21 - Red Bull Music Academy Daily

DAILY NOTE
THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2013
21 22
of
Dark days
The ominous sounds of nyc
FILLMORE EAST / L.I.E.S. / LIQUID LIQUID
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
We’re careening toward the end of Daily Note’s
run and this issue is totally on the edge. We’ve
done a lot of dancing with the past and now we
jump into the present. Our cover story travels
from dark and foggy LES basements to dirty
Bushwick warehouses to explore the darkmusic varietals that have been flourishing in
New York City for the past five years. Along
the way, we explore the effect that living in the
city has on the types of art people make. It’s
an ongoing conversation—a feedback loop, if
you will. And speaking of feedback loops... We
look deeper into the analog fetishists of upstart
house label L.I.E.S. and offer a primer on the
dub-reggae purveyors—both modern and
classic—who will be echoing inside Le Poisson
Rouge tonight. Dancehall producer Dre Skull
gets inspired by his visual-artist friends, while
gear columnist Nick Sylvester sings the praises
of soldering your own synths. We’re 21 today,
so here’s a toast to the young and the young at
heart. To all the mavericks, misbehavers, and
madmen keeping the city going through its
darkest hours… Cheers! Now drink up.
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editors Todd L. Burns
Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
for Doubleday & Cartwright
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
2
ABOUT Red bull music academy
Contributors
Sue Apfelbaum
Adrienne Day
Vivian Host
Sal Principato
Chris Protopapas
Nikki Sneakers
Nick Sylvester
Francesca Tamse
Cover Photo Nikki Sneakers
Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth performing at
Wierd at Home Sweet home, NYC 2010
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
The content of Daily Note does not
necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
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
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.
Top: Pantha du Prince
and the Bell Laboratory
at West Park Church.
Photo by Anthony Blasko
Bottom: Alva Noto and
Ryuichi Sakamoto in
conversation at the
Red Bull Music Academy
lecture hall. Photo by
Dan Wilton
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
“I am very classically trained, but my curiosity is
huge. I always want to forget what I have learned...
but I’m good at that.” — Ryuichi Sakamoto, May 28, 2013
Saint Vitus
MAY
Oneohtrix
Point Never
ELECTRIC
AVENUE
Red Bull Music Academy
Presents Pass the Gates:
NYC in Dub feat. Lee ‘Scratch’
Perry w/ Subatomic Sound System
vs. Adrian Sherwood; the Congos
vs. Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras
and the Raw Power Band; Peaking
Lights In A Dub Style vs. Future
Times, Julien Love
Thursday, May 30, 9 PM to 1 AM
at Le Poisson Rouge,
158 Bleecker St., Manhattan
ECHO CHAMBER
Five local names representing
of-the-moment house label L.I.E.S.
WHO’S THAT?
Legendary Jamaican
dub innovator with
a celebrated wacky
streak.
Peaking
Lights
Adrian
Sherwood
The
Congos
Future
Times
Sun
Araw
LA husband-and-wife
duo playing kaleidoscopic, lo-fi dub-influenced weirdness.
British reggae
producer, label head,
and remixer. Has
dubbed everything from Sinead
O’Connor to Skinny
One of the best
D.C.-based crew making warm, analog
dance music. Not really dub. Maybe they
didn’t get the memo?
With their vast
musical knowledge,
they should be able
to bluff their way
through just fine.
LA-based one-man
psychedelic noodle
party. Collaborated
with the Congos in
2012 for a release
on New York label
RVNG Intl.
Jamaican reggae
vocal groups ever.
Formed in the 1970s,
reformed in the ’90s,
and still at it.
Puppy. Bald.
936 (2011).
Honorable mention
for the dub mix they
cooked up for
dummymag.com.
There isn’t really one
record—it’s more
about his whole
universe. Go and
find pretty much any
compilation from his
On-U Sound label.
Heart of the Congos
(1977). A Perry-produced classic with
incredible harmonies. A near-perfect
reggae record.
Vibe 2 (2011). A
great overview of the
eclectic label’s deep
catalogue.
Ancient Romans
(2011). The dankest nug in a career
packed with dank
nugs.
Would do well to
help shape Kanye
West’s current
goth-industrial
phase.
Now that they’ve
worked with a tall
white dude that lives
in California (Sun
Araw), maybe they
could track down
Sublime cover band
Badfish and/or the
Sublime dog
Lou-Dog.
Future.
Times New Viking.
Yes—see the excellent
Augustus Pablo collaboration “Vibrate
On.”
4
They have a song
called “Cosmic
Tides.” Close enough.
Nope. Too classy for
vibes.
Yes—note the
aforementioned Vibe
compilations.
Yes—was in a “supergroup” called Vibes.
(Really.)
TEREKKE
By day, Terekke (pronounced ta-reek) works
at a Manhattan synth
repair shop called the
Analog Lab; at night, he
produces fuzzy and narcotic analog house emissions using the Roland
SH-101 and TR-707, then
records them to cassette
tape, giving them a
uniquely smudged, gauzy
feel. “Astral projection
house,” if you will.
PROFESSOR
GENIUS
SHAWN
O’SULLIVAN
New Jersey’s Jorge Velez
dropped 12-inches on
Italians Do It Better
and Thisisnotanexit
before appearing on
L.I.E.S. with Hassan, a
startling full-length
based around layered,
Arabic-style synths. The
results are enigmatic
and dramatic, less postpunk than his other work
but no less captivating.
When he’s not moving
keys as part of the minimal synth outfit Led Er
Est, O’Sullivan issues
dark, snarling, and
trippy techno that lays
bare his interest in
goth/industrial sounds
and the Detroit forefathers. He’s known for
recording tracks in one
take, which bestows upon
his work a wild flavor
and the occasional crazy
mistake.
Skull snaps
Now that he’s worked
with a roots-reggae
group, he can branch
out to the real
authentic stuff like
Leftover Salmon.
GOT VIBES?
Their 1997 reunion
album Natty Dread
Rise Again includes
the track “Vibration.” Scratch didn’t
produce it, but still,
technically “vibes.”
NYU Skirball Center
A TALK
with
James
Murphy
MAY
27
Benji B
FaltyDL
Dorian
Concept
More
MAY
27
West Park Church
Pantha
du Prince
& The Bell
Laboratory
MAY
28
Le baron
UNO
NYC
MAY
28
metropolitan museum of art
Alva Noto
+ Ryuichi
Sakamoto
MAY
29
TONIGHT
Dre Skull on his favorite visual artists.
