Category: Music

A briny Brooklyn-based brass band.

The Mystical Arts of Tibet: Sacred Music Sacred Dance performance comprises selections believed to generate energies conducive to world healing. Robed in magnificent costumes and playing traditional Tibetan instruments, the Loseling monks perform ancient temple music and dance for world healing. The program features authentic temple dances and multi-phonic chanting. This is a rare opportunity for a look into the Tibetan monastic culture as these pieces are rarely seen outside the monasteries in which they are performed. The Mystical Arts of Tibet is a world tour endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to promote world peace and healing. The artists are monks from Drepung Loseling Monastery (re-established in exile in South India). The performers on The Mystical Arts of Tibet tour are not full-time professionals; rather genuine monks who are taking time off from their life-long devotion to contemplation and study to participate in the tour. These monk artists consider it an honor to be selected to represent their monastery and share their cultural traditions on the tour, hoping that they will be able to make some small contribution toward world peace and toward greater awareness of the Tibetan situation. At the end of each tour the monks return to Drepung Loseling Monastery to continue their vocation. In addition to the performance on October 13 the Monks will also create a Sand Mandala at UPAC from Wednesday October 9 thru Saturday October 12. The creation of the mandala will be free and open to the public each day.

https://www.mysticalartsoftibet.org

Sam Cohen’s second solo LP, ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears​, just might be a magical thing. An album blessed equally with melody, melancholy and depth. A richly psychedelic listening experience, immaculately produced, often the work of one man toiling away alone in his studio but sounding like a cast of many, chasing his dreams late into the night. A collection of songs that take stock of a maddening present and a potentially dark future, but delivered with heart, warmth and wit.

It’s also an album that might never have happened.

Backtrack to 2015. Cohen had just completed work on his first solo album, ​Cool It, after spending his 20s with psychedelic rockers Apollo Sunshine, then taking flight as Yellowbirds, a bedroom project that somehow ended up as a real, live band.

In tandem with Yellowbirds, Cohen began nurturing a career as a producer (Kevin Morby, Benjamin Booker, Curtis Harding and others), thanks in large part to the production on his two Yellowbirds albums. With the growing demands of producing, coupled with the impending birth of his first child (he has two kids now), Cohen reluctantly disbanded Yellowbirds to streamline the completion of ​Cool It. While the album won a cult of loyal fans following its 2015 release, Cohen says, “Commercially, the album didn’t connect as I had hoped, and I might have been content, at that point, to have just decided, ‘Well, that was my final album as an ‘artist,’ I’ll just concentrate on collaborating as a producer now.’ The vanity of laboring to promote myself started to take a back seat to other ways of doing what I love, and it became a welcome path of less resistance.”

Fortunately for Cohen, however, one of ​Cool It’​s most loyal cultists was Brian Burton, better known as Grammy-winning producer, songwriter and musician Danger Mouse – and he didn’t want to see Cohen stop releasing music of his own.

“Brian got in touch, and was, like, ‘No man, you need to continue doing this’,” says Cohen. Burton signed Cohen to his 30th Century Records label, reissued ​Cool It,​ and gave Cohen the boost of confidence he needed to return to writing and recording his own material, setting the album that would become ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears​ in motion.

“Brian really helped me get motivated to make this record,” says Cohen. “His support pushed me to get started, and to value myself as an artist. It came at a time when I needed to hear that from someone.”

Danger Mouse’s divine intervention was just the latest twist in a career that began on a school playground in Houston, TX, when, aged 12, he and his friends decided to start their own group, fashioned after the biggest band on the planet at that time: Guns N’Roses. “When I picked up the guitar,” he remembers, “I was like, Oh, I get this. I could definitely do this for the rest of my life.”

