HASH #6

HASH MAGAZINE Fall-Winter 2013 | Issue 6

FEATURING

TAME IMPALA BUKE & GASE THE MILK CARTON KIDS SWANS + MORE

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF

RAFIQ BHATIA FALL–WINTER 2013 | 1

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JACOB GARCHIK’S ATHEIST TROMBONE GOSPEL CHOIR Winter Jazzfest The Bowery Electric, New York City Photo ALEC McCLURE FALL–WINTER 2013 | 3

PUBLISHER / EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

PUBLISHER / CREATIVE DIRECTOR

M. Sean Ryan @mseanry sean@hashmagazine.com

Monica So @hellomoso monica@hashmagazine.com

CONTRIBUTORS WRITERS

DESIGN

Brandon Specktor @bspecks

Francisco J. Hernandez @voonderlad

Nick Amies @nick_ amies

ILLUSTR ATION

Carly Lewis @carlylewis Alyssa Noel @alyssanoel333

Fyza Hashim @14eleven Na Kim @OKAY_ NA

PHOTOGR APHY Gavin Thomas @gavinthomasfoto Alec McClure @subjectiveideal Joshua Sarner @jsarnerphoto Tim Bugbee @tinnitus_ photo Jonathan Goldberg @Campgreenpoint Peter Roessler @shootmepeter

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HASH LCC Š 2011-2013 No part of this magazine may be published without the written permission of the publisher. www.hashmagazine.com

CONTENTS

HASH MAGAZINE Fall-Winter 2013 | Issue 6

FEATURES

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The Brave New World of Rafiq Bhatia Rafiq Bhatia just released two brilliant, genre-defying records. His music doesn’t fit in the jazz clubs, or have a happy home in rock halls—yet. But that doesn’t keep him from believing it’s all worth it Leaders of the Pack Inside the new-model industries created by Adam Schatz and Matthew E. White

6 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR PROFILES

26 42 45 8

Tame Impala: We Need to Talk About Kevin Call Me Nothing: The Declassified DIY, Identity of Buke & Gase

Q+A

56 60 64

Jai Nitai Lotus: Through the Lotus Lens

The Milk Carton Kids: Joey Ryan Caspian: Erin Burke-Moran Swans: Michael Gira

THE HASH

PLUS 1

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Live shots: New Order, Crystal Castles, The Bad Plus, NYC Winter Jazzfest, Dirty Projectors, Wilco, Lightning Bolt, Widowspeak, Das Racist

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Album Reviews: Mountains, Norvaiza & Karriem Riggins Track Reviews: The season’s variety

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A Letter From the

EDITOR

For the first time in the two years that this modest project has grown from something of an experiment and into something that’s reaching people outside the circles and faces we, the makers, know personally, HASH Magazine has made it to print.

We’re in the flesh, the pulp— the third dimension!

I have to assume that even the readers who still open magazines skip the foreword. With that in mind, and for the sake of those who’ve been with us for however much of the dance so far, I’ll refrain from any kind of history lesson. Instead: a quick “Thank You,” aimed once more at the scores of backers who pushed us to our goal of bringing this issue into print via Kickstarter. If it needs to be said, we couldn’t have made this without you.

Not to make the fact that this edition exists in print the biggest story here, because the story remains the musicians filling these pages. And thinking over the list we’ve got for this go round, I’m rather satisfied that for those being hereby introduced to HASH the experience is being fronted by Rafiq Bhatia, the guitarist-composer sitting coolly on the cover here.

His music is incandescent. How and why it’s confluent with what we’re doing—those are particulars I hope I’ve made evident within the piece itself. In hindsight though I find it telling, and probably predictable, that after our sit-down Bhatia and I talked for some time about where we see expectations and notions of Genre (capital G) to be slowly melting.

He’s a young musician, and I think in the rare position of one both conscientiously poking holes in stylistic tradition as well as a part of the growing number who can’t help but do so; it’s just plain intuitive for them. Like this issue—the first of ours to fall between two different seasons, and straddle two calendar years—Bhatia’s music traces a kind of balancing act. How better to lead HASH into 2013?

Signed and sealed,

M. SEAN RYAN

Editor & Writer in Chief Visit us online and listen to the music from this issue using our playlist. And let us know you did, on Facebook or Twitter.

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To those who encouraged us over the past two years, especially those who've pushed and supported us for even longer, and everyone who backed this issue on Kickstarter:

THANK YOU! Grandma Leola, Mark + Mimi Ryan, Sidney + Lydia So, Lynette Liwanag, Lily Vanilli, Sean McGowan, Noah + Beth Ramos, Marissa Chen, George Diaz, Sophia Hong, Bunty Keo, Katy Poramapornpilas, Tom Ryan, Marco Teran, Bryan Kershnar + Anna Du, Matt Kershnar, Susan Chim, Jay Dacon, Bobby Glennon, Lesley Jacobs, Anthony Liang, Michele Osborn, Eric Sokun So, Tom So, Gavin Thomas, Gloria Choi, Kathy Kotary, Derek Lee, Pucky Lewis, Erik Rex, Holly Shoals, Dari So, Oanh Tran, Yvonne Truong, Joe Werner, Elena Lysenko, Stephanie Tam, Erin Doyle, Kim Gilby, Jennifer Abounader, Robert Alfaro, Sandra Andrade, Nuzi Barkatally, David Bright, Rachel Borengasser, Sarah Bovagnet, Mike Boyd Jr., Alberto Capetillo, Dennis Chim, Megan Clegg, Jack Davis, Nick DeFrancis, Juan Pablo Esparza, Sue Fallone, Sandy Famolaro, Pat Gerasia, Paige Guido, John E. Hargraves III, Francisco J. Hernandez, Luke Higgins, Raette Johnson, Jason Joseph, Toby King, Louis Koehl, Katherine McMahan, Alexis Mercado, Chris McGuire, Anthony Nguyen, Viet Nguyen, Joseph Pancho, Douglas Price, Michael Davis, Racheal Shaw, Christy Shum, Jemar Meezy Souza, Brandon Specktor, Adry Suryadi, Hanh Trinh, Andrea Trninic, Manny Toro, Chris Van Wagenen, Kyle Warren, Zach Wyles, Kelli Scarr, Frances Sera Kim, Neiki Ullah, Eric Dornbush, Steve Campbell, Brandon Lane, Irene Rodriguez Lopez, Hiroya Miura, Omar Morsy, Marla Mrowka, Luis Paez-Pumar, Leonardo Pedemonte, Jerry Schwartz, Connie Shu, Jerrod Veron, Midori Yamada, Doris Zapata, Andrew Breidenbach, Zach Lansdale, Saret Son, Thomas Chim, Alec McClure, Frank Esposito, Adam Evans, Katy To — Sean + Monica

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PLUS 1

NEW ORDER Roseland Ballroom, New York City Photo ALEC McCLURE

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CRYSTAL CASTLES Roseland Ballroom, New York City Photo JONATHAN GOLDBERG

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PLUS 1

THE BAD PLUS Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn Photo JONATHAN GOLDBERG

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DEBO BAND Winter Jazzfest The Bowery Electric, New York City Photo ALEC McCLURE

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PLUS 1

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BOBBY PREVITE BARI TRIO Winter Jazzfest Bowery Electric, New York City Photo ALEC McCLURE

JACOB GARCHIK’S ATHEIST TROMBONE GOSPEL CHOIR Winter Jazzfest The Bowery Electric, New York City Photo ALEC McCLURE 14 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

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DIRTY PROJECTORS Capitol Theatre, Port Chester Photo JOSHUA SARNER

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PLUS 1

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WILCO Capitol Theatre, Port Chester Photo JOSHUA SARNER

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LIGHTNING BOLT 285 Kent, Brooklyn Photo MONICA SO

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WIDOWSPEAK Brooklyn Bowl, Brooklyn Photo ALEC McCLURE 22 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

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DAS RACIST Irving Plaza, New York City Photo PETER ROESSLER

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WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

By Nick Amies x Photos Alec McClure

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Profile

TAME IMPALA

TAME IMPALA’S KEVIN PARKER IS REDEFINING WHAT ROCK BANDS SHOULD SOUND LIKE IN THE 21ST CENTURY. IF ONLY HE KNEW HOW IMPORTANT THAT WAS...

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“WE DON’T PLAY MUSIC THAT YOU CAN REALLY GET DOWN TO, AND SOME OF THE SONGS GO ON LONGER THAN A PINK FLOYD EPIC... IT KINDA CONFUSES ME AS TO WHY PEOPLE ACTUALLY LIKE IT.” It's a testament to the spirit of The City That Never Sleeps that after one of the most physically and emotionally draining fortnights in recent memory, there is still a significant number of New Yorkers willing to brave the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and an exhausting presidential campaign to welcome Tame Impala to Brooklyn.

Even with his knowledge of the Big Apple's fabled levels of resistance and perseverance, it still comes as quite a shock to Kevin Parker as his troupe of Australian psychonauts roll into town to be met by legions of adoring fans at the beginning of their US tour. It seems that even superstorms and election night hangovers aren't enough to keep those in the know from experiencing one of the most anticipated live shows of the year.

“The reception we've been getting is really humbling and more than a little confusing,” the laid-back front man says, his Antipodean drawl stretched out over the vowels and consonants like a lazy cat on a warm radiator. “We used to play one big gig on every tour and that would probably be back home in Australia. It would be about 500 people and that would be the highlight. Now every night is the biggest gig of the year.”

In person and on stage before a show begins, Parker looks every inch the accidental rock star, both out of place and out of time. He seems uncomfortable with having to be the focus of attention, be it in front of the media or an expectant crowd. It's 28 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

only when the music starts to flow out of him that Kevin Parker grows exponentially in stature and confidence, a musician at one with the sounds he's unleashing from his head. It's a sound that has resonated with tens of thousands so far on this tour. The European and North American shows have all sold out and yet Parker, when away from his sonic comfort zone, still wonders what all the fuss is about.

“We don’t dance about, we don’t play music that you can really get down to and some of the songs go on longer than a Pink Floyd epic when we play them live so it kinda confuses me as to why people actually like it,” he says with surprising honesty.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they do. But we don’t really fit in with what’s supposed to be popular. I suppose that’s part of the attraction.”

Since signing his first deal and releasing the band's eponymous debut EP in late 2008, Parker has seen interest in what is essentially his personal pet project rocket to stratospheric levels. The buzz became global with the release of debut album Innerspeaker in 2010, which alerted the rest of the world to the band's heady mix of ‘60s psychedelia, dance rock and spaced-out feedback. It was a sound that conjured up images of Cream in their heyday, Hendrix at his most cosmic and the druggy splendor of White Album-era Beatles, and one painfully at odds with the omnipotent plastic pop of the charts.

Now, with the release of sophomore album Lonerism

Profile

(Modular), Tame Impala's nostalgic futurism is a seriously international phenomenon.

Not that you'd get any of the affected posturing you'd expect from a 26-year-old musician with the indie world at his feet and a Who's Who of rock royalty singing his praises. Despite nearly four years in existence, the popularity of Tame Impala is still a mystery to the band's affable and eloquent mastermind.

