DAILY NOTE - Red Bull Music Academy Daily

DAILY NOTE
THURSDAY, MAY 2, 2013
5 22
of
NYC DRONE
LA MONTE YOUNG AND HIS DISCIPLES
DIPSET'S HARLEM WORLD / MASTERS AT WORK / WARHOL'S FACTORY
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
It’s tempting to define the cultural thumbprint
of a city by a single style or scene: Seattle
grunge; Detroit techno; Miami bass. This is
unfair, of course, but sometimes an outsized
creative moment can too-easily consume the
narrative. Not in New York. The city, bustling
with innovative artists of all genres in every
neighborhood, refuses to be reduced to a single
type. This issue of Daily Note revels in the
diverse cauldron of New York music and culture.
Alan Licht dives into the droned-out
world of minimalist composer and
artist La Monte Young, investigating
his collaborative Tribeca installation/
performance space the Dream House.
Far away—stylistically and
geographically—is Harlem’s Diplomats
crew. In 2011, the irreverent rappers
spoke to the Red Bull Music Academy
about how their relatability as a
fiercely neighborhood-repping posse
was key to their success. (Cam’ron
also explains how Juelz Santana
initially won him over by rapping
Clockwise from top:
Throwing Snow in an RBMA
bedroom studio; Erykah
Badu invites fans onstage
following her public
lecture at Brooklyn
Museum; Kim Gordon and
Stephen O’Malley at their
individual lectures at
the Academy.
about stealing cable.)
Douglas Wolk navigates the
intertwining worlds of underground
music and comics in ’90s New York,
detailing the overlapping sensibilities
of, and mutual appreciation between,
two staunchly independent and
alternative subcultures.
The participants of Red Bull Music
Academy 2013 come from all over the
world, make music of many styles, and
have converged in a city that can’t sit
still. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
Stay weird, New York.
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editor Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Contributors
Jung Hee Choi
Dame Darcy
Adrienne Day
Seze Devres
Laura Forde
Marcellus Hall
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
Cover Photo Jung Hee Choi
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
The content of Daily Note does not
necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
Alan Licht
Richard McGuire
Brent Rollins
Nick Sylvester
Douglas Wolk
The Just Alap Raga Ensemble performing Raga
Darbari, Dream House, Berlin 2012. L-R: Jung Hee
Choi, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, voices;
Naren Budhkar, tabla.
ABOUT RBMA
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates
creative pioneers and presents fearless new
talent. Now we’re in New York City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a worldtraveling series of music workshops and
festivals: a platform for those who make
a difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two
groups of selected participants — producers,
vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and
musical mavericks from around the world — in
New York City. For two weeks, each group
will hear lectures by musical luminaries,
work together on tracks, and perform in the
city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine
2
a place that’s equal parts science lab,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a
touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a
sprinkle of Prince Jammy’s mixing board,
and Bob Moog’s synthesizer collection
all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re
halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has
been traversing the globe since, traveling
to Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona,
London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red
Bull Music Academy open early next year.
3
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
“I would never call myself
avant-garde, I’d call myself
retro-garde.” —Stephen O’Malley of
Sunn O))), May 1, 2013
TONIGHT
Knockdown Center
Drone
Activity In
Progress
Stephen O’Malley
Body/Head
(Kim Gordon & Bill
Nace)
work it
W
The Techno
Underground
Five classics from the
Influential house duo
hen it comes to house music and its long history
in New York City, Masters At Work are unquestionably an essential part of the story. Throughout the ’90s and into the 2000s, ‘Little’ Louie
Vega and Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzalez, put together an extensive
discography, turning out both original productions and an almost impossibly large volume of remixes—including reworks of
pop stars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Debbie Gibson
as well as underground dance icons such as Cajmere, Lil Louis,
and Deee-Lite. While a playlist of all the essential MAW tunes
would literally comprise hours and hours of music, we’ve listed
a few standout classics in advance of the pair’s special Red Bull
Music Academy performance this Friday at Le Bain.
“I Can’t Get No Sleep”
(Cutting, 1993)
This horn-driven anthem
pairs MAW’s patented
shuffling rhythms, rounded basslines, and bouncy
organ melodies with the
pipes of India, whose diva
turn takes the proceedings
to another level.
Hardrive
“Deep Inside”
(Strictly Rhythm,
1993)
Penned by Vega, engineered
by a then-unknown Erick
Morillo, and released
by the seminal Strictly Rhythm label in 1993,
“Deep Inside” is undoubtedly one of the most
influential tunes to ever
emerge from the MAW camp.
It also spotlighted a vocal snippet from Barbara
Tucker, who later became a
regular collaborator with
the group.
Masters At Work
“The Ha Dance”
(Cutting, 1991)
Flipping a bizarre sample from the movie Trading
Places, “The Ha Dance” is
not only a potent stomper—
it’s a song that’s truly
transcended its origins.
Following its release
in 1991, the track was
adopted by the vogue and
ballroom community, and
remains the defining track
of that scene today.
The Bucketheads
“The Bomb! (These
Sounds Fall into My
Mind)”
(Henry Street, 1994)
A 15-minute odyssey
crafted by Gonzalez,
“The Bomb!” is based
upon samples from Chicago’s “Streetplayer.”
Employing a thick funk
bassline, whirring synths,
and clanging percussion,
the track—which quickly
became a Eurodance smash—
ultimately hinges on its
throwback breakdown, which
recalls its source material and channels the feelgood vibes of ’70s funk.
Barbara Tucker
“I Get Lifted”
(Strictly Rhythm,
1994)
“I Get Lifted” found
MAW’s swing-heavy grooves
infused with a touch of
gospel spirit, with Tucker
backed by a church choir
and flashing more vocal
command than her appearance on “Deep Inside”
hinted at. Even more potent is the track’s “Bar
Dub” version, on which
MAW amps the low end while
chopping and looping Tucker’s vocals for maximum
dancefloor effectiveness.
