Q+A
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Q+A / Weekend Flux Pavilion flexes his dubstep muscles in Atlanta this weekend
Posted by Jonathan Williams on Wed, May 23, 2012 at 9:58 AM
- Fiona Garden
- Flux Pavilion
As one of the purveyors of the wobbly and staticky glitch sound known as dubstep, Flux Pavilion's contributions to contemporary electronica cannot be denied. And with dubstep's dominance in today's mainstream music scene, it's not surprising that his music recently caught the ears of Jay-Z and Kanye West, resulting in the use of his song "I Can't Stop" on last summer's Watch the Throne album. Working on an album of his own for release next summer, Flux Pavilion returns to Atlanta this weekend after a performance last June at the Quad. This time the Circus Records co-founder will be rocking a more expansive stage at the Tabernacle. As the U.K. favorite prepares for this tour, he takes a moment to talk about the Kanye/Jay-Z thing, dubstep's overwhelming popularity and his last show in Atlanta.
Flux Pavilion with Terravita and Brown & Gammon. $30-$42. 9 p.m. May 26. The Tabernacle, 152 Luckie St. 404-659-9022. www.liquified.com. www.tabernacleatl.com.
You're probably best known for your contributions to the current dubstep movement. As someone who has been responsible for helping create this movement, what do you think are some of the main reasons dubstep has exploded into the mainstream so much over the past couple of years?
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Q+A / Tonight / New Music Free from Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty finds his wild, fearless self
Posted by Johnnie Sanchez on Tue, May 22, 2012 at 5:25 PM
Having released seven albums under the established name of "J. Tillman," Josh Tillman threw his hands up to the flailing project in 2010. Last year he subsequently made the daring (and what looked then to be dumb) choice to quit drumming for an itty bitty band from Seattle called Fleet Foxes. He went on a now-legendary trek in his beloved van, filled his body with drugs, wrote a novel as bearded traveling men tend to do, and finally came out of the midst of a debilitating depression with a newfound realization that he had never really said anything honest about himself in all seven of those albums.
So he did what few people in this world are able to do: He changed. He took his fear, turned it on its' head, and had some fun with it. These losses and events seem to have served as fuel to the fire in the resulting masterpiece Fear Fun. Given his penchant for playing with words (courtesy his appetite for multiple and conflicting lyric meanings) and toying with people (his drunken middle-of-the-night Twitter rants to Pitchfork are not to be missed), Father John Misty could be the next Bob Dylan or Jack White, no question. We hit Josh up and talked about his girlfriend turned dominatrix actress, why fear is not so important after all, and why everything that he says in this interview may one day be the foolish vanity of his past — and why he's not afraid of that, or really anything at all, anymore.
Father John Misty. With Har Mar Superstar, Damon Moon and the Whispering Drifters. $12. 8p.m. Tues., May 22. Masquerade, 695 North Avenue NE. 404-577-8178. http://www.masqueradeatlanta.com/
Nancy From Now On is a video in which you deal with a dominatrix in a hotel room, with her eventually cutting your hair and ending up together. How was the filming?
Father John Misty: That was a really intense one for me because I've recently kind of found this real love and companionship and empathy and mutual respect with this woman, Emma, who's in the video. The video is essentially her and I trying to explore issues of intimacy through the lens of what you might call a radical honesty, or something. It's actually a very innocent video. For me, if I want to make something about love, I don't want to fall back on the tropes or cliches of discussing love and intimacy in an artistic context because it's fucking just not me. That first scene, that really was just me and Emma getting a room at the chateau and saying "let's just fucking get weird". We're both into getting weird, and I wanted a hair cut, and I wanted her to do it. What you see on screen is shockingly this meta whirl wind.
And it really was paradoxically an innocent video. Considering the concept it could've been way less tasteful.
