Elsewhere…
Still from a PANTONE promotional shoot, 2010
- Stephen Holden on Hoagy Carmichael: As affably easygoing as the early jazz that wound through his music like a lazy river: that would describe this season’s final program of the 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics & Lyricists series, devoted to Hoagy Carmichael, the proto-Midwest hipster. Carmichael, who has been described as the first singer-songwriter in a tradition that includes obvious descendants like James Taylor and Tom Waits, once described himself as sounding “like a shaggy dog looks.” He added, “I have Wabash fog and sycamore twigs in my throat.” [New York Times]
- Derek Walmsley covering the Montreal Mutek festival: I was blown away once again by Moritz von Oswald trio, whose set was simply one extended track, with Vladislav playing percussion at the side of the stage, Moritz (dressed absoultely immaculately in a suit, tie, with hankerchief poking out of his pocket) playing keyboard lines and dubbing Vladislav’s percussion parts on the fly, and Max Loderbauer working on the far side of the stage. Half way through, those Rhodes-like keyboard lines (stuck through dozens of echoes) sounded like mercury slithering around the floor. You could have taken and looped any four bars from the middle of the performance and it would have made an extraordinarily good 12”. Organic’s the wrong word… it ends up deliciously complex yet finely focused on the groove. Towards the end Mortitz elbowed some growling notes out of his keyboard John Lennon at Shea Stadium style, nudging Delay into even wilder drumming, and with that liberated gesture they concluded after fully 45 minutes. [The Wire]
- From Simon Reynolds’ profile of Ariel Pink: Depending on how you calculate, “Before Today” is Pink’s ninth album or his 24th. The Haunted Graffiti discography is a chaotic sprawl of ultra-limited-edition cassette, CD-R and vinyl releases, confused further by rereleases and reconfigurations of earlier material. But Pink insists that “Before Today” is “the first album” … “Before Today” strips away a lot of the echo-laden wooze that swathed Pink’s earlier music. What emerges, glistening and majestic like a yacht through fog, often sounds like chart material. The only catch is that these would be radio smashes in 1986, or 1978, or whichever year that a particular song refers to stylistically. You can’t imagine anything on the record making a dent on today’s radioscape. [Los Angeles Times]
New York—June 2010