4
Red Bull Music
Academy Presents
Masters At Work
Friday, May 3 at
Le Bain at the Standard.
444 W. 13th St.,
10 PM – 4 AM
For more info go to
redbullmusicacademy.com
The Bunker with Andy
Stott, Objekt, and more
The Bunker’s musical explorations
Bunker photo of Juju & Jordash by Seze Devres
asters at Work
M
feat. India
Prurient + 13 More
Bryan Kasenic’s Brooklyn techno party the
Bunker began life ten years ago at SubTonic, a
dingy bar in the basement of Tonic, a legendary home for experimental music once located at 107 Norfolk in the Lower East Side. The
upstairs main room would host everyone from
John Zorn and Bill Laswell to then-fledgling
bands like Gang Gang Dance and Animal Collective; downstairs, an eclectic crew of electronic-music-minded bartenders gave DJ friends
free reign to play leftfield disco, minimal techno, UK garage, and breakcore.
While the Bunker ultimately moved to
Williamsburg venue Public Assembly (it also
recently started hosting events at the brandnew club Output), Kasenic avoids faddish obsessions and adheres instead to the original
Bunker ethos: “An ongoing night of musical explorations.” He often books minimal synth acts
and experimental noise bands alongside techno
or house DJs.
We sat down with Kasenic recently to
discuss the Bunker’s unique approach to
dance-music programming.
“I’m always trying to make a statement with
the lineups for the Bunker. It’s one of my primary creative outlets. It makes a big impact
on the people that come to the party... Even
though we’re primarily still a techno party,
it’s not for people who just want, like, chugging tech-house as background for their drug
is this Saturday at
Public Assembly,
60 N. 6th St., Brooklyn.
For more info go to
redbullmusicacademy.com
trip, or they’re trying to get laid or whatever.
Bringing in the serious record collector and
music-nerd-type people is important—once I
get those people hooked on the Bunker, they’ll
stick around for years.
By bringing in Vatican Shadow and Tropic
of Cancer and those kinds of acts, that’s part
of what I’m trying to do. We had a party with
Sandwell District, with Function, Silent Ser-
vant, and Rrose in the
backroom, and Juju
& Jordash and Morphosis in the front
room. Those were
all artists known for
techno, and that one
felt like a goth night.
I always want to
introduce new [DJs],
but over time I’ve
gotten interested in
supporting artists,
booking them regularly, and building
an audience around
them. We have that with all the resident
DJs and with Peter Van Hoesen, Prosumer,
Sandwell District, the Modern Love guys, Demdike Stare and Andy Stott… All those people
have been part of the Bunker for a long time
and remain a part of it. And as far as some big
superstar who’s never played the Bunker, I’m
just kind of over it. I don’t care anymore. It’s
just not what I want to do.”
–Vivian host
MAY
02
UPCOMING
EVENTS
145 W 32nd St
Brian
Eno: 77
Million
Paintings
MAY
03
Le Bain
Masters
At Work
& Special
Guests
MAY
03
Smorgasburg
Brooklyn
Flea Record
Fair
Special
MAY
04
The Bunker @ Public Assembly
Andy Stott
Atom TM
Objekt
Octo Octa
More
MAY
04
New Museum
Brooklyn Flea Record Fair Exclusives
O
n Saturday afternoon, the Brooklyn Flea Record
Fair posts up at
Williamsburg’s sprawling outdoor food market
Smorgasburg. Not only
will there be dozens of
labels and independent
vendors hawking great
records—in many cases,
they’ll be hawking great,
exclusive records. We
rounded up some of the
gems shoppers should look
for this weekend.
Classic Album
Sundays: A
David Bowie
Special
Nile Rodgers, Tony
Visconti, Ken Scott
MAY
05
Terminal 5
The Smith Tapes
Filmmaker Ezra Bookstein
has unearthed reel upon
reel of archival interviews conducted by late
’60s and early-’70s
Village Voice columnist and radio DJ Howard
Smith. Smith spoke—
candidly and often at
length—with many of the
era’s most notable musicians, artists, and radicals, from Mick Jagger to
Dennis Hopper. Bookstein
will have a beautifully
packaged treasure trove
of material available,
including a cassettetape-shaped USB stick
that Record Fair attendees can load up with any
interviews they choose.
Captured Tracks
(Cleaners From
Venus Box Sets)
Having already released
one three-LP volume of
reissues from slyly influential UK leftfield
lo-fi pop mavens Cleaners from Venus, Captured
Tracks has prepped a
four-LP second volume
covering their fruitful
’83 to ’85 output. Not
officially available for
another two weeks, you
can skip the queue and
grab a vinyl or CD set on
Saturday.
Warp
(Limited Box Sets)
In addition to a box
set from Red Bull Music
Academy 2013 lecturer
and Daily Note cover star
Brian Eno, venerable UK
label Warp will have super limited reissues from
legendary electronic-music pioneers Aphex Twin
and Autechre.
Minimal Wave
(Assorted Rare
Cassettes)
Minimal Wave is dedicated to (and astonishingly
proficient at) finding
and reissuing excellent
unreleased or extremely
rare analog synth music
from the post-punk era.
Just in time for the Record Fair, they got in a
shipment from ’80s Dutch
cassette label Tear Apart
Tapes. Six cassettes from
T.A.T. will be available
on Saturday, with any
leftovers (yeah, right!)
slated to be sold on
Minimal Wave’s website.
