Bob Barker Says Spay or Neuter Your Pet or Risk Having New Tour and LP from Deer Tick on Your Hands

By Nobodaddy on Apr 23 2009

There’s never been any question: New York-based composer and minimalist pioneer Steve Reich is cooler than all of us. Always has been, always will be. I mean, think about it: who among us could get away with wearing that beat-up baseball cap around throughout the entirety of our professional lives and have it be attributed not to our unwillingness to cooperate with workplace standards, but rather to some eccentric outward symbol of our staggering/precocious/whimsical (at times) inward genius? Yeah, exactly. No one. (Face it, not even Ashton Kutcher is doing a good job wearing hats for a living anymore!)

But now, just in case there was any lingering doubt whatsoever, he’s gone and won the Pulitzer Prize for music this week, for his 2008 piece Double Sextet. A good deal (though not necessarily entirely) less sexual than it sounds, the work calls for two identical sextets of instruments -- each made up of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone, and piano -- and can be performed in one of two ways: with 12 musicians, or, as in the case of its world premiere last May with the Eighth Blackbird ensemble, with six musicians playing against a recording of themselves. Mixing live music with recordings (or, heck, “sampling” in general) is nothing new to Reich though, who has spent his life plumbing the depths of the beauty that can be created with tape machines, loops, phasing, texture, and polyrhythms (sound familiar, Animal Collective fans?)

"It's the idea of writing basically unison canons," a much-smarter-than-you-and-me Reich says of Double Sextet. "The same timbre playing against itself, so that when they intertwine, you don't hear the individual voice; you hear the composite. Now, if you have several composites going on at the same time, you really get to an interesting situation, and that's what's going on in Double Sextet... I'm very glad that this particular piece got it, because I do think it's one of the better pieces I've done in the past few years." Notice the “in the past few years” part. Yeah, ol' boy could have won a dozen or so Pulitzers for a myriad of earlier badass and highly influential works, such as Music for 18 Musicians, Electric Counterpoint, Different Trains, Violin Phase, Clapping Music, and of course the loop-phase-masterworks It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. Not familiar with these pieces yet? Well you’d best check them out before you go around issuing any declarations about how “groundbreaking” Merriweather Post Pavillion is.

By Kasia Galaxy on Apr 23 2009

With vinyl sales on the rise and records trumping CDs in coolness, it seems like increasingly more artists are opting to release their stuff in LP form. I mean, there’s no Compact Disc Day, right?

Which is why it’s not surprising that John Vanderslice and John Darnielle have released a vinyl-only EP entitled Moon Colony Bloodbath. If anything, it pisses me off that I still haven’t a proper output for my dust-collecting record player.

Darnielle tells Pitchfork: “Some of the songs have something to do with a loose rock opera/'concept album' idea about organ harvesting colonies on the moon and the employees thereof, who spent their off months living in secluded opulence in remote American locations.”

The EP was recorded for the Johns’ most recent tour. You can buy some of the remaining copies via mail order after they’re shipped to Beggars Group and 3 Beads of Sweat. Vanderslice will reportedly lug a few to his solo shows, while Darnielle will sell some at Bull City in Durham, NC.

The tracklist:

A1 Surrounded

A2 Lucifer Rising

A3 Satori in Denver

B1 Scorpio Rising

B2 Sudden Oak Death

B3 Columns Pillars Steps

B4 Emerging