Six years later, after moving to Boston to study music, he formed Apollo Sunshine with fellow students Jeremy Black and Jesse Gallagher. “I’m glad I spent my 20s as a rock’n’roll monk,” he laughs. “We happily gave up everything for that band: we didn’t have apartments for a long time, we kept the van running on vegetable oil…sort of running! Jesse and Jeremy are still like my brothers, and that band formed my ethos, which is still very DIY. Do more with less.”

It’s an ethos still in play on ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears​. The album’s roots were far from grandiose, beginning during a session where Cohen was expecting to help Burton work on another artist’s material. When the session fell through, Burton suggested they spend the studio time on some of Cohen’s own material. “I hadn’t written a song since ​Cool It,” remembers Cohen, “so Brian said, ‘Okay, let’s write something now.’” The first track they cut was “Lose Your Illusion,” released as his first single on 30th Century Records. Then they cut a bass and drums loop with the Strokes’ Fab Moretti, which Cohen took home to work on, later building it up into the album’s stately opener “I Can’t Lose.”

This session kick started Cohen’s work on the new album. “I obsess over certain details of my music, but then I let other stuff totally go,” he says. “I record really fast and crazy, I leave little errors and flubs, but I’m always tweaking the sounds, and especially the lyrics.” The fruits of this approach blossom across the album, in its mixture of handmade and homespun with artful exactitude.

Recording at his own studio gave Cohen the luxury to record in haste and sculpt at leisure. “This record was very much built in the cracks between helping other people make their albums,” he reflects, but the slow gestation has yielded something remarkable, Cohen reveling in his dual roles as artist and producer.

“When I’m producing, it’s mostly about the sound and arrangements, and I get ​really excited about those elements” he says. “But I also really love helping out when an artist is stumped on lyrics because they start talking about what the songs mean to them. All these ideas and images pour out, and it’s always better than what was on the page. I’ll tell them ‘say that!’. It’s made me more direct in my own writing.”

The words within ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears are certainly direct, though hardly upbeat. “I’ve been writing about climate change and the decline of the west for a long time, and those issues have amplified to sort of a fever pitch. It’s on a lot people’s minds.” The title itself is a statement on Cohen’s own state of mind. “It’s just always reverberating in my head,” he says. “What is our future? Is there a future?”

Becoming a parent put a fine point on his worldview. “For years I was like, ‘Alright, humans are killing the Earth — we had a good run, but…party’s over, guys!’” he laughs. “It pains me more now. You can’t protect your kids from what’s to come. “The only way to go on is to laugh at it a little, because the weight of it and the profundity of the problems can destroy you. What I want for this music is to connect with people struggling with these same thoughts and feelings. I want people to hear this and say, yes, this is all really heavy, and I also feel helpless, and we don’t have any good answers…but we have each other. And this music sounds really good! It’s all I can offer.”

Consider ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears as a respite, then, a chance to laugh at the absurdity of it all, to revel in all the unlikely beauty that still surfaces amid the chaos and meaninglessness, a soundtrack to the apocalypse you’ll struggle not to whistle along to.

It’s an album Sam Cohen almost never made. You’ll be glad he did.

https://samcohen.bandcamp.com/

Mary Hood is a rising voice from a digital generation singing about old school themes like loneliness, love, loss, and longing with twisting acoustic guitar and a reedy soulful voice. Her music stands alone but her main influences Fiona Apple and Shakey Graves can be heard in her raw and resonant style, while others have compared her lyrics and storminess to acoustic legends Elliot Smith and Nick Drake. Mary’s motivation as a writer is to tell the truth even when it’s hard to say. She is backed by Chris Curtin on drums and Brian Hart on bass who have grown her sound to another emotional level. She has played everywhere from The Bitter End in New York City to Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, to Pleasantville Music Festival where she opened for Blues Traveler and Suzanne Vega. Experiencing prejudice in the music industry firsthand, she is passionate about bringing women artists and musicians together in hopes that we can change the way the industry works. She put together a small diy all women run, all women played festival in 2018 and is hoping to grow the festival over the years and do more events to help women in the industry.