PHOTO BY Francesca tamse
They’ve already
collaborated with
their own infant, so
they might as well
continue down the
artistic-baby collaboration path. What
are the Look Who’s
Talking babies up to?
Are they still babies?
BOOKWORMS
After years spent quietly producing hazy,
tribal-infused house and
techno in San Francisco,
Nik Dawson relocated to
Brooklyn in 2012, hooked
up with L.I.E.S., started regularly collaborating with Steve Summers, and saw “African
Rhythms”— a track first
released in 2009 — become
one of the year’s most
celebrated tunes.
feat. Legowelt, Beautiful
Swimmers, Marcos Cabral,
Willie Burns, Bookworms,
Professor Genius, Jahiliyya
Fields, Shawn O’Sullivan,
Kerri Chandler, Mathew Jonson
(Live), Mosca, and Red Bull
Music Academy Allstars
Friday, May 31, 8 PM to 4 AM
at Output, 74 Wythe Avenue,
Brooklyn
COLLABORATIONS WE’D LIKE TO SEE
After creating, producing, and remixing
approximately eleventy billion records,
he’s worked with everyone from Andrew
W.K. to David Lynch.
Not many places left
to go. Maybe something with Curiosity
the Mars rover?
STEVE SUMMERS
Jason Lietkiewicz is
the most prolific of the
L.I.E.S. bunch, with
pseudonyms for days
(Malvoeaux, Sensual
Beings, Confused House).
Deeply inspired by
late-’80s and early’90s
Chicago house, acid, and
electro-funk, his tracks
have a sexual swagger
and a loose-limbed electronic jack that owes
a great deal to the 909
drum machine.
Red Bull Music Academy
Presents the Closing
Party with L.I.E.S.
KEY RECORD
Super Ape (1976).
An untouchable dub
touchstone.
26
Evian Christ
Bill Kouligas
More
Deviation @ Sullivan Room
Tonight, dub lovers and creators old and new converge on Le Poisson Rouge as part of Red
Bull Music Academy 2013. Legends (Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Congos) and upstarts (Peaking
Lights, Sun Araw) will be performing, live remixing, and collaboratively tweaking the
sounds of reggae into a massive, refracted dub melange. We put together a quick guide to
this evening’s heady hosts.
Lee
‘Scratch’
Perry
ron morelli managed a lot of warehouses and DJed a lot of dive bars before he landed his perfect career as the curmudgeon behind the counter at the
famed A-1 Records in the East Village. While peddling gently worn Prelude singles and long-lost soul LPs, Morelli got the impetus to start his L.I.E.S. label. The
name stands for Long Island Electrical Systems—a nod to his background as a
Long Island hardcore kid who ended up loving house and techno—and the ethos
is raw and distorted DIY analog electronic goodness that sounds super fresh in
this overly digital age. The Red Bull Music Academy closes tomorrow night with
a L.I.E.S. party at Brooklyn club Output—though Morelli won’t be there (he’s on
tour in Europe), we wanted to spotlight a few of his local labelmates, some of
who will be turning up behind the decks.
brooklyn producer dre skull (aka Andrew Hershey) has quite the
résumé, which is why we’re looking forward to his lecture today at Red Bull
Music Academy. Apart from running his own Mixpak label, the bearded
studio wizard was behind the boards for the last Vybz Kartel record and also
flew to Jamaica to work with
Major Lazer on the Snoop
Lion LP. Though he’s arguably most influential in the
dancehall realm, his tastes
go well beyond Jamaican riddims. Mixpak dabbles in hiphop, house, techno, soca, and
a variety of tropical sounds,
and Dre Skull’s own aesthetic
roots trace back (in part) to
New York’s experimental and
visual-art scenes. We asked
Hershey to take off his producer’s cap for a spell and tell
us about a few of his favorite
NYC visual artists.
(Le) Poisson Rouge
Brian
Blomerth
“Brian is a man
of many talents.
He’s a great visual artist, he’s
obsessed with dogs
(especially Pomeranians), and he’s
best known for his
comics, but you
also may have seen
him on one of the
greatest episodes
of Judge Judy,
where he proudly exclaimed, ‘We
don’t smash stuff
inside. But we love
smashing stuff.’
It’s also possible
that you’ve seen him
on tour performing as Narwhalz (of
Sound) doing crazy
power-electronics
noise madness. He
can also be found
designing cover
art, t-shirts, and
flyers for Mixpak.”
Devin Flynn
Jacob Ciocci
“This might be one
of the most accomplished people in
America without a
Wikipedia entry.
He’s an in-demand
video director
(he’s done videos
for the Alchemist,
Yelawolf, Flying
Lotus, and many
others), he created
the animated show
Y’all So Stupid for
Adult Swim, was
the bassist in DFA
band Pixeltan, and
he’s a video artist
who back in the day
curated shows at Deitch Projects. For
true OG status, the
man also designed
the original logo
for the legendary Loud Records.
Flynn did the cover
art for Sticky’s
Jumeirah Riddim release on Mixpak.”
“Jacob is a contemporary renaissance
man who self-describes as a ‘cultural producer’ and
‘cultural consumer.’ He’s well known
as an artist who
performs, paints,
and makes videos and
he’s well versed
in all things new
media. He came up
in the game as a
founding member of
the Paper Rad crew.
Also, check his band
Extreme Animals — a
collaboration with
composer David
Wightman.”
NYC In Dub
Lee ‘Scratch’
Perry
The Congos
Peaking Lights
Sun Araw
Adrian
Sherwood
MAY
30
UPCOMING
EVENTS
Output
L.I.E.S. MAY
Kerri Chandler
Mathew Jonson
MOSCA
More
31
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
GARY BARTZ
A sax legend learns from Miles Davis,
Sonny Rollins, and Beethoven.
PHOTO Pere Masramon
You’re a saxophonist and a bluesman. You’ve played with Miles Davis,
Charles Mingus, Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, McCoy Tyner, and
Chaka Khan. Who else have you played with? Well, I moved to New York
in 1958. Living in New York you end up working with most people that come
through, so I can’t even remember everybody.
People have told me that you are very uncomfortable with the term “jazz,”
despite being known as a jazz musician. The word jazz has no meaning—it is
a made-up word. It is not even a real word, and the origins of the word are from
the whorehouses in New Orleans where you would go to find women. Certainly it
is a negative word and most of the musicians I have been fortunate to be around
hate that word. I hate that word too.
