There are records music critics absolutely adore and records that they totally hate.
A Proposed Method for Determining Sanding Fitness is somehow both of them. What do we mean? Well, all too often, the cultural gate-keepers in contemporary America sample the tried and true and attack it for a lack of adventurousness or derring-do, calling it safe and staid in the opuses they write. But what happens when they are presented with something truly weird, something BEYOND adventurousness?
Enter Stella Research Committee, a Cincinnati/Columbus, all-Ohio trio releasing their fifth LP on 12 March. The group bill themselves as purveyors of strange sounds sitting at the intersection of noise-rock and no wave but, of course, it’s all a little bit more complicated than that. The band’s sound is frequently more NOISE than ROCK – no AmRep or Touch and Go deals here – despite the somewhat conventional three-piece line-up. And, yes, the no-wave trappings, that notion of anti-art and urban
Destiny Street Complete, a two-disc reimagining of Hell’s least favorite entry in his brief discography, consisting of four different versions of the album: 1. The original release; 2.
Destiny Street Repaired, a 2009 reinterpretation featuring new vocals and new guitar parts from Marc Ribot, avant jazzer Bill Frisell and original Voidoid Ivan Julian; 3.
Destiny Street Remixed, sonic surgery done to the original 24-track master tapes by Hell and
Destiny Street Demos (1978-1980), which should be self-explanatory. We took the set’s release as an opportunity to discuss his role in punk history and the record that’s finally in a form he’s comfortable with.
A couple lounge on the flower-dotted grass, gauging the prospects of eternal love against time s gathering clouds. A woman in a yellow dress abandons her saddle shoes at a sock hop. Tennis players measure their strokes up against old-timey nets. A young Miles Davis cradles his horn on a stump, honing his chops in the great outdoors on the way to transforming a thousand smoke-filled clubs.
Honor Titus’s paintings, on display at Timothy Taylor gallery, New York until March 27, adroitly mine the grand bohemian tradition of freewheeling leisure. Titus, who grew up in Brooklyn and relocated to Los Angeles four years ago, is glad for the homecoming. It s amazing to come back and have something to share, says the 31-year-old painter. I ve got so much history interwoven in these streets, and it could easily not be a feel-good story.
When I met Nathan Marcy way back in 1999, he creeped me the fuck out.
Back then, the Denver musician who died Wednesday morning at the age of 43 from cancer, leaving behind his wife, the singer-songwriter Rachael Pollard, and their two daughters had yet to make his mark on the local scene. That didn’t last long. At his rented house on 14th Avenue and Humboldt Street in Capitol Hill, he was then in the process of assembling a big group of Denver-based guitarists, myself included, to take part in a one-off performance. It wasn’t a rock band. It was an entire guitar orchestra that Nathan was going to mastermind by giving each instrumentalist a different alternate tuning that he’d devised. The idea was to let each guitarist run wild and improvise at the same time, with the result being an enormous, shimmering cacophony.