“Back in Perth, people don't treat me differently, I'm still just Kevin and no one attaches any of this bizarre, constructed rock star status to me or any of the other guys,” Parker says. “That's why Perth is a sanctuary. I can go home and be with my friends or disappear into the crowd like I used to. Out in the world, people stop me outside venues and stick cameras in my face and want autographs, and I'm like—whoa, okay dude... I'm just this fucking guitar nerd who makes music in his bedroom... but hey, that's cool!”

With this apparent obliviousness to the reasons behind the growing adoration and the widely-

TAME IMPALA

held perception of Parker as a young man most comfortable in his own company, many observers have taken Lonerism to be a collection of songs about his struggle with isolation. With titles such as "Why Won't They Talk to Me?" and "She Just Won't Believe Me," it's easy to mistake the album as a vocalization of Parker's own insecurities. But the chief Impala maintains that it's not a record about being alone.

“Most of the songs are about other people, and trying to establish connections,” he says. “Deep down, it's hard for everyone, especially when you come to realize that you're not one of these people who belong in the middle of the rest of the world.

It's about being a member of the human race and what a huge deal that is, being a small part of something so immense. It’s more about that than physical loneliness.”

Lonerism as an album is as contradictory as the world Parker has to operate in. It's a record jam-packed with panoramic soundscapes of soaring beauty and Parker's dreamy vocals: played deep in FALL–WINTER 2013 | 29

the mix, under fuzzy echoed guitars, laser-beam synths and rumbling bass that trips over danceable drums and leftfield orchestration. It's a life-affirming album despite the fact its lyrical content hints at inner conflict and paralyzing questions of existence.

Parker may have uprooted his entire home studio in Perth and had it freighted to a small apartment in Paris to record Lonerism but he says this had nothing to do with any concept he had of an album about solitude.

band, are also founding members of Pond and their project's rise to prominence has made things a little “squeaky” in Parker's words. “It makes it a little tighter now when it comes to planning tours and stuff but I've been producing Pond's next album on my laptop on this tour so we make it work,” he says. “I play live drums for Pond and so we have to coordinate things a bit more these days with both bands taking off. But Tame and Pond are just a couple of pieces of this giant noise-making puzzle we have as a circle of friends.”

“IT’S ABOUT BEING A MEMBER OF THE HUMAN RACE AND WHAT A HUGE DEAL THAT IS, BEING A SMALL PART OF SOMETHING SO IMMENSE. IT’S MORE ABOUT THAT THAN PHYSICAL LONELINESS.” “My girlfriend was there and I wanted to be with her as well as work on the record. I pretty much do everything on all the records on my own anyway, so it's not like I had this Marlene Dietrich moment and swanned off from the others to be alone. I play, record and produce the music myself and always have done. I only get involved with others in the mixing because, to be honest, I'm a fucking terrible engineer.

“The other guys have their own things going on and are cool with that. I don't expect that input in their bands. It sounds like I'm just a control freak who won't let anyone else have a turn in the studio but to us, Tame Impala is just Kevin's project and everyone has their own.”

These projects, born out of Perth's tight-knit underground music scene which centered on the notoriously avant-garde Troy Terrace, Parker's home in the city for four years, have themselves started to make an impact internationally. Jay Watson and Nick Allbrook, part of the Tame Impala touring 30 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

Despite the growing global acclaim, Parker and his cohorts still manage to tap into the spirit of those early days in Perth when Troy Terrace was filled with broken instruments, bong smoke and crazy levels of creativity. “When we’re at home and one of our bands is playing gigs, it’ll be like the old days,” he says with a smile. “Stuff the drums in the car and drive to the gig; drink our six-pack of warm beer backstage then play the gig to one man and his dog like it’s Madison Square Garden and then go home.

It’s like nothing ever happened.”

If only.

However hard Kevin Parker tries to convince himself that this is the case, Tame Impala's meteoric rise is changing things forever in the rest of the world. Whether he likes it or not.

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Rafiq Bhatia just released two brilliant, genre-defying records. His music doesn’t fit in the jazz clubs, or have a happy home in rock halls—yet. But that doesn’t keep him from believing it’s all worth it.

By M. SEAN RYAN

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Photos GAVIN THOMAS

“FIRST OF ALL, I WAS THE WORST OUT OF ALL OF MY FRIENDS,”

Rafiq Bhatia says, recalling his earliest days as a guitarist without a whiff of nostalgia. “I was terrible, and they all made fun of me for it.”

Had those early critics only been among the thirty or so in attendance at Piano’s, the downtown New York club where Bhatia wrapped a month-long residency the night before, they’d have found themselves in a small sea of reverence—silent even between songs, arched in a semicircle ten feet from the stage.

There, Bhatia and his combo churned their urgent strain of music: intensely dynamic, dissolving notions of tappable meter along the way, it showered notes into improbable crevices but also brooded with slow sincerity. It scanned as jazz, though junctures were undeniably beholden to the waves made by electronic beat pioneers who’ve blurred the lines between hip-hop and interiorized dance floors over the last decade. If the pedal-triggered stitches of loops and ineffable sonics weren’t evidence enough, the quartet wrangled one of Flying Lotus’ typically chameleonic compositions in such a way that the move wasn’t just a highlight of the set, it felt like natural territory to visit.

“People can call it whatever they want to call it,” Bhatia says the following day, a balmy afternoon for mid-October despite the constant breeze winding along the East River. He sounds somewhat at peace with the notion, perhaps a shade resigned—certainly as though he’s already given it plenty of thought. Today has been no exception.

Seated at a bench in Williamsburg Park, the young bandleader is exuding a calm authority, clad in a crisp all-black ensemble, his unflappable gaze beaming through thick-framed glasses. It’s been some time since he’s had to prove much as a guitar player but the debate over what exactly to call his band’s luminous sound has become a front line of sorts for Bhatia in the last two years, whether navigating record label offers or butting up against stylistic expectations in the pursuit of a venue suitable to bear it.

This fall, it became available for the first time in two separate records, the EP Strata late in September, and Yes It Will, Bhatia’s full-length debut, the following month. Both brim with dauntless concepts of momentum and protean texture—the EP perhaps more so. And both are, primarily, vessels for Bhatia’s own compositions, though they make some room for others’ too.

Each closes with a cover: Strata with “Pickled!,” the Flying Lotus number frequenting the group’s live shows; Yes It Will with an orchestration of Sam Cooke’s soulful evergreen “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

“The album is named after that song,” Bhatia says of Cooke’s Civil Rights-era classic, pointing out the chorus lyrics that follow its title. And not for nothing; while that song may well “stand on its own, outside of a context,” as Bhatia reasons, it also resonates in a contemporary, acutely personal way for the guitarist-composer.

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Born in Hickory, North Carolina and raised nearby in Raleigh, Bhatia grew up in the South, a first generation American of East African Indian descent.

(His parents immigrated to England from Tanzania following the Zanzibar Revolution, then here in the early 1970s.) As an adolescent groping for identity under such circumstances, much less in the immediate years following 9/11, Bhatia wasn’t exactly a stranger to the pinch of proximate social tensions.

“That was a really interesting place to be,” he tosses out. “By interesting I mean genuinely interesting, because in certain ways there was an openness to have discussions about that uneasiness that you would never have here.”

Not to imply that uneasiness was by any means subject to discretion: “In a lot of ways it was really negative,” Bhatia says, but more often than not the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill constituency of North Carolina—locally dubbed The Triangle—offered an exception.

“It’s like an oasis, in terms of a progressive hub in the South, relatively.

There’s an openness there that I want to take with me wherever I go.”

Music was pretty much an outlet from the beginning. Bhatia took to the violin at an early age, learning by ear via the Suzuki method. By his account that didn’t always translate to the easiest time in the school orchestra, though in all likelihood it paved the way for Bhatia’s transition from four to six strings later in high school, when friends were beginning bands of their own.

From there it’s a progression most virtuosos have in common, of countless hours spent holed up in a bedroom. Bhatia’s were spent absorbing a spate of ‘60s rock and concurrent free jazz—late period Coltrane in particular— and plumbing the songcraft from every detour made between the Beatles and Motown.

As that multifaceted taste slowly came to grips with an underlying interest in both improvised and effects-driven productions, Bhatia began playing around town with friends. It would be some years before an identity in sound would become entirely realized, but in and around this fledgling phase, hand in hand with the musical hunt came a deeper realization.

“Growing up, there was never anybody that looked like me on TV or in ads, not that many musicians of Indian descent,” Bhatia says. The exceptions, he continues, were usually diminutive caricatures. That dearth of South Asian figures in art and popular culture was disheartening, especially at a point when music was solidifying into something to take beyond his bedroom. “If anything,” he contends, “It was more pressure for me not to do it.”

Especially when transitioning from high school to college, in the odd months spent reconsidering the divergent academic interests he’d developed late in high school. Bhatia had already opted for early acceptance to NYU, though his observations of New York’s scenes in his first year as an undergrad were less than encouraging.

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Clockwise from upper left: Alex Ritz, Jackson Hill, Jeremy Viner, Bhatia.

Photo credit Peter Roessler

“I felt like there were pretty entrenched scenes with limited boundaries,” he explains, naming several schools of jazz and their corresponding neighborhoods. “I wasn’t really even in a position at that time to belong to any of them, because I didn’t really know what I was trying to do. I didn’t know what [my music] was going to turn out to be like.”

New York’s playing field might not have been porous, or necessarily receptive, but ultimately these properties would do little to deter Bhatia from pursuing his own guitar-based logic. And although there was still a sparse precedent of Indian musicians in and around jazz, even beyond its fringes— and that was no less forbidding—Bhatia’s intrepid resolve had cemented.

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Looking back, he relates a kind of inner dialogue: “I was like, ‘No. I don’t want it to get to the point where other people are making that kind of decision.’

And, ‘No, I don’t hold that belief that music can’t be a powerful force in society,’ because actually it’s been more powerful than anything else in my life.”

Still, a shift was still in order. Bhatia transferred to Oberlin College and moved to Ohio. Within a week he befriended Alex Ritz. A few years older, Ritz would move to China after graduating to make a living as a jazz drummer.

But not before he’d had the chance to play with both Bhatia and one of the guitarist’s oldest friends from home, Jackson Hill, who anchored the hyperactivity of the other two on bass.

“Playing with them was like walking around on concrete,” Bhatia’s eyes close for a moment. “It was so easy. I felt like I could do anything I wanted.”

Hill transferred to Oberlin the year after, and the three played and toured whenever they could manage it.

Of course, their bond wouldn’t be the only significant one struck up at Oberlin. Bhatia describes Alexander Overington, one of his first-year dorm neighbors, with a kind of matter-of-fact deference. “He was two years ahead in the coursework for composition,” Bhatia shakes his head slightly. “He was a genius from the day that I met him, and the thing we bonded over the most was we both approach music as listeners first.”

Without wasting much time they began throwing listening sessions hosted by Overington—the inherited burden of owning the best speakers— during which a handful or so of music obsessives gathered to offer current obsessions or obscure curios.

“I got exposed to more music in that few months than I had ever before,” Bhatia reflects. “All of a sudden I was surrounded by a bunch of other people who were crate diggers. They were just as into it as I was, but they were into their own stuff.”