What about the term “blues.” Why is that any better a term? I think blues
is the essence of the folk music that comes from the United States; all of the different forms, whatever you want to call them, stem from the blues. That is how
I started playing the blues, listening to the blues, working with it, and playing
dances. I’m more comfortable with that term.
I heard you say that musicians often don’t label their sound. They don’t
get the chance to, right? Somebody else does it for them. For all these years
I have read quotes from Duke Ellington, and in his book he says, “That music
that they want to call jazz, they keep insisting.” But he never called it that. It’s
a hard thing because I don’t even know whether you can fight it. It goes in the
magazine, it is all over, and everybody sees it. We say, “That is not who I am,”
but who hears that? That is an individual thing. I don’t know, I call it music.
What innovation!
It seems like every 20 years in music there is a cyclical regurgitation
of what was here before. In the past, it seemed like music was a forward movement, like swing going into bebop and that going into forward-thinking jazz. How was it to you? You have to move forward—that
is the future. An artistic period does go back, but you can’t just go back—you
have to maintain what is going on at this time and maybe bring back some of
the older styles. I was just reading this book about Miles Davis’ music. I worked
with Miles for two years. His thing was always to go back, but he would always
say, “Play what you know and then, more than that, play what you don’t know.”
The idea that you focus on what you don’t know rather than what you
do know, or what is perhaps comfortable, is really interesting. On one
of [Miles’] recordings, actually it was Bitches Brew, he must have given [John
McLaughlin] this melody… So he was playing this melody and Miles comes
over and says, “I want you to play this melody as if you don’t know how to play
the guitar.” So he’s messing around trying to figure out how to play the guitar
as if he didn’t know it, and that is what ended up on the record. He had no idea
6
he was being recorded—that is what Miles wanted. He had a certain way of
getting things out of musicians.
When you’re listening to a piece of music, how do you listen to it? I listen
to it in lots of different ways. Sometimes I’m listening to it in one way, sometimes I’m listening to something else, sometimes I’m listening to the whole.
When I moved to New York I didn’t know any harmony or any theory but I
could hear, and I realized that hearing comes before anything else. All the
books and everything that is written about music, somebody heard it before it
was ever put down on a page. Beethoven was hearing things that nobody else
was hearing—flat fifths and dominant sevenths and dominant ninths, nobody
had heard these things before. Everyone thought he was going deaf as a result
of his lack of hearing. My students always ask me, “What can I do? How can I
hear?” It is a funny thing because for me it’s the musicians who learned by ear
first—which is the natural way, because that’s the way it happens. I’ll say we
are going to learn a song a day and they start to get their books out and I’ll say,
“No, no.” They are lost if they can’t read it but I want them to hear it—that is
what they have to get back. Everything is backwards nowadays.
When you are recording, do you have the sense that you are trying to take
things in a new direction? I love all forms of music. I don’t want to be in a
box. That is what happens: you have all these jazz musicians in their jazz box
and they can’t get out and it is all too much. Everything is music, sounds. I
used to practice with Eric Dolphy and he would go out in the woods and listen
to the birds and take his flute and try to mimic the birds and things. Pharoah
Sanders, Reggie Workman, Stanley Cowell, Freddie Waits, that is who was on it.
With Pharoah, we used to go out into the park and play horns. We would go out
and practice in the park and see how loud we could play, just beside the West
Side Highway in New York City where the cars were. We would try and play so
loud the drivers would turn and say, “What is that?”… which they never did. We
couldn’t play that loud.
Is there something useful in taking your instrument out of its normal environment and playing it in a way that you wouldn’t normally? A lot of times
if there is a nice brick wall, I sit on my chair in the corner because the sound
comes right back at me and I can hear it so clearly. Sometimes you play in the
bathroom and you hear the echo. It’s nice to play in different places and see what
it sounds like. What made me recognize that is that I would go and see Sonny
Rollins and he was always walking. He would walk across the stage, he would
walk around, and I would ask why he was walking—he was listening to the way
the horn sounded on different parts of the stage and in different parts of the
room, so I became cognizant of it.
Interviewed by Om’mas Keith at Red Bull Music Academy Barcelona 2008.
For the full Q&A, head to redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures.
7
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LIGHTS
OUT
New York artists explore colors
from bleak to black.
WORDS vivian host
photography nikki sneakers
Mike Sniper of
Blank Dogs at
Wierd.
8
it was the worst of times, it was the worst
of times. Living in New York is never easy, but
2008 was particularly gnarly. In the midst of
possibly the worst financial crisis since the
Great Depression, people were losing jobs
left and right. The rent, as mayoral candidate
Jimmy McMillan reminded everyone, was too
damn high. (It still is.) There was a mass exodus of artists, musicians, and writers—anyone
in a creative profession, really—and real-estate
moguls literally wandered the streets of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick looking
for buildings to buy and lots to loft. And the
music wasn’t that hot either. Rock was dominated by half-baked garage and a horde of
happy, jangly indie bands that were nearly indistinguishable from one another. Dance music—still reeling from the hangover of mashups and blog house—was a pit of electro-house
excess, classic disco rip-offs, and bad bar DJs
aping Diplo. Hip-hop was saying… well, next to
nothing new. By the time the apocalypse movie
2012 was released in November 2009, pounding $8 PBRs to the sounds of Kanye and Hot
Chip had started to feel pretty empty indeed.
But seeds of musical unrest had already
been sown and were germinating in bedrooms
and practice spaces, in dimly lit basements and
dank Brooklyn warehouses, many so filthy and
fire-hazardous they seemed purpose-built for
listening to music on the edge. Bands like Light
Asylum, Cult of Youth, Xeno & Oaklander, and
Led Er Est were revisiting their old Cure, Coil,
and Cabaret Voltaire records and getting inspired to create fresh dynamics of darkness
and shade. Labels like Dais, Sacred Bones,
and Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave had begun creating connections between the goth/
industrial, minimal synth, and experimental
punk of the past and the darkly hued underground of the present day. Meanwhile, events
like the Brooklyn techno party the Bunker,
the Pendu label’s Pendu Disco, and Wierd Records’ Wednesday weekly became sanctuaries
for those looking to dance to sounds that were
dark, psychedelic, cold, melancholy, occult, or
simply different.