Flying MAY
Lotus
Ultraísta,
Thundercat & Band
05
The Great Hall at Cooper Union
Brian
Eno: An
Illustrated
Talk
MAY
06
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5
FROM THE ARCHIVES
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
Dipset
Cam’ron, Jim Jones, and Juelz Santana reminisce
about Diplomats’ Harlem world.
photo Olugbenro Ogunsemore
Do you feel like Harlem is a very different place
now? cam’ron: Never could be a stranger, but it’s
changing. But it’s like… if you not around, you not going
to see the changes. We see the changes as they happening, so I like the change. juelz santana: I ain’t gonna
front—10, 15 years ago I probably wouldn’t have liked
the change, but just being a little older, you know, maybe having kids and understanding that things have to
change, and maybe change for the better… It may be
good, but I mean, being young and just running around
Harlem, I definitely feel that we got some of the glory
days. cam’ron: The biggest change is the cops. You can’t
even stand on the corner and eat some chips, man. It’s
crazy. Like, they run down on you for anything. I’m in
the back of a car, drinking out of a Styrofoam cup, which
was juice, and I got a ticket. And I’m not even on the
street. That’s how ridiculous it is.
But let’s compare it to back when you guys were
first coming together. What were you doing on the
corner then? jim jones: Cases of champagne on the
floor, Styrofoam cups, weed in the air, hustling… juelz
santana: No good, no good.
Do you feel like there could have been a Dipset in
2011? juelz santana: Oh, we like the Renaissance. We
always would. See, we still here right now.
You guys basically taught a generation about your
lifestyle in Harlem. If you had more restrictions,
you wouldn’t have even lived that lifestyle. cam’ron:
Yeah, I ain’t gonna lie, it’s tough outside. We used to be
on 145th and Broadway doing some wild stuff. I don’t
even think you could do that [now], what we was doing
back then.
Talk about the role that the Harlem streets had in
what you wanted to rap about, what you were influenced by, what you aspired to, what your goals
were. jim jones: We were fortunate enough to put out
the official soundtrack to Harlem, as far as painting the
picture of what we witnessed. Our good times, our bad
times, the people that we looked up to, the things that
we saw when we looked out our window, the things that
we did when we went outside. This is what we put into
our music, and we was fortunate enough to be able to
witness an era. We might not have been a part of the era,
but we was fortunate enough to witness an era that led
6
us to do what we doing today. We were lucky. Where we
from, you got a chance to sell drugs or you got a chance
to make it out of the ’hood by going to school. Going
to school’s usually not the first option—selling drugs is.
When we got famous and when we got our first deal, it
was in between, like, “Yo, to make money it’s either we
gonna go hard on these streets” or “We gonna take this
opportunity serious and go all the way to the top and
make some money, let them know how instrumental the
streets was to us and how we would like to give back,
and maybe we could lead by example.”
You guys have known each other for a long time.
How far back do you and Jim go? cam’ron: Maybe
[since] eight or nine [years old]. His grandmother and
my grandmother lived in the same building. You know
how you go to your grandmother’s house on the weekend? We always seen each other—every weekend.
And what about Freekey Zekey? jim jones: Zekey
I knew literally from [age] eight. We went to summer school together. Catholic school. cam’ron: And
they from the eastside, too. I met Zekey when I was
about 13, 14. I met Juelz when I just finished my first
album, going into my second album. My man Tobe
I knew since I was five years old. He kept telling me
about Juelz, how Juelz was in a deal and the deal was
messed up, and he was in a group. I heard the group
and Juelz’s partner wasn’t as good as Juelz, I felt.
But Tobe kept telling me about him and I’m like, “Yo
man, let me get my thing together. I only got one album out, let me get it together.” So I fell asleep in my
car one day and Tobe was driving. I woke up—he woke
me up—he like, “Yo, here go my man in the back seat
right now, ready to rhyme.” I’m looking at him like,
“Yo, man, I don’t got time.” He was 16. juelz santana:
Tobe had just called me on the phone. He like, “Yo, come
down. I’m driving around the block, Cam’s sleeping.
Come downstairs.” I was in a group, my partner wasn’t
home yet. So I came downstairs, I got in the car. Like
he said, Cam was sleeping in the passenger seat, dead
asleep. He woke up wiping his face or whatever the
case. And he just gaped, he didn’t even really look at
me… cam’ron: You gotta realize that in Harlem, before
Ma$e… We used to think like Harlem got the jinx. Everybody from Brooklyn get on and Queens was poppin’.
This person’s poppin’ from Staten Island and Long Island—like, Big L and Gruff was our rappers, but it never
was nothing national, so we was like, “We got the jinx
on us.” After Ma$e, we was like, “Yes! The jinx over,” you
know what I’m saying? So I got everybody now in Harlem trying to rap to me, know what I’m saying? I’m like,
“I ain’t got time for this.” juelz santana: I knew that
look he had, ’cause he looked at Tobe while he was driving like, “Oh, you really just gonna drive over here and
got this little nigga in the back of my car!” But I knew
that was my only chance. He said, “Nah, this is my cousin I was telling you about. Rap.” So I rapped.
So, you had to rap for a guy who had just woken up
and was grumpy as hell? juelz santana: So I had to
be kinda good, right? cam’ron: I was tight, and then
he start rapping. I was like, “Hey yo, shorty nice.” juelz
santana: But he didn’t show me that. He didn’t really
show no emotion. I just got out the car and kinda waited
for Tobe to call me. cam’ron: I went back to the crib and
I told Jim, “Yo, it’s this young kid that Tobe got uptown.
He’s poppin.’” jim jones: I remember the bars. He said,
“I keep guns in my trunk. When I go swimming I keep
guns in my trunks.” [Laughs] cam’ron: Nah, you know
the line that got me? Man, we keep it 100 when he said
something about, “We still stealing cable. We got the
chip in the box.” Everybody was stealing cable at that
time. We got mad free cable, so I was feeling it.
