Former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha recently announced news of a sophomore LP to be released next month by EMI Japan. Entitled Look to the Sky, the album is Iha’s first collection of solo recordings since 1998’s well-received Let It Come Down, and judging by the titles of the tracklist, it’ll be a clear continuation of the prior LP’s sunny folk/pop brew.
Since the demise of the original line-up of Smashing Pumpkins (a band he co-founded with fellow Windy City nincompoop Billy Corgan) in 2000, Iha has been busy producing and remixing other musicians, guesting on friends’ records, contributing to various soundtracks and even co-founding a label, Scratchie Records, with Smashing Pumpkins bud D’Arcy Wretzky and Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne. The label has released LPs by bands like The Sounds and The Blank Theory. Iha has also regularly played with bands like A Perfect Circle and Tinted Windows. Look to the Sky is due March 14.
Look to the Sky tracklist:
01. Make Believe
02. Summer Days
03. To Who Knows Where
04. Till Next Tuesday
05. Dream Tonight
06. Dark Star
07. Appetite
08. Gemini
09. Waves
10. Speed of Love
11. 4th of July
12. A String of Words
13. Diamond Eyes
14. Stay Lost
Jodie Christian, the protean jazz pianist who bridged the hard-bop and avant-garde eras in Chicago, died early Monday morning. He had marked his 80th birthday less than two weeks ago, on February 2.
The pianist had an enormous impact on Chicago music of the last half-century. As a collaborator with Ira Sullivan in the late 1950s, and as a regular “house pianist” with visiting soloists in the decades after, he exemplified the bold and brawny Chicago approach to mainstream jazz. As a sideman for several of saxophonist Eddie Harris’s projects — including Harris’s first foray into electronics — he contributed to recordings that helped pave the way for the jazz-rock fusion. And he unassumedly mentored two generations of younger musicians who have in turn made significant contributions to the Chicago scene.
But Christian truly secured his spot in history in 1965, when he and three other Chicago musicians — Muhal Richard Abrams, Phil Cohran, and Steve McCall — initiated the discussions that became the groundbreaking Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. As documented in George Lewis’s AACM history A Power Stronger Than Itself, Christian’s was one of the five names that appear as signatories on the AACM charter granted by the State of Illinois on August 5, 1965.
You’re about to learn a lot of cool things about Ghost frontman Masaki Batoh. It’s probably best to lay out the facts in bullet point form:
• In addition to fronting one of the great Japanese psych rock bands of our time and touring regularly, Batoh is a professional, working acupuncturist.
• Batoh commissioned a device called the Brain Pulse Music machine that essentially translates brain waves from the parietal and frontal lobes into sounds (and Batoh has mastered its use).
• Batoh has a new album, Brain Pulse Music coming out on Drag City February 28.
• Batoh is a badass who really cares about the people of his country.
• Watch this.
Brain Pulse Music (BPM) was originally meant to be a straightforward attempt to translate brain waves into sound for the purpose of creating music. Following the earthquake that hit Japan in March 2011, the project changed considerably. Once Batoh was able to return to his acupuncture practice, he noticed a distinct increase in the anxiety levels of his patients. Instead of just translating any old thoughts into sounds, Batoh’s mission shifted to translating the post-disaster mindset that he saw permeating society into music. By creating music out of the brain pulses within this framework, Batoh also sought to create a release valve to help relieve that newfound anxiety.
Here’s a little more info on the machine:
…[The BPM machine] consists of headgear and a motherboard. In order to see the immediate effects on the level of brain waves, a special set of goggles that project indicator lamps (synchronized with the motherboard) are worn during the performance of the recording session. The headgear is worn by the performer, which picks up brain waves from the parietal and frontal lobes and sends them, via radio waves, to the motherboard. The motherboard then converts the radio waves via a generator into wave pulses, which are then output as sound.
Needless to say, this is a very cool and intriguing idea that borders on science fiction. The intensity and emotion that the promotional video hints at is a good indicator of the heft that Batoh’s project brings to the table. While the tones that make up this music are electronic, the album finds Batoh releasing some of the most traditional folk-oriented music of his career, a reflection of the roots of where the electronic tones originated, the Japanese psyche.
Batoh is donating all proceeds from the album to the Japanese Red Cross in support of earthquake victims. If the concept at play here isn’t enough to get you to buy this, hopefully that should do it.
Brain Pulse Music tracklisting:
01. Kumano Codex 1: Shou (wind pipes) and Nambu Furin (bells)
02. Eye tracking test: BPM machines (2 machines at same time)
03. Kumano Codex 2: 9 people play Konchiki (small gong hit by dear horn
stick) walking in a circle
04. Kumano Codex 3: Kodaiko (small drum), Shakubyoshi, Hansho (Buddhist
gong), Kagura suzu