https://maryhoodmusic.com

Elvis Perkins has released three full-length collections of songs, two under his own name (Ash Wednesday (’07 XL Recordings) & I Aubade (’15 MIR) and one under the band name Elvis Perkins in Dearland (’09 XL Recordings). The band with whom he has toured extensively also released the six-track Doomsday EP in 2009 (XL). In the past three years Elvis has made two film scores: “I am the Pretty Thing the Lives in the House (Netflix, October ’16) and “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” (A24 ’17). A soundtrack album for the latter was released via Death Waltz Recording Co. in March 2017. His last single, There Go the Nightmericans (Dec ’17), with the help of Revolutions Per Minute directs all proceeds to The Emergent Fund which supports communities most threatened by Trump administration policy. Elvis is currently in a Beth Morrison Productions theater piece, HOME, the brainchild of his old friend, Geoff Sobelle (Object Lesson), for which he provides live original music. HOME world premiered at Philly Fringe Arts in 2017 and will be touring internationally through 2019. 

Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz

https://elvisperkins.bandcamp.com/album/there-go-the-nightmericans-clockwork

Scarcely a year after the release of the self-titled Dirty Projectors LP, Dave Longstreth’s band returns with a new album that is, in pretty much every way, the YANG to the yin of that record. Coming in at 10 songs, 37 minutes, LAMP LIT PROSE is The Straight Story to the s/t’s Blue Velvet; Punch-Drunk Love to the s/t’s Magnolia.

Lamp Lit Prose, the eighth Dirty Projectors LP, is an album of light and lightness, tenderness and care, melody and fascination and beauty.

The album cover speaks volumes: unbleached linen, an explosion of flowers, the absence of gravity — happy chaos shot in lysergic detail. This version of the classic red-and-blue Dirty Projectors logo features two custom-made sculptural glass objects bending toward each other in taoist harmony — a new configuration that suggests affirming, restorative balance.

Lamp Lit Prose is a REBIRTH: an album of new hopes, new ideas and new collaborators. Song titles read like breathless dispatch from a place of beginnings and elemental forces: ‘I Feel Energy’, ‘Break-Thru’, ‘Lifestyle’, ‘Right Now’, ‘Feel It All.’ Should it be paradoxical that it’s also a return to form? Lamp Lit Prose feels like a RECOMMITMENT to the sonics and ideals of Dirty Projectors albums past, anthologizing the band’s trademarks and wrapping them within Dave’s ever-growing production chops and arrangement sense.

On ‘Right Now’, the album’s scene-setting opener, Dave sings, “there was silence in my heart, but now I’m striking up the band.” It’s true: together with the announcement of a new live band and the first proper tour dates in five years, this album feels like the return of a dear friend — albeit one who always surprised and pushed the sonic envelope. GUITAR has returned to the Projectors’ world, and so has VOCAL HARMONY. These are some of the most intricate and gorgeous vocal arrangements in the band’s catalog — from amazing GUEST ARTISTS including Syd, Amber Mark, Empress Of, Haim (background vox), Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, Rostam, and Dear Nora.

In its unity of taut songwriting, electric emotion and great performance, Lamp Lit Prose stands as Dirty Projectors’ most extroverted and immediately accessible record in quite some time.

In Dirty Projectors’ universe, there are the ‘concept’ records — The Getty Address, Rise Above, Mt Wittenberg Orca, Dirty Projectors [s/t] — and the ‘songs’ records: Bitte Orca, Swing Lo Magellan, The Glad Fact. Lamp Lit Prose is the latter — a stylistically diverse collection of absolute CHUNES — unified around a core of optimism, bonhomie and new love. This is what wild, new, risk-taking music sounds like, from an artist who puts his lyric and his lifeline on the line.