Diplomats were already featured on your album
Come Home With Me, but then there was the whole
crew on the album Diplomatic Immunity. Cam, as
kind of the head honcho of this, you made a decision
of “I want to go forward with this group.” Did you
think of it as another Roc Dynasty or compare it
to some other type of mega-group? cam’ron: Why I
think people liked us so much is ’cause we just lifestyle—
it wasn’t formulated. It isn’t like there’s some dude from
Philly. We’re not dissing them but it was like, guys from
Brooklyn, guys from Philly, another guy from Brooklyn,
dude from Chicago. We all from the same neighborhood,
so it’s kinda natural. When we got into rap beefs with
everybody, everybody jump on the song, whether they
had beef with them or not. It was more family-orientated, so I think that was why people kinda liked what we
had going on.
Interviewed by Miss Info at the Red Bull Music
Academy World Tour in New York 2011. For the full
L-R: Juelz
Santana,
Cam’ron,
Jim Jones,
Freekey
Zekey.
Q&A, head to redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine.
7
feature
La Monte Young,
“Dronacharya,
The Master of
Drone” NYC 2009.
THE HUM
OF THE CITY
La Monte Young and the birth of New York drone.
WORDS Alan licht
PHOTOgraphy Jung Hee Choi
Marian Zazeela, “Akash Devi, Goddess of the Aethers”
in Drone Light, Dream House, Mela Foundation,
NYC 2000.
8
or the last 20 years, passersby on Church
Street, just south of the triangle now occupied
by the Tribeca Grand Hotel, may have noticed
a magenta glow coming from a third-floor loft
window. Ring the buzzer, ascend the stairs, and
you will find yourself at the Dream House, an
electronic sound and light installation. Maintained by composer La Monte Young and artist
Marian Zazeela, it realizes an idea Young conceived 50 years ago of a building in which single tones would be sustained around the clock.
Young—a teenage jazz saxophone prodigy who
turned to the avant-garde and became virtually synonymous with drone music—is elusive;
he hardly ever gives concerts and his music is
rarely performed by anyone other than himself or ensembles of his own making. He has
only a handful of officially released recordings
to his name, all of which are out of print and
command large sums on the collectors’ market (and his own website). In fact, the Dream
House, which is open three days a week, albeit seasonally, is Young’s one point of access
to the public. Like his predecessor John Cage,
Young exemplifies the contemporary composer
9
feature
feature
La Monte Young,
Marian Zazeela,
Dream House,
Villa Elisabeth,
Berlin 2012.
Brian Eno, only 15 years
Young’s junior, once
said, “La Monte Young is
the daddy of us all.”
whose music is seldom heard but whose influence is pervasive. Even Brian Eno, only 15 years
Young’s junior, once said, “La Monte Young is
the daddy of us all.”
Start digging around in latter 20th-century
music history and Young quickly emerges as a
pioneering figure. He was the first post-Cage
composer of note to decisively embrace tonality,
the first to make a practice of utilizing drones
and/or as little as two pitches. He encountered
Terry Riley as a fellow aspiring composer when
both were graduate students in the late ’50s
and greatly affected Riley’s own break with serialism, the atonal, often dissonant form that
had dominated modern music from the turn of
the century onwards (as exemplified by composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky).
Riley began working with modal, highly repetitive instrumental and tape music, subsequently
meeting and influencing another like-minded
young composer, Steve Reich, who in turn met
and influenced a then equally unknown Philip
Glass—the three (and often Young as well) were
later corralled by critics and historians as the
prime movers of an entire musical movement:
minimalism. Young was affiliated with the Fluxus artists when he arrived in New York in the
early ’60s and organized what is said to be the
first series of downtown loft concerts in New
York (at Yoko Ono’s home on Chambers Street),
paving the way for later Lower Manhattan
avant-garde venues like the Kitchen, the Knitting Factory, Experimental Intermedia, Roulette, Tonic, and Issue Project Room. The Velvet
Underground’s John Cale played amplified viola with Young from 1963 to ’65, leaving when
the Velvets began to pick up steam. There’s a
saying about the Velvet Underground’s first
album, often attributed to Eno, that not many
people bought it when it was first released, but
everyone who did went out and formed a band.
Maybe now, a half-century later, the people who
have heard the Velvet Underground outnumber
the bands that were inspired by them. But one
thing’s for sure: the Velvet Underground is unthinkable without La Monte Young.
The story goes like this: John Cale first
joined forces with Lou Reed in a rather ramshackle outfit called the Primitives, organized
to play a few shows to promote the gimmicky
singles Reed was writing and recording (under
various fake names) as a staff songwriter at
Pickwick Records. The other two members of
the Primitives were also Young associates: violinist/filmmaker Tony Conrad and land artist/
drummer Walter De Maria. The Velvet Underground grew out of this social milieu—in fact,
it was Conrad who found the book from which
the band took its name, and the Velvets’ original drummer, the poet Angus MacLise, had also
played with Young. Musically, Cale brought the
viola drones he was playing for hours at a time
with Young to Reed’s “Heroin” and “Venus in
Furs”; Cale’s hypnotic piano part in “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is also derivative of Young’s keyboard style. And Reed’s Metal Machine Music
double album, created by leaving several guitars tuned to the same single note to feed back
10
while leaning against amps, namechecks Young
on its back cover.
The drone aspect of the Velvet Underground
reverberated over the next four decades, proving substantiative to the trance-inducing ’70s
progressive/psychedelic Krautrock bands Can,
Neu, Ash Ra Tempel, and Faust. Later underground groups such as Sonic Youth, My Bloody
Valentine, Stereolab, and Spacemen 3 also bear
traces of the band in their music. Away from
a specific post-Velvets sensibility, Earth’s Dylan
Carlson began listening to Young and responded with Earth 2 (1992), which melds the drone
aesthetic to heavy metal guitar riffs; it culminates in an open E chord left to hang in perpetual stasis for 30 minutes. Sunn O))), a group
partially formed in tribute to Earth, picked up
where Carlson left off, making drone metal a
certifiable micro-genre in the early 2000s. The
rock lineage continues through the Yeah Yeah
Yeahs’ drummer Brian Chase, who worked at
the Dream House as a sound monitor and has
recently released an album called Drums and
Drones that documents his own work with
overtone-based music.