“I moved here at a really crazy time and
people weren’t really going out,” recalls Shannon Funchess, frontwoman of the modern industrial duo Light Asylum, who arrived in New
York in 2001 from Seattle. “The nightlife had
basically been halted with Giuliani shutting
every nightclub. I moved here three days after
the World Trade Center bombing and everyone
had the fear of going out and breathing toxic
air. It wasn’t the New York I had planned to
move to. I spent a lot of time figuring out how
to survive and not turn around and run home
with my tail between my legs.”
After turns lending the powerful, androgynous boom of her vocals to bands like
Telepathe and !!!, Funchess began writing
songs on the side, inspired by a lifelong obsession with goth and industrial bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Front 242. Teaming
up with synth enthusiast Bruno Coviello, they
launched Light Asylum in 2009, at a time when
many other similarly minded bands were also
beginning to surface. “It might have been the
bleakness of the eight years of the Bush administration,” she says, musing on the collective
consciousness fading to black. “And there was
the downturn in the music industry, as far as
record sales and artist signings and the Internet age. Whereas before I think people were
trying to be the next Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the
next indie thing out of Brooklyn, I think people
realized they should be making the music they
should have been making all along, and that
included electronic music on the darker side.”
“In terms of dark music being a trend in New
York, you could see it really happening around
about 2007 and 2008,” explains Patrik North.
9
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“People were like, ‘Oh shit, this candy stuff, this
totally bright stuff, is not really meshing with
my financial situation,’ because of course the
recession had really started to kick into gear
then.” North is a Canadian transplant and the
label owner of Acéphale Records, currently
home to Pitchfork favorites like How to Dress
Well and Korallreven. In 2008, though, he was
either a demon or a saint (depending on who
you asked) for discovering and releasing Salem,
a trio of drug-fried Midwestern art-school kids
who mixed goth, chopped ’n’ screwed Southern
rap, and Chicago juke with an at-times terrifyingly dark and demented aesthetic. (Acephale’s
first release was Salem’s Yes, I Smoke Crack EP
in July 2008.)
“I was living in Montreal when I first found
Salem, who were in New York at that point,”
recalls North. “Salem, to me, was the sound of
the coming economic crash. Gas prices were
going crazy; it was a really apocalyptic time.
The fact that they were originally from Michigan was perfect, because it was like the sound
of the Rust Belt and American decay and all
this stuff.” Salem eventually got burned at the
stake for being the poster children of “witch
house”—a nu-goth niche that became more
about a fashion for upside-down crosses and
Zapf Dingbats-level occult symbology than
musical longevity—but for a brief, incandescent moment, they were a portal into an otherwordly space that sounded like Passion Pit’s
worst nightmares.
Things only got darker in the coming
months. “Nothing is fun right now,” DJ Venus
X would opine to the Opening Ceremony blog
in October 2011, as crepuscular fashion and
musical vibes had begun infiltrating the mainstream. “Everything is really evil and dark.
There’s a recession, the world is coming to an
end, and people are kinda scared. So the music
should be the same.” The mastermind behind
the GHE20G0TH1K parties—which marry a
gothic aesthetic with raw forms of bass music—Venus is ultimately one of the few who
has openly copped to purposely doing something “goth,” perhaps because she and the other GHE20G0TH1K residents do not originate
from that subculture to begin with.
“Goth” is the elephant in the room in this
conversation—nearly no one wants to use the
word, though the one thing 90% of the people in this article have in common is being
inspired by bands like Bauhaus, Psychic TV,
and Clock DVA, alongside classic dark New
York acts such as Suicide and Swans. No one
wants to claim membership in a scene, especially not one whose modern incarnation
brings to mind terrible trance bands, hotironed hair, and Hot Topic. “We don’t use the
term goth,” Pieter Schoolwerth of Wierd explained to Vice in 2007. “It has a derogatory
connotation. It’s degenerated into some kind
of ironic B-horror-film thing. It’s lost its elegance, sophistication, and most importantly,
its pretentiousness.”
“I still love Bauhaus and all the stuff I
learned about in my formative years,” says
Sacred Bones label manager Taylor Brode. “I
think Caleb [Braaten, Sacred Bones’ owner]
feels the same way. At the same time, I think
that goth has reached this apex in Brooklyn
and London and some other places, where the
resurgence of it is a bit off-putting to both of
us. We’re not interested in putting out your
goth band. It’s too… base and obvious. We
don’t want to be that stereotype.”
“We don’t go, ‘Alright, we’re gonna find the
scariest shit,’” concurs Braaten. “It’s just what
we’re into. Townes Van Zandt is darker than
anything that we’ve ever put out, and he’s a
folk singer.” Though their biggest success story
so far has been releasing Wisconsin’s ethereal
diva Zola Jesus, Sacred Bones has also reissued
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probably create a certain type of sound because everybody’s just terrified of the fact that
they’re always teetering on the edge of failure.
But I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live,
and I don’t think that’s a good environment for
homo sapiens. I think it’s terrifying and bad
and I do not recommend it.”
Ragon—who, in addition to Heaven Street,
also runs the Blind Prophet record label—has
a comfortable relationship with the melancholy and despair that he channels into Cult
of Youth, a project whose intense look and
enigmatic music—dark yet oddly hopeful—
is inspired by martial industrial sounds and
Death in June–style neo-folk. “New York is a
night culture and it’s a club culture, but part of
that is because nobody has any space,” he says.
“In other places where creative endeavors aren’t regulated to either an art gallery environment, which is just centered around money, or
a bar environment, which is centered around
alcohol, I think they can express themselves in
different ways. It does make things a little bit
more nihilistic here because behind every creative endeavor is something inherently evil—
either the financial aspect of the art world or
the self-destructive reality of nightlife.”
“I find that New York is the perfect place to
get into some ‘dark’ stuff and not just music,”
concurs Bonnie Baxter, who makes haunted,
spacey beats as Shadowbox. “It may not be as
gritty as NYC in the ’70s through the ’90s, but
it’s still got some grit. Nowadays you have to
hustle to live here,” she continues. “Not everyone is sad or depressed here, but many are,
and you can see it in their expressions—they
are tired, hungry, talking to themselves, crying
the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Eraserhead,
worked with Foetus’ JG Thirlwell and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and released a series of
brooding and enigmatic recordings from the
local bands like Blank Dogs, Led Er Est, and
Pop.1280.