The music press is so goliath and shit. As far as press is concerned, you really don't get the benefit of the doubt that you're actually trying to do something meaningful, so what I ended up seeing was a bunch of "parties with a bunch of dominatraxes and then goes home with a different girl" and I'm like dude, it's the same girl the whole time you fucking dummie! Like, think about this for a fucking second! I like confronting people with shit like love but with all kinds of symbols that are not particularly precious. Is it possible to portray real understanding and intimacy between two people with mutilating images like domination?
How long have you and Emma been together?
Oh, I'm not going to divulge the intimacies of my life here! [Laughs]
[Laughs] What is she like?
Friday, May 18, 2012
Q+A / Weekend Why the Flaming Lips won't take NO for an answer
Posted by Chris Parker on Fri, May 18, 2012 at 3:38 PM
Not only have the 25-year psych-rock icons been busy with these collaborations, but according to leader Wayne Coyne, he and fellow Lips songwriter Steven Drozd have come up with a new album and a sound they like to call "heroin new wave." While Coyne recognizes the hyperbole, he feels it's one of the most personal, cohesive, and perhaps best sets of music they've ever created. On the eve of headlining Atlanta's Party in the Park, Coyne spoke about the thrill of working with these artists and how it helped seed the new album, expected for a fall 2012 release.
Party in the Park. With Flaming Lips, Young the Giant, Awolnation, Dawes, Ponderosa. $25-$75. 3 p.m.-11 p.m. Sat., May 19. Centennial Olympic Park. ticketalternative.com.
How did all these series of collaborations get started?
Wayne Coyne: During the record that came out in 2009 (Embryonic) we were in the studio with our producer Dave Fridmann and he had been working with MGMT. We'll sometimes come up with these songs that we would say, "Wouldn't we be cool if, like, MGMT could sing on this?" And then lo and behold, we called them up, they say yeah. We're working in New York and getting done about midnight. We email it to them. They're working in L.A. building a bonfire in the studio, and taking drugs all night, and we wake up next morning and they've helped us do a track... Over half the things we've done, these are just people I've still never met. Like Justin Vernon from Bon Iver. That's one of our great collaborations. I've texted with him probably 10,000 times. We've recorded things but I've never been in the same room. I've never actually seen him play up close
Now we just never shy away from anything. And I don't take no for an answer. I can tell you for certain — not everybody, but probably half of the people that are actually on the record, the first contact they said, "I can't do it." I'll keep trying and that's really the key. It's the key to any relationship really. You just need to keep saying, "This is fun, we can make this work." People with less experience — someone like a Yoko Ono — would say no. And you'd say, okay. I go, "Well, let's try again." And that's exactly what happens. Because I know from past experience that people say no a lot — they don't like getting into new things. I like getting into new things, so I say, "This will be great, let's keep trying." That just comes with doing it doing it and doing it.
I have heard from other musicians that collaborating with others, when you come back to the band it feels fresher.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Q+A / Tonight For Horse Feathers, depression is the new optimism
Posted by Johnnie Sanchez on Thu, May 17, 2012 at 1:36 PM
Having just released fourth album Cynic's New Year, Portland resident Horse Feathers seems to know no end to producing reliably good folk albums — almost too reliable but we'll get to that in a second. Justin Ringle, founder and sole unchanging member of the band, brought in at least a baker's dozen of his most trusted allies to help him concoct an orchestration of horns, reeds, banjos, and the swaying bows of those chilling cellos and violins. The result is one of harnessed beauty as he reclines comfortably into his fourth album. Ringle knows what he's doing. And therein, for some, lies the problem.
With his don't-fix-what-ain't-broke model intact, Ringle wields his own double-edged sword with the subsequent release of each stunning record — all of which sound and feel exactly the same as the one before it. Cynic's New Year is no different, but it does touch on a new major theme for Ringle — one that revolves around America's economic uncertainty. This record is like an upbeat Steinbeck novel, if such a thing existed.
On the eve of his Atlanta show, he talked to me about why the country seems so down and out, why he misses strip clubs in Portland, and why the changing of the seasons is so S.A.D.