Two further examples of New York’s most
innovative music can be traced back to Young’s
circles. In the early ’70s Young employed Rhys
Chatham, then barely out of his teens, to
tune his piano. Chatham was a minimalist at
the time, creating an hour-long piece for two
gongs (performed by himself and Yoshi Wada,
another Young student and a Fluxus artist) and
playing in trio configurations with fellow composers Tony Conrad, Charlemagne Palestine,
and Laurie Spiegel. Later in the decade, after
seeing the Ramones, he developed a drone
piece for rock-band instrumentation, “Guitar
Trio.” Glenn Branca was originally playing
“Guitar Trio” with Chatham, but soon developed his own ideas about injecting rock-derived multiple electric guitars into avant-classicism and formed his own ensemble (which
at various times included members of Sonic
Youth, Swans, and Helmet, as well as Ned Sublette, another former Young student). Branca,
informed by Young’s intoned works, also went
through a phase of composing using just intonation, an alternate tuning system considered
more precise than the equal temperament
system that has become uniform in Western
instrumentation. Trumpeter Jon Hassell met
Young through Terry Riley (he plays on the
original 1968 recording of Riley’s In C, a seminal minimalist composition) and performed
with Young in the early ’70s, as documented
on La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela Dream
House 78’ 17”, a legendary LP released by the
French Shandar label. Taking the world-music
fusions of Miles Davis’ On the Corner album as
a starting point—but also impacted by working with Young and studying with Indian raga
vocalist Pandit Pran Nath (of whom Young was
a committed disciple)—Hassell developed his
Fourth World concept, finding connections
and then dissolving boundaries between ethnic, electronic, jazz, and avant-classical musics. Hassell’s Vernal Equinox album became
Extra noise
Over the years, Red Bull Music
Academy has focused a lot of
attention on the dancefloor, but
the goal of championing the
entire spectrum of forwardthinking music remains. We asked
four Red Bull Music Academy
2013 participants who make
experimental music—sounds
that are more head-expanding
than body-moving—how they
developed their styles.
CABAAL
(Ottawa, Canada)
“Boards of Canada
were really my
introduction to
ambient music, if some of their
stuff can be classified as such.
I think for myself, and for a lot
of the people, Boards are like a
gateway drug. They show you that
synthesizers don’t have to sound
digital or lifeless, they can be
organic and emotive.”
soundcloud.com/cabaal
Hiram Martinez
(Zapopan, Mexico)
“I want to say I make
drone pop, but I don’t
even know if that
exists. Someone gave me a digital
copy of the Water EP by Salem in
early 2010. I was just coming out
of a post-rock band and it was the
first time I was using a laptop
to create music. I found the mix
of pop and darkwave interesting
so I decided to start mixing the
genres that got me inspired to get
involved in music.”
twitter.com/cnzontle
Alitrec
(London, England)
a favorite of Brian Eno’s around the time Eno
was heading into ambient music, and the two
made a collaborative album, 1980’s Possible
Musics. (Eno also worked with Cale, and even
performed one of Young’s scores while an art
student in the late ’60s.)
The confluence of sonic vocabularies in Hassell’s approach, along with the denser, darker
pockets of Eno’s ambient work, laid the groundwork for the so-called “illbient” scene in New
York in the ’90s. Illbient was ambient music that
took into account the flux of city living; it favored
harder urban sonorities that differentiated it from
ambient’s often-pastoral evocations. Sure enough,
one of the leading proponents of illbient was yet
another former student of Young’s: trumpeter
Ben Neill, who appears on Young’s 1991 recording
Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown
Transformer. “The concept of the drone is such
a great vehicle for the integration of all sorts of
different musical elements,” Neill told The Wire in
1996. “Whereas if you look at the ’80s approach
to integration of these exploded vocabularies of
music that we’re working with now, it was really
about juxtaposition, not really about integration.
That’s where my kinship with the whole ambient/
illbient scene comes from.”
Crossing over from the avant-classical scene
(he was also music director at the Kitchen at
this time), Neill’s participation is in itself indicative of illbient’s porous nature, but his
emphasis on holistic integration as a kind of
drone is a key to locating the idea of drone in
the psyche of New York City itself. One might
think of drones as meditative, and New York is
not a particularly meditative place. But “the city
that never sleeps” is decidedly a natural environment for the kind of drone that emanates
from continual human and mechanical activity,
what Eno once termed “the general hum of the
city.” The constant energy of New York is what’s
reflected in its drone music. When you step inside the Dream House, you’re enveloped by a
voluminous, dizzying chord emanating from
four speakers­—it fills the room with buzzing
overtones that seem to appear and disappear
with even the slightest movement of your head.
It’s exhilarating and almost hallucinatory; often
billed by Young as a kind of respite from the
frenzy of NYC living, in many ways it actually
reflects the panoramic onslaught of stimuli just
outside the Church Street door.
In early-’60s rehearsals at Young’s loft, Young,
Cale, and Conrad tuned their instruments to
what Young called “the underlying drone of the
city,” i.e. the 60-cycle hum of the city’s electrical
system, as heard from your refrigerator or by tapping a guitar cable. Young recalled listening as a
child to the droning sound of a power plant next
to the gas station his uncle ran. In the ’60s the
late percussionist and sound artist Max Neuhaus
had a similar fascination, leading listening trips
around the city, including one to the Con Edison
power plant on 14th Street. In the ’90s, Beth Coleman, one of the organizers of the itinerant illbient
party Soundlab, told a journalist, “Since I’ve been
DJing, I don’t hear the city the way I used to. I
have a friend who lives on the eastside near a big
power plant. One morning she was walking home
from one of our shows, and she heard the hum of
the plant and it sounded like music to her.”