Sacred Bones may currently share a sunny office space in Greenpoint with the labels
Mexican Summer and Captured Tracks (owned
by Blank Dogs’ Mike Sniper), but it wasn’t always this idyllic. For the first four years of the
label’s existence, it operated out of the dank,
dusty basement of Academy Records on North
6th Street in Williamsburg. In many ways, the
sound of early Sacred Bones releases evokes
the dark corners of this cramped underbelly.
“You would walk down these rickety old
stairs and as soon as you got to the bottom,
there would be piles of discarded children’s
toys and broken baby carriages and cribs and
stuff,” explains Braaten, who could pass for a
sepia-toned photo of a turn-of-the-century
undertaker. “Ultimately, it was very harmless
but it looked very frightening.” “It looked like
a pedophile hang spot,” concurs label manager
Taylor Brode with a wry smile. “It was cool to
bring people down there and [they’d] be like,
‘Whoa, what is this?’ but it wasn’t always great
to be there. It was cold all year round. No windows. It was an old meatpacking place so it
was a big freezer at one time. There may have
been a rat or two.”
“Everything is based on the fact that nobody can really afford to be here,” says Sean
Ragon of Cult of Youth, a punk from Boston
who moved to New York in 2001 because he
wanted more from life than his “shitty pizza
job.” Cult of Youth has released records on Dais
and Sacred Bones and played at Wierd, and
Ragon stocks everything from Sandwell Dis-
openly. These people aren’t crazy, there are just
so many people around they don’t think anyone is looking. New York is an amazing place
to live but it’s not an easy place to live. It can
create some angst in music for sure.”
Though she doesn’t feel connected to any
particular scene, Baxter recalls being inspired
by the dark energy of events at renegade underground spaces, many promoted by Todd P.
“When I first moved here, DIY shows at places
like Silent Barn, Market Hotel, Death by Audio, or just
someone’s random basement
were crazy and the grimiest
shit I’ve ever stumbled upon:
blood, puke, PCP episodes,
people lighting themselves on
fire. So it’s not like some ‘dark
movement’ just started happening.”
As far as events go, few
have done more in the last
few years to foster a scene
around dark and experimental music than Pieter Schoolwerth. In 2003,
Schoolwerth began brewing a cabal under the
umbrella of Wierd, a weekly party and record
label. Originally launched at a dive bar in the
shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, the Wierd
party moved to Home Sweet Home on the edge
of Chinatown in late 2006, and became a lively weekly meeting place for bands, fans, and
freaks of the minimal synth, goth/industrial,
noise, and punk persuasion. “There is less public space where one can feel as free as old, triumphantly seedy and dangerous NYC,” Schoolwerth told Bomblog last year. “I hope Wierd
lock Silent Servant (a frequent Bunker guest
who also runs a post-punk label called Downwards) with minimal synth band Xeno & Oaklander and noise artist Carlos Giffoni, while the
Bunker’s ten-year anniversary this January was
headlined by Vatican Shadow, the melancholy
techno project from noise/power-electronics
demigod Dominick Fernow (whose cassettes
Kasenic initially discovered while shopping at
Fernow’s esoteric and now-defunct Hospital
Productions record shop in
the East Village). “I’m always
trying to make a statement
with the lineups for the Bunker,” says Kasenic. “I never
throw together a random lineup or book some DJ only because I think they’re going to
bring out a lot of people. But
I think it has pretty consistently leaned toward the more
psychedelic, strange side of
electronic music. There’s definitely a dark streak that goes
through as well, always. In my own mind anyway.”
While dark sounds will never truly go out
of style, some are predicting that 2013 will
bring more light into the picture. “There’s a
lot of positive stuff and people uniting who
wouldn’t usually,” says Gadi Mizrahi of Wolf +
Lamb, a DJ crew and record label once known
for moody sounds and druggy all-night techno parties but has recently switched almost
entirely to poppier and more positive strains
of house music. “It just feels like we’ve passed
some kind of energy crisis or something, and
now it’s a brand-new palette.” “I don’t want to
spend my energy pushing a dark feeling in this
world,” concurs his Wolf + Lamb partner Zev
Eisenberg. “I want to push positivity on every
level we can.”
Roi believes the dark aesthetic trends of
the last couple years—with Satanic and occult
imagery appearing on everything from record
covers to t-shirts at Urban Outfitters—will fade,
but not before predicating an actual shift in
culture. “People are just so intrigued by those
symbols, but what they’re really intrigued by is
a deeper meaning. It’s like, ‘The world didn’t
end, what happens now?’ The whole dark thing
is just a safe way for a lot of people to experiment with God, or experiment with spirituality
in a safe way where their friends aren’t gonna
be like, ‘You’re a freak because you believe in
something.’ That is actually going to fade and
people are going to be spiritual in a real sense
instead of just dillydallying with it. I think the
nihilism is going to fade.”
“‘Pre-millennium tension’ is the key to timelines for when darker music is absorbed by a
larger audience. It’s all about tension and release,” concludes Todd Pendu. From January
2010 through December 2011, he ran Pendu
Disco—a series of “horror disco” parties that
mixed up various strands of the scene; he continues to run the record label Pendu Sound,
a cauldron of dark arts that includes artists
Chelsea Wolfe, Mater Suspiria Vision, and
aTelecine. “A friend of mine and I joked back in
2009 that dark music was doing well because
of all the hype around the apocalypse of 2012
but that, starting in 2013, we would probably
have to start looking for other jobs since the
apocalypse isn’t going to happen and people
are going to want music that’s just fun and
ridiculous,” he recounts. “We were somewhat
right, I guess. I could also say that hyper-colorful movements of late have been pushing
against the darker edge; even some who used
to be a part of the ‘All Black Everything’ are
now championing a return to ’90s rave aesthetics and such. But everything is in flux. Nothing
stays the same, right? I’m okay with that.”
“The whole dark thing is just
a safe way for a lot of people
to experiment with God, or
experiment with spirituality
in a safe way.”
Clockwise from top: Pop.1280 at Public
Assembly; Cult of Youth plays at Wierd;
Røsenkøpf live; Liz Wendelbo of Xeno and
Oaklander at Wierd.
trict and Autechre to local punk 7-inches at his
Heaven Street record store in Bushwick, which
makes him sort of an accidental ambassador
for this scene-not-scene.
