Shuffle No. 11

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Dan Melchior + Floating action + Mountain Goats + Songs of Water + Whatever Brains

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Carolinas’ Independent Music Source

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Yar dwor k Shouts it Out!

Toro Y Moi Gets Funky Chaz Bundick jazzes up chillwave

Charlotte sextet finds their voice on raucous debut

A Vision of Paradise N.C. label reissues David Lee soul gems

+ Editors’ Picks + Concert Calendar + Andrew Weathers/CJ Boyd + Hammer No More the Fingers

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G N I T N E S E PR F O T S E B THE UTH THE SO

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FEATURING THE MUSIC OF

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04 Concert calendar 06 Songs of Water 07 Mountain Goats 08 Whatever Brains 09 Dan Melchior 12 Toro Y Moi 20 David Lee/Paradise of Bachelors 22 Hammer NO More the Fingers 24 Obstructions 27 Now Hear This: Floating Action 28 Editors’ Picks 30 Venue News Publisher Brian Cullinan

Illustrator Taylor Williams

Editor In Chief John Schacht

Sales Max Benbassat Bryan Dowling James Wallace

Assistant Editor Bryan Reed Design Gurus Taylor Smith Patrick Willett Photo Editor Enid Valu

Website Mike King Contributing Writers Grayson Currin Corbie Hill

Brian Howe Mark Kemp Topher Manilla Ryan Snyder Contributing Photographers Bryan Reed Patrick Willett

All content © 2011 Shuffle Magazine Cover photo: Enid Valu This page: Enid Valu

Shuffle Magazine P.O. Box 1777 Charlotte, N.C. 28224 shufflemag.com 704.837.2024

Issue #11 Shuffle magazine is not responsible for your music tastes, just our own.

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Concert Calendar

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16 Lucinda Williams at The Orange Peel 17 Murs at Local 506 18 Southern Culture On The Skids with Mad

Tea Party at Grey Eagle 19 Polvo at Kings Barcade 19 Steve Reich & Kronos Quartet at Page Auditorium 19 The Adicts at Tremont Music Hall 19 Overmountain Men at Snug Harbor 19 Town Mountain CD release party at Grey Eagle 20 Agalloch with Worm Ouroboros at Kings Barcade 21 DeVotchKa at The Orange Peel 22 Trentemøller at The Orange Peel 23 Moon Duo at Kings Barcade 23 Wild Flag with Grass Widow at Grey Eagle 24 The Funeral Pyre with The Secret and Young And In The Way at The Milestone 25 Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings at Music Farm 25 Årabrot with Wizard Rifle at Kings Barcade 25 The Fleshtones at Snug Harbor 25 Weedeater with Zoroaster at Ground Zero 26 Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise Tour at Kings Barcade 26 The Fleshtones at Local 506 27 Jessica Lea Mayfield with Daniel Martin Moore at Grey Eagle 27 Sebadoh at Cat’s Cradle 27 J Roddy Walston and the Business at Kings Barcade 28 The Cave Singers with Lia Ices at Kings Barcade 28 Mike Watt + The Missingmen at Local 506 28 Tombs with Wormrot at The Milestone 28 The Cave Singers with Lia Ices at Grey Eagle

4 Calendar shuffle eleven

APRIL 1 Hammer No More The Fingers album

release party at Motorco 1 The Pains of Being Pure At Heart at Cat’s Cradle 2 The Black Angels at Grey Eagle 2 Silber Records 15-Year Anniversary Showcase at Nightlight 3 Eugene Chadbourne with Tatsuya Nakatani at Nightlight 3 Explosions in the Sky with the Octopus Project at Amos’ Southend 3 Warpaint with PVT at Kings Barcade 4 Bare Wires at Nightlight 6 Destroyer with The War on Drugs and Surf City at Grey Eagle 6 Black Lips with Vivian Girls at Cat’s Cradle 7 Destroyer with The War On Drugs at Cat’s Cradle 8 The Mountain Goats with Megafaun at Cat’s Cradle 8 Mount Kimbie at Grey Eagle 9 The Skull Defects + Daniel Higgs (of Lungfish) with In The Year Of The Pig at Nightlight 9 The Avett Brothers at Bojangles’ Coliseum 9 J Masics with Kurt Vile & The Violators at Grey Eagle 9 Rotting Christ at Volume 11 Tavern 10 The Mountain Goats with Megafaun at Grey Eagle 10 J Masics with Kurt Vile & The Violators at Cat’s Cradle 10 Rotting Christ at Tremont Music Hall 12 Wanda Jackson at Local 506 13 The Greenhornes with Pinche Gringo at Kings Barcade 14 Taj Mahal Trio at The Orange Peel 14 Old 97s with Teddy Thompson at Visulite Theater 15 Mount Moriah album release party at Cat’s Cradle

15 Toro Y Moi at Local 506 16 Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting

Paraiso UFO at Local 506

17 Hunx & His Punx with Shannon & The

Clams at The Milestone

18 Hunx & His Punx with Shannon & The

Clams at Duke Coffeehouse

18 British Sea Power with A Classic Education

at Cat’s Cradle

23 Yacht at Cat’s Cradle 23 LAKE at Duke Coffeehouse 26 The Fresh & Onlys with Crocodiles at

Kings Barcade

26 Iron & Wine with the Low Anthem at Amos’

Southend

29 Peter Bjorn & John at Cat’s Cradle

MAY

2 Pinback at Cat’s Cradle 3 Interpol with School of Seven Bells at The

4 Interpol with School of Seven Bells at Cat’s

4 Young Widows, My Disco, and Yardwork at

4 Sleigh Bells with CSS at the Orange Peel 7 The Twilight Singers with Margo & the

Fillmore Cradle

The Milestone

Nuclear So and So’s at Cat’s Cradle

11 Coliseum, Gods & Queens, Young and

in the Way and Pig Mountain at The Milestone 12 Ted Leo (solo) with Pujol at Local 506 17 The Flaming Lips at The Fillmore 21 Gruff Rhys with NIWL at Local 506

Greg Cartwright of Reigning Sound at Shuffle Issue #10 party at Visulite Theater, Charlotte. Photo by Patrick Willett

sh uffle Publisher's Note and detrimental effect on live and outdoor music.

Changes proposed include new and vastly overreaching prohibitions against live music and the businesses that support them. If passed, this new ordinance could be devastating to the enjoyment of live music. “Save Charlotte Music” is the group that’s been formed to help fight this. If you live in Charlotte and care about live music, we need your support. We’ll soon be announcing the lineup for our Save Charlotte Music benefit concert taking place at The Neighborhood Theatre on April 15. You can find out more by visiting the Shuffle website.

Finally, please don’t forget Record Store Day on April 16. As we’re all aware, independent record stores are cornerstones of the local music community. The Carolinas are fortunate to have a wealth of great independent record stores that will be hosting special events, giveaways, and offering special deals on this date. If you care as much as we do about supporting these folks, please mark that date on your calendar. For a list of participating Carolinas record store, drop by our website.

Thanks again for reading Shuffle.

Brian Cullinan Publisher

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ssue No. 11 marks the beginning of significant growth for Shuffle. Through our expanded distribution into the Greensboro/ Triad area, Greenville/Spartanburg, and via gift bag-distribution throughout the Carolinas on National Record Store Day, many of you may be reading us for the first time. Thanks! Shuffle is a quarterly music magazine and website covering the grassroots/independent music scene in the Carolinas and highlighting the best music this region produces. We also hope to serve the music community by communicating issues and ideas important to both musicians and fans of music.

Thanks for picking us up and make sure to check out our website for much more.

We also wanted to let our readers know about two important issues involving local ordinances that could have adverse effects on the way we enjoy music. In Columbia, the group “Bars, Bar Staff, and Customers against a 2 A.M. closing time” has been fighting to ensure that, among other businesses, music venues that derive income from their bar business won’t be faced with changes in closing times that would have an adverse effect on their bottom lines. If you’re a reader in Columbia, please take a moment to support these folks by stopping by their Facebook page.

In Charlotte, a proposed re-write of the citywide noise ordinance threatens to have an immediate

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5 pointscolumbia sc shopsidnancy.com

Songs of water Tapping Into Tributaries

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rying to nail down what kind of music Greensboro octet Songs of Water creates is like trying to guess which of the 30-plus instruments in their quiver any one of the members will pick up next.

One moment they’re weaving vibrant tapestries of Celt-folk with bouzouki, violin, guitar, and hammered dulcimer over ragtime rhythms, the next they’re pounding out polyrhythmic world-beat on hand drums or wringing gypsy punk from an accordion. The band’s music feels primitive but forwardthinking, exotic yet familiar; it creates a complete narrative in the listener’s mind with rarely a word sung. Essentially, their music is transportive.

The Songs of Water sound was forged eight years ago on Stephen Roach and Jason Windsor’s respective passions for multicultural roots fusion and classical music. But as a casual collaboration grew into something that Roach says required dedication, so did the richness of its sound.

Fans viewed the nascent band’s eponymous 2004 debut as a breakthrough, but Roach calls it “a junior high photo,” contrasted with its

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By Ryan Snyder

follow-up, 2010’s The Sea Has Spoken. Before that, however, the band would undergo tumultuous changes.

March of 2007 was the beginning of what felt like an interminable hiatus. Songs of Water’s creative spark-plug and close friend Israel Sarpolus succumbed to cancer, and the band’s momentum crashed. They floated in limbo for months, unsure of how to replace what violinist Marta Richardson describes as not only “a beautiful guitar player,” but someone who was a defining element in spirit and personality.

Molly and Luke Skaggs — multiinstrumentalists, vocalists and children of bluegrass luminary Ricky Skaggs — provided a second wind. Luke would be the first to accept an invitation to join. Molly came on after appearing on the sophomore album, along with their father, whose studio hosted a significant portion of the recording.

Roach, who also possesses a musical heritage as the cousin of flatpicking master Tony Rice, said the elder Skaggs saw a part of himself in what Songs of Water was trying to accomplish and became a father figure to the group.

With The Sea Has Spoken still relatively fresh, Roach says the band is busy mapping out tour plans for 2011, with an eye toward Australia and Europe. They’re busy writing new music as well, though several factors are in play that might impact the sound they take into the studio. With both Skaggs offspring possessing their father’s high-lonesome vocal gene, the band plans to incorporate much more lyrical content into future work.

The collective is also searching for a more distinctive and concise sound that doesn’t betray its core influences. That Songs of Water’s long-range touring usually finds the band pared down to five or six players, Roach says, should help them reach that goal.

“We’ve been more experimental with the palette of sounds that we create on the past two albums,” Roach says. “We’re still staying heavily instrumental, but now that we’ve covered that, we’re honing it and I think the third album will be even more of a further development in the sound that defines us.” shuf11

Photo courtesy of Songs of Water

Mountain Goats The Pen Is Mightier By Bryan Reed

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he path that led John Darnielle, counselor at a mental health facility in Ames, Iowa, to becoming John Darnielle, leader of the Mountain Goats and one of contemporary popular music’s most respected lyricists, is well-trod in profiles such as these. Through a string of homemade recordings and vacation-time touring, Darnielle told his stories to audiences, which grew gradually in size and fervor.

All Eternals Deck, is Darnielle’s 13th Mountain Goats LP since he started the project in the early 90s. And following suit with The Mountain Goats’ evolution, it is also the most musically adventurous and full-sounding Mountain Goats LP to date.

Darnielle, whose bleating voice has often suited his moniker more than unacquainted listeners’ ears, is more bard than balladeer.

But here his instrument is confident, even refined, without losing its bite. It’s polished enough to support the medieval-sounding backing chorus of “High Hawk Season,” powerful enough to carry the punchy rocker “Estate Sale Sign,” and controlled enough to

Photo by Steven Dewall

captivate through the spare arrangement of “For Charles Bronson.”

But let’s be honest: Talking about The Mountain Goats is almost never a musical discussion as much as a lyrical one.

Darnielle’s standout quality is the novelist’s eye that has, for about two decades, given short, rhythmic songs the gravity of literature. Mountain Goats albums are not unlike books on tape. And damn good ones, to boot. Darnielle is a thoughtful sculptor of drama, character and imagery.

“I want things to have stories behind them,” he says. “I want objects to have some sort of physical presence, like, when I see a book, I think of the person who wrote it and I think of the people who printed it and I think of the stuff that went into making it.

It’s everything, really everything. I wonder if it really goes back to how connected I was to my stuffed animals when I was a child, that I infused them with personalities and stories and imagined that they had private lives when I wasn’t in the room.”

As a child, he dreamed of being “a writer whose work reached people.” And through

The Mountain Goats, he’s achieved some semblance of that goal. But the heart wants what it wants. Roads diverge. Darnielle published his first novel, inspired by Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, an entry in Continuum’s acclaimed 33 ⅓ series, in 2008.

A second novel is in the works. It seems reasonable to wonder could John Darnielle, author, usurp John Darnielle, Mountain Goat?

“The Mountain Goats have been such a huge part of my life for so long now that it is difficult for me to imagine not having that at the center of what I do. But then again, 10 years ago, it would have been difficult for me to imagine the Mountain Goats being the absolute center of everything I did.”

Perhaps, for the fanatic Mountain Goats fan who prefers prose set to melody, there’s solace in the different approaches songs and novels demand, and which Darnielle is especially aware of. “Books are different from songs,” he says, because it bears reminding. “A book is a journey you take over a period of time, whereas a song is a splash of water in the face.” shuf11

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WHATEVER BRAINS Unpopular Favorites

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n their roughly three years of existence, Raleigh’s Whatever Brains have released seven recordings. Of those seven, four are three-song 7-inch EPs, one is an outof-print CD-R, one is a home-dubbed cassette, and one is an entry in a compilation which stretches its 12 contributions over the 12 sides of six cassingles.

Clearly, Whatever Brains aren’t concerned with the state of the music industry. It’s probably a good thing, too, because as singer/ guitarist Rich Ivey confesses, “We don’t sell many records.”

That might be because Whatever Brains aren’t concerned with playing to a style, either. Ivey, 26, had done that already with his previous pop-punk band Crossed Eyes. “I wanted something more interesting,” he says.

“I wanted to experiment a little bit and go with the flow.”

Crossed Eyes shared a practice space with Whatever Brains drummer Evan Williams’ band, Grass Widow (“Not the awesome girl Grass Widow from San Francisco, but the mediocre Grass Widow from Raleigh,” Williams, 27, laughs). Ivey and Williams bonded over a shared affection for the noise-

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By Bryan Reed

rock band Karp. They decided to start a metal band, and named it Tight Dogs From The Future. It failed. “Our amps weren’t big enough,” Ivey says, half joking.

The duo formed Whatever Brains without giving much thought to what the new band ought to sound like. Almost half of the band’s debut demo cassette, Soft Dick City, was self-recorded. This time, it worked. The resulting sound was all slurry hooks and punk riffing recorded way, way in the red; a smear of Siltbreeze lo-fi, not far removed from Times New Viking or Dan Melchior.

Guitarist Will Evans, 25, and bassist Matt Watson, 29, joined the band, though neither was a stranger. In the early 00s, Evans’ high school band, Black Castle, had played a show in Lynchburg, Va., with Ivey’s still semiactive Order — which shares members with Virginia’s Invisible Hand. Afterward, the two stayed in touch via MySpace. Watson played drums in Crossed Eyes. Keyboardist Hank Shore, 18, joined the band last year, completing the band’s current five-piece lineup. “This is a solid unit,” Ivey says. “I don’t want to mess with it.”

As the band’s roster evolved, so did its

sound. The blown-out garage-punk jams of Soft Dick City morphed into a punchier, crisper sounding outfit by Whatever Brains’ fourth release, the Nesting 7-inch. “Nesting,” as reprised on the 7-inch, becomes a wiry thing, built on a nimble, if crooked, guitar melody which stretches the cassette’s condensed, scorching original into a rapturously tense build-up to one of the band’s most dramatic “whoa-oh” choruses.

The latest offering, the cassingle-cut “Math 2.0,” sits opposite Birds of Avalon’s retro-psychedelia. Ivey’s nasal drawl, a near embodiment of pissed-sarcasm, is buoyed by the song’s tight-wound circular guitar riff, hypnotic keyboard drone and waves of distortion. The cleaner production only gives Whatever Brains room to get weirder, much like the Scottish band Country Teasers at their delirious best.

Eighteen new songs have been assembled and demoed for Whatever Brain’s first proper LP. The band is recording this month with Evans at the helm. Carrboro label Sorry State Records will press and release it this summer.

People will buy it, or they won’t. Y’know, whatever. shuf11

Photo by William Butler

Dan Melchior Just Don’t Call It ‘Blues’

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he wildly eclectic, lo-fi noisefests that Dan Melchior makes these days are quite a leap from the blues-based, bash-and-burn garage-punk he played in the late-90s with Medway renaissance man Billy Childish. And, hey, don’t ask Melchior about that stuff, because to this Brit with an attitude, who settled in Durham four years ago, it’s irrelevant.

“I haven’t played anything that relates very closely to blues for about five years,” Melchior says. That may be a bit of an overstatement. Melchior did, after all, put the “B” word in the title of his latest homemade album, Assemblage Blues. And in the second song, his snotty punk vocals warble and waver along with raw, acoustic-blues picking.

Another track, “Dugan,” sounds at times like what you might hear if you were listening to an Allman Brothers concert in the stadium parking lot — or underwater. But Melchior’s point is well taken. He’s hardly channeling Southern rock or 80s jangle pop, and he hasn’t covered or rewritten Muddy Waters in years.

But there was a time when he did it with every

Photo by Letha Rodman Melchior

By Mark Kemp

bit of the passion and inventiveness of the White Stripes.

Like so many British enthusiasts of the South’s dark, raw musical underbelly — from the blues to Appalachian folk ballads — Melchior spent his early career aggressively reinterpreting it. His 1998 set with Childish, Devil in the Flesh, either ripped up Mr. Morganfield (“Trouble No More”) or rerendered the august bluesman through the prism of punk (Melchior’s own “Two Men”).

His debut with his band the Broke Revue, This Love is Real, continued in that vein, covering Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move” with a hungry wail Mick Jagger only wishes he’d achieved on the Stones’ version. Melchior hit his peak on his 2002 classic Bitterness, Spite, Rage and Scorn, a wild amalgamation of slashing garage rock with nods to everyone from Phil Spector to the Fall.

By then, Melchior was living in New York City and his stylistic lens, if not his lo-fi recording aesthetic, was opening up. He reintroduced himself on 2004’s Hello, I’m Dan Melchior, a set that found him exploring straighter singer/songwriter territory,

borrowing here from the Kinks and there from Jonathan Richman and the provocatively titled This is Not the Medway Sound. “I worked with Billy 15 years ago,” Melchior says.

“Our music is extremely dissimilar now.”

Aside from a few minor brush strokes, Assemblage Blues really does squeeze out all but a few remaining drops of Melchior’s earlier stylistic tendencies. The album, which he recorded by himself, sizzles to a start with throbbing bass and scissor-like guitar lines that cut circles around distorted vocals. If anything, Assemblage Blues and Melchior’s other recent works — like 2009’s Thankyou Very Much and last year’s Visionary Pangs, both with his band Und Das Menace — draw more from earlier pioneers of lo-fi aesthetics like Half Japanese or Vertical Slits’ late Jim Shepard.

Melchior might have put the musical South behind him long ago, but his move to the Triangle area has only made him more creative and prolific. “I didn’t know that much about (the NC music scene) before I moved,” he says, “but luckily I couldn’t have made a better choice.” shuf11

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sh uffle Find news, photos, videos, concert info & plenty of other Shuffle stuff at:

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whig 1200 Main Street Columbia, SC (803) 931 8852

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Beyond Chillwave

By Topher Manilla Photo by Bryan Bush



Toro Y Moi steps out from behind the laptop for an album of jazz-flavored cosmic-disco

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haz Bundick has the unassuming, shrugging demeanor of a producer, almost nervous to be guiding an interview rather than at the helm of a mixing board.

With his friendly baby face, Filipino/African-American features and iconic clear-frame glasses, Bundick, known to an international legion of young fans as Toro Y Moi, is the most recognizable mug among the handful of artists in the blog-made, ill-defined genre of electronic music called chillwave. (It also goes by the name glo-fi, or, at other times, the clumsy hypnogogic pop.)

In March, 2009 (almost nine months after chillwave entered the indie lexicon), The New York Times belatedly characterized the genre as “memories of electropop from the 1980s, with bouncing, blipping dance-music hooks (and often weaker lead vocals). It’s recession-era music: low-budget and danceable.”

Unlike the more hook-oriented work of peers Neon Indian and Washed Out (whose sole personality, Ernest Green, is Bundick’s close friend, musical associate, and fellow University of South Carolina grad), Bundick trades immediate hooks for depth of production. In just a year and-a-half, Bundick also has the deepest and most varied catalog among his contemporaries. While we wait to see what Neon Indian’s next move might or might not be, Bundick is already on his fourth move. He’s in the creative pocket at the moment.

“I’m interested to see where [Washed Out and Neon Indian] are going to go next,” Bundick says when I speak to him in the first week of 2011. His sophomore record for Carpark, Underneath the Pine is slated for a late-February release and he’s spent the day filming his first video for the album around his Columbia home.

“I feel like I’m almost going in a funk, R&B, jazz direction. Like Detroit house, Chicago house used jazz samples, and I feel like that’s my next move.”

Bundick also has his own Tumblr fan site, Fuck Yeah Toro Y Moi, a sure sign that one’s star has truly risen. (“Funny and flattering but kinda weird,” he laughs.)

Bundick and his music are often identified with top-down drives to the ocean-side and the summertime ennui of hipster youth. But you get the sense he spends long summer days indoors obsessing over his dizzying roller rink disco-funk. And when his voice isn’t channeling a Kevin Shields-does-Stevie Wonder falsetto or soggy with reverb, he delivers concise, polite sentences on all manner of topics: his hometown’s music scene; national tours with Phoenix and Caribou; or his sophomore LP which, by the time you read this piece, will likely have scored Bundick some further praise across the tastemaking music press (Editor’s Note:

A “Best New Music” tag from Pitchfork, for starters).

On display this go-round is not only Bundick’s sharp-as-shit production ear, but also his staggering keyboard acrobatics. Live instrumentation supplants most every computer-generated sound on Underneath the Pine, beautifully dissonant mini-explorations and cosmic forays buffeting would-be Soul Jazz crate-digging treasures. It’s Herbie Hancock-meets-Loose Joints disco, and it does away with any remnants of this label crutch we writers have come to know as chillwave. Bundick will leave that business for the trend-conscious, and hope his listeners are on board for some schooling.

“I felt the funk and R&B would serve as the segue [for current fans],” says Bundick, 24. “I definitely wanted to open up my fanbase to some of the other music I’m really interested in. I wanted to broaden the music they listened to, but also broaden what my music could be. I thought the light jazz would appeal to the hip-hop fans.”

To date, Bundick’s music has caught the ear of hip-hop royalty like Kanye West (“Cool shit,” Kanye wrote of Toro Y Moi on his blog) and L.A.-based up-and-comers Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, whose leader, Tyler the Creator, reached out to Bundick as a fan.

This “other music” Bundick mentions are the Euro-synth horror soundtracks of François de Roubaix and Piero Umiliani, and the more accessible output of Sun Ra and keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith. Not exactly flavor of the month-hipster listening, but influences that fold into Bundick’s funk quite nicely.

“I was trying to go for a totally 70s thing,” Bundick says. “Sort of take the more ambient pieces from (Causers of This, Toro Y Moi’s 2009 debut for Carpark) and put it into a more traditional arrangement and soundscape. It’s being ironic, but being serious at the same time about choosing sounds. I really do listen to and like space-disco, but I also know it’s kind of ironic.”

As usual, Bundick played most everything heard on Beneath The Pine, finding a sort of masochistic thrill in studio takes and not being able to use computer production tools as a crutch this time.

Bundick’s got the chops for it, thanks in part to the piano and guitar lessons he took as a pre-teen, courtesy of his parents, who are both music fans. “My mom liked Madonna, but my dad would like The Pretenders. He liked stuff that was a little more underground,” Bundick says.

His own eclectic tastes were obvious early on. The first CD he ever bought was the 1998 Godzilla soundtrack, featuring the likes of Jamiroquai, Ben Folds and a Jimmy Page/Puffy collaboration.

A devout follower of Weezer and At the Drive-In during his formative years, Bundick was an indie-scene personality in Columbia as a member of his own guitar-jangle indie unit The Heist and the Accomplice, his band through high school and college.

But alone in his college dorm room, Toro Y Moi, a name that references his cross-cultural bloodline, served as a platform 

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Beyond Chillwave (cont'd)

to experiment with folk a la Sufjan Stevens or Grizzly Bear. In fact, “Before I’m Done,” a slower song from Underneath, is an obvious homage to Elliott Smith in both sound and theme — that is, until we go deep space for its last wonderful moments.

And then, sometime in 2008, Bundick began working within a milieu of three very different influences: The late, adventurous hip-hop producer J Dilla; tribal-rave giants Animal Collective; and shoegaze progenitors My Bloody Valentine. He debuted this new, solo project and sound in late 2008 at house parties in both Carolinas, showing up with electronic equipment when friends expected an acoustic guitar.

Bundick’s meteoric rise began early June 2009, when überinfluential hipster blog Gorilla vs. Bear (which posted Toro Y Moi’s still-timeless summer anthem “Blessa,” culled from a sampler Bundick had been slinging at house parties) called his music, “Ariel Pink...jacking Air France’s Warm Jets and turning them Midas gold.”

A few weeks later, Michael Jackson died of a doctoradministered overdose. The King of Pop’s passing is something that seemed to play into the cultural subconscious, accelerating the popularity of chillwave and Bundick’s music. The core sound of chillwave is like listening to a half-melted Off the Wall cassette with all the windows down. And in Bundick, we get a two-fer, equal parts Quincy and MJ. By the second week of July, Toro Y Moi would be aligned with Carpark and plotting a debut record. “It didn’t take me long after listening to ‘Blessa’ to call Chaz,” says Carpark head Todd Hyman.

“I was just like, ‘Wow.’” Bundick was still figuring out how to bring Toro Y Moi to the live setting, but Carpark was all in. To date, the label has released two full-lengths, two 7-inches (a “Blessa” single and one with garage-y rock more akin to Heist) and a 12-inch of Bundick’s Ibiza-disco project Les Sins. He also released a noisier, now out-of-print cassette on the Charleston-based tape label, Mirror Universe.

“I was so into his music, it didn’t matter to me so much,” says Hyman. “Sometimes the music comes first. Sometimes it’s the band live. Sometimes it’s both. I don’t think (the many releases) were a calculated thing. It was just ‘This is awesome. I have to release this at some point.’”

In only a year, Bundick’s growth as a performer has been impressive. From nervously — if charmingly — working out his bedroom dance in the corner of a pizza parlor in August of 2009 to working over a room of sweaty festival goers at 2010’s SXSW, the arc was inspiring.

Along the way, Bundick’s Heist and the Accomplice project disbanded. “Kind of a bummer,” Bundick says. “But it was nice to have a real reason to end it.”

Still, some members of Heist are now spread through both Bundick’s band and that of Washed Out. This reconnection to friends, family and Columbia is a theme throughout Underneath

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Photo by Bryan Bush

the Pine, so it’s fitting the theme manifests in the new live show.

Toro Y Moi debuted the new line-up at a New York show with Carpark labelmates Cloud Nothings in January. For the live band set-up, Bundick loosens his production reigns to let each musician bring their own personality to his songs. “I don’t want to

just play the album. I want it to be about the chemistry between the four of us,” he says.

Where Causers focused on the loss of a single love, Underneath the Pine varies its themes: the death of a friend and the push/pull of staying in a city like Columbia, a place that has become both a comfort zone and holding tank. The phrase “underneath the pine” is pulled from the lyrics of “Before I’m Done,” and reflects Bundick’s wish to be buried in South Carolina, his ultimate home.

The second time Bundick and I speak, the video for “Still Sound” has just premiered on Pitchfork, and Bundick has been practicing with his band all afternoon. He’s pleased with how things are sounding. Underneath the Pine doesn’t take all its cues from vintage cosmic jazz, space-disco and horror film composers.

Bundick was particularly inspired by his tour with Caribou, whose latest album, Swim, embraced a more psychedelic live sound than found on previous records. “[Caribou’s Daniel Snaith] built Swim around how it would be live. He had it mind. It’s nice to finally get it done right,” Bundick says. “I don’t feel like the laptop is the best way to portray these songs.” shuf11

Ba n d o f B roth er e r s

I

f the Charlotte six-piece Yardwork has any fault onstage tonight in Raleigh, it’s that they’re having too much fun. The missed guitar notes, the unplugged bass rig, the time it takes members to swap instruments in a circuit that never seems to cease: It’s all kind of charming. But then Yardwork launches into another arching, twisting pop number with chanted vocals, doubled guitars and doubled drums, the members smiling at each other like best friends, writhing about the stage like young punks. It all looks a little unbelievable — too good to be true, a cynic might argue.

But on the far left side of the stage, Andy Thewlis — a multiinstrumentalist who, tonight, sticks to trombone, tambourine and background vocals — offers the band’s own counterargument.

His eyes and his mouth beam, focus fixed on frontman Thomas Berkau and bassist and guitarist Bo White. They ricochet between amps, microphones and one another like sweat-doused pinballs. Reaching for his trombone, Thewlis looks not only elated but surprised to be that way; he seems, sincerely, like someone surprised to be in a band, especially one this good, this triumphantly poppy.

“I kind of had the idea in my head I was never going to be in a band again,” Thewlis says, surrounded by the rest of Yardwork in Berkau’s bedroom a week later. “I had just gotten out of this really awful experience playing in this anarcho-hardcore band. It was really spirit crushing.

Yardwork was the antithesis of that experience. It was really easy to take this energy and express it.”

The energy of which Thewlis speaks is one of positivity and perseverance. From its history to its view of its own future, from its sing-along anthems to its members’ generally genial manner, Yardwork is an encapsulation of redemption. The byproduct of hard times and a whole lot of hardcore bands, Yardwork feels like a welcome shout of relief.

Standing behind Thewlis, drummer Taylor Knox leans back: “Everybody kind of came out of a shitty situation in some part of our lives with this band. Yardwork was where the shitty situation ended. I guess none of it was expected, but it was like, ‘This is pretty awesome. Let’s do this.’ ” Redemption, of course, is often hard-and-long-won; for Yardwork, it’s no different. Some of the songs on Brotherer, the band’s excellent debut album, are more than four years old, written by Berkau on the sly when he fronted the punk band Control. Taylor Knox was a fan of Control and Berkau’s roommate.

He remembers Berkau calling him into his bedroom — a memory

Photos by Bryan Reed

even Berkau’s forgotten — to play some part. Knox would tap on the floor, making a beat, and Berkau would build the song. But he wasn’t trying to start a band. He was just trying to record some songs.

“I’d be like, ‘What are you doing?’ He’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ ” remembers Knox, now one of Yardwork’s two drummers. “He was in this hardcore band, and, of course, all he did was scream.

Nobody really knew he had musical talent.”

Control broke up. Berkau eventually let his friends, including Knox, hear the songs. People were surprised — stunned even — that he could not only write and sing these something-like-pop songs but record them, too. He’d carefully multi-tracked layers of guitars, drums and his own voice. “I wanted it to be really accessible but weird,” he summarizes. But Berkau could only go so far by himself.

Eventually he started making sojourns to Boone to record with Derek Whycoff, the drummer in the band Naked Gods and a guitarist who seemed to understand the music Berkau was trying to make. Matt Nelson lived in Boone, too.

“They showed up at my house with these songs that sounded the way that they did,” remembers bassist Nelson of Berkau and Whycoff, pausing to smile. “It took a while to wrap my mind around playing this type of music — especially doing it live and owning it. But the songs themselves were immediate, and really optimistic. There wasn’t anything bad to say about it.”

Yardwork really is an assembly of musical misfits, playing the sort of tunes they never expected to make or even hear. That stems both from Berkau’s past and what he intended for the present. He wanted to make pop music, he says, but he wanted energy. Finding musicians who knew more about punk fervor than pop finesse made sense.

“A lot of it was just, ‘You kind of play bass. You can kind of do this and do that. But I like hanging out with you a lot,’ ” says Berkau. “I don’t know how to play guitar, either. That’s how people got invited to be in the band. It wasn’t musical stuff.”

Nelson, for instance, can’t think of references in his own listening history for Yardwork. Thewlis plays in the free jazz outfit Great Architect. And, White, who describes himself as “the weirdo who put on noise rock shows and played in a noise rock band,” was in the elastic, aggressive Calabi Yau when Berkau started writing these songs. No one expected him to be in a band to which you could hum. The songs, though, were “right on point.”

Eddie Schneider, who had lived with Nelson, was listening to drone acts like Yellow Swans and rhythmic tinkerers like Black Dice and Boredoms when Yardwork crossed his radar.

Remembers Schneider, “I wasn’t thinking about pop music, really at all. After those first things Thomas had done, I was just like, ‘What is this?’

“It kind of came out of nowhere,” he continues. “I had no 

shufflemag.com 17

idea he wanted to do something like that. But I knew that it was immediately catchy. You didn’t even have to think about it.”

That approach has somehow almost always worked.

Bands often talk about their first show — or their first several dozen, really — like disasters. They’re still learning their tunes and their roles, still adjusting to hearing themselves surrounded by an audience or an empty room. But just as every member of Yardwork is quick to extol the quixotic, contagious charms of Berkau’s songs on first listen, they talk about that opening date with wanderlust and pride. They knew they had something special.

White, the oldest member of the band by two years at 29, is an understated fellow. In his warm country accent, he describes the past in restrained declarations. Even he can’t limit himself in gushing about that night. “That first show was amazing, and it continued full force. I had no idea it was going to be that good,” he says, launching into a full description of the night’s lineup and vibe. “Every time, people are really excited.”

Yardwork wasn’t delivered fully formed, though. For one, they’ve gotten better at directing their passions onstage, working more to build toward climaxes than always hit them right out of the gates. And while the band’s seven-track debut EP, released in 2008, showed promise, their full-length actually delivers. The edges are sharper, the maneuvers tighter. Consider “Kiethiopia” (sic), one of the three songs reworked from the EP: initially, the

18 Yardwork shuffle eleven

Photo by Enid Valu

guitars fanned out, the riffs sometimes swapping clarity for texture, glow for precision. This new version pushes aside the bramblesand the distractions, though, with the guitars pirouetting through the double-drum cavalcade. They sing with spirit, too, chanting a mid-song breakdown with bonfire enthusiasm.

What’s more, those misfit backgrounds — the drone dude and the punk dudes, the free jazz guy and the noise-spazz bandleader — all put a little more of their own lineages into Berkau’s songs here. The aleatoric wash at the start of “Soda Sprouts” winks to jazzman Don Cherry, while the guitars of “Helmets (in the) Meantime” snap and stack as though spliced from a math-rock reel. They shout in chorus and harmony, too, turning pop into a platform for whatever else works.

“At the end of the day, nobody wanted to be in a pop band, per se,” explains Schneider, who says that fringe dwellers like Boredoms were the band’s real inspiration for moving beyond one drum set. “You kind of think about it in loose terms. Stuff that’s more experimental was just bound to come out.”

“I’m a big fan of any pop music that brings that stuff in already,” White continues, citing John Cale’s boundary-breaking Fear as a touchstone. “Some of us are still in crazy bands. We all still have an active interest in that sort of thing. It’s going to blend in always — that’s where some of our tastes lie.”

Berkau’s guidelines for forming the band — recruiting people

“Everybody kind of came out of a shitty situation in some part of our lives with this band. Yardwork was where the shitty situation ended.”

—Drummer Taylor Knox

he liked, people who also liked playing music — seems to have worked. The sextet’s interaction off the stage seems mostly identical to its interaction on the stage, full of jokes and laughs and candid stories. Berkau formed the band in his bedroom, but given the way Yardwork’s members discuss the band, he seems to have ceded leadership to group democracy years ago. After all, these guys needed this band.

“All of us kind of clicked onto this one thing at the same time,” Schneider says as if realizing the synchronicity and serendipity needed for a band that feels this fresh for the first time. “Looking back on it, it’s really bizarre.”

“When we first started, everybody was into the PMA aspect — positive mental attitude and Bad Brains,” echoes Nelson. “We try to be as positive as possible when we play.”

They’re being humble, though: As energizing as Yardwork’s stage show might be, as redeeming as their attitudes might be, it’s these songs — the same ones that convinced a gaggle of decidedly non-pop musicians to try something different — that still make Yardwork matter. These songs are college radio gold, fitting somewhere among the mystical spires of Akron/Family, the gang-vocal exuberance of Man Man and the acrobatic guitars of Deerhoof. “Kiethiopia” builds antiphonally, moving back and forth between Berkau’s weary observations and the band’s chanted affirmations. “Helmets (in the) Meantime” revels in

instability, with its skittering rhythms, knotty guitars and shaky vocals suggesting that it’s all always about to fall apart. The hornabetted “Eddie San” begs you to sing, too, while “All Andy Were the Borogroves” climaxes with the sort of oomph that, in 2011, can ostensibly nab you the closing spot at the Grammys.

Together, they make the sort of exultant proclamation that’s a bona fide arrival. But after four years of building toward a record, after one scrapped studio session and a few lost band members, Yardwork is just elated to be this close to a finished product.

“We’re way more anxious for this to come out than anyone else is,” says Berkau, a chorus of laughter rising around him. The band’s already got a few singles ready for release, and they’re eager to start writing the second LP. “The songs on the record, we all like them, and they’re very close to our hearts. But I hope the record re-energizes them for us.”

After all, Yardwork seems to give it all away when it takes the stage, even on a mishap-prone Saturday night in Raleigh. Finally, for a mostly perfect 30 minutes at a time, these songs can shout for themselves. shuf11

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A Vision Deferred With a helping hand, Shelby songwriter, producer and label-owner David Lee finally gets his due

By John Schacht

L

David Lee

ate in the Fall of 2010, a little-heralded event took place in Shelby, N.C., that abridged the last 60 years of Southern race relations to a fine point on the city’s new Don Gibson Theater stage.

That evening, Nov. 7, 74-year-old David Lee took to the stage to sing some of his songs in celebration of the release of his anthology, Said I Had a Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee, 19601988. The handsomely packaged vinyl, the inaugural release from N.C.-based Paradise of Bachelors, compiles 14 of the best songs written, produced and released on labels owned by the life-long Cleveland County resident during a music career that spanned from the late 1950s to the 1980s.

Lee released 14 45s and two LPs during that time, and his songs featured some of the best regional soul and R&B bands and artists of the era, among them The Singing Mellerairs, Brown Sugar Inc., and Ann Sexton. One act, The Constellations, was one of the first mixed-race pop bands in the South. Lee’s sponsorship of that band – he was also their business manager – comes as no surprise given his own background. Lee’s songwriting was colorblind, informed as much by country radio and legends like Roy Acuff (a Lee favorite) as the soul giants of the era, and worthy of standing with them.

Sadly, Lee isn’t counted among those songwriting soul giants or country legends, though there are familiar and tragic reasons why. Like many African-American songwriters and music entrepreneurs, Lee enjoyed whatever success he had -- and he did have some – against tremendously stacked odds. That was especially true in the Jim Crow South and its immediate shadow, where for every James Brown or Little Richard there were untold blacks who never got the recognition they deserved. Ghettos 20 David Lee/Paradise of Bachelors shuffle eleven

existed in the music business as concretely as they did in urban settings.

But events on that Shelby stage last Fall point to how far the South has come. The woeful yet familiar history of racial musical divides, stolen royalties, and lack of deserved recognition dovetailed a few years prior to Said I Had A Vision with the modern interests of two white music detectives and graduates of UNC – folklorist Brendan Greaves and crate-digger and Carolinasoul.org founder Jason Perlmutter, the men behind Paradise of Bachelors.

“Brendan and Jason, they have opened up a great new road for me,” Lee says, citing the mixed-race crowd that evening – as well as that of an earlier pre-release date in October -- as a specific example. “I worked at a (country) club, and a lot of the songs I wrote, I would be singing them while I was working, cleaning up the building, getting ready to serve. Those people, that’s who was shaking my hand that night, telling me ‘we listen to your music all the time now.’”

But this isn’t just a story about audio reparations. Without Lee, Paradise of Bachelors wouldn’t exist – nor would the GreavesPerlmutter partnership. Greaves, 32, was completing his degree in folklore and doing field work researching musicians in Cleveland County when he came across Lee’s name. He did an oral history with Lee in 2008 for what would become the Earl Scruggs Center/ Museum in Shelby.

Meanwhile, Perlmutter the record collector was doing research for CarolinaSoul.org on another Shelby musician, Ray Harper, when Lee’s name came up. Perlmutter already owned over half the 45s that would eventually wind up on Said I Had a Vision, so Lee’s labels and songwriting credits didn’t come as a complete surprise.

Photos courtesy of Paradise of Bachelors and David Lee

The Constellations

Ann Sexton with Paradise of Bachelors’ Brendan Greaves (L) and Jason Perlmutter

But he tracked Lee down, and soon came under the spell of both the warm family man and his remarkable story. (Both Greaves and Perlmutter still chuckle over the fact that it took Lee a while to realize there were two young white guys from Chapel Hill contacting him separately.)

It was Lee who suggested to Greaves that they reissue his music and share the profits, and that’s what brought the latter and Perlmutter together. “The initial idea was just to do something to help David and perhaps get some royalties for his music,” Perlmutter, 29, says, “but also because he wasn’t widely recognized for what he’d done over the years.”

In November of 2009, Lee invited the two into his home, fed them, later introduced them to some of the musicians he’d worked with over the years, and allowed them access to his photo and record archives. The latter were kept in a trailer behind his house, leftovers from his Washington Sound record shop he ran from the early 1970s to 1995 that supplied the community with R&B, soul, gospel and even classic country.

“He’s incredibly warm and took us in as family,” Greaves says. “And we were taken aback by how amenable he was to the suggestion that we could work together on a record project.

Sometimes folks are quite reasonably suspicious about offers of that kind.”

What they discovered was not only a rich musical history, but the corrosive effects of segregation – and how it worked both ways. Country music – “everything I write tends to have Roy Acuff feel,” Lee laughs – wasn’t going to embrace Lee, and the genre wasn’t exactly embraced by Lee’s own community.

“I had a great love for it, but during that time, I have to admit that a person like me couldn’t break in,” Lee says, citing

exception-that-proves-the-rule Charley Pride. “I wouldn’t be accepted by anyone, even my own people wouldn’t accept me.”

Then there were The Constellations. Made up of black and white teens, the band survived by playing the Southeast fraternity circuit. But it wasn’t easy. “Being salt and pepper,” Lee says, “they couldn’t mingle with the people. They slept on that bus. They couldn’t eat together, either. So what they’d do was get the food and eat on the bus.”

Even Lee’s greatest success from the three labels he started –Impel, Washington Sound and SCOP (“Soul, Country, Opera and Pop”) wasn’t immune. In 1971 he wrote “You’re Letting Me Down” for a little-known Greenville, S.C. soul singer, Ann Sexton, which the two recorded. The record was reissued on well-known Nashville DJ John Richbourg’s imprint, Seventy-Seven Records, and received national airplay. But when Richbourg died in 1986, so did the royalties, though the Sexton-Lee records are still bootlegged in Europe to this day.

Yet even that story ends with a happy twist. On October 23 of last year, after two years tracking down Sexton, who was a school administrator in New York, the two reunited on stage in Shelby and performed together for the first time in 39 years.

“I never will forget that day,” Lee says, after breaking into an impromptu version of “You’ve Been Gone Too Long,” another song he and Sexton recorded. “It was very well accepted. The people just enjoyed it, even my wife Nellena told me, ‘now that was good.’”

And now, thanks to Lee’s perseverance and Paradise of Bachelors, the rest of us can hear just how good. shuf11

shufflemag.com 21

Hammer No More the Fingers plays rock for rock’s sake

By Corbie Hill

I

t’s a Thursday night at the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, and the weather is just on the tolerable side of chilly. The air feels wet but there is no rain, and on Country Club Road cars honk and whip by each other in a hurry to pass the traffic in front of the Uiversity’s historic Playmakers Theater.

Inside, Hammer No More the Fingers is revving into its second song. The Durham trio’s party rock resonates with the college-age audience. A dozen or more fans rush the front of the house where they lean on the stage and dance. Ushers quickly drive them back to their seats and hover like Border Collies, keeping the crowd fenced and hassling photographers.

The constantly-shifting balance of power between attendees and attendants is almost as entertaining as the show itself. Live, Hammer doesn’t keep still. The act communicates shameless excitement. This is rock for its own sake, and the audience responds with a surprising knowledge of Hammer’s lyrics. Quite a few seem to know every single word, even to tracks from the not-yet-released LP, Black Shark. It raises the question exactly how mum the band has been with this record — which won’t technically be released until early April.

But no one ever accused these guys of being self-serious.

People who take themselves too seriously don’t typically put 20

22 Hammer shuffle eleven

Photos by Bryan Reed

people on the guest list at a 240-capacity venue, trade outfits between sets, or sing “my name is Leroy, motherfucker!” with a straight face.

“I feel like we have this, not alter-ego really, but this ironic pride,” bassist and singer Duncan Webster says, several weeks prior to the Playmakers gig. He shares a booth with his bandmates at Bull McCabe’s, a little Irish pub in their hometown.

“We act like we’re badasses, but it’s kind of a joke.”

Drummer Jeff Stickley and guitarist Joe Hall — who also share vocal duties — agree. Part of the fun of being in Hammer, they say, is letting the audience in on the act. Rock & roll has a long history of performance bravado, from Chuck Berry’s duckwalking to Manowar’s outfits, which is often lost in the world of selfconscious indie rock.

Yet Webster revels in self-referential lines like “Hammer, you have come to save us all.” Ironic pride, if that’s what this is called, is more common to hip-hop spheres. Of rockers, Weezer perhaps strikes a similar balance between irony and strut. And it may be an appropriate comparison; Black Shark opener “Atlas of an Eye” echoes “My Name is Jonas.” But where Rivers Cuomo and company get downright neurotic, Hammer’s approach is more happy-go-lucky, often silly. If Method Man and Beck gave

songwriting lessons to Interpol, it might come out like this.

Hammer lets the audience in on the fun by making this tongue-in-cheekiness transparent. And when it works, when the crowd plays along, what ensues is more party than performance.

The crowd at Playmakers knows this. One dude shouts “let us dance!” between songs, but the stage blockade holds firm.

Hammer typically works to break down such barriers. Most notably, the band released their last album, 2009’s Looking for Bruce, with a weekend’s worth of faux-meatheadedness they called Viking Storm. A ton of bands played. There was a theme song (“Heave! / Ho! / Heave! / Ho!”), specially brewed beer, and many fans came dressed for battle (to say nothing of the band itself, which arrived with a stage-length wooden Viking ship).

But the band doesn’t release records every day, and big events like Viking Storm take serious time and effort to put together.

So Hammer seeks the balance between surviving as a band and sharing the fun. One end of this equation means playing a 160year-old theater and letting ushers hassle the more enthusiastic audience members. Student unions have deeper pockets than rock clubs, and college shows can be dream gigs for bands of this size. Besides the obvious financial incentive, though, something in Hammer’s jubilant party rock speaks to this largely-undergrad crowd. Small packs repeatedly surge forward, dance ban be damned. Even though, as one girl can be overhead telling a friend, “They’re old. Like, 30.”

She quickly adds that Hammer — actually made up of three 27-year-olds — rocks.

The trio seems aware that its music is more conducive to youthful exuberance than the crossed-arms analysis typically associated, rightly or wrongly, with indie acts. Yet what’s indicated here is the misconception that Hammer would, by virtue of its local nature, automatically identify as “indie.”

Case in point: the “Hammer Jammer.” “It was a hot mess,” laughs Webster. “It was?” Hall cuts in, defending the open jam

the band led at Motorco Music Hall — a Durham venue co-owned

by Webster’s parents. “The way it was set up, it was going to have disastrous moments,” Stickley explains, taking an optimistic middle ground. “It didn’t matter if you knew how to play or not, and some people who didn’t know how to play anything got up there.”

The Jammer, rather than encouraging Widespread Panic-style noodling, was meant to give people who haven’t been in bands the feel of a good practice. Like many acts, Hammer writes new songs by riffing back and forth, often ad-libbing entire rehearsals.

This band is in a position where quite a few people jump at the chance to get onstage at a proper venue and jam with them. It sounds perfectly egalitarian, but Motorco — a sizeable venue — has struggled to get on the radar of touring national acts or other big-draw bands. Hammer brings people in the door, especially in Durham.

Yet on that late-January night, a theater predating the Civil War shakes not only with Stickley’s bass drum, but also with the bounce of dancing college kids. Per a compromise with

“ I feel like we have this, not alter-ego really, but this ironic pride. We act like we’re badasses, but it’s kind of a joke.”

—Duncan Webster the ushers, they’re now allowed to dance in their “seat areas.”

When they do, the floor moves. Many of the people have given themselves over to the experience, shouting until they’re hoarse.

Hammer’s manager trots to the front of the room and lets fly a double-handful of glow sticks. A few dozen hands go up in the neon plastic rain, and the band plays on. shuf11

shufflemag.com 23

Instructive Obstructions

Andrew Weathers learns about his own music in working with CJ Boyd

By Brian Howe

I

n the early 2000s, the abrasively brilliant Danish auteur Lars von Trier approached his hero, Jørgen Leth, with a daunting proposition. Leth would remake his own 1967 short “The Perfect Human” five times, obeying von Trier’s increasingly diabolical rules, which were designed to pull Leth out of his comfort zone and cause him to make a “bad film.” The result was The Five Obstructions, which blended scenes of von Trier and Leth discussing the obstructions with the products of Leth’s efforts. The experiment built toward an epiphany on von Trier’s part, not Leth’s, who remained unchanged. The Devil tempted God and learned his lesson.

In 2010, the itinerant experimental bass player CJ Boyd started a new cassette/download series called Over My Obstructions, where two musicians who know each others’ work intimately make a split album where they give each other five rules. The first number in the series, This Voice Saying These Words, came out late last year, with Boyd squaring off against the Greensborobased electro-acoustic composer Andrew Weathers. Released as a split by Boyd’s Obsolete Media Objects and Weathers’ Full Spectrum Records, the concept doesn’t dilute the music — as in the case of von Trier and Leth, the artist remains himself.

“CJ tends to mull things over for a long time,” Weathers recently told Shuffle at Caffé Driade in Chapel Hill. “I met him right at the beginning of the Forever Tour in 2008.” (The Forever Tour involves Boyd living on the road in his converted

24 Obstructions shuffle eleven

ambulance.) “We played together in Ohio, when he was on his way to Denver to get his ‘jambulance’ converted to veggie oil.” After that, Boyd often came through Greensboro, where Weathers is now in his final semester of the Music Composition program at UNC-G. Boyd often saw Weathers perform at his house. “He saw me do some things decently and struggle with others,” Weathers said, “and I think he felt like he had a good grasp of how I make music.” He invited Weathers to begin the Over My Obstructions series with him.

To give someone “obstructions” is essentially to call out what you perceive as their clichés. Did it sting? “It was like, ‘Oh man, that’s hard!’” Weathers assented. “I don’t want to make a record that’s only one-quarter guitar; I play guitar! But another part of you realizes that maybe you are dependent on that thing you do.”

Weathers barred Boyd from using ostinato, because much of his music is loop-based. He tends to make long pieces, so he couldn’t make anything over five minutes. His upright bass had to be played arco, i.e. bowed, two-thirds of the time, because Boyd often plays pizzicato. One track had to use no musical instruments, and one had to be atonal. “I don’t know how I feel about he got around that,” Weathers mused. “He has a minute with a drum beat and a spoken vocal sample” — atonal, certainly, but more in line with the letter of the law than the spirit. At any rate, Boyd’s side is immediately striking, evoking a more corporeal Arthur Russell.

Weathers, whose music relies heavily on processed guitars,

Illustration by Taylor Williams

got around the guitar restriction by playing more mandolin and banjo; the latter an instrument he’d only picked up recently. He conjures a vast variety of timbres, from synths that sound like woodwinds to a bowed banjo that sounds like a hurdy-gurdy. He had to cover a song he strongly dislikes, which explains the Moldy Peaches-sounding version of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” that opens the record so incongruously. A cover of Allison Krauss’ “I Go Down to the River to Pray” was mistaken by one reviewer for the hated track, but Weathers loves that one. He has interesting and decisive tastes—surprisingly, he dislikes Philip Glass, finding him “overwrought and romantic.”

Weathers was required to make one long piece of music, because he tends to “separate things more,” and he had to employ

“He saw me do some things decently and struggle with others,” Weathers said, “and I think he felt like he had a good grasp of how I make music.”

—Andrew Weathers some fugal elements, which presented the biggest challenge for a composer who relies so heavily on long tones. “You have to do transpositions in a fugue,” he explained, “and that sound doesn’t work for me because my music is all about stasis. I tried to counter that by having a synth drone under the fugal elements in the banjo, to keep them in the same place.”

But the obstruction that was most productive for Weathers was

having to base a part directly off a recording of someone else’s work. He had traditionally been averse to covers and samples, but had been opening up to them in recent years. He put a transducer on the headstock of an openly tuned guitar so that recorded sound could be played through it, and transformed D.O.A.’s cover of “Folsom Prison Blues” into a highly Weathers-esque ringing. “I think that’s where I really succeed in following the rules without making it boring,” he said. An album of punk “covers” for his new transducer-guitar technique is forthcoming from Blondena Music.

Weathers’ style here, which blends folk elements with electronic drones, is a far cry from his old sound. His early music as Pacific Before Tiger, made in his late teens when he was just beginning to study music in Greensboro, focused on pure tone to an uncompromising degree. It was the ambient musician Belong that initially weaned him off rock, leading him to discover key Minimalist influences like Steve Reich, John Cage, and Morton Feldman, whose music he is currently arranging for guitar.

“Belong sounded like one big chord to me,” he said, “and so I wouldn’t allow myself anything more than that.”

But Weathers also likes pop music, and has developed a keen interest in folk in recent years. “A lot of guys at school,” he said, “won’t blend what they like with what they make. They love Dave Matthews but sound like Mozart.” Weathers is learning to let pop and folk elements into his “grave austerity,” a process that this collaboration has sped along. A forthcoming record by the Andrew Weathers Ensemble, We’re Not Cautious, features mutated pop songs. “It’s really about trying to synthesize everything that comes through me now,” Weathers said. “I used to filter my music heavily — ‘I like all this stuff, but these two things, I want you to know that I like.’ Now, I want everything.” shuf11

shufflemag.com 25

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but not11 necessary.

A passion forTHEATRE what we do,AT SPIRIT SQUARE MARCH • McGLOHON intimate knowledge of the local music scene and great relationships within it are what we’re looking for. Flexible schedule requiring a few hours a week making sales calls/visits. A great gig for someone already employed in the local scene looking to help us out and make some extra dough in the process.

Interested? Email publisher Brian Cullinan: brian@shufflemag.com

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704.372.1000 • BlumenthalArts.org

Floating Action Desert Etiquette Park the Van

S

eth Kauffman, the given name of the Black Mountain musician who records alone and releases music as Floating Action, seems to assemble songs more than write them. Canyons, traitors, smoke halos, tropical cities: On Floating Action’s second LP, Desert Etiquette, Kaufmann’s lyrics are knots of impressionistic fragments, threads ostensibly lifted piecemeal from notebook margins and paper scraps.

“The powers of silence couldn’t meet its demands,” Kauffman muses on “Modern Gunslinger,” a piquant mix of sharp electric guitar and soft thumb piano. “It’s hard to run when the temperature’s falling.”

Kauffman mines the same aesthetic musically, wedding pieces of sound that, on paper, might not make sense together but, on record, fold into perfectly warm and welcoming decoupages. “Eye of a Needle,” for instance, boasts a cavernous bassline that seems swiped from a Stax session, while the rhythm alludes to aggressive Merseybeat. One electric guitar line suggests a dub plate; another, Pops Staples.

There’s a synthesizer drone that hints at Low and an instrumental break that points to Sonic Youth re-purposing a film score.

Thing is, this song is just an easy drifter that nods along, Kauffman harmonizing with himself as he repeats another elliptical mantra

Floating Action illustration by Taylor Williams

— “The eye of the needle/ that will never go through.”

Dissected, it probably sounds like an unsettled number. On tape, especially as a piece of Kauffman’s oeuvre as an aesthete big on contrast and inclusion, it’s but another perfectly natural, contently weird gem.

About three hours away from Kauffman’s home base, there’s an entire movement built from his sort of rickety, vintage pop music. Loosely referred to as the Drughorse Collective, the bands in and around this circuit include the late Max Indian, the gauzy 12,000 Armies and indie ascendants The Love Language. Their Piedmont pop is infinitely catchy and endearing, full of songs bound for college radio land.

Josh Carpenter, who supports Kauffman with drums live, makes solo music that jibes well with that crew — a mix of country, pop, soul and old rock records that’s smart yet simple.

But Kauffman is the outsider wizard to any insular clique, making music that’s too perfectly idiosyncratic and individual for a posse.

Those layers of personality wash against his warm rhythms and splash against his sad smile of a voice on Desert Etiquette; they’re the stuff that, once again, makes the latest Floating Action album one that you’ll rediscover every time you revisit.

—Grayson Currin

shufflemag.com 27

Weedeater Jason … The Dragon Southern Lord Records

A

bout four years ago, I burned a considerable amount of time with “Dixie” Dave Collins, the venerable if infamous frontman of Weedeater, the Wilmington trio which has — for more than a decade — infused its peculiar brand of sludge metal with misanthropy and bongwater. Those were crazy days: Collins spent a Saturday night snorting various chemicals from my dashboard. He prowled a coastal skate park on a Sunday afternoon, dissecting regional racism and detailing his lyrics. He slipped me a disc of band photos at a John Prine concert in some sylvan amphitheater setting, but I’m guessing I remember the encounter better than he does. Point is, Collins and his bandmates — drummer Keith “Keko” Kirkum and guitarist Dave “Shep” Shepherd — party pretty hard; especially on 2007’s God Luck and Good Speed, the bass-heavy, militant metal ends justified the red-eyed, vomit-mouthed means.

But Jason...the Dragon, the band’s fourth album, shows worrying signs of wear and tear. Jason runs mostly like God Luck II, winding its riffs and roars into suites of seamless tracks about assholes (literal and metaphorical) and the destruction that they should meet. It’s less urgent and inventive than its

predecessor, simply taking ideas that worked before and trying them once again.

What’s worse, every time Jason actually roars forward to find its footing, Weedeater squanders the momentum with unnecessary and wasteful hokum. The spookyvoiced introduction, for instance, invokes Eyehategod but does little else except slow our immersion within Collins’ bass roar at the start of “Hammerhandle.”

From “Hammerhandle” onward, though, the first side does flow powerfully, with Shepherd and Collins doing an Earth-like slow dance through the title track and Kirkum mauling the breaks during “Mancoon.”

But Weedeater gets tripped by its own tradition. In the middle of the maelstrom, they again drop a hillbilly acoustic track about hard times, called “Palms of Opium.” Collins’ lizard-like vocals and the goofy rhythmic shuffle not only feel like self-parody but also interfere with what’s best here. The same goes for Kirkum’s 59-second drum solo — not interesting enough for its own track, though that’s what it gets.

“Homecoming” is as close to pop as Weedeater’s ever been.

Built from a crisp riff and a drum pattern that stacks like logs, this is a Weedeater confident — or, maybe, mad — enough to land a different look. After its five-minute blaze, though, the band heads for the exits with a simple banjo line that darts through a wash of field recordings.

The concern here is that the fuel — the weed, the booze, the parties, the shit-talk — has finally blitzed the old Weedeater’s engine, stripping it not of strength but of the ideas and ambitions that made God Luck so god damn good.

—Grayson Currin

28 Editor’s Picks shuffle eleven

Americans In France — Crawling (Odessa) The Chapel Hill trio of Josh Lajoie, Casey Cook and Kent Howard raise a stiff middle-finger salute with their sophomore release, 11 tracks of snot-nosed, scuzz-fuzz art-rock. Streamlining their songwriting from 2009’s debut Pretzelyvania and red-lining the distortion throughout, AIF subvert any hook or melody with frenetic shifting tempos and pedal-settings cranked to “snarling bandsaw.” Lajoie spits like Johnny Lydon fronting Bleach-era Nirvana, while Cook’s sweet voice belies the piss-and-vinegar of a song such as “Like I Said,” whose chorus resonates like an LP-long thesis statement: “Fuck you!” (JS) David Banner & 9th Wonder — Death of a Pop Star (eOne Music) Mississippi MC David Banner found his greatest success rhyming over the brash backbeats and jittery hi-hats that defined the mid-00s Southern rap explosion. Durham’s 9th Wonder found his voice in full-sounding productions built on rich soul samples and neck-nodding snares. Banner’s sound was built for loudspeakers; 9th’s for headphones. But Banner’s rubber-band drawl adds vibrancy to 9th’s formula, like 9th’s sonic sophistication gives Banner’s verses a proper foundation. The couple might be an odd one, but that’s why it works. (BR) Birds of Avalon — Birds of Avalon (Bladen County) Birds of Avalon’s third LP is actually their second. Recorded between the arena-pop debut Bazaar Bazaar, and the sprawling, psychedelic Uncanny Valley, the eponymous effort was shelved when then-label Volcom ran out of money to promote it. Finally revealed, the record is an engaging bridge between Bazaar’s outsized hooks and Valley’s murky sonics.

Here, the Birds’ psychedelic excursions feel justified, and offset the concision ex-vocalist Craig Tilley brings to the song’s gummy pop centers. (BR) BraveYoung — We Are Lonely Animals (The End) The Greensboro collective formerly known as Giant crafts a brooding, melancholic yet ultimately redemptive paean to loneliness in all its various shades. More Mono than Mogwai throughout, opener “Flesh & Bone” defines the human condition as transitory and forlorn, its minor-key piano reading like shafts of dim sunlight piercing the mist of a cold, bowed-bass forest floor. The agonizing melody and percussion thunder of “And No Two Walked Together” is the futility of Aristophanes’ search for our other halves writ large, and the distant guitar lines of “How Each Friend Departed” read epitaph, not leave-taking. Rather than fling waves of crescendos at the listener with diminishing returns, Braveyoung’s songs smolder inexorably, low-end bass and rumbling timpani consuming melodic oxygen until the songs combust: on “The Weight of Loss Is Whole,” the flame is a beacon; on the 10-minute epic “The Light Narrows,” a holocaust. Art and beauty are all that remain in the ashes. (JS)

Small Plates Bailey Cooke — Tennessee (Share the Road) The full-length debut from Charlotte’s trad-country songstress hews close to her EP’s roots — in part because three of the EP’s traditionals make this tracklist, along with two more. They’re all executed flawlessly, often with Cooke’s stellar claw-hammer banjo underpinning. But the stars of the disc are Cooke’s own compositions. The murder ballad “Preston Finley” could have been brewed in a backwoods still, and her love lament “Nowhere Else to Go” — with Wes Langlois playing the David Rawlings to Cooke’s Gillian Welch — is a stunner. (JS) Elonzo — A Letter To A Friend (Self-released) Proving themselves worthy heirs to the legacies of Whiskeytown or Roman Candle, Rock Hill, S.C.’s Elonzo is sure-footed across a broad roots spectrum here: from sparkling open-road laments (“El Rio”) and broken-hearted twang (“Cold Heart”) to rockin’ declarations of perseverance (“Fight Fight Fight”) and full-choir salves (“Don’t Be Downhearted”). The songs are tighter and the hooks bigger, and the keys, bass and guitars (augmented by pedal steel and fiddle) braid their lines through each other like friends linking arms. (JS) Hiss Golden Messenger — Bad Debt (Blackmaps) “Are you with me now?” MC Taylor asks at the start of Bad Debt, Hiss Golden Messenger’s third LP. Here, Taylor is alone with his guitar and sing-softly-to-no-one croon. Alone, that is, except for God. As Taylor wrestles with angels on riverbanks against a backdrop of casual, thoughtful melodies, the deity and Taylor’s questioning of him/her/it are omnipresent. But Taylor’s approach is patient, not grave. His words, like the lingering tones of his guitar, resonate. (BR) Paper Tiger — Me Have Fun (Boy Girl Recordings) An eclectic blend of trip-hop, Shirley Bassey/Bond theme and lounge jazz, the Asheville duo makes late-night mood music for the louche and lovelorn alike. The duo blend synth textures, samples and processed beats with just enough organic elements — ringing guitar notes, double-tracked vocals, shuffling percussion — to tilt toward soulful intimacy rather than, say, Portishead’s creeping existentialism or Beth Orton’s summery trip-folk. The duo link longer songs with instrumental or vocal snippets, creating an album-long dreamscape of cocktail cool. (JS) Various Artists — Tobacco A-Go-Go: North Carolina Rock ’n’ Roll in the Sixties (Blue Mold) Released in 1984, Tobacco A-Go-Go was out of print until an untouched box of original-press LPs recently surfaced. With 18 inspired cuts — from The Young Ones’ fresh-faced swagger on “Too Much Lovin’” to Arrogance’s 1969 debut, a moody midtempo rocker titled “Black Death” — the collection is a rare treat even if it’s no Nuggets. The sounds here don’t surprise, but that these songs might otherwise have been lost to history ought to. (BR)

By Bryan Reed

scare flicks, the minimal John Carpenter-meets-Goblin sprawl pulls itself taut and tense like mummy-skin.

Brain F≠ Restraining Order and So Dim 7-inches Static Shock and Grave Mistake In a four-song flurry spread over two singles, the confusingly named Charlotte foursome offers an invigorating punkgarage slurry. Nick Goode and Elise Anderson offset superball rhythms and fuzz-frayed strumming with vocal volleys that manage to be both deadpan and frantic. Think West Coast punks The Avengers shoulderchecked into Functional Blackouts’ weirdo pogo pit.

BoyMeetsHermaphrodite BoyMeetsHermaphrodite CS Space Idea Tapes BMH’s fragmented-then-warped pop comes off distant and intriguing; not unlike hearing a rock & roll house party from the upstairs bedroom.

Horseback Forbidden Planet CS Brave Mysteries The tape lays out dark, scorched expanses broken by insectoid chatter and ghoulish vocals, but a few steps back reveal a deliberate and freeing sense of smoldering melody.

Horseback/Voltigeurs Horseback/Voltigeurs (10-inch split) Turgid Animal Voltigeurs’ ash-black noise undulates like heat-mirages after a scorched-earth campaign.

Horseback stretches keyboard melodies through barren black stuff like the post-apocalypse’s first emerald blade of grass.

Jefferson Mayday Mayday Jefferson Mayday Mayday CS Space Idea Tapes A collection of soundtrack fodder for low-budget, artsy

Los Naturales Los Naturales 7-inch Holy Owned Subsidiary Chapel Hill trio’s debut platter is a three-song spree of rambunctious, hastily (read: ideally) recorded garawge, which shoves its hooks under fuzz, like rugs under dust.

Mad Tea Party Rock & Roll Ghoul 7-inch Whose That The peppy Halloweenthemed jump-blues on this platter (with a hand from Reigning Sound-man Greg Cartwright) might be out of season, but they’re not out of style.

Pornojumpstart A Change In The Weather CS Space Idea Tapes Columbia’s Pornojumpstart offers two sides of fuzz-fried synth-pop, a marriage of film-score ambiance to dingy disco, infectious dance jams for those who prefer dancing alone.

Stripmines Sympathy Rations EP Sorry State Levying metal heft against hardcore urgency, Stripmines’ debut checks off all the loud music prerequisites while toying with tempo and dynamic to allude to greater things to come.

Various Artists Cassingles Vol. 1 DiggUp Tapes Twelve songs on six cassettes is a deliberately impractical mode of delivery, but, like most of the assembled tracks, it’s not a bad look.

shufflemag.com 29

Venue News

South Memphis String Band at SECCA's Crossroads series

T

he next music venue in the Triad to open on time may as well be the first one.

Despite The Blind Tiger’s intentions for a New Year’s Eve baptismal featuring Toubab Krewe at their new location less than two miles from their home of more than 20 years, inclement weather led to construction delays and permit setbacks, and owners Danny Forman and Don “Doc� Beck were forced to cancel or postpone several weeks’ worth of performances. The wait, however, was worth it, as the new venue on Spring Garden Rd. more than triples the occupancy of their former location and opens the door for upgraded bookings.

 “That was the main reason for the move,� said Forman. “We just want to be able to bring in larger shows more consistently than we could at the old place.�  After canceling Big Sam’s Funky Nation and postponing The Love Language, opening night on January 28 was a sell-out.. Donna the Buffalo played for more than three hours, starting with a cover of The Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed� picked up from the house music. The venue’s current calendar primarily consists of jam and countryrock with scattered indie influence, a mix that Forman says caters to the clientele that’s followed them to the new venue.

 The Blind Tiger isn’t alone in experiencing delays. The Ziggy’s revival, which was originally set to occur in mid-March, has been pushed back two months to May. However, sources close to the venue say that a more likely target date for the opening at this juncture is June.  Despite Ziggy’s setback, Winston-Salem will not be wanting for quality bookings thanks to the recent upgrades to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts’ McChesney Scott Dunn Auditorium. The 300-seat room was close to capacity at the inaugural performance of SECCA’s Crossroads performing arts series. Sets by altcountry songwriter Jim White and loose-knit old-time troupe the South Memphis String Band highlighted the space’s crisp acoustics and feeling of intimacy between audience and performer.  Renovations to the space began in June 2010 and were completed two months later, though SECCA Curator of Education Michael Christiano said that they are in the process of raising funds to re-fit the room to support streaming content. The idea, he noted, would be to maintain active engagement between past and future Crossroads artists and SECCA’s audience.

SECCA board member Andy Tennille says that an announcement on the series’ next installment, slated for July 23, is forthcoming and that people will be “pleasantly surprised� at the programming.

Compiled by Ryan Snyder

Photo by Ryan Snyder

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Photos, clockwise from left: Claude Gassian Elvis Costello, Paris, 1989 Gelatin silver print 12 x 10 in. (30.5 x 25.4 cm) Credit Line: Claude Gassian; Nitin Vadukul Radiohead, St. Louis 1993, taken 1993, printed 2008 Giclee Print Sheet: 39 7/16 x 44 in. (100.2 x 111.8 cm) Image: 24 x 36 1/8 in. (61 x 91.8 cm) Credit Line: Photographed by Nitin Vadukul; Ebet Roberts The Cramps, CBGBs, New York City, taken December 10, 1993, printed 2009 Chromogenic print 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Credit Line: Ebet Roberts; Ian Dickson The Ramones, 1977 Silver gelatin print 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Credit Line: Ian Dickson/www.late20thcenturyboy.com; Barry Feinstein Fans Looking in Limousine, London, taken 1966, printed 2009 Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Credit Line: ©BarryFeinsteinphotography.com; Jerry Schatzberg Frank Zappa, “Himself”, taken 1967, printed 2009 Chromogenic print 19 x 19 in. (48.3 x 48.3 cm) Credit Line: Courtesy of Jerry Schatzberg

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