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It’s a small wonder that such eclectic sweep defines Rafiq Bhatia’s music today, or that Overington has become such an ineluctable partner. Beside producing Yes It Will and Strata, Overington shares responsibility for the music as the co-founder of Rest Assured, the label he began with Bhatia.

Its foundations cemented early this year in Iceland—where Overington was living at the time, working with the engineer and producer Valgeir Sigurðsson.

Beyond architecting radical-sounding records, Sigurðsson is known for founding Bedroom Community, a smallish label fostering the omnivorous folk and electronic projects of a small cadre of musicians, based at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik.

With his LP recorded, Bhatia came to Sigurðsson early in 2012 to put final touches on Strata, but a larger consequence of the visit was the model he and Overington saw in Bedroom Community, a self-sustaining label with sharply defended aesthetics. According to Overington the key conversation happened FALL–WINTER 2013 | 37

sometime last February, with the two snowed in at a bar in Reykjavik. “We stayed there so late arguing over the pros and cons that they had to kick us out after closing time,” Overington wrote in an email.

By this point Bhatia had been based back in New York City for close to two years with his band, which also included the multireedist Jeremy Viner.

“I just found him as a listener,” says Bhatia, recalling a particular recording from a Myspace page of Viner’s that was “everything I wanted to hear in a saxophone player.” There was a studied lyricism and edge that bowed openly to the Yes It Will (top), Strata (below). Art by Michael Cina. dominant saxophonists of the mid-’60s, Wayne Shorter, Sam Rivers, Coltrane.

But Bhatia was just as taken with Viner’s knack for merging real and synthetic elements: a set of skills and priorities that make him a straightforward fit for Bhatia’s quartet, and for Rest Assured overall.

“There’s a commitment to a sort of hyper-realistic view of music,” Bhatia reasons. “We’re interested in things that are really intricately put together, almost like a ship in a bottle.”

With Rest Assured the bottle, and even the proverbial box it ships in are assembled in-house: “It’s difficult—having people manufacture physical product for you can be a real headache, but I’m really lucky I have friends in those circles.”

Still, to realize Yes It Will on his own terms, the guitarist would need to make friends in other circles—namely, those with money to share.

For that most pressing reality Bhatia and Overington took to Kickstarter, as so many indie and jazz musicians do these days. Successfully funded back in 2010, the campaign ensured Bhatia’s album would feature a varied vanguard of names: the acclaimed pianist and trio-leader Vijay Iyer, the International Contemporary Ensemble’s trumpeter Peter Evans and flautist Claire Chase, and lastly, perhaps most fortuitously, Billy Hart, the drummer known as a busy during the 1970s and increasingly as a reputed bandleader thanks to albums released in the last few years.

Bhatia connected with him at Oberlin, where the percussionist has taught since the early 1990s. It was Hart’s inclusion that drew the interest of Michael Cina, the renowned creative director and graphic artist known in musical circles for his work with the label Ghostly International. An admitted fan, Bhatia approached Cina on a whim and found a mutual aficionado.

“He has all these Strata-East records that Billy is on. He was like, ‘I don’t usually do this, but I saw in your email that Billy Hart plays drums on your record... Send me the music.’”

A few months later Cina’s rippled paintings cover both of Bhatia’s records, though Yes It Will is currently the only one that can be held and appreciated for the obsidian-like sheen of its sleeve’s surface. (Strata remains a digital-only release.)

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And it’s the tangible world the enterprising guitarist-composer-label founder is looking to tackle. That means playing out, flexing and honing the effervescent hybridism of both records with Viner, Ritz and Hill here in New York. But for all the music’s rapid-fire flare, it rebuffs plausible categorization at a similar speed. It doesn’t fit anywhere—at least not too neatly—and that is partly by design.

Most often though Bhatia opts for rock clubs, where their noise can roar like a many-headed beast. For now, reconciling his music with classification is a reductive concession the young bandleader is willing to make, so long as it’s putting the songs before fresh ears. That final destination is the one that counts, and where it’s always begun for Bhatia himself.

“Pretty much, I was never interested in being a performer first. I’ve always approached music from the perspective of a listener,” he says. It’s something Bhatia has touched on multiple times, whether recounting how he met the musical players who form his current circle, or describing a first time listening to Jimi Hendrix and lumping recording engineer Eddie Kramer in with the same breath. The marvel, he adds, wasn’t “just the guitar playing. I was really into the songwriting, the production, just the whole package.”

It’s a comprehensive approach Bhatia equates with other producer-artist unions: Teo Macero and Miles Davis, Radiohead and Nigel Godrich. Perhaps someday others will find a suitable extension of that legacy in Bhatia and Overington.

The only other artist currently affiliated with their label, Overington’s own music will likely prove as important in shaping the conversations that surround that of Rafiq Bhatia. “The world hasn’t really heard his music yet,” Bhatia says, “but I’m excited for them to.”

These days however it’s mostly his own music Bhatia’s concerned with making sure the world hears. And considering the aims Bhatia has for it, and himself as an artist, the intent bound to Yes It Will mandates that it lead the way; it’s a manifesto of sound, no doubt. But mooring his first full-length statement to “A Change Is Gonna Come” brings the original song’s unshakable connotations of shifting social tectonics along for the ride.

By doing so Bhatia plants a flag for aspirational young musicians, of the present and future, dissatisfied as he was with a stubborn cultural tapestry and searching for credible exceptions to the norm. It’s an answer to a specific issue of representation he identified some time ago, built to resonate beyond any one group—as encouragement, as motivation. And despite the uphill battle it means today, Bhatia remains staunchly committed to the path.

“I’m just realizing there are compartments everywhere, and with my music I’m trying to do stuff I would like to listen to, so I try not to worry about it,” he reasons, leaning forward slightly. “I can’t really think of anything better I could be doing with my time right now.”

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Call Me Nothing

The Declassified, DIY Identity of

By Brandon Specktor Illustration Francisco Hernandez 40 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

“I want [the gase] to simultaneously sound very subtle and almost acoustic, but one second later it can play Slayer...

I’m definitely getting close.”

T

he instrument-engineering duo of Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez formed Buke & Gase in 2008 out of a problem: How do two people produce the sonic muscle of an entire band, or an entire orchestra, or, better, an entire drum line of Karen O lycanthropes at equinox?

This is, of course, all according to plan.

“I want [the gase] to simultaneously sound very subtle and almost acoustic, but one second later it can play Slayer,” Sanchez said on a speakerphone call with Dyer, one afternoon last October. The day before, they’d spent 13 hours driving from a Four years and three records later (the newest, show in Richmond, VA to their new home base General Dome, due out January 29th), Sanchez and in Hudson, NY, where the two wrote and recorded Dyer have attacked their founding problem into General Dome over nine months in a reclaimed overkill using the same proven Franken-stringed 19th century factory. On the way back, Sanchez weaponry from which their band takes its name, started designing the newest gase mock-up on his though the models and methods of delivery have computer, and its potential was fresh in his mind. been upgraded a little over time.

“I’m trying to balance those high and low worlds in Dyer (“girl Arone”) riffs erratic on the third one instrument, and I’m definitely getting close. iteration of her buke (a six-stringed, semi-blinged It’s a lot closer than a couple years ago.” remix of the baritone ukulele originally crafted to In 2010, Buke & Gase released Riposte, their ease her carpal tunnel), and keeps a troubadour’s genre-confounding full-length debut on National beat with a self-crafted toe-bourine hugged tight brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner’s Brassland around her stompin’ foot.

Records imprint, honed to jagged perfection in Sanchez (“boy Aron”) is designing his ninth or Sanchez’s basement apartment near the maybe tenth prototype gase, abandoning previous waterfront of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The album’s models of the guitar/bass hybrid soldered from unusual sound, coupled with the band’s Volvo parts for a more lightweight, buke-like exhaustively artisanal approach—everything from body with a standard guitar scale neck, capable of their amps to their effects pedals to the home silkplunging to even deeper, doomier lows.

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 41

screened band merch was made by hand by one of the Aron(e)s—made their music difficult for fans and critics to classify.

“That would kind of defeat the purpose,” Dyer added.

“Who wants to be in a box? Nobody wants to put Baby in a corner.”

But now that Dyer and Sanchez have effectively solved the problem of emitting a quartet’s weight in noise from their four hands and feet, they’ve taken up a new puzzle to propel them into new bursts of innovation: How to maintain their unclassifiable uniqueness?

With General Dome, Buke & Gase continue boring holes through the corners of their oblique tunes and evolving voice. Sanchez’s gase rumbles on haunting, subterranean levels. Dyer sings about surveillance and paranoia as desperately as ever, some occasional AutoTune-y assistance amplifying her quivering peaks and foreboding valleys to even eerier extremes.

“We just recently posted a thing on Facebook,” Dyer said. “We had two different blog posts trying to describe our music, and they came up with two COMPLETELY different things.”

One post described Buke & Gase as an “avant-folk duo,” while the other characterized their music as “fiery metal-infused indie rock.”

“Who wants to be in a box?

Nobody wants to put Baby in a corner.”

“And I think we’re neither of those things” Dyer said, “or both, maybe. But we got a whole stream of comments with people trying to describe our music…and it’s apparently quite difficult.”

Maybe most impressively oddball of all: the album art is a 36-character coded alphabet meant to further obfuscate the band’s identity in a time “when governments can freely survey the citizenry’s every action and our lives become increasingly less private,” a press release reads.

It’s a characteristically ambitious stab at evasion—and, even when someone inevitably breaks the code, you can bet your buke it’ll only take a few hours for Dyer and Sanchez to scramble up a new one.

The resulting flood of overwrought (and over-hyphenated) portmanteau abuse included descriptors like “microwave,” “Polyrhythmic Industrofolk,” “If I were to make a completely beautiful and and “post-robo-beard-rock.” B&G threw out a sugperfect instrument, it wouldn’t mean anything,” gestion of their own—“chamber-punk”—but even Sanchez says. “I’d probably be cutting a hole in it that self-imposed label only stuck for a day or two. a week later.”

Asked if they’d come up with a description for their music that they both liked, the answer was an instantaneous, simultaneous “No.” “We don’t want that,” Sanchez said.

42 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

THROUGH THE LOTUS LENS Montreal rapper-producer Jai Nitai Lotus has made an introductory album that caters only to its own standard.

By M. Sean Ryan

On the internet, among other things, you can see Jai Nitai Lotus rapping on various street corners around Montreal.

The video for "Eyes Wide Whut," an abrasive track that went online early last year, is one such offering: the camera follows him, semiguerilla fashion, through even a purposefully awkward scene in which the music cuts and Nitai tries paying for groceries with a jar of change. He's firmly rejected by the bodega clerk.

And this is his hometown.

"It’s a challenge," the rapper reflects from home, just a few hours before heading to a local radio station to discuss his freshly dropped solo debut Something You Feel. "For English hip-hop, there’s no industry [in Montreal].

For French hip-hop, you can get grants, support. You have people investing money in artists. But in English? You’re on your own."

That's perhaps one way of accounting for the no-shelter

urgency pumping through most of Jai Nitai's musical corpus, and especially his self-released first album. The handful of years he's spent growing a name for himself locally—mostly as a producer, furnishing beats to others and collaborating on independent releases—have seen that taut yet soulful balance he calls his own filter steadily into the genome of Montreal's multilingual rap scene.

But with Something You Feel, released November 6th, there's a FALL–WINTER 2013 | 43

more tailored energy at play. It's a brief record, not built around story telling but overflowing instead with isolated meditations on a palette of emotions.

And it vents more than it boasts—that road most-traveled in hip-hop—though, when Nitai does walk that line he's the type to analogize his verbal prowess to a Sufi poet. Which isn’t toying with convention so much as it is a kind of personal homage; Nitai grew up surrounded by overtly spiritual music. His father played professionally in a jazz fusion outfit during the 1970s before abandoning material possessions altogether to convert to Vaishnavism, after which he practiced only devotional music.

44 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

In the end though, a passing mention of Sufis or Qawwali is ultimately more suggestive of Jai Nitai's crate-digger proclivities. In fact, the sources of most samples he lifted from his vinyl collection for Something You Feel remain a mystery to the mastermind himself, lost to his stacks of records.

On one hand that reflects the type of vacuum the creative process can create for Nitai. "My favorite," he says, "is where I feel like I start working on something, and it will be done in, like, 20 minutes, half an hour. And I feel like, 'I don't even remember doing this.'"

There are non-musical pieces that fit into this album's puzzle as well, like a Nina Simone sound-

bite in which she muses about the notion of putting an emotion such as love into words. It bridges the album's opening tracks and Nitai can't recall exactly how he happened upon it, except that it happened at the right time: "These things they are almost given to you."

On the other hand, that haze also underlines how impulsively— intentionally so—Something You Feel came together. At times it’s an ethos trickling through the songs themselves.

"Scrap verses, it's free-form let's get it on," Nitai raps in opener "Mingus Clap." You practically hear his teeth grinding as those words find space atop the swinging blues pattern being chanted

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and sawn out by a small group of chamber strings. It’s among the album’s more telling lines.

For Nitai, recording Something You Feel was an exercise in rawness as he defines it. Most of his verses were freestyle takes, and the same might be said of the beats he programmed. "On some of these tracks, they’re stereo out of my MPC," says the producer, meaning without a multitrack production, "I couldn’t go back in afterwards and manipulate each layer individually."

That on-the-fly methodology went for guests of the record as well. When it came to horn arrangements, Nitai kept the session players in the dark until they were in the studio—not unlike Miles Davis used to, he adds. "You know they're talented enough that you can put them on the spot like that. Usually they give you something great.

"That nervous, unsure energy," Nitai continues, "I like that in music. It creates new dimension."

Like with the record's more emotionally wracked sketches, he explains, which were born from a similar approach. Sarah Linhares, a Montreal-based vocalist who figures prominently on the album, also handled most of the conceptual groundwork with "80's Heart": sharpening his sparse but bruising beat into a pointed articulation of jealousy.

"Love Won't Be," another love-gone-sour tale was similarly executed.

"I didn't write a thing down," he says, allowing that an old relationship with someone suffering drug-addiction accounts for the lyrics, and how they are voiced.

"It has a half-suppressed anger in it, where I'm singing it, but biting down on my teeth."

“NERVOUS, UNSURE ENERGY...

I LIKE THAT IN MUSIC. IT CREATES NEW DIMENSION.” That's palpable, which is the ultimate intention Nitai had for this album. (And what he named it for, if it must be said.)

But the sensations in this song cycle that truly stick have the howitzer-throated rapper reveling, in less combative mode—as in the slow-crackling "Moon & Star," or over the J Dillarecalling limp of "The Barrel," which features a memorable turn by the rapper Ceasrock.

Even in these songs there remains a somewhat sinewy surface, and that separates them from the record's centerpiece.

"Hard Times And Bless" is a soft

JAI NITAI LOTUS

spill of gratitude featuring Georgia Anne Muldrow chiming the hook. It's the sole track in the set that doesn't really bristle: a testament to Muldrow's assured vocal lines, which come layered amongst Nitai's gentle, snaremarshaled production.

"Hard Times and Bless" is also an outlier in that, unlike so much of Something You Feel, it wasn't recorded in the flesh. "The music is always a mood for me," Nitai reflects, and the spectrum here was one he was mostly able to extract in person, within the studio, by virtue of Montreal's buzzing musical hive.

Local talent may provide the bulk of its guest list, but Nitai roundly dismisses any priority on exclusivity. "I don’t look at things in a small way like that," he says, adding, "Montreal plays a role in my music," but not in the kneejerk sense that others might lay claim, which he puts with mock bravado: “Like, 'This is the sound of our city.'

"No, it’s not," he reckons.

"There’s so much going on here, and so many branches." Nitai's conversational momentum slows for a moment, but only that. "I’m not only looking at things within the city; I'm looking past and outside of it, reaching as far as I can."

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 45

Two jazz-reared impresarios wake up in 2012 the center of buzzing communities: Matthew E. White in Virginia, and Adam Schatz in New York. Their voices differ, as do the goals and machinery of their self-start operations. But fueling both, apart from sheer chutzpah, is an unshakable faith—in new, original music, and in the players that orbit them.

By M. Sean Ryan • Illustration Fyza Hashim

U

nless you’ve been living under an iPhone 3 for several years you have by this point already heard (more likely read) that we live in an age of connectivity: ripe with hotspots, and FaceTime; where social networks proliferate like rabbits and Liking something is itself a branded motion.

A sprout in this green plastic garden is live streaming, a phenomenon that already feels inextricably tied to our current embrace of live music. As popular a platform as it’s become for concerts or top-tier venues, the extent to which streaming benefits anything distinctly local is less clear.

Consider this a subtext to the spectacle that took place early last September in Raleigh, North Carolina. On the second evening of the Hopscotch Music Festival, Matthew E. White stood center stage at the Fletcher Opera Theater, bedecked in white, shining like a beacon of ‘70s flair and wizardly poise, flanked by dozens of supporting musicians.

It’s accessible in part thanks to a well-circulated video that captures the climax of the performance,

which concluded like White’s album, Big Inner, with a slow rumble of sleepy, psychedelic funk called “Brazos.” Swelling for minutes in a seesawing refrain—”Jesus Christ is our Lord / Jesus Christ, he is our friend”—in this incarnation it’s bolstered by untold string and horn players, a choir, and, lest it be forgotten in all of this, the audience.

It is rapturous: a gospel-style ascent, even if the lyrics, as White has taken to pointing out during shows, come from the vantage of an escaped slave couple—and the closing refrain, as the album’s liners note, is an echo of Jorge Ben’s tropicália number “Brother”.

But to White the event marks a culmination of years of long-term planning. Recalling the North Carolina festival some weeks later, a bit of wonder still in tact, he posits, “I’m on the stage with 30 other people who are all professional-quality musicians, who are all my friends, who I hang out with.” He then reiterates something that keeps surfacing in his assessment of Richmond and its musicians: “That’s so rare.”

As idyllic as that may sound, it’s harder to doubt WINTER 2013 | 47

“I’m on the stage with 30 other people who are all professional-quality musicians, who are all my friends, who I hang out with… That’s so rare.”

—WHITE

the longer White waxes lyrical about Richmond’s accumulating body of musicians. They traveled “in order to make something that can’t be made very often,” White says, his chuckle sounding warming at the other end of the line. “As a community we have the opportunity to do that over and over again.”

By this point White, 30, stands as a de facto nucleus of Virginia’s Richmond cell. This wasn’t always the case, of course. When he moved to Richmond in 2003 to study jazz arranging at Virginia Commonwealth University, the state of live music in the area appeared stuck, and stale. “The coolest gig in town was playing standards at the Italian restaurant,” he recalls. “That was the cool shit.”

To foster new, original jazz he wasted little time in co-founding Patchwork Collective with musicminded friends Scott Burton and Chris Elford. It was about “creating conversation between Richmond and the outside world,” he reasons, “and creating an audience in Richmond for that kind of music.

“It wasn’t just me doing it,” White adds. Patch48 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

work Collective was a deliberate first step made with a clutch of friends from UVA after graduation.

Foregoing the assumed next step of moving to a city like New York or Chicago or Seattle, they dropped anchor in Richmond instead.

“My two things were: We need to bring music in and let people know this is a place to come; and we have to get music out,” says White. “That’s the way to create an economy for the music community, to let it grow.”

Their investment and Richmond’s gravitational pull deepened with time. White presided over the front lines with his bluesy free-jazz band Fight The Big Bull (conducting, arranging, playing some guitar) and also as a member of the Great White Jenkins, a folk project with his friend Andrew Jenkins—who worked closely with White as a co-writer on much of Big Inner. Other bands formed locally, and touring groups and soloists passing through stopped for regular gigs. Some would stay longer.

Photo credit Sara Padgett

A

dam Schatz sits at a booth inside a Brooklyn restaurant, sipping gingerly from a glass of water. He’s suffering through the parting aftershocks of what he classifies as a “terrible French fry experience.” Freshly recovered, lungs liberated with air, he heaves back into conversation.

He has plenty to cover. There’s the handful of bands to which the mustachioed 25-year-old currently claims membership; which of those groups he’s close to recording with, and which ones he’ll soon join on the road; or the exciting run of rabblerousing anthems he’s been penning lately, mostly for his off-kilter-pop band Landlady; and of course, the thread tying it all together, Search & Restore: Schatz’s non-profit enterprise promoting and exposing live music in New York City.

“I don’t think I need to cut anything away, ever,” is the polymath’s reply to the question begged by all of this activity. Keeping in constant rotation, he reasons, only increase the chances of new listeners

finding their way on to the Adam Schatz musical merry-go-round.

That’s something of a gamble, but it’s at the heart of the curiosity and appetite for discovery he counts on, and has for some time. It also happens to be the lifeblood of his Search & Restore outfit, which, since 2007, has worked to introduce an audience to the young, mostly-jazz skewing groups playing around New York.

2010 gave the organization a successful push in the form of a successful Kickstarter drive. It funded a website, which furcated into an online directory of shows happening nightly as well as a substantial video archive of artists and shows from the following year. What lies ahead at this stage is by no means certain. But, Schatz, never one to idle, has mentally already drawn up the plans—and they start first thing in 2013, even if he’s still on tour.

Despite their concentrated efforts at home neither Schatz nor Matthew E. White ignore the importance of the road. For White’s Patchwork Collective in Richmond it facilitated growing a scene from the bottom, up; whereas for Schatz it’s been a process of creating a filter-like platform for players already bent on New York.

By February of 2011 White deemed his local movement strong enough to transition to the exporting phase of his music-economy model. He launched the label Spacebomb as a vessel to reach beyond Richmond.

“That’s kind of what Spacebomb was about,” he says, adding “And that’s what [Big Inner] has been able to do: get me on the phone with people. I’m talking about my record, about myself and my songs, but below all of that is this unique community situation I’m in. Spacebomb will only continue to do that.”

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 49

The label is communally driven and classically minded. In sound and spirit Spacebomb tips its cap to the more or less forsaken ways of making records White sees worth rekindling. He’s inspired by early reggae studio recordings and label-dedicated house bands like the Funk Brothers or Booker T. and the M.G.’s. Accordingly, Spacebomb has its own house band, which White arranges for, as well as the Spacebomb Choir, and the Spacebomb strings— assigned to arrangers Phil Cook and Trey Pollard, respectively.

That’s a way of highlighting Richmond’s musical stock, but it’s also an economic ploy. White estimates 50 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

Adam Schatz leads Landlady at Glasslands, in Brooklyn. \Photo credit Alec McClure

“there’s an energy to the band that is Landlady, and whoever’s playing in it at anytime understands and believes that.”

—SCHATz Big Inner took a week to record: “It works, financially. You can make a record in three days if you know what you’re doing.

“The Spacebomb model is the idea of making records as a team,” he sums. “That’s what it comes down to; the idea of making some-thing better together as a community than what I could make on my own is incredibly rewarding.”

That kind of cooperation also feeds quite nicely into the plan White had for his first record, which departs from his ensemble work with Fight The Big Bull. “The example I always use is ‘Heard It Through The Grape Vine,’” he notes. “No one plays that song at Open Mic Night with their acoustic guitar, even though that’s, like, one of the greatest songs ever written. That song is married to its production, and the production and the lyrics of the song make this iconic work of art.

It’s not one or the other; it’s both.

“That’s how I think about my songwriting,” he concludes, keen to acknowledge the resources at his disposal—and extend them creative license over his songs. “There is just a level of musicianship, as well as a willingness to work together as a community that is rare. [It’s] a particularly special place in the world right now.”

T

here’s something reassuring about Matthew White. You get the impression that’s a big part of his success as a leader, be it with his own music, his label, or with Patchwork Collective.

Adam Schatz, on the other hand, eddies a raw-nerve energy and force of will that feels apt—or inevitable—for someone in his shoes: a promoter bushwhacking New York jazz into new venues and neighborhoods (for the last few years he’s helped organize Winter Jazzfest and launch the Undead Festival, key extensions of the undertaking bound up in Search & Restore) he’s simultaneously busy as a sideman, and as a singer-songwriter frontman.

He’s the type of musician with both the creative juice and audacity to realize “Beehive State,” Randy Newman’s pithy salute to the Midwest, as a ten-minute swirl of rumbling piano, saxo-drone and looped ambient splotches. It works, mostly because it makes room for Schatz’s gnarled tenor, which sounds as comfortable soaring as it does curled into a quiver.

Out front with Landlady, he leads the congregation with messy glee: cueing collective hits and gesturing for proggy left-field section changes with his entire body if both hands are glued to his Farfisa keyboard.

When not playing or singing Schatz roams— gripping his bandmates by the shoulders as a professional quarterback might (before a play though, not during), or fidgeting with their gear.

“The thing I’ve had to come to terms with, with Landlady,” Schatz reckons, “Is it’s my music. It’s a band, and there’s an energy to the band that is Landlady, and whoever’s playing in it at anytime understands and believes that.”

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 51

Everything You Wanted to Know, But Were Afraid to Ask...

From the nitty-gritty to the nonsensical, a White / Schatz exclusive: What’s your favorite record of 2012?

Schatz: Sweet Heart Sweet Light

by Spiritualized White: Catch a Fire ­— the Jamaican mixes that came out recently, not sure exactly when, but it’s my favorite thing I heard in 2012 3 local bands everyone should know?

Schatz: Sinkane, Delicate Steve, Celestial Shore White: NO BS Brass Band, Glows in the Dark, The Scott Clark 4tet What’s your spirit animal?

Schatz: The Common Loon White: The American Black Bear Elvis, Miles, James Brown: Who would you choose to...

Have a drink with?

Schatz: Miles Davis White: James Brown

Write a song with?

Schatz: James Brown White: Miles Davis Catch you in a trust fall?

Schatz: Elvis White: Elvis

52 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

He goes on, singing the praises of those supporting members and how they bring Landlady’s crackpot psychedelia into being. “Anytime I’m not playing I’m just marveling in that fact. It’s not done on purpose; it’s inevitable. I’m clearly having a really good time.”

Like the ringleader himself, most of the group’s members are active in other outfits. The “extended family,” as Schatz calls it, rotates from one Landlady show to the next as schedules demand. That’s impressive given the technical detail and commitment to crescendo that most of Landlady’s oeuvre call for.

On songs new and old (those come from the frenetic EP Keeping to Yourself) the music can tear off to deep-space exposition, where sonar pings float amid keyboard ripples or expectant slashes of guitar, then plummet back to bright, earthy embrace. As that happens that happens in “Ballad of a Milkman,” the shout-along is a firm chorus, questioning, “What will the neighbors think? What will the neighbors drink?”

With newer songs the refrains can be just as opaque, though they seem to suggest something more affirming. Some spiral around wordless towers of ooh’s and ahh’s, while the still unrecorded “X-Ray Machine” takes orbit in separate trips: “I will serve your family,” and “We are more than carnivores.”

Then there’s the surging standout “Above My Ground,” a snare-marshaled storm of Schatz’s phlegmatic tenor cresting with a repeated “Always” that seems to flip between a promise and a plea.

The singalong component has been a recent development, he says. It began during a few tribute concerts for Levon Helm this summer and ignited shortly afterward during an improvisatory set Schatz played in Puerto Rico. “It was just this ooh-based vocal thing through a blown out microphone,” he notes. “These kids started singing along to it. That never happens.”

For Schatz, allowing the crowd into his Landlady songs isn’t merely a matter of showmanship. “I’ve really been valuing vulnerability as a performer,” he says, “and the ability to let people in as an audience.”

“I’ve really been valuing vulnerability as a performer, and the ability to let people in as an audience.”

—SCHATz Bringing people together has been another day in the life for Adam Schatz since high school, when he started playing and promoting shows around Newton, Massachusetts. But letting the audience into his songs? That’s something new.

W

hile White chalks the circumstances in Richmond up to a dwindling music industry and a lack of “real musician jobs” in even big market cities, in New York City Schatz found himself in the big market city. Yet insofar as jazz in New York can seem sealed off to even those looking for a window in, it’s easy to see where Shatz’s inclusionary intuition took issue.

The task wasn’t so much one of building as it was cutting through the clutter to expose the movement he’d found himself circulating wildly through with a spate of bands, some of which, like Zongo Junction and Father Figures, he remains quite active. (He’ll tour with both through the end of 2012, after recording with the willfully outlandish Philadelphia outfit Man Man.) Search & Restore has provided footing for the webwork of improvisatory styles and DIY shows that Schatz and his circles call their specialty. But it’d be a mistake to call it a self-serving enterprise: Already the web site has accumulated a hefty rolodex of over 200 musicians that rounds together up-and-comers and more familiar names like Colin Stetson, the drummers Marcus Gilmore and Kendrick Scott, or Craig Taborn, all catalogued with their own profile page and videos showcasing them in action and with different ensembles.

Couple that with the recent growth both Undead and Winter Jazzfest have enjoyed—in ticket sales and in number of musicians involved—and things would appear in rather good standing. But already Schatz hints at another round of serious funding for Search & Restore that could happen as early as these first few months of 2013.

That will be difficult, he realizes, considering the added commitment of touring he’s already signed onto during that time. But he hints at a marathon concert event as just one of the ideas he’s developing for Search & Restore, which accepts donations on its site, to widen its reach and further sharpen the lens for the audience. Considering his crosspromotional worldview that only stands to benefit everything else, including Landlady.

For now though Schatz is waiting for an outside force to help the at-least-six-piece “survive and live the life it deserves.”

“I have some label possibilities,” he says, pulling one knee up, almost to his chin, before reconsidering. “Maybe. I never hold my breath.”

He’s seen his share of promise and hard-reality, but those “promoter muscles” of his still appear in good condition.

“We’ll see,” Schatz smiles. “I’m definitely not meeting any less people.”

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 53

THE MILK CARTON KIDS Folk revivalism has burst at the seams, charged to a mainstream fore and trumpeted its own arrival with breathless singsong choruses and faceless bromides—even the occasional trumpet. Hiding in plain sight is the one group that speaks the softest, and hits the hardest.

By M. Sean Ryan x Photo Gavin Thomas The lasting impression created by a Milk Carton Kids performance is one of striking harmony, whether it’s the hushed vulnerability of Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale’s songs or the comic rhythm they strike up in between them.

“THE WRITING PROCESS IS ONE OF THE SMOOTHEST FOR US. EVERYTHING ELSE IS A REAL BOUT, INCLUDING PERFORMING. WE’RE PRODUCTIVELY ANTAGONISTIC, I’LL SAY.”

Joey, the taller, shaggier of the two, is a pillar of dry wit. He tends to parry the wry jibes and jabs of his partner with a deceptively flat demeanor and overlong retorts or explanations.

“We’ve prepared a professional set list for you this evening,” he deadpanned during one show earlier this fall, allowing a healthy silence to pass. “Hence, the suits.”

But for all the levity they may inject on stage there’s an inescapable gravity to the songs.

Prologue, their sole, self-released album from 2011, cleaves to a sense of wonder and regret without ever rising above a fraternal whisper of guitars and harmonies. The Ash & Clay, the pair’s next full-length due late this winter on Anti-, is a refinement of that expressivity that will in all likelihood bring The Milk Carton Kids before a wider audience—thanks in no small part to Gus Van Sant, the Good Will Hunting director who tapped three of those new songs to soundtrack stretches of the Matt Damon-starring film Promised Land.

On a day that finds the two apart for a change, Joey Ryan opens up about grappling with new songs, Hollywood, and the occasional heckler.

54 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

Q+A

THE MILK CARTON KIDS

very good. He disagreed. He thought it was great, and I don’t think we’ve had one single agreement since then.

Why did it strike you as not-so-great sounding?

You and Kenneth are both from LA. Do you recall how you first met?

I had heard about him and I really loved this one song of his called “Memoirs of an Owned Dog.” I introduced myself after the show, and then I forget how it happened but we ran across each other again and he had in the meantime listened to my most recent EP I’d just put out. He invited me over to his place to play.

So I did, and when we sat down… I don’t know man I actually thought it was kind of shitty. I didn’t think we sounded

It’s funny—the reason why I thought it wasn’t working was because of a musical disagreement. The way that we treat time and tempo is incredibly different from one another. I thought because of that that we were just really fighting each other and rubbing against each other in the wrong way, and it sounded terrible, but Kenneth loved it.

He had put up a microphone to record it, and when he played it back there was this tension that was created, but something about it was really working. And I couldn’t tell in the moment, as we were playing it, but when I heard it back I realized it was this wonderful—I feel like discord is the wrong word—but just this uneasiness about it that was kind of exciting. The interplay between what we were doing was the whole magic of it.

If you haven’t agreed on anything since that first recording experience, how exactly do Milk Carton Kids songs come together?

We fight over things and we disagree, but the writing process is one of the smoothest for us. Everything else is a real bout, including performing. We’re productively antagonistic, I’ll say.

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 55

Does that mean Kenneth usually wins?

It depends on what we’re discussing. I think Kenneth has a much better, uncanny ability to listen objectively to a performance we’re delivering as we’re delivering it. I find Kenneth is a much more natural producer in that way, which is incredibly valuable.

But we instituted a policy early on where both of us have veto power over everything.

If one of us has a very strong opinion and the other one doesn’t really care, then whoever cares more gets their way. At the same time, if there’s something that one or the other of us just can’t abide then we invoke the veto card. And that’s with songwriting, that’s with business decisions, that’s with lunch decisions, everything.

Were the songs for Promised Land ones you’d already written for the new album? How did you become involved with Gus Van Sant?

We’d met him many months earlier. He had seen us play. But it’s a surreal situation to find yourself in, where Gus has called you into his studio, and he wants your music to be a big voice in this film—the fact that it’s coming directly from him. Then instead of asking, “What else do you got?” he goes, “Well, why don’t you write something for these scenes, for the end titles and this big montage in the middle of the film?”

They’d been going through and temping in songs from a whole bunch of different artists. We got to sit in with [Gus] and evaluate all of these really famous peoples’ songs. He wasn’t quite happy with any of them and was trying to figure out why. I think through that process we discerned what he was after. It really did happen pretty quickly.

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The scenes that we were looking at are incredibly powerful, and without seeing them in much context with the entire film, both of us—I definitely—had a really strong emotional reaction to it. It may have helped that we still don’t know the plot of the movie. [Gus] told us the emotional crux of what was happening, but we just caught a glimpse. I think because we didn’t have the entire picture of what was going on in the film it made it easy to write it from a personal and honest place—just make it seem like the songs were for us.

And those tracks will be on the new album. Have you been playing them live, or found the recent shows to be any different?

We’ve been on tour so long now it all kind of runs together. More people are coming to the shows. We’ve been playing the same songs for a year now and now we’re starting to play the songs off The Ash & Clay. That keeps things interesting. It’s like we’re discovering them every night in front of the audience.

“WE’RE STARTING TO PLAY SONGS OFF THE ASH & CLAY... IT’S LIKE WE’RE DISCOVERING THEM EVERY NIGHT IN FRONT OF THE AUDIENCE.”

Q+A

Your songs are invariably quiet. Have the two of you ever found yourselves playing to an inhospitable venue, or crowd?

All summer we were on tour opening for bands that are way bigger than we are, and playing for crowds that are much bigger than we’re used to. For the most part we got lucky in that the crowds were up for paying attention to really quiet music because they had no idea what it was. But there were a handful of instances where we really just got trampled by the noise of several thousand people who didn’t care to know who we were.

And the way that you deal with that is by sort of going inside yourself and delivering the best performance you can, and hope that through all that din a good amount of people are listening, which is usually the case.

But I think the most entertaining ones are when we’ll play these little clubs—and our shows can be interactive between songs. We talk to the crowd and if they talk back we engage them. Sometimes we get people who are a little boisterous, probably a little drunk, and feel like they want to be a bigger part of the show than maybe they should be. We’ve gotten pretty good at handling them gracefully but sometimes that can get awkward because they start to ruin the flow of the show. Then you have to figure out a way to make them stop so that everyone can enjoy the show they came to see.

THE MILK CARTON KIDS

Have you ever had to really cut somebody down?

Not recently. The last time this happened one woman kept responding to every single sentence we would say on stage, even ones that didn’t warrant a response. At one point Kenneth said, jokingly, “Oh just ignore her.” And the crowd cheered in such a mean way that the person really felt shot down. After that applause died down, man, there was some tension in the room that we had to recover from. I felt kind of bad for the woman.

But not bad enough to write her a song. Which, tell me, what’s the saddest song ever written?

A lot of ‘em come to mind right off the top of my head. I would’ve had different answers for this at different times. My most recent obsession contains a song that is so heartbreaking: it’s Joe Henry’s, on his record Civilians, it’s called “Civil War.” I don’t know for sure what it’s about, but it feels like some sort of heartbreaking, nostalgic divorce song, and it doesn’t even have to be within the context of a marriage; it just feels like something incredibly deep and meaningful is ending, and nobody wants it to. That’s the one, man.

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 57

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CASPIAN 20 years out of the church youth choir, Caspian guitarist Erin Burke-Moran is still seeking transcendence.

By Brandon Spektor x Photo Tim Bugbee “Caspian’s definitely not a Christian thing or anything like that,” Erin Burke-Moran, one of four guitarists for the Beverly, MA post-rock hydra, recently reassured me over the phone. “But I think that there’s a reverence and spirituality that we apply to our music. It’s sort of a respect we share for performance, and that moment that happens when you’re at concerts…where you all just kind of go somewhere.”

Live at Old South Church, recorded in a Boston cathedral in October 2010, is one of two Caspian releases this year that attempts to capture those holy musical moments. Until its explosive all-hands-on-drumsticks finale, the band’s wordless sermon at Old South conjures a gentler spirit, alternately panning through valleys of slow-swirling keyboard fog and making enlightened ascents to the firmament-scraping, tremolo-picking peaks where jacked angels gargle their sacramental Listerine before the Great Gig in the sky. Play this next to Waking Season—Caspian’s recent third studio LP, not to mention their most dynamic, thoughtful, and just-damnreplayable post-rock apocrypha to date—and you needn’t take Burke-Moran on faith when he says, “I’m just kind of a sucker for rocking out.”

I called up Burke-Moran during a week of respite between Caspian’s North American tour with Minus The Bear (whose Matt Bayles produced Waking Season) and current headlining gigs in Europe, just a few days after the guitarist’s 32nd birthday (“I spent it driving home in the van to South Carolina. It was okay though; I was with my buddies. It’s just another birthday at this point.”) We chatted about his musical life in churches, his reverence for life’s most massive and quiet creations, and how all of this may only be an accidental influence on Caspian’s continued growth into post-rock prophets.

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 59

How did you get into music, Erin?

When I was 12 or something I was really into rock’n’roll, playing air guitar in my living room, and I always wanted to be a guitarist. The opportunity kind of arose and I started playing guitar at church with a youth band, playing contemporary worship tunes and stuff. They just got a bunch of kids together and we played a service. A couple at the church was really into it, and they kept it going and helped us practice with them once or twice a week. They were big influences as far as making music available as something for me to do. A couple years went by and I started wanting to go to college and study music for my undergrad, and it just kept going that way since then.

What did you rock out to as a kid?

[Laughs] I grew up Christian, so it was Christian music. Though one of the non-religious bands I was into was Live.

When I was 15, I started playing guitar and I fell in love with that band. That was probably my first main music influence. I think the first concert I went to though was Plankeye, this kind of alternative rock Christian band.

When you joined Caspian in 2007 did you bring any of that religion to the band?

We all grew up in religious families, but I don’t see that there’s necessarily a religious connotation to our music. I don’t want to speak for everyone in the band, but religion became more of a spirituality thing for me— thinking about where we came from, what we’re doing and what’s going on. The band’s definitely not a Christian thing or anything like that. But I think that there’s a reverence and spirituality that we apply to our music.

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Reverence for a higher power, or something more abstract?

Maybe just abstract—a deeper presence in things? I’m not saying we’re agnostic or anything like that but there’s definitely something….going…on [laughs]. As far as reverence…it’s sort of a respect we share for performance, and that moment that happens when you’re at concerts.

I think I know the moment you’re talking about. That transcendental feeling when music sort of overtakes you?

Exactly. We’re shooting for it, it doesn’t always happen.

When that moment happens, what happens to you?

Time kind of stops somehow, and you just get really absorbed by the moment, you know? Sometimes you’re playing and you’re going through the motions onstage and you’re trying to feel it a little, and sometimes everyone just gets it at the same time, and something really special happens.

The best shows are when everyone in the band is just feeling it, and the crowd is with you, and you all just kind of go somewhere.

That doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s really awesome when it does.

Q+A

Do you have a favorite concert memory where that transcendental feeling set in?

A few years ago we played a festival in France, on my birthday. We were playing under a bridge in the middle of a road.

They’d closed down this road, and they set up underneath an overpass—and it was crazy. There were people out in front of us, people on the bridge looking down, it was a wild show. It was in Metz—this beautiful, beautiful little city in France. I love the cathedrals in Europe, and one of the most amazing cathedrals I’d ever seen was in that town. It’s one of the oldest cathedrals in Europe, actually. Cathedrals in Europe are just amazing, the architecture and everything. We kind of wander into those places when we have a chance.

Does being in old cathedrals like that inspire you?

Yeah, in some ways. When I was in college I went to Europe a couple times with the school choir and sang in a bunch of different cathedrals, mostly in Germany and a couple other places. We just don’t really have structures like that here. I can totally understand why people in the past have been overwhelmed by those sorts of places and attributed them so much to this powerful God. There really is sort of a quiet that comes over you when you venture into a cathedral like that. It’s the same thing as like, when I went to Yosemite in California and I got to see some of those giant trees.

Have you ever seen a sequoia in California?

CASPIAN

“I CAN TOTALLY UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE IN THE PAST HAVE BEEN OVERWHELMED

BY THOSE SORTS OF PLACES...

ANYTHING JUST HUGE AND MAGNIFICENT LIKE THAT, THERE’S SOMETHING THAT’S SORT OF QUIET ABOUT IT, TOO.” Not in person.

Man. There’s this one tree that was like 3,000 years old and 26-feet across… it’s the most massive thing I’ve ever seen in my life, it’s crazy. Anything just huge and magnificent like that, there’s something that’s sort of quiet about it, too.

Do you try to recreate that sort of balance between massive and quiet powers when you’re building songs for Caspian?

I guess so… I kind of wonder how much you try to do stuff and how much it just sort of happens, you know? I think it’s just the kind of people we are. We just kind of gravitate toward that sort of thing in our music.

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 61

SWANS From the intimate roster of his own Young God Records to the inextinguishable clamor of Swans, mastermind Michael Gira can’t keep from melting methodology and expectations. Not that he cares what anyone else thinks...

By Alyssa Noel x Photo Tim Bugbee Swans frontman Michael Gira did not expect to be rounding anyone’s Best Albums of 2012 list.

That his band’s latest record, The Seer (Young God), their second since reuniting after a nearly 15-year hiatus, has received high praise for its collection of darkly cinematic, noise-rock pieces (“I don’t know if you would call them songs,” Gira says. “They developed organically and I made a conscious decision not to edit them down…”) isn’t much of a concern.

“It’s very good of course to have large audiences, to see people receiving something of value from the work,” he says, recently over Skype one morning from his home in upstate New York. “Really, all you can do is focus on the work itself and let things happen as they may. I’m no stranger to the indignities of obscurity. It’s fine, either way.”

Gira also spoke about the push and pull that yielded The Seer’s grinding Zen, bringing Karen O into the mix, as well as why Swans’ sprawling catharsis will never be de rigueur— and why it will always keep us (at least) marginally uncomfortable.

You’ve said that The Seer was 30 years in the making. What exactly did it take to get to this point?

I mean, my breathing right now is the result of 58 years of living. I sort of realized after the fact that pretty much all the ways of making sound that I’d been involved in were in this record.

There are still lots of different atmospheres and approaches to sounds and lots of dynamics. I should say, of course, the sound is made viable and benefited greatly by all the musicians I work with. So it’s not just me.

What did you envision when you set out to make this record? It’s incredibly dense and it has this epic feel to it. Is that what you had in mind, or is that just what unfolded?

Both. Being rather hapless in many ways, I grapple with the material at hand and experiment and fail and try again and eventually things accrue and I force it into some kind of shape. Many of the songs on the record, four of them to be specific, were developed live. As is our habit these days they kind of extend live and morph and change in our performance, so the basic structure of those part songs were determined in the live situation then I orchestrated them and augmented them further in the studio.

Have you always been able to work that way or has that come with experience?

Experience. I’ve never done that specifically with a band before. It’s gratifying, and a bit risky of course. We’re doing that now with three new songs that aren’t recorded yet. We’re playing them on tour and they’re gradually taking shape and getting better as they go. It’s

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Q+A

SWANS

“IT’S NICE TO FEEL LIKE THERE’S NO GROUND UNDER YOUR FEET WHEN YOU’RE PLAYING... YOU HAVE TO FIGHT FOR A PLACE.”

nice to feel like there’s no ground under your feet when you’re playing, so you have to fight for a place. I think it’s good to be uncomfortable.

or something. I was at a bit of a loss.

Our bass player Chris Pravdica is friends with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and suggested I listened to Karen O’s solo work, and I did.

I found her voice to be very touching and

How did the collaborations on the album come about?

trenchant. It almost has a maternal aspect,

I had written this song, “Song for a Warrior,” which is a love letter to my six-year-old daughter. I was singing it and sounded like some ancient, grizzled cowboy

to her pop music where she’s a bit ferocious,

like a mother singing to a child, as opposed I suppose. I thought it was kind of warm and touching, so I asked her to sing [‘Warrior’] and she did. It worked well.

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 63

Ben Frost: I think he’s a great electronic music composer, so I asked him to do some things. [Former Swans member] Jarboe sings on the record. That’s a watershed event, I suppose. Ran into her while we were on tour in Atlanta, got along O.K., and started a conversation with her online. When the time came for some extended drone vocals I thought her voice would be perfect.

I read something where you were talking about seeing younger faces in the crowd and also a growing female audience. What do you attribute that to?

I think the people who naturally have an inclination towards the sound we’re making are finding it probably through the internet. It’s not fashionable.

It never has been and hopefully it never will be, but it seems it’s reaching its audience. It’s certainly never going to be a pop-sized audience. But it’s good people have discovered it; it makes it more enthralling to play for people that actually want what we’re doing.

Why do you hope it will never be fashionable?

Because then you get into a kind of falsity, and people then expect you to be a certain thing, a certain way. I always [want] to change the sound and challenge ourselves and, by extension, the audience. We’ve never been part of a scene really or accepted in any way. I think that’s good because it keeps you on your toes and you have to make the work for its inherent value—not for any other reasons.

THE HASH CENTRALIA (Thrill Jockey) Mountains

This time last year Koen Holtkamp wrote to us about his favorite record from 2011.

We’d selected Air Museum by Mountains (Holtkamp’s musical partnership with Brendon Anderegg) for this magazine’s year-end favorites list, which in turn surveyed the artists about the album that had defined their year and why. Holtkamp picked The Voice Rolling by Mind Over Mirrors, a post-electric meditation on the harmonium’s trance-inducing capabilities, released on the small Oklahoma-based electronic label Digitalis.

Illustration Na Kim 64 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

The HASH

It made sense: The droning elasticity, the recom-

ALBUM REVIEWS

tinkling keyboards: It takes minutes to establish

binant interest in acoustic vs. electric sounds, the

a heartbeat before being ruptured altogether by

patience of it all. Every adjective in Holtkamp’s

slashes of electric guitar that chime a resplendent,

explanation, it seemed to me then and still, could

droning doom-metal power chord.

readily apply to the impressionistic, not-quite-post-

That’s about as gestural a moment as you could

rock mantle that Mountains have carved in earnest

hope for in a Mountains record. (This is instrumental,

since moving to Brooklyn in 2008.

mostly rhythmless music after all.) So it’s not

“Controls set either straight for the sun or perhaps

surprising that “Liana,” as well as its setup, the

your mind’s eye. Oh wait…” That’s how Holtkamp

vertiginous, 20-minute “Propeller,” are in fact live

concluded, and why his remarks stuck with me—maybe

recordings, taken from a set the band played in

more than any response I received—probably because

Europe in 2011 and dressed in minimal post-production.

it winks in a way I can’t grasp. Or so I tell myself.

Now, fortunately, there is Centralia to set

But that’s not to say the studio-bred songs, which are the majority, don’t summon up the same sense of

my mind’s eye at ease.

a human hand guiding

Mountains’ third release

these distended,

with Thrill Jockey (avail-

surging tracks. Unlike

able January 22nd), it

Air Museum the

is invariably the duo’s

concern of Anderegg

most ambitious ambient

and Holtkamp here is

symphony, at once brilliantly

merging rather than

restrained in its slow-drip

transfiguring sounds.

crescendoes and totally

So there’s “Circular C,”

uninhibited in its release.

building on an

Compositional farsight-

expectant piano-

edness is nothing new to

guitar motif, accruing

Anderegg and Holtkamp.

ineffable layers,

Their last few records have

droning with deeper

been governed by a

intensity as it peals

conceptual baseline atop

forward; or “Sand,”

which songs were assembled. “Choral,” from 2009,

where synths ebb and flow before ceding to an

was guitar-based and rooted to fidelity, a set of songs

elegiac coda where bowed cellos groan with a

played and recorded live with a modicum of post-

near-human resonance.

production; Air Museum jettisoned that template

The sonic boundaries may be more cleanly

for analog synths and a gently fastidious rewiring of

stitched, but they’ve been masterfully interlaid

acoustic timbres via patches, pedals and the like.

and arranged. As they congeal on Centralia it

Centralia bears the residue of both, though that

would seem Mountains have struck a balance of

never feels like a reconciliation. The guitars return,

inevitability and surprise. This album’s landmarks

sometimes as texture, other times for dramatic

and eruptions have a way of sneaking up on you,

effect, as in “Liana,” an effervescent cloud of

even after repeated listens.

FALL–WINTER 2013 | 65

That could be why Centralia feels like their best

could pass for an early Beirut song. Cremation

record so far, and like physical space to visit and

Ground’s denouement, “The River Ideath,” is a

wander—whether aimlessly or in total anticipa-

fifteen-minute-long apocalypse missive that sounds

tion. Having been there, I feel at peace leaving the

more like a psychological thriller soundtrack than a

meaning of Koen Holtkamp’s Best Album comments

piece that should follow such stirring harmonies and

an unsolved mystery. —M. Sean Ryan

thoughtful composition.

For better or for worse this is an EP that works

CREMATION GROUND (Self-Released) Norvaiza

through its moods—that wallows in agony, that weathers the storm of its own making. It is cathartic without forsaking its artfulness, which is what makes it the kind of record you might listen to many

The title track of Cremation Ground creeps open like

times, and not just the inflexible side experiment of

a burglar tip-toeing around a palace with a backpack

someone with enough musical know-how to make a

full of emeralds. Strings are plucked with paranoid

few mandolin-driven pop songs sound avant.

care, vocals peregrinate slowly and the morbid suspense lingers until Todd Macdonald, the maestro behind Norvaiza, lightens the mood with a surge of chimerical harmony alongside accompanying singer Sarah Albu. The song, much like this entire EP, is ominous and delicate—meticulously so—with haunting moments just disconcerting enough to be intriguing.

Cremation Ground marks the debut output for Norvaiza, but multi-instrumentalist Macdonald has been a certifiable Montréal appurtenance for years.

A founding member of the now defunct chamberpop group The Winks, he’s played and recorded with Secret Mommy, Gutstrings and Elastic Fountains, among others. Norvaiza, however, is an effort all his own, ruled by the brooding vulnerability of Macdonald’s echoing baritone coupled with sharp mandolin, intimate lyrics and soft, sonic subtleties.

As it manifests in this set, that cathedral-sized ambition offers a glimpse of the potential figures Norvaiza may someday be molded into. And for now, any one of them is a solid beginning. “Shadow’s Path” improbably pulls off a sensitive-Lou Reedsociopath vibe while “Ice Cube in a Plastic Cup,” with its grandiose mandolin upswing and sullen strumming 66 | HASHMAGAZINE.COM

With Cremation Ground, Norvaiza succeeds in making something mystical. —Carly Lewis

The HASH

ALBUM REVIEWS

of producers stabled at Stones Throw (which, as of this record, includes Riggins). That’s something of a help in narrowing a destination for Alone Together to drop its pin on the style map. But it’s of fleeting use. As the wizard behind the curtain, Riggins construes a deliberate pastiche: above all a percussive one that limps and lilts with style and exudes an august feel for rhythm, even if its grooves aren’t exactly probed as grounds for exposition.

Brevity and cohesion keep this album in perpetual motion. (Just one song lasts beyond three

ALONE TOGETHER (Stones Throw)

minutes.) They also make it hard to take in anything

Karriem Riggins

smaller than chunks. To an extent, that uncompromising momentum means some of the most dazzling moments here are the 15-30 second upheavals not

There’s an unmistakable air of arrival streaming

even designated with a title—like ”I Need Love,”

through Alone Together. Karriem Riggins introduces

which fades after 40 seconds and returns with a

himself several times, though always indirectly: a bit

quixotic bout of vaguely Eastern trills; it’s a bridge

of admiring radio hosts sampled here, some live

that pleads to be more.

recordings of emcees announcing him to an audience there.

There’s a near pathologic avoidance of exposition that can leave some of the most immediately thrilling

And that seems appropriate. A first-call drummer

grooves feeling too short, or plain underdeveloped.

for leaders in both jazz and hip-hop (where he’s also

“K-Riffins,” a crystalline vamp of guitar filigree that

produced for Slum Village and Erykah Badu) for at

subsumes “I Need Love,” starts airborne but never

least a dozen years, Riggins is a stalwart. But he’s

really swoops or ascends from there.

only just making a mark in this capacity.

A similar thing could be said for a handful of these

And what capacity is that, exactly? One could ask

songs, but because Riggins’ notion of the long-play

this at any point in this sprawling confection. Its 34

(or, on the granular level, the countless 45s, tapes

bite-sized instrumentals glaze into one another like

and in-betweens scrawled into this album’s DNA) is

half-remembered sketches of glitch, lounge grooves

so evidently a studied one, it’s a knowing pace that

and Dilla-tossed hip-hop: cut short of completion and

Alone Together strikes, that keeps it from stalling–

reassembled, Burroughs-like, into a vivid tapestry.

and its heartbeat singular enough to make it worth

In places it’s cut from the same cloth spun by

the ride. —MSR

dusty beat abstractionists like Madlib or any number FALL–WINTER 2013 | 67

BEAT GOES ON MaG freedom. (Self-Released)

There’s usually a manifesto sitting somewhere inside the dense, internal rhyme schemes architected by Bronx rapper MaG on freedom., his first LP since 2009 (expected

VANGUARD

early in 2013). More than ever, the productions finds him spreading out: again finding

José James

plenty of fertile soil in mid-’90s East Coast

No Beginning No End (Blue Note)

hip-hop but also lassoing funk-suffused shards of early 1970s post-bop, Gil Evanslike orchestrations, even some of the sweaty

José James is a neo-soul savvy crooner

synth paranoia from Kanye’s short but

who’s been stressing that connection of

influential Heartbreaks period. “beat goes

late. But unlike that school of vocalists he

on,” while not as brightly hued or triumphant

doesn’t bother with sweaty falsetto olympics,

as other moments (see “paper airplanes” or

or need to. So even as his first Blue Note

“freedom”), is one of the most compatible

release—due January 22nd—harbors furtive

moments on this album—one that involves

funk and Soulquarian vibes, James sticks to

several beat manufacturers. Here, the soft but

the resonant depths of his baritone and a

insistent nudge supplied by Atlanta producer

breathier intuition. Conceived and recorded

Kuddie Fresh pairs ably with MaG’s ponderous

independent of a label, mostly with bassist-

approach; it keeps him pliable and playful,

producer Pino Palladino, this record is his

even as he cross-examines disenfranchised

self-aware step into post-jazz territory. As

youth: “You can come from them slums where

such, it casts a spotlight on José James The

the bums use cans for their heat / Get deep,”

Songwriter. And considering the bravura

he raps, decelerating into droll wordplay with

of friends who show up on this record, it’s

evident relish, “Don’t dumb it down / I done

understandable that lyrics often take a back

it now, did it how? / Style: Wild.”

seat to the slick arrangements—or fitting that one this album’s best songs, “Vanguard,” isn’t titled after the existential questions from its verses, but for the Village Vanguard, where Robert Glasper (who plays on this and another track) riffed its rippling, R&B-ready chords during an impromptu writing session.

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The HASH

MAKIN’ TIME Sinkane Mars (DFA)

TRACK REVIEWS

Lustman has built a small but sturdy portfolio of remixes and deep house singles over the last two years. This full-length debut is his coming out party, a rush of crisp percussion and rubbery incantations where Lustman

Ahmed Gallab outlines an idiosyncratic theory of groove with Mars, the appropriately dance-oriented debut on DFA by his outfit Sinkane. They’re trafficking in sounds of the past, which means the music comes tempered not only by Gallab’s whispery urge as a singer and bandleader, but also by the dated colors and quirks of the tools he favors. And for good reason: a brush with autotune would likely have cast some of these songs with too treacly a finish. So instead it’s a talk box warping Gallab’s singing with just the right amount of languor, in the dub funk of “Lady C’mon,” or in “Makin’ Time,” which gallops as lushly as anything here. It’s polyrhythmic but loose, built to carry a specific amount of weight—even if the load is changing from

finds new ways to turn the pointed, blunt elements he favors into seamless, sustained daydreams. On “She Sleeps” the task is shouldered more by the wispy falsetto of Friendly Fires frontman Ed Macfarlane.

“Straight & Arrow,” follows that exhale by similarly staggering and overlapping elements, though their colors are more vivid and boundaries drawn clearer. Lustman interlays vocals with surgical precision: individuating a single phrase by range, from the guttural to glottal-scraping cries, and rearranging them into a forward somersault that never repeats itself. It’s more than a bow to British techno maven Four Tet—which may be why he opted to remix “Straight & Arrow” for its recent release as a single.

a rightly smoldering George Lewis Jr. guitar solo to the outlandish synths that cement later on, under Gallab’s reinvigorated declamation “I go cruisinngggg.” Indeed.

STRAIGHT & ARROW FaltyDL Hardcourage (Ninja Tune)

On Twitter Drew Lustman cuts a stoic figure.

Compared to most, musicians especially, he’s succinct, straight to the point. That only seems more appropriate the longer one spends with Hardcourage, his forthcoming full-length, out January 22nd. As FaltdyDL, FALL–WINTER 2013 | 69

FROGS IN A WELL Kidkanevil & Daisuke Tanabe Kidsuke (Project Mooncircle/HHV.DE)

Daisuke Tanabe and Kidkanevil are two electronic producers separated by geography but bound nevertheless by a mutual affinity for crater-like rhythmic space and

THE VAN THAT GOT AWAY (Self-Released) Zongo Junction

handcrafted sounds to frame them. Kidsuke, their first collaborative outing, feels rooted to those principles even as it has the pair incorporating unfamiliar tools. Drawing

The brainchild of percussionist-leader Charlie Ferguson, this Brooklyn-based afrobeat enclave boasts a broad rhythm section and an equally stacked line of horns—and nothing else. Their 2010 record Thieves made an exception for the longtime Fela Kuti affiliate Leon Kaleta Ligan-Majek. His vocal acrobatics may be absent from this titanic yet limber single the band has posted for free download on its site, but not for any lack of the ferocity and spryness (see “Madoff Made Off”) flowing within that album. “The Van That Got Away,” the first tease of Zongo Junction’s follow-up, expected sometime in 2013, is forthright about its deep-pocket commitment to groove. There’s also a blush of novelty about the voices in this frenzy: the electronic drums stamping its opening bars, the bottomless bank of keyboards coursing through its spacey, brooding middle.

It’s suggestive of a changing conversation within this band, though their agreement about élan has never sounded stronger.

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heavily from Kidkanevil’s own collection of children’s toys and instruments—music boxes and thin chimes, especially—they aim for an insular, miniaturized ecosystem and nail it. Their footnote-sized scrawl can make for overly meticulous passages, but this album’s best moments, like “Frogs In A Well,” shimmer and crumble with affection and warmth. Couched in such nostalgic inertia, Kidsuke feels like only one permutation of this pair’s compatibility, from a field of plenty.

The HASH

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BLACK SUPER HERO THEME SONG ERIMAJ Conflict Of A Man (Don’t Cry)

Not unlike the releases by his peers and occasional bandmates this year, the drummer Jamire Williams found a kind of instant gratification when Conflict Of A

ZERO SUM Alec Gross The Sorry Sorry Sun EP (Handsome Lady)

Man, the first release by his group ERIMAJ, dominated digital charts outright after its release early this fall. Records by Robert Glasper and Christian Scott may have fared even better outside of iTunes jazz charts in

Speaking of the handmade, there’s no other dogma guiding Handsome Lady, the acoustic folk label begun in part by Alec Gross, whom we profiled in the fall of 2011. For roughly a year and beginning in earnest this summer it has gathered handfuls of singer-songwriters to cut filmed performances shot in-house and on the cheap, all of them recorded to analog tape—something each video takes care to mention right away. It’s tempting to consider that proviso as more to do with aesthetics than fidelity; most of the songs are new but channeled in an old, deliberately familiar folk idiom. As it turns out, being consistently well recorded ensures the exceptional performances are impossible to miss. Several of those come from the silvery vocalist Barnaby Bright, others from Alec Gross, naturally. “Zero Sum,” the sad sack opener to his latest release, laments a parasitic romance. That’s prime territory for Gross’ limpid cry, and the

2012, but those were disseminated via the traditional label system (and in physical formats­, whereas 45-singles are all that’s been revealed or planned for this album).

ERIMAJ meanwhile kept to its own channels, releasing this lush, loose song cycle through its website in August. It rarely evokes the taut, boppish intensity of Scott’s album, on which Williams can also be heard, but even more of an achievement is the compositional narrative agreed upon here by Williams and trombonist Corey King, who share directorial roles within this band. It makes for a collegial arrangement that’s never centered around one player—at least not for too long. On “Black Super Hero Theme Song” center stage is shared all around, and organically so. With his closing solo Williams flips the tempo entirely for a feel evocative of J Dilla—a technical feat, of course, but also a deflection in its own way.

stripped-acoustic treatment makes plain which lyrics he feels deserve a particularly burred edge.

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JESUS, HE’S ALRIGHT! Team Spirit Team Spirit (Self-Released)

Led by Ayad Al Adhamy, these punchy rock ironists from Brooklyn (where else?) recently signed to Vice Records (who else?). Their self-titled EP may prove a rawer recording than the updated version they’ll release this year through that label, but that’s probably for the better. The hand-in-glove guitars

COMPUTER CLUB

wheedling through “Teenage Love” and especially “Jesus, He’s Alright!” aren’t as

Herrmutt Lobby

preening as the more polished, Thin Lizzy

Haters Gonna Hate (Eat Concrete)

model their contour recalls. And that keeps the onus on songcraft, which, so far for this quartet has shown Adhamy to be an intuitive

This four-song EP by Brussels-based Herrmutt

conduit of angst, neediness, and no-future

Lobby bears the flag of futuristic funk flown

nihilism. At the heart of these three-minute

most visibly these days by Flying Lotus.

sprints is a garage pop flair that’s been more

But such a comparison feels misplaced; the

endemic to the West Coast lately, thanks to

sonics here are determinedly more rigid.

Thee Oh Sees, FIDLAR and Ty Segall, when he

They nod, among other things, to rugged old

feels like it.

school rap, zapping video game sonics, and sun-warped cassettes lifted from a Boards of Canada yard sale. And yet there’s lightness about this peripatetic set. “Computer Club” exudes electro-blip vibes, swooping through a hazy maze of dub drum-fills and liquidbass thud. Herrmutt Lobby, a collective of programmers active for ten years now, are known outside their own recordings for the tactile patches they design and engineer and sell. With this EP (due January 14th), you have the sense there’s a similar degree of heightened awareness within the group as well.

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The HASH

(“She’s caught up in the magic of the camera glare... She’s everywhere”). Davey could be singing about herself, but her diffidence is so well studied it’s contagious—you don’t even care to question.

THE CHESTER ROAD Land Observations Roman Roads IV - XI (Mute)

WHATEVER’S CLEVER Jack Davey Lo-F! D’Lux (ILLA V 8 R)

With so many instrumental and electronic programmers hung up on evoking aural landscapes, the British guitarist-composer James Brooks went straight to the source. His work as Land Observations is a minimalist’s

She just had to get these songs out of her

caravan: traveling the extant roads of the

head. It’s a familiar claim, and how the

ancient Roman Republic through England and

story goes with Jack Davey, known around

mapping them with a guitar and pencil. (His

LA for guest spots in a slinkier R&B vein, as

ornately cross-hatched drawings contained

J*Davey (also comprised of Brook D’Leau.)

by the album’s booklet art form their own of

This decidedly garage rock affair was

network of abstraction, too.) This is Brooks’

conceived in pieces, and released likewise:

first undertaking since the disbanding of his

the Side A EP (recorded bedroom-style, with

post-rock trio Appliance. And he’s still after

her newborn sleeping nearby, she claims)

something revelatory, but chasing it instead

in October, followed a month later by the

by way of fastidious latticework, as in

meatier, sharper Side B. Despite the larkish

“Portway,” a pointillistic sketch of twinkling

aura about this project, Davey wields her

guitar harmonics. “The Chester Road”

recently learned guitar chords with effective

forms a kind of cornerstone in the album’s

swagger. Vocally, she veers from Iggy Pop

steady arch; it’s a soft opus centered on

snarl (“Ride On”) to untempered prettiness

one blinking chord, conflating the chilly

(“In The Wind”), evoking both the pop

atmosphere of compatriots the XX with the

songcraft of Frankie Rose and the solitude of

sometimes brittle, warren-like productions by

Cate Le Bon’s recent recordings. And unlike

Brooks’ label-mate Apparat.

the washed out murmuring of so many Brooklyn bands you can understand what Davey’s singing, which, during “Whatever’s Clever” amounts to a venomous third-party account of ignorance, entitlement, and probably fame

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