“In a way, I think [the atmosphere of New
York City] makes some people work harder
with their creative endeavors. They have so little just to give to it and have to fight so hard
for a resource of any sort—like to have a practice space that maybe they can only go in for
a few hours a week, and they share with ten
other bands—that they put a lot into it. I think
there is a sense of desperation. In a way, it does
can be one of these safe havens in the night.”
In a long, skinny basement under a blanket of
thick fog, Wierd hosted and inspired a dizzying
array of DJs and bands­—including Light Asylum, Zola Jesus, Psychic TV, the Chameleons,
and the Soft Moon—before shuttering its doors
this February.
“Home Sweet Home, as a venue, grew to
fit Wierd and Wierd grew to fit Home Sweet
Home,” explains Soren Roi, a bartender at the
—SOREN ROI
club and a member of Røsenkøpf, who released
their hypnotically drummy debut on Wierd
Records last year. “Pieter finessed it all. Every
little detail mattered to him so much. If one
light bulb wasn’t working, he was not happy.
His main thing was showcasing bands with
integrity. He was trying to prove points about
live performance—what a live performance is,
who is actually playing ‘live’ as opposed to who
has got everything backtracked or just pressing
play on a laptop.”
Soren—along with photographer/bartender
Nikki Sneakers—is behind Home Sweet Home’s
new Wednesday night party Nothing Changes,
which picks up the torch from Wierd but expands the palette. “What I think is interesting
now is a lot of people that were raised in the
punk scene are starting to do more electronic
stuff, more hardware-based techno stuff. That’s
what I would like to foster. In the scene I’m
in, techno is the word that’s on everybody’s
tongue. People are intrigued by it or they’re
not intrigued by it, but having that polarity is
important. Like with witch house: people were
really into it or they fucking hated it. To a lot
of people, to even say that you enjoyed a Salem
song was like… they would pretty much slap
you in the face. They were offended by it. But
it’s always gonna be shifting and as a promoter
it’s your job to allow those changes to happen,
and to help them happen. Otherwise, you’re
just going to have the same bands playing the
same shit.”
If techno is currently on many people’s
minds, Bryan Kasenic’s the Bunker parties
have been connecting the genre back to its
roots in synth-punk, experimental electronics, and EBM. Kasenic has run the party since
2003, when techno was scarce in New York.
Bunker started in a basement below Tonic,
a Lower East Side venue that was a hub for
avant-garde downtown musicians like John
Zorn and Bill Laswell. “We were trying to force
the people who were coming to the dance party
downstairs and the people who were coming
for the more experimental music upstairs to
intersect, but we really struggled,” remembers
Kasenic. “We’d have a great crowd upstairs
for Gang Gang Dance or Animal Collective or
something and a great crowd downstairs for
Daniel Bell and we would literally stand at the
top of the stairs when the rock show was over
and be like, ‘Everybody come downstairs! We’re
not even going to charge you!’ And they’d be
like, ‘Eh, techno…’”
Since moving to Public Assembly in 2007,
the Bunker has continued to mix up what
“techno party” means, perhaps now more
than ever. A 2011 show with No Fun and Wierd
paired Sandwell District’s moody techno war-
11
COLUMNS
Columns
L AN D MARKS
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.
the world at large first witnessed Public
Enemy when the Beastie Boys took them on
their 1987 Licensed to Ill tour, introducing
thousands of suburban kids (your author
included) to the activist flip side of the
Beasties’ rambunctious party rap. While the
headliner’s stage act included writhing girls
in cages, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Flavor
Flav, and DJ Terminator X came off dead
serious, flanked by footmen in military
garb and backed by a banner bearing the
image of a silhouetted figure locked in the
sights of a rifle’s crosshairs. PE’s entire
presentation served as a wake-up call.
That disquieting graphic identity, paired
with an Army-inspired stencil logotype,
was designed by PE mastermind Chuck
D. Born Carlton Douglas Ridenhour in
Queens, he had earned his bachelor’s in
graphic design from Adelphi College in
1984 with the goal of working in the art
department of a record company. He did
not see himself becoming a successful
recording artist—Rick Rubin hounded him
relentlessly until he signed with Def Jam—
12
let alone an inductee into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame.
As Chuck D told the Red Bull Music
Academy in Barcelona in 2008, “I always
liked to see the rock ’n’ roll guys; they had
logos, so why couldn’t it be the same in rap?
I wanted to make the music legitimate, as
much as other genres.” Chuck came up with
the concept, cutting and pasting a mockup by hand. The model for the godfather
hat–wearing figure has been mistaken for
a state trooper, but it was in fact E-Love,
LL Cool J’s producer and sidekick. “I
cut E-Love’s picture from a magazine,
blackened it in, pasted on crosshairs, and
put it through a copying machine,” Chuck
explains via email. That rough image was
then refined and rendered for use by “cleanup man” Eric Haze, who art directed the
cover of their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush
the Show. “When the time came to create
his artwork, [Chuck] knew exactly what he
wanted,” recalls Def Jam art director Cey
Adams. “His idea was that the black man is
a target in America.”
-Sue Apfelbaum
gear acquisition syndrome, or gas,
is a real snag for work flow. Even if you’ve
scratched the itch for new gear, there are
now just as many ways to fetishize (and
bankrupt yourself over) the old stuff. In
speaking with many artists for this column,
I’ve come to realize that some are more
susceptible to GAS than others. GAS people—many of them extremely productive,
talented, and highly focused world-touring musicians—live in a permanent state
of longing. They want to get closer to the
sound they imagine in their head, and are
willing to pick up any piece of tech (also
called “kit”) to try and make it real. There is
no cure for GAS.
That said, there is at least one way
to slow down GAS: build your own gear.
Places like Music from Outer Space, Group
DIY, Seventh Circle Audio, CustomAPI, Drip
Electronics, and New York’s Small Bear
Electronics offer a number of ready-to-solder kits and circuit boards for everything
from synthesizers and stompboxes to 500
series preamps and thoughtful remakes of
vintage outboard gear like the LA-2A compressor. These are not “just for fun” projects, but well-developed and often extremely sturdy builds for top-notch equipment.
It takes time to build anything—the usual
rule of thumb is three times longer than you
think—and in the process you learn about
the actual physical relationship between the
components and the ways they affect the
signal. Building even a simple distortion
pedal is a great way to learn about the different kinds of distortion and overdrive, if
only to guide future GAS-induced purchases.
And because no two components are exactly
alike, building your own piece means yours
will sound like no one else’s.