https://home.dirtyprojectors.net/

100ANDZERO is a three-piece punk band with some tendencies for noise and the odd toe-dip into new wave. True to punk rock’s hardcore heyday, 100ANDZERO pushes fast tempos to dead stops while also experimenting with the role of each instrument. More often than not, bass and drums take center stage and the guitar holds the plot. Together for years and years, 100ANDZERO have three releases – a full length, and two EPs, and have played all around the East Coast in basements, bars, clubs, and festivals.

https://100andzero.bandcamp.com/

Tyler Wood was born and raised in the northeast corner of the U.S. Although Presque Isle, Maine is known more for potatoes and skidoos, he had a rich musical upbringing. His first instruments were piano, trumpet, and cardboard-box drums.
When Tyler went to college, his plan to study astrophysics was eclipsed by the purchase of a real drum set and a new-found love for hip hop and recording. The campus had a dingy basement studio, where he encountered his first multitrack tape machine and sampler. He began playing, recording, and mixing music of all kinds. Tyler progressed into more experimental music through an electro-acoustic composition class, where he spent countless hours composing on the studio’s massive Serge Modular synthesizer. But New York beckoned…
After arriving in Brooklyn in 2006, Tyler began to tour internationally and record with acts such as Luke Temple, Glass Ghost, Joan As Police Woman, and most recently Elvis Perkins.
Meanwhile, Tyler reconnected with his old acquaintance Therese Workman to form the group Oh My Goodness. They’ve since released two E.P.’s of original music that has been described as “Worry-Core” and “Cross-Eyed Soul”.
Tyler also has been traveling the world as Audio Director and engineer with the non-profit group Remix <–> Culture, recording remote video shoots of underrepresented folkloric music from Morocco to Brazil.
Tyler currently resides in the Hudson Valley of New York, and performs locally as well as internationally. The submitted composition was premiered at Basilica Hudson’s “24-Hour Drone” in 2016.

As director, composer, curator and performer, my aim for Dronechoir is to present beautiful musical experiences that provide deeper connections between women of different cultures within our musical community. Dronechoir performances require a group of no fewer than four female vocalists of various ethnic backgrounds and musical interests who perform an unrehearsed piece that I’ve composed. Each singer is given musical and movement cues through earphones. Although the current composition of the piece is a constant, Dronechoir continuously reshapes itself through space-specific movement directions that are fed to generous, adventurous vocalists of diverse backgrounds whose voices vary in volume, range and timbre — which is where the movement directions come into play, physically foregrounding specific singers at different points in the piece. As a result, the singers may move closer to members of the audience than expected, bringing depth to the listener’s experience by challenging comfort barriers and introducing a heightened sense of engagement with the performance. But discomfort is a factor for the performers as well: Dronechoir combines unfamiliar collaborators with an unrehearsed performance, and everyone is singing together for the first time with people they may never have met before. We are given the opportunity to become comfortable with our discomfort, settling into the unknown. Throughout the piece, vocalists learn what their role is within the choir and composition. By committing to this unrehearsed performance the vocalists naturally demonstrate a sense of hope and support, acceptance of the moment, love and respect to our audiences and each other.

www.aronedyer.com

‘The best critique is self-critique’ is the mantra of Brooklyn art rock unit BODEGA. With wild minimalism and sharp wit, they revitalize the rock and roll vocabulary under the influence of post punk, hip-hop, kraut rock, and folk-derived narrative songwriting. Still on the endless tour behind their debut LP ENDLESS SCROLL – Ben Hozie (conductor, vocals, guitar), Nikki Belfiglio (art director, vocals, samples, hi hat), Heather Elle (bass), and Madison Velding Vandam (lead guitar, producer) have recently recruited Tai Lee (formerly a performer/drummer in the show STOMP) as their new stand-up percussionist (original drummer Montana Simone has left to pursue her painting and sculpture). The art rock group has written and recorded a new EP titled SHINY NEW MODEL w/ Tai (produced by Madison) that will be released September 2019.

https://bodeganyc.tumblr.com/