Horse Feathers. With Mount Moriah and Matt Bauer. $10-12. 8:30 p.m. Thurs., May 17. The Earl, 486 Flat Shoals Avenue. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.
Cynic's New Year is very much about the working class with lyrics like, "Every morning my grandmother worked for a wage" or "fit against the country/it's a hard country we made."
Justin Ringle: It's very much a theme to the songs. Those things were really thematic and kind of the impetus to the record. 2011 was kind of a hard year for me and a lot of close friends and family. Anyhow, I was just talking about that because I witnessed some of the boiling[-over] involved with working class stuff.
What did you witness?
Q+A / Weekend A conversation with Ernest Greene of Washed Out
Posted by Chad Radford on Thu, May 17, 2012 at 12:11 PM
Time on the road as been a learning experience for Greene, and while making his way back to Atlanta with a mostly new band lineup in-tow, he's still planning his next move with Washed Out, all the while ruminating on the Internet's unruly ways, and how he's grown as a performer.
Washed Out. With Airbird, Dog Bite. $15. 9 p.m. Sat., May 19. Terminal West, 887 W. Marietta St., Studio C. www.terminalwestatl.com.
Chad Radford: So are you living in the city now, or are you still somewhere in the outlying communities?
Ernest Greene: Yeah, my wife and I have a house in East Atlanta — just a couple blocks from the Earl. We've been here for about a year now, I guess. I did most of the recording for the last record in Eatonton, Georgia on Lake Sinclair, but that’s been over a year now. We still feel pretty new to Atlanta. Everything is very spread-out, and I'm still wrapping my head around the different neighborhoods and stuff. We’re excited for the show coming up on the West Side at Terminal West. I haven't spent much time over in that part of town at all.
You're at a point now where the excitement surrounding Within and Without has tapered off. Are you playing new stuff these days?
We’re wrapping up our summer tour in Atlanta, and surprisingly enough, it's the first headlining tour we've done for this record. When it was released, we headlined a handful of shows here in Atlanta, New York, and a couple on the West Coast, but then went straight to Europe, did a bunch of shows there, then came back in the Fall for a tour with Cut Copy. I wrote a lot of this record with the live show in mind, but didn't have the experience to know how to pull it off. At this point, we've played the songs enough now, and I've changed things around enough to where, after a month of rehearsing, we're pretty comfortable with the songs.
Since it’s a headlining tour, we have more money to invest in the visual side of the things, which is important. It's hard to put on a really entertaining show when you're stuck behind a synthesizer — in a rock band with guitars and everything, you're free to move around, and for the audience it makes a more entertaining show. But when you're playing soundscape synth music, any kind of visual effects really help. So that’s something new, and I'm hoping that by the time we get to Atlanta, we'll have our shit together, and it'll be a better performance than anything we’ve done here previously.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Q+A / New Music Killer Mike talks community, cops, and 'R.A.P. Music'
Posted by Gabe Vodicka on Tue, May 15, 2012 at 1:08 PM
Killer Mike's stunning new album R.A.P. Music drops today (read our feature over here). I recently sat down with the Atlanta-based rapper at Graffiti's Swag Shop, the Southside barber shop he owns with his wife. Mike talked about the new album, working with El-P and the blowback surrounding some controversial comments. Read some choice excerpts below.
You’ve been outspoken in your advocacy of black entrepreneurship and community involvement. What does it mean to you to have this shop now?
Killer Mike: It’s like, you can have not a penny in your pocket, you can have on old clothes, [but if] you get a decent haircut your confidence just goes through the roof. And it’s a place where men can just be men. It’s hard to find man spots. When I was little I used to go to the barbershop with my grandpa, see him get shaved, and I always loved the atmosphere. I found [the shop] on Craigslist. I was in New York recording R.A.P. Music, and sight unseen, I [bought] it. It was a lot wrong with the shop when we came in (laughs). Since then, the old staff left, the new staff came, and they’ve just been great. I’m into the fact that barbershops provide cash options for young men trying to figure out what they gonna do with their life. My son’s 17 years old, he’s about to go to barber school while he’s prepping for college. I think that trades are important. I’m a college guy, so it’s a lot of days I regret I didn’t go get a trade. I had to get a bullshit job or two, you know?
It’s interesting to me, because you see a lot of rappers who buy restaurants or clubs and don’t seem that invested in it, really. You’re obviously really invested in this.
I’m invested in people for real. At base level, I’m just down with the people. So this is giving me a chance to interact with the people. People come in here, they tell me whether they like my records or they don’t. I just like my brothers. It’s really no other way to put it. I like brothers. Black men are great people. They have interesting conversations. I just wanted to create an environment that was first-class. And we’re growing toward where we wanna be. I’m not gonna be comfortable ’til brothers come in here like, “I gotta come in here weekly, I gotta get swagged up.”
People were talking about that clip of you talking to MTV, where you advocated NRA membership for African-Americans.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Q+A Big K.R.I.T revisits 'K.R.I.T. Wuz Here' on week of rerelease
Posted by Rodney Carmichael on Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:48 PM
Some artists linger on major labels for years without putting out a classic album; Big K.R.I.T. had to put out a classic album just to get signed to one. Two years after releasing K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, his pivotal 2010 mixtape — or albumixtape, as Andrew Noz appropriately called it — gets the industry treatment it should have had the first go-round with an official album release, along with his follow-up mixtape Return of 4eva, via Green Streets Entertainment. Both are available on retail shelves this week. It’s part of the promotional buildup to the forthcoming release of his official Def Jam debut Live From the Underground, due to drop June 6.
Considering all the ground he's covered in the past two years — producing T.I.’s big post-prison single “I’m Flexin’,†linking with the likes of Bun B and Ludacris on the “Country Shit†remix, even working with B.B. King for his upcoming album — it’s hard to believe he was barely keeping his head above water prior to 2010. With a handful of mixtapes to his name, the majors were flirting but steady dragging their feet on the Meridian, Miss. native — until K.R.I.T. drew a line in the sand with K.R.I.T. Wuz Here. Not only did he find his voice, behind the boards and in the booth, he instantly became the most vital new voice of the South.
A couple of days before the rerelease I got on the phone with K.R.I.T. to talk about the mixtape that finally got the industry to come correct. As K.R.I.T. reminisced about recording K.R.I.T. Wuz Here in his now-deceased grandmother’s bathroom several years ago, I had to remind myself that this is still just the beginning of this kid's career.
For a lot of people K.R.I.T. Wuz Here served as their introduction to you, even though you’d been putting out mixtapes like five years before that. But since that album/mixtape really put you on the map, so to speak, I’m curious if you consider it your personal best?
Man, that’s hard to say [laughs]. I think up until that point, yeah. I think K.R.I.T. Wuz Here was the best up until that point. I can’t really take away anything from [the follow-up] Return of 4eva because it was a different point in my life…. People got the opportunity to see me work with other artists. It just changed it up on a funky, kinda soulful level. K.R.I.T. Wuz Here was more like, “I rap.†And [the last mixtape] 4eva in a Day stands alone because it’s super personal, like a day in the life aspect. There’s not a lot of footage of me or people following me around, so I put my whole life on wax. But K.R.I.T. Wuz Here has stood the test of time, so it definitely played its part as far as introducing me to the world. And when people go back they see this growth.
I heard you say in an interview that you recorded the entire album K.R.I.T. Wuz Here in your grandmother’s bathroom. How surreal is that looking back on it now that she’s passed?
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Q+A Ted Kennedys talk Dead Kennedys
Posted by Chad Radford on Sat, May 5, 2012 at 12:11 PM
- Chad Radford
- Clockwise from top left, Andrew Wiggins, George Asimakos, Ryan Fetter, and Ian Deaton
The best Dead Kennedys cover band to ever grace Atlanta is playing its final show today, sometime after 6 p.m. is their best guess, at El Myr in Little 5 Points. Behind El Myr in the parking lot, actually, as part of the revered burrito bar's annual Cinco de May festival. After this, drummer Ryan Fetter is moving to Southern California, and the rest of the guys say it wouldn't be right to carry on without him. I caught up with the group during their final practice to talk about the Dead Kennedys and the lore that surrounds them.
Chad Radford: True or false, all Dead Kennedys albums rule?
George Asimakos: False. Bedtime for Democracy — It seems like the songs were written just for Jello to spit off as many lyrics as possible over this entire album, and a lot of the songs aren't all that musically inspired ...
Andrew Wiggins: A lot of the songs are more about being a background for his message. Same thing with someone like Fugazi: I'm not going to say that every Fugazi record rules, because it doesn't. No band is infallible.
Asimakos: I'm not the only one who things this, and I've read interviews with East Bay Ray — he's like my favorite punk guitar player of all time — where he's even said the reason why the band ended after Bedtime ... was because it felt like Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys. Jello wanted to do spoken word, even before the band hand ended. He was writing verses and verses and verses, and that's why some of those songs are like seven minutes long.
There are a lot of songs on that record, too.
Right. Too many Songs. Plastic Surgery Disasters is the perfect length, and there's the perfect amount of songs. They're good songs and they're sequenced right. Bedtime is just a fucking mess.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Q+A Suzanne Baker bids farewell to Street Violence
Posted by Chad Radford on Thu, May 3, 2012 at 2:43 PM
You’re playing the final Street Violence show tonight?
Yes, it’s the last show for a very long time.
Does that mean that the group will play again?
Maybe, but not definitely. We might revisit it someday. Who knows?
Why bring it to an end now?
Well, there are a couple of reasons: Cole Grant, our bass player, does his river-rafting thing every summer — he’s a river guide on the French Broad, and I’m going back to school in the fall and working full-time. I’m also in a few other bands that I’d like to focus on a little more, so all of these things combined … Last summer when Cole was gone we had some people stand in for him, but it was always hard to teach them the new songs.
Rafting was why Cole stopped playing with A Grimes, too, right?
Yeah, but he loves it and I think that’s what he wants to do with his life, so it’s cool that he’s taking steps in that direction.
Really, I wasn’t feeling the Street Violence thing anymore, especially for how time consuming it was. When I started doing Faun I kind of fell in love with it. It’s what I want to do musically, and it’s where I want to go now. Street Violence is super fun and a big party all the time but I kind of feel like I’ve reached my peak with it. I love those guys and Street Violence shows are the funnest shows that I’ve ever played. They get wild: I broke somebody’s nose at a show once, and I got blackout drunk and head butted someone at another show. They were fun, and the music was cool, but it’s not what I want to do anymore. I definitely don’t want those guys to feel like I didn’t value it, though.
Q+A / Weekend Hitting Apache Café May 5, Sy Smith talks ‘Nights’
Posted by Carlton Hargro on Thu, May 3, 2012 at 1:04 PM
A little more than a month ago, California-based soul songstress Sy Smith released her latest CD: Fast and Curious. Since dropping the acclaimed album, she — along with her frequent collaborator musician/producer Zo! — has been on the road, performing tunes from the new project (and probably a few old ones as well) at venues across the nation. This weekend (May 5 to be exact) Smith and Zo are slated to bring the tour to Apache Café — and one track we’re hoping she unleashes onstage is her version of Billy Ocean's 1981 dance classic “Nights (Feel Like Gettin' Down).”
Back in March, we actually chatted with Smith about her remake (a duet she does with Rahsaan Patterson, which can be found on Fast and Curious) of Ocean’s dopest cut ever … and here’s what she had to say:
Creative Loafing: Listening to the new album, one song in particular I thought took a lot of balls to remake is “Nights” by Billy Ocean.
Sy Smith: Ha! Thank you! It did take a lot of balls, and I’m glad you recognized my balls!