It is not insignificant to note that Neuhaus took complete strangers to listen to the
power plant and Coleman organized floating
club nights, while Young’s communions with
the electrical system took place with chosen
co-conspirators behind closed doors. Like their
creator, Young’s drones are reclusive and must
be sought out. But if you go to the traffic triangle between 45th and 46th Streets in Times
Square and there’s not too much extraneous
noise, you will hear a drone coming up from
the street grates. It’s a sound installation by
Neuhaus called “Times Square,” first set up
in 1977, dismantled in 1992, and reinstated in
2002. Unlike the Dream House, the point is
not to get lost in the drone itself or to initiate
a “spiritual retreat” from one’s surroundings.
“Times Square” situates a drone as a steadystate aural marker amidst the hubbub of one
of the world’s busiest intersections, matching
an unchanging electronic chord to the hive-like
drone of the city’s hustle and bustle. Rather
than compete with the volume of its environment, “Times Square” functions as a barometer
of Midtown noise levels. Its audibility changes with the amount of sound generated in its
immediate vicinity; during the day it’s often
drowned out, revealing itself more in the evening hours when the traffic lessens. The Dream
House is ultimately a private concert of sorts,
complete with “stage lighting” (“The Magenta
Lights,” created by Young’s wife and collaborator Zazeela) and thrice-weekly scheduled “performances” (Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
from 2pm to midnight). “Times Square” is a
public artwork par excellence, open at all times
to anyone who chances upon it and probably
subliminally affecting those who pass through
it every day without ever knowing it’s there.
Unmarked and unadvertised, “Times Square”
calls no attention to itself, yet—in its unassuming way—it’s the ultimate monument to the
intangible energy that forever characterizes
New York City.
“I don’t think ambient
music has played a
major part [in my
music] over the years, but I
guess any ambient [influence] has
really been later — and probably
unintentional — through doing a lot
of field recording and listening
to more experimental, sound-artbased works, as well as loads of
film soundtracks. Artists like
Drexciya, Dopplereffekt, Japanese
Telecom, and Autechre were big
influences initially. A lot of it
is very dark and weird sounding,
creating these strange dystopian
worlds that draw you in.”
soundcloud.com/alitrec
Seretan
(Istanbul, Turkey)
“My greatest
influences are Brian
Eno, Steve Moore,
and Steve Reich. It’s apparent
that sound-shaping and spacemaking tools also affect my music
because I like to work directly
with sound. I don’t know why,
but I like to express myself
with continuous and surrounding
textures. Dissonance, stillness,
and techniques of repetition are
important for me. The only thing
I was sure of was that I wanted to
have certain relationships between
music and life.”
soundcloud.com/ozcanertek
11
COLUMNS
Columns
LANDMARKS
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
LO G OS
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
A month after graduating from Rhode
Island School of Design in 1992, Kevin
Lyons knocked on the door of the
Groove Academy offices. “I had seen an
ad in Paper and mistakenly assumed it
was a record store,” he says. There he
met Maurice Bernstein and Jonathan
Rudnick, founders of a marketing and
concert-promotions company “dedicated
to the preservation of funk” and creators
of the New York club night Giant Step.
After glancing at Lyons’ sketchbook,
they gave him a crack at designing the
party’s logo.
Giant Step, founded in 1990, may have
imported its retro vibe—a fusion of bebop,
beatnik, and funk—from London’s acidjazz scene, but its hip-hop energy was
pure New York. “The name came from two
places,” recalls Bernstein. “For those that
knew, there was the Coltrane reference,
but it was also a statement of intent: we
wanted to take a musical leap from what
was going on in the city at that time.”
12
In 1990 that meant a five-dollar cover
and a young, mixed crowd getting ITS
groove on to seamless DJ sets of house,
funk, and jazz-infused hip-hop. There
were also live musicians in the mix:
a flutist, horn players, percussionists,
rappers, and singers, in an evolving
house band who came to be known as
Groove Collective.
Rather than create another homage
to Reid Miles’ Blue Note album cover
designs, Lyons recalls being inspired
by the playful hand-lettered style of the
title sequence from the 1960s TV series
My Three Sons. “I thought, ‘What if the
word giant was a trumpet, with the woodtype-style letters kind of bouncing up and
down?” He stayed up all night working
on it. “I drew it a million times and edited
the letters with Wite-Out.”
The core of the drawing is still being
used today. “He nailed it,” recalls
Bernstein. “It basically said everything
-Laura Forde
about who we were.”
control in creative audio
is less a feature and more a promise: the more discrete qualities of a
sound we can fine-tune, the more
accurately we can translate what’s in
our head into actual, audible music.
It’s how we’ve gone from recording
entire orchestras with a single mic to
inventing software that can fix pitch
mistakes buried within dense guitar
chords. We are attempting to minimize accidents. And we are doing a
pretty good job of it, at who knows
what expense.
On the other hand, there are
machines like Casper Electronics’
NovaDrone, an experimental sound
and light synthesizer that, in the best
way possible, is one big accident.
There’s no correct way to play the
NovaDrone. Six oscillators output
sine and triangle waves, which combine to create textured drones and
noise soundscapes. There are knobs
and switches that modulate the
waveforms, but to a large extent you
adjust yourself to the machine’s temperament. You feel your way through
the dark.
“There’s something to be said for
the abdication of control,” says G.
Lucas Crane, who helped design the
NovaDrone alongside Peter Edwards,
Casper’s founder. “Sometimes the
control you try to exert over something is the thing that’s taking you
the farthest away. You can’t see the
box you’re putting yourself in.”
At the output stage, the signal is
split to feed line-level audio and a
bright three-color light. “The exact
same waveforms that are being created by these feedback loops are at
the exact same time making the light
flash,” Crane explains. When you get
close to the light it breaks down into
color bands and trippy patterns. At
the moment, the NovaDrone is a primary performance instrument for the
experimental noise artist Greg Fox,
the ecstatic drummer behind Guardian Alien who also performs solo
as GDFX.
