (THRILL JOCKEY)
Hot Butter - "Popcorn" from V/A - Super Hits of the 70s, Vol. 9 (RHINO)
------ talk set ------
Sufjan Stevens - "We Won't Need Legs to Stand" from Seven Swans (SOUNDS FAMILYRE)
Loren Connors, Neel Murgai, Andrew Burnes - "excerpt from Thomas Paine ("Where Are Your Bones?")" from V/A - No W... Now! (PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE) [this one's an anti-Bush comp so I'm giving it a hyperlink!]

Out of the new stuff I encountered, I was most amped by 15.60.75 (completely caught off guard by this one...an awesome Kent, OH band from 1975!), the always top-notch Fennesz, Girl Talk (which I've got on order for a mere 9 bucks from the fine folks at Illegal Art), and the late 80s Arthur Russell comp (which sounds like it'll make a nice complement to the excellent Soul Jazz reissue of earlier disco-y productions). The Magical Power Mako was pretty cool too. Last week I picked up the hot Murs/9th Wonder album...very solid. It's a little funny to see Durham's 9th Wonder riding the Kanye/Just Blaze "helium soul" production tip right after producing a Jay-Z track, but it all sounds great so props to a local guy who's really starting to make it big!

During-show transcription is kind of a pain....so by the time I do my next radio show, WXYC playlists will be live and direct on the WWW....I guarantee it.

Posted by Tim at 01:16 AM | Comments (5)

March 31, 2004

Dook and the College Dropout

I hesitate to say anything too nice about Dook with the Final Four coming up this weekend, but someone over there did a really nice job booking their annual Last Day of Classes concert. Yep, that's right - Kanye West and Dilated Peoples, Wednesday April 21 on the main West campus quad! I just hope this show won't fall victim to the typical hip-hop concert delays and cause me to miss any of Four Tet at Go! later that night.

On a related note....UNC almost never gets to blow massive wads of student fee cash on campus hip-hop shows, but this year they've actually booked a Nas show at the Dean Dome - and on the day after Kanye, no less. Student fees partially subsidize the Nas show so that student tickets are only $10. But still, it's not quite the same as a free outdoor Kanye West show....and I just learned that Hell's long-awaited Super-Trivia-With-Cash-Prizes is scheduled for that same night (4/22). OK, enough with the planning for late April...

Currently listening to: the debut of Air America. In general, this sort of babble-heavy caller-centric talk radio is not exactly my cup of tea, but this new network is clearly an important and exciting development.

Posted by Tim at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2004

Bears See Things Pretty Much The Way They Are

Don Caballero played Go! Room 4 tonight but I intentionally passed on the show. Don Cab are one of my favorite bands ever but the current incarnation is a bit of a sham, somewhat of a False Caballero. The lineup now consists of longtime drummer/octopus Damon Che and some guys from Creta Bourzia who (impressively) figured out all of the Ian Williams/Mike Banfield guitar parts to old Caballero songs. False Caballero rolled through town last October and I eagerly went to the show without knowing anything about the lineup change. After a lot of the emo kids cleared out after this band I'd never heard of called The Constantines, False Caballero took the stage and played copious portions of What Burns Never Returns and For Respect in addition to some other DonCab oldies and even a few new songs. All of the "old" songs were technically dead-on & very accurate...and I must admit that I enjoyed hearing them. But I got this weird icky feeling that I was being sold something under the guise of nostalgia...and that maybe I had finally passed some age threshold where the bands I liked in college were already doing "reunion" tours for cash a la The Who. Five years ago I saw a Steve Perry-less Journey at Walnut Creek Ampitheatre and enjoyed the hell out of it...but my ticket was free and I was drunk on a grassy lawn on a warm summer evening and I had absolutely no delusions of (or vested interest in) "Journey authenticity". Funny, the one thing that I will probably remember the most about last fall's False Caballero show was that Damon was totally drunk and pissed off about the band's performance and who knows what else...he kept making negative comments and I thought he might even start re-enacting elements of the Don Cab show at Local 506 ten years earlier when he got frustrated with soundman Todd Goss and proceeded to pitch a huge fit....as well as a snare drum and most of his drum sticks onto the Local 506 floor. Now those are good memories....

Back in the present: I was lucky enough to witness Ian Williams' awesome new band Battles a couple weeks back...more on that show sometime soon.

Posted by Tim at 01:48 AM | Comments (4)

March 25, 2004

Don't Blame Canada

So tonight I went to Kings to see Broken Social Scene. I'd totally missed the boat on this Canadian band for all of last year, despite the fact that a friend had been playing and hyping their You Forgot It In People CD for my housemate once last summer. WXYC never put the album in rotation as far as I know, and it wasn't until January of this year that I finally got a chance to fully digest the CD while riding around snowy Wisconsin in a friend's car. I must admit, my overall tolerance for new-ish "indie-rock" is not always so high these days, but damn if this CD didn't grab my ear, throw in some curveballs, and retroactively earn a would've-been spot in my top 10 of 2003...or did it come out in late 2002?!? Anyway, the live show was pretty satisfying, the 8+ people in the band played most all of the songs on the first (and best) half of the album. Several of those songs really do a great job of capturing the spirit and sound of late 80s Dinosaur Jr....which is an awesome thing when you get it right. Which these Canucks have somehow figured out how to do. Hmmm, it seems that one of these guys was actually in Do Make Say Think, who put out an awesome CD on Constellation many many years ago...

Posted by Tim at 01:48 AM | Comments (0)