There’s a zen that sets in when you have
the guts of a machine spread out on your
kitchen table. Time seems to disappear,
though maybe that’s just the fumes from
the soldering iron talking. (Pro tip: always
solder in a well-ventilated room.) Attempting an analog delay build on protoboard
straight from a schematic, I developed a
reverence for the fact that anything electronic and audio ever works at all. Which
is to say, building your own gear is a kind
of rock bottom—the most literal way to get
lost in tech and forget about making actual
music. But there’s something about hitting
that gear rock bottom (“GRB”), and experiencing the ultimate frustration that just
makes you want to get back to work. Fillmore
East/
The Saint
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
1 max neuhaus’
12 Daptone
“times square”
Records
13 The Village
Secondhand
Store
Top
5…
Summer
cycling songs
PRESENTED BY
-Nick sylvester
For a few weeks each year, the lingering spring
chill and the muggy summer swamp are interrupted
by a meteorological moment of absolute glory. It’s a time when fair-weather cyclists dust
off the cobwebs and hit the streets with reckless abandon. To celebrate, Ken Farmer, creative
director of Nuit Blanche New York and curator of
the Kairos exhibition at Red Bull Music Academy,
suggests some of his favorite headphone classics
for summer cycling.
THE BRONX
past featured landmarks
2 The Thing
one bright spring day in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash
& Young tickets went on sale at the Fillmore East in
New York’s East Village. Back then the Internet wasn’t
an option for concertgoers, so fans did it the old-fashioned way: they waited in line. By noon of the day tickets went on sale for CSNY’s weeklong string of shows in
early June, a crowd of thousands had gathered around
the Fillmore on Second Avenue and 6th Street, sprawling around the venue in every direction and disrupting
pedestrians and traffic alike. Evidence of this event is enshrined not only in fans’
memory but in photographs that hang in the venue’s
current incarnation—an Emigrant Savings Bank. (The
original entryway to the Fillmore is the current entrance
to the bank, while the 2,600-capacity venue sits further
back on the lot, and is currently an apartment building.)
The Fillmore East was only open from 1968 to 1971,
but during that brief period legendary rock promoter
Bill Graham booked everyone from the Grateful Dead,
Allman Brothers, Frank Zappa, and John and Yoko to
Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin (who
opened for the more popular Iron Butterfly). CSNY, Jimi
Hendrix, Joe Cocker, and Miles Davis all recorded live
albums there, with the Joshua Light Show’s psychedelic
“liquid light” displays getting everyone in a trippy frame
of mind. What’s not on display in these photos on the walls is
just as important from a cultural perspective: there are
no references to the Saint nightclub, which opened in
the old Fillmore space in 1980. For eight years, the Saint
functioned as a dance club with a largely gay clientele.
It was opened by Bruce Mailman, a local entrepreneur
who also owned the New St. Marks Baths, a nearby gay
bathhouse. Both the Saint and the New St. Marks Baths
were closed by the city as sites of “high risk” sexual activity in the midst of the burgeoning AIDS crisis, so it’s
not exactly a surprise that the history of the Saint is absent from the sterile confines of the bank’s lobby. At the
same time, it’s hard not to feel like a piece of the story
isn’t being told.
-Adrienne Day
16
Gate/Life/Le
Poisson Rouge
3 The loft
14 The Anchorage
4 Marcy Hotel
15 Electric Lady
5 Andy Warhol’s
Factory
6 Queensbridge
Houses
Studios
16 Crotona Park
Jams
17 Fat Beats
7 Record Mart
18 Mudd Club
8 Deitch
19 Mandolin
Projects
9 Area/Shelter/
1
7
8
5
Brothers
20 Addisleigh
Vinyl
6
5
7
17
Park
10 Studio B
15
11 Market Hotel
2
13
3
9 8
MANHATTAN
QUEENS
5
10
8
18
4 12
14
12
11
20
What: Fillmore
East/The Saint
Where: East Village
Why: Groundbreaking
music venue;
legendary gay
nightclub
When: 1968-1971;
1980-1988
19
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
1 2 3 4 5
Nina Simone,
“Feeling Good” Birds flying high you
know how I feel/
Sun in the sky you
know how I feel/
Breeze driftin’ on by
you know how I feel.
Nina Simone is
eternal.
Nicolas Jaar, BBC
Essential Mix Long rides to Red
Hook require long
mixes. The young gun
killed it on this
one. Opening with Angelo Badalamenti’s
recollection of David
Lynch’s musings on
the Twin Peaks score,
Jaar orchestrates a
journey from Jonny
Greenwood to Igor
Wakhevitch to Mr.
Marvin Gaye.
Grace Jones,
“Libertango” Batman probably listens to this track,
off duty, biking
around Greenwood Cemetery. Batman would
probably be scared of
Grace Jones, for good
reason.
Giorgio Moroder,
Live at Deep Space
Cathartic bop from the
electronic disco pioneer. Moroder’s set
was a highlight of
the Academy. Catch it
on RBMA Radio if you
missed it.
Tom Waits, “The
Piano Has Been
Drinking”
It seems that daytime
drinking becomes an
occupational mandate
in the summer. Tom
Waits makes it feel
like it’s okay to
sing/scream out loud. 13
NEw york story
NEw york story
ABOUT A SONG
The making of Liquid Liquid’s legacy.
Words Sal Principato (as told to Piotr Orlov)
PHOTO Chris protopapas
from 1980 to 1983, Liquid Liquid was a modern band. In retrospect, the group seems like a cultural myth that New York dreamt up
just because it could. Three classic, genre-busting, scene-defining EPs; a career on the verge destroyed by a maelstrom of music-industry machinations (as documented by Mike Rubin in Daily Note #13, in the 99 Records story); subsequent legendary status; and miles
upon miles of underground influence. We talked to Liquid Liquid’s singer Sal Principato, who remains a positive influence on New
York’s post-disco dance scene, about his memories of that moment. His thoughts are presented here in an edited narrative format.