The NovaDrone makes music creation less about pushing forward and
more about stepping back and paying
attention. It trains your ear to small,
almost imperceptible differences in
timbre. The NovaDrone is a crash
course in waveform manipulation.
And, as a nod to Casper’s penchant for
circuit-bending, the NovaDrone has
a small breadboard area jumpered at
the bottom of the device so people can
manipulate the signal paths with impunity, so they can control how they
lose control. -Nick sylvester
Andy
Warhol’s
Factory
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
past featured landmarks
Next time you find yourself in Union Square, take a
moment to check out a slim white building on the west
side of the park. 33 Union Square West, aka the Decker
Building, is a structure that has a history as colorful as
that of its ornate stone façade. It was built in 1892 as
the headquarters for the Decker Brothers’ piano company, in accordance with designs by radical anarchist
and sometime architect John Edelmann, who fused elements of Islamic and Venetian styles for the decidedly
offbeat structure.
Appropriately enough, from 1968 to 1973, the sixth
floor of the Decker played host to Andy Warhol’s Factory
and the innumerable art-world celebrities, musicians,
and hangers-on who frequented the space. Lou Reed,
Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, and John Cale were all Factory
regulars, along with SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas, who famously shot Warhol there on June 3, 1968.
In Warhol’s day, Union Square was a very different
beast than it is today. The view from the large windows
at the front of the loft would have been of a parking lot,
instead of the bustling farmers market and playground
that now occupy the northwest quadrant of the park.
In true New York style, the Factory didn’t begin or
end at the Decker Building. Prior to that, it was located
at 231 East 47th Street in a building demolished in 1968,
which prompted the move downtown. After five years
at the Decker, the Factory moved just up the block to
a much larger space at 860 Broadway, on the square’s
northwest side, in a building currently occupied by a
giant Petco.
In March 2011, “The Andy Monument,” a silver
chrome statue of Warhol by artist Rob Pruitt was unveiled in front of the Petco, overlooking the square. But
in typically Warholian fashion it was a brief showing,
and on September 4, 2012, “The Andy Monument” was
sent to a contemporary art museum in Houston. Warhol left the city, and his innumerable New York fans,
for good. - Adrienne Day
Top
5…
NYC Iconoclasts
Other Music has been selling records in NYC
since 1995, and if there’s one sentiment that
summarizes our diverse selection, it’s our love
of groundbreaking, impossible-to-pigeonhole
artists who stake out their own territories.
To honor that passion, and the diverse festival
that Red Bull Music Academy has brought to New
York, we thought we would list five of our alltime favorite NYC musical iconoclasts.
1 max neuhaus’ “times square”
2 The Thing Secondhand Store
3 The loft
4 Marcy Hotel
1
QUEENS
2
3
MANHATTAN
4
What: Andy Warhol’s Factory
Where:231 E. 47th St.;
33 Union square west;
860 broadway;
22 E. 33rd st.
Why: Warhol’s studio,
hangout for Lou Reed, Candy
Darling, Edie Sedgwick
when: 1962-1987
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
1 2 3 4 5
Arthur Russell
PRESENTED BY
THE BRONX
Russell was in so
many ways the quintessential NYC artist,
an Iowa farm boy who
came here as a young
man in the mid-’70s.
Though he was strictly underground during
his lifetime, his
music has had a deep
and lasting impact on
the worlds of disco, house, post-punk,
hip-hop, orchestral
pop, and much more.
William Basinski
Basinski’s dronebased orchestral
compositions have
long made him an NYC
original, and his
stunning Disintegration Loops series
has become known as
a powerful wordless
tribute to, and commentary on 9/11.
Kool Keith
From his early days
in the Bronx crew
Ultramagnetic MCs to
his space exploration
as Dr. Octagon, Kool
Keith Thornton has
been blazing trails
through the world
of hip-hop (and out
into the stratosphere) for three
decades.
Moondog
First finding a measure of fame as a
street musician in
the early 1950s by
playing incredible
solo compositions
dressed in a spaceage Viking costume,
the blind musician
Moondog’s rhythmic deconstruction
of jazz, classical,
and early music is
like nothing else on
Earth.
La Monte Young
He incorporated Indian ragas and classical minimalism in his
incredible hours-long
performances, and from
his collaborations
with artists like
Terry Riley and John
Cale, to his ongoing
work with wife Marian
Zazeela and their
still-running multisensory Dream House
experience. Young’s
singular vision is
inextricably intertwined with the city.
13
New york story
New york story
Drawn
together
A cultural critic surveys the relationship between
alt-comics and underground rock in NYC.
Dame Darcy
from Meat Cake
(1996)
Marcellus Hall
from Bill Dogbreath
(1990)
Richard McGuire
from Here
(1989)
WORDS Douglas Wolk
new records come out on Tuesdays; new comics come
out on Wednesdays. Those of us who are obsessed with
each of those forms build our weeks around those days.
When I moved to New York City at the beginning of 1992,
I was already fascinated with both of them, and I discovered that the people who went to shows and the people
who read comics were very often the same. What surprised me was that the people who played music here and
the people who wrote and drew comics here were almost
never the same.
The early ’90s were when the audiences for comics
and music really started to overlap. They’d brushed up
against each other before: in the late ’60s, the “underground comix” scene and hippie bands hovered around
the same demimonde. As head shops disappeared,
though, those worlds drew apart again; for most of the
’70s and ’80s, American comic-book readers were generally too young to get into rock clubs.
The most significant music/comics overlap of the
1970s arguably came from the handful of KISS comics
Marvel published. (Back when they were a NYC bar band,
Gene Simmons supposedly modeled his stage makeup
on minor superhero Black Bolt’s costume. The first KISS
one-shot, from 1977—supposedly printed with vials of
14
the band members’ blood mixed in with its ink—isn’t the
most valuable comic book of its era but, anecdotally, it’s
the one most often requested by random dudes walking
into comic-book stores. When the disco-themed superheroine Dazzler debuted in 1980 (after plans to simultaneously introduce her as a Casablanca Records act fell
through), she just looked like a failed attempt to capitalize on another branch of youth culture.
By 1990 or so though, the average age of American
comics enthusiasts was a bit higher, there was a lot
more on the shelves of comic-book stores than kid stuff,
and “alternative comics” were starting to turn up in
the same circles as “alternative music.” The two scenes
weren’t quite the same still, but there was a sense of mutual admiration between them. See Hear, the long-gone
store in the East Village that was the place to buy music
zines, also stocked a handful of independent comics like
Eightball, Yummy Fur, Hate, and Dirty Plotte; the latter’s
creator, Julie Doucet, moved to New York for a while. If
you were reading Dan Clowes’ Eightball, you were probably reading zines like Chemical Imbalance and Your
Flesh, too.
At a time when unknown musicians relied heavily on
7-inch singles’ sleeves to communicate their aesthetic to
a potential audience, if you saw that a record had cover
art by Jaime Hernandez or Peter Bagge or Steven Cerio,
you could pretty well assume that the band at least had
good taste. (You could sometimes tell what a band sounded like by recognizing the cover artist’s style; for instance,
Evan Dorkin or Bob Fingerman drawings signified East
Coast ska for a while.) And the beloved free-form radio
station WFMU (then located in East Orange, New Jersey,
although its listenership was already pretty heavily New
York–based) initiated its longstanding tradition of excellent cartoonists designing its promotional T-shirts.
The two scenes—both subgroups of my friends in the
city—depended on word of mouth, and work passed along
hand-to-hand. (As my apartment gradually filled up with
physical media, I made mixtapes for comics people, and
lent increasingly battered stacks of comics to music people.) Underground musicians had to work within a fragmented distribution system that eventually squeezed out
anything that didn’t have a certain level of commercial
potential; alternative cartoonists had to work around a
centralized distribution system that did the same thing.
And everybody in both subgroups had to figure out how
to carve out time to create their work—work that seemingly had no chance of slipping into either the main-
stream or the moneyed fine-art world—while earning
enough to survive in the most expensive city in America.
Over the course of the mid-’90s, while I was working at
a music magazine, running a tiny record label, and trekking down to Other Music every Tuesday and St. Mark’s
Comics every Wednesday, New York’s comics and music
subcultures kept bumping into each other—more successfully on the indie side than on the more mainstream side.
(For every coup like Ghostface Killah calling himself Tony
Starks and naming an album Ironman, there was a fizzle
like 1994’s Break the Chain, a comic about KRS-One by
artist Kyle Baker, which was far from a career highlight for
either of them.) Marcellus Hall sang in Railroad Jerk and
drew the comic strip Bill Dogbreath, and that totally made
sense. East Village personality Fly played bass with God
Is My Co-Pilot and fronted Zero Content; she also drew
(and still draws) nifty comics, including the portraitswith-words series she calls PEOPs. Dame Darcy wrote and
drew the independent series Meat Cake, and made odd little records for which she drew the sleeves, too. Cartoonist
Lauren Weinstein played in a band called Flaming Fire,
the force behind the Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible Project,
which attempted to get friends and strangers to draw an
image for every verse in the Bible.
Still, by the end of the ’90s, the music and comics scenes in New York retreated to their own corners,
where they currently remain. Part of that had to do with
the NYC comics diaspora—as rents spiraled upward and
cartoonists could transmit their work online instead of
physically knocking on editors’ doors, they took off for
more affordable locations. The only major local comics/music crossover figure of the past decade has been
Gerard Way, who was an intern at DC Comics in Manhattan before he fronted My Chemical Romance (and
who writes the series The Umbrella Academy, which
owes rather a lot to the Grant Morrison–written era of
Doom Patrol).
The separation between the disciplines also has to do
with the fact that, while consuming them is pretty similar (both comics and music fans seek out artifacts, introduce friends to their favorites, collect oddities, and so on),
producing them is very different. Making music requires
constant in-person interaction; making comics, even collaboratively, is a solitary pursuit. It’s hard to make sound
work in combination with static visual art. (You can put
graphics on albums, but you can’t put music in comics.)
And both music and comics generally take a very long
time to learn to do well.
Part of the joy of both reading comics and listening to
music, as I discovered over the course of my time in New
York, is digging through bins to discover the people who
made magnificent art in the past. And when I realized that
someone was brilliant in both disciplines, I felt like I’d hit
the jackpot. New York has been graced with at least one
of those creators, although he’s far more influential than
he is prolific. Richard McGuire was the bass mastermind
of Liquid Liquid, the early-’80s groove band that left an
enormous mark on both hip-hop and experimental music.
His comics bibliography is tiny, but it includes a six-page
comics story called “Here”—published in 1989 in the Art
Spiegelman/Françoise Mouly–edited series Raw—that
inspired a generation of art cartoonists, notably Chris
Ware. (A book-length version of “Here” is apparently in
the works.) McGuire’s masterworks in both worlds strip
everything down to its essential form, boil it down to a
concentrate, and repeat it again and again—the hallmarks
of a broader tradition of great New York City art.
Douglas Wolk is a freelance journalist and critic who
writes about music, comic books, and other things for
TIME, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and
Rolling Stone. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
15
Red Bull Music Academy
Culture Clash 2013
Red Bull Music Academy New York 2013
April 28 – May 31
236 ARTISTS. 34 NIGHTS. 8000 ANTHEMS. 1 CITY.
www.redbullmusicacademy.com
Discover More
On Red Bull Music Academy Radio
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM