I already posted this on my music blog yvynyl but I gotta share with all y’all who don’t read that (yet!). This is the new music video from my pals Free Energy. The vid was directed by m ss ng p eces and shot on location at the dudes’ house party earlier this summer. I’m really in love with this song and the video – and well, as I said on yvynyl:

Philly + bikes + summertime + my neighborhood + cute kittens + my buddies’ band + a great house party + cameos of dozens of my friends (damn, i didn’t make the cut!) + one kick-ass party song makes this my favorite music video of the week. Then again, I’m biased.

I just got an email letting me know that my music video for The War on Drugs was accepted into the 17th Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival in Portugal! I’m excited to actually have a film IN a film festival instead of just projecting film all the time. Wish I could attend…

Audrey and I have been meaning to watch Buena Vista Social Club… and voila! Here it is:

So right this moment I’m listening to Last.fm wirelessly connected to my living room stereo system. How? By buying this nifty lil’ app called Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba, telling it to grab the audio from the Last.fm App, streaming it to my Apple AirPort Express wireless router which is connected via RCA cables to my living room stereo. Bing.

We’d love to see your smilin’ face at the next Hunter/Gatherer gig being held on March 13th at 7pm at the Green Line Cafe on 45th and Locust in West Philly!

Audrey and Jesse will be playing with two cool local bands, Faux Slang (who’s EP you can download for free here) and Fence Kitchen. Having just delved into both bands’ catalogues, I can assure you it will be a good show. Please come out and start yr weekend right!

I haven’t been blogging about bands all too often here on The PJS because I do most of that over on yvynyl lately. However, this band I just discovered is too mind-blowing not to share.

Stag Hare is a young fellow named Garrick Biggs who lives in the middle of Utah. Followers of Growing, Brightblack Morninglight and Faust (as I am a huge fan of all three) will certainly fall deeply in love upon first listen. Here, lemme show you:

Stag Hare – Born into Magic

Also, if you dig this, you should most definitely check out my dear friends Niagara Falls who have a new limited-edition vinyl LP available now and are playing a show tonight at The Marvelous in West Philly. I’ll be there!

My mom decided a couple years ago to take up playing the violin. She really loves playing, she practices all the time. Thing is, she doesn’t think she’s very good. I’m not sure of the veracity of that statement because she always plays when no one’s around and hasn’t played a recital or anything for us. But all that is about to change.

Over the past year, my mom has been working on organizing the Really Terrible Orchestra in Pennsylvania. The concept is pretty basic. RTO “exists to encourage those who have been prevented from playing music, either through lack of talent or some other factor, to play music in the company of similarly afflicted players.” I guess they’re being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but no, they insist. They’re really terrible.

I’m proud of her regardless. Not only because of her dedication to the project, but she even made a website for RTO-PA all by herself! And then in today’s Sunday Morning Call, she’s got a nice long feature about the group which has grown rather quickly.

She’s been most excited about the original ensemble from Scotland making their United States debut. I’ll be there. Maybe you’d like to as well.

REALLY TERRIBLE ORCHESTRA CONCERT

What: The original RTO, from Scotland, makes its New York City debut
When: 8 p.m. April 1
Where: The Town Hall, 123 W. 43rd St.
Tickets: $25 and $35
Info: http://www.ticketmaster.com or 212-307-4100

I just whipped together a new website for Audrey’s band, Hunter/Gatherer. She’s recently joined forces with the very talented Jesse Hale Moore and I’ve been lucky enough to listen to them practice a bunch in our living room. Yes, I’m biased, but seriously, they are so good!! Have a quick look at the site. Fun fresh content, including songs, photos and more coming soon!

Also – Hunter/Gatherer has a new gig coming up in a couple weeks here in Philly on February 4th at Kung Fu Necktie in Fishtown. Mark your calendars!

Friend up H/G and listen to some demos on their MySpace.

My friend Tim and I were talking the other day about artists we knew of who struggled and overcame major mental challenges to create fresh and amazing creations. I brought up Daniel Johnston. He brought up Wesley Willis. I had never heard of him, but I’m so glad I know his work now. Wow!

There’s another excellent night of avant/psych music at my friends’ house in Fishtown. Come on, feel the noise. From the desk of my friend Brooke:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21
8:30 PM
@ 2037 FRANKFORD AVENUE
(between Norris + Susquehanna Aves. Enter around back on Sepviva Street)
$5 donation
byob

Hope to see you,
Brooke

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ZOMES

Lungfish’s guitarist Asa Osborne is back with an instrumental record chock-full of eerie fuzzed out loops and droning drums. Released under the pseudonym Zomes, this debut album is dark and cinematic with influences ranging from library music to East-German electronica.

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DANIEL HIGGS

Daniel Arcus Incus Ululat Higgs is a musician and artist from Baltimore, Maryland on whose behalf superlatives are destined to fail. It’s not that his artistic output – spanning three decades, numerous albums, books of poetry and collections of drawings – simply eludes classification, it defies it. Often we hear that a true work of art is meant to speak for itself, and with the work of Daniel Higgs the maxim rings truer than ever. His art is of the cosmos, we on Earth merely lucky that it happens to be confined to our atmosphere, in our lifetime. Higgs is known primarily for his work as the sole lyricist and frontman of the band Lungfish, a four-piece dedicated to charting, in this listener’s estimation, nothing short of the evolution of all species, known and unknown. That the band has undertaken this pursuit in the guise of a humble rock outfit, in the absence of any public relations fanfare, etanarrative, or manifesto has been enough to endear them to tens of thousands. They are enshrined as one of America’s last true folk bands, and Higgs anointed as a patron saint to artistic purity.

In recent years, Higgs has released a number of solo outings that can only be described as the ultimate in isolation, worlds away from the hypnotic, communal rock of his band. On Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot, Higgs weaves meditative, casually ruptured drones using acoustic and electric guitar, upright pianos, banjo and jew’s harp, recorded entirely at home on cassette recorder. He pairs the music with a series of paintings that call to mind religious iconography passed through the disfiguring surrealism of Miro.

Higgs has wedded his music and his visual art into a singular being, meant to be encountered as a conjuring force similar to that of the tarot experience. The yggdrasil is the great tree of Norse myth that connects all worlds of cosmology. Passing into Christian folklore, the tree is said to connect heaven and earth. In his relentless pursuit of the indivisible, Higgs travels up and down this spine and hatches a new transubstantiation of sound and image into life-form.

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BILL NACE (tbc)

Bill Nace is an itinerant guitarist in the improv-minstrel mode. His best known projects are X.O.4, Northampton Wools (with Thurston Moore), Vampire Belt (with Chris Corsano), but he is happy to work without a net in a variety of settings.

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OTTO HAUSER

(of Espers & Vetiver) solo

Gangi

I’ve been a fan of Matt Gangi’s music for something like two years, having completely randomly stumbled upon his MySpace page through friends. He’s an amazing songwriter and his sounds are completely 21st Century, but rooted firmly in the psychedelic era of the 60’s. He’s got an amazing ear and his partnership with Lyle Nesse on drums/drummachine/synth forms a killer duo. I’m so glad to have seen them play a small show at the studio/rehersal space/party house Inciting HQ last night – a complete treat.

06-animals

Magical, Beautiful

Magical, Beautiful is the band of my buddy Chris Keener whom I met years ago at True/False in Columbia, Missouri, his home town. He now lives in Chicago and collaborates with these fellas. We went to see them play at a small house show they booked, and I was blown away. Dualing synths, deep drums and what might be described as Joy Division-style vocals.

They just came out with their first music video recently:

Both of these bands are completely DIY operations, neither is on a record label. If you dig their music, I encourage you to click over to their websites and purchase their records. I have them, and I highly recommend them. Support indie music!

the summer camp hanging out by the lake vibe…

the fun new friends we made…

the amazing music performances…

But I can’t. I’m too exhausted. But I know if I don’t post something now, I might never get to it. I’ll let me mediocre photos tell the story for me.

I will say this: ATP was hands-down one of the best, most fun festivals of any kind that I have ever attended. Yes.

[UPDATE: Pitchfork actually has a fantastic review of the weekend - and I agree with pretty much every point, for those of you music nerds interested in the finer points of the performances.]

Allow me to say a few words about grouping music by genre: it’s a stupid concept. I wish the world would banish it to the annals of mid-20th century mega-rcrdlbl company dinasaurs. There is no use for such vague labels as genre. What the hell do they even mean? Look, for example, at the image above – just a small segment of the, oh, 200+ ‘genres’ I have in my iTunes library. I think maybe 10% of them make any sense at all.

Okay, now, many of you probably noticed that iTunes launched a new version of it’s software this past week. Cool, if you use it a lot. But for some ridiculous reason, they decided to disable the ability to get rid of the ‘genre’ column while browsing in the old (and my preferred) boring, spreadsheet style layout. Luckily, I found a quick and painless solution for us Macheads on MacOSXHints.com.

Quit iTunes, launch Terminal, and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

Relaunch iTunes, open the browser, and you’ll notice the Genre column has vanished. You can reverse this by quitting iTunes and repeating the above command, but with TRUE instead of FALSE.

Bing. No genres.

This does get me thinking about the ways in which people initiate their music listening sessions is changing. People once touched, held and looked at at the records on a shelf and pulled out something cool and fresh and in-the-moment. Now, iTunes looks more like a spreadsheet than anything else. And oddly, even with their fancy new CoverFlow layouts, I still use the spreadsheet look. Because I’m used to it? I’m not sure. When I want to listen to something, often times it’s specific and browsing by title is the easiest way to get there. CoverFlow kinda works when I have absolutely no idea of what to listen to, but that’s usually when I default to shuffle. Or ditch iTunes all together and hit up Last.fm or the Hype Machine.

What’s the solution here? How do we recreate the analog, physical experience of listening to records in an immediate digital world when memory is no longer based on a physical object like a record, but rather a name of a band, or how recently I bought something?

Go buy a record player, I guess.

[via Pitchfork.tv]

The video is made entirely of clips from the Prelinger Archive of Moving Images at the fantastic resource, archive.org. So thanks to them for providing such an amazing service, and such great quality Public Domain films. Long live remix culture!

Don’t forget, you should really buy this album, Wagonwheel Blues. It’s fantastic, gorgeous, entrancing. My friend Adam is a gifted songwriter and I promise it will provide an amazing soundtrack to the rest of your summer.

Ariel Pink’s set was one of the best shows we’ve seen this year. Mesmerizing. It was last Friday night at the MRoom, ‘The Other Bar‘ as my friend Sammy likes to call it due to it’s proximity to our usual hang out, ‘The Bar‘, Johnny Brenda’s. Ariel jumped, writhed and moshed all throughout the crowd, working the room like a stadium concert. It was amazing. I hadn’t heard much of his music before then, but have been collecting samples all week since.

I’ve been a fan of the young opening band from Brooklyn called Chairlift for a while. They’ve got some great throwback synth-pop going on. I struck up a conversation with the band after their set and ended up inviting them to crash at our house for the night. Turned out to be fun, and we talked music all the next morning until they headed off to their next gig in Baltimore. Here’s their awesome single, “Evident Utensil“. I dare you not to like it.

[click img to see it full sized]

[Vampire Weekend]

We got to enjoy a very relaxing, sunny summer day listening to music outside at Drexel’s campus this past weekend (see all the photos here). The Popped! Music Festival got a lot bigger this year. Last spring we were cramming into small local venues watching great up and coming area bands. This year, it was a full-on festival complete with international musical acts.

My friend Alexis did a great job pulling this thing together over the past year. I helped her out planning a bit early on, so Audrey and I scored some VIP passes and had a good time watching the (ahem) mild debauchery going on back stage.

If you’d like to see some live music clips from the event, check out my music vlog yvynyl live.