The band (Scott Hartley, Richard McGuire, and Dennis Young) had an
We had to have a name for “Optimo,” in order to say, “Let’s do this”—esapartment that people would move in and out of near the American Muse- pecially if we could come up with a good name. At the time, it seemed like
um of Natural History. When I returned to the East Coast from San Francisco every cigar and newspaper stand had the Optimo logo. Like the Gem Spa
[in 1980], Scotty and Richard had graduated from Rutgers and moved into on the corner of St. Mark’s and Second Avenue—they had egg creams too.
this place, and I came back to visit. I was writing music, but they were ac- But it was also something that very few people consciously registered untually playing around town. I came back for a two-week vacation and it was less you smoked cigars. It was a word that was almost hiding in plain sight.
like, “We have songs—before you go back let’s get a gig at CBGB.” So we go to
The record was pretty much recorded live in the same room with porCBGB with our little cassette tape and give it to Hilly Kristal, and he gave us table sound walls between us so that there was some separation in order
a gig. We were the fifth band on a three-band bill. It was so much fun [that] I to do a proper mix. And because it was a former radio-broadcast studio,
never went back [to San Francisco], and that was the beginning of the band. there were various sound-effects elements that we took advantage of—inIt’s funny because when I came from the airport to 80th and Columbus, I’m cluding a door in a frame which we slammed at the end of the track “Out.”
like, “Oh damn, where are they living?” Because up there it used to be block
One of the more memorable moments of that session was when Dento block—one block would be upscale and upper-middle class, and one block nis and I went out to pick up sandwiches for everybody. We took the
would be a drug block. There was a leather bar across the street [where] they Radio City freight elevator down to the street; at one point the elevator
made that Al Pacino film, Cruising. There were families and dealers [in the stopped and in comes a bevy of Rockettes in full regalia. I’m not the tallest
building] who had been there forever on the first two floors, and we were on man in the world, and it seemed I found myself in a forest of legs, as the
the fifth floor, and we would practice there. We practiced there even when dancers were all much taller and were wearing heels.
there were people living in the building, but then we started squatting and
Before we were done recording, at the prompting of our producer and
taking electricity from the hallway. Now just the thought of practicing in an manager Ed Bahlman, we did some extended versions of tunes, especially
apartment in the Upper West Side and not paying rent is
“Cavern,” which looms large in our discography. Ed idenmind-blowing.
tified it as a dance track, so along with the other tracks
In late 1982, we started working on our third EP, Opon the EP it was edited by the engineer and finally mixed
timo. We were primed to really make a definitive artiswith everyone’s input.
tic statement. We were not particularly scenesters, [yet
I love every song on that EP. That was everything
we were] aware of what was bubbling up around us. We
coming together, and “Optimo” seemed to sum it all up.
were a self-contained entity looking outward for validaOne other important thing to mention is that Richard
tion. So when we were given the opportunity to record
created a really beautiful cover for Optimo. I don’t know
our next record on the top floor of Radio City Music Hall,
if iconic is the right word, but that is an evocative, catchy
at what was formerly the studio for NBC Radio broadvisual, unlike anything else at the time. It really stuck out
Liquid Liquid, Optimo
casts, the band felt it had met its match.
in a record bin. People have told me that they bought the
(99 Records, 1983)
We first performed “Optimo” some time in late ’81 or
record because of the cover.
early ’82. We definitely played it when we went to play in
We decided to release four songs from the session:
Paris at the Rex Club in 1982, which was the first time I had been out of “Optimo,” “Cavern,” “Scrapper,” and “Out.” Obviously, we thought “Optithe country, and it was amazing. Before we went, we were at our wits’ end mo” was the main track, but as I mentioned Ed had different ideas. We
as to where we fit in the scheme of things, and in Paris it just all kind of made a mix of “Cavern” and he pressed an acetate of it. His brother Bill
clicked and gave us this crazy confidence. [The club] was packed. We did DJed at this bar called the Anvil and Ed would give him the latest versions
two nights in a row, and then they asked us back. There’s a recording of it to play to see what parts the boys responded to. Soon I was hearing it on
that was made and I know we were already doing “Optimo.”
the urban contemporary stations.
We never wrote a song where someone sat in a room the night before
Nowadays, to play “Cavern” is very obvious—that’s probably one of
and said “Hey! I wrote this song—you do this, you do that.” It happened in the reasons contemporary DJs don’t play it. And “Optimo” was a great
a slow, organic, arduous process. I’m not sure if I remember the specific track. We named the record Optimo because we kind of thought that was
way that we wrote “Optimo,” but there were a couple ways we would write the track.
music. Songs didn’t totally come together until we were in the studio. We
The first time we met [Keith McIvor and Jonnie Wilkes, aka JD Twitch
would smoke a little weed and just play and play until we came together and JG Wilkes, who run the Optimo Espacio party in Glasgow] is when
on something. Get a groove, expand on that groove, and then make a de- they flew in for the reunion show Liquid Liquid played at the Knitting
finitive arrangement out of it.
Factory in March of 2003. Liquid Liquid eventually played at the Optimo
With “Optimo,” there were a bunch of spliced things. The whole thing party in Glasgow. I do think it’s kind of a sweet thing they do, continuing
with the opening drums, the cowbell coming in… I’m not sure that’s how the legacy, and not in a corny way that’s totally about us. Now it has a
it was originally played. It probably was more just a straightforward whole other meaning, and probably more people know about the Optimo
groove without the drop-ups and downs. I was probably hitting sticks or party than actually know the song. Our impact is really hard to measure.
the cowbell, and Scotty was doing the rhythm on the cymbals, and I just I run into people in the music scene now who have never heard of Liquid
followed it on cowbell. Same with Richard’s bass—he always puts in a sol- Liquid. I’ll be at a dinner party in New York City, there are ten people
id bass line—and the marimba player just put colorings on it. One thing there and we’re all chatting, and they ask, “Oh what do you do?” I say, “I
about our material: it’s like an empty vessel that we poured emotion and used to play in this band.” “Oh, what was the name of the band?” I’ll say
excitement into. The structures themselves and the songwriting weren’t Liquid Liquid, and eight of the ten faces will be absolutely blank, and the
necessarily sophisticated, but the way it’s presented and what we put into other two people will be like “Holy shit!!!” and go all fanboy.
it makes it seem much more than it really is. So if you’re not catching the
feel of it, it’s almost like there’s nothing there. It’s not like we have this Salvatore Principato is best known as the vocalist/percussionist
great melody going on—I mean, occasionally we do, but it’s more the feel- for seminal minimalist-funk band Liquid Liquid. He is also an
ing behind it that made a difference.
impresario, DJ, producer, studio manager, podcaster, and vegan chef.
14
15
Brian Eno
77 Million Paintings
FINAL
WEEK
"disorienting,
challenging,
and—after a
few minutes of
concentration—
beautiful."
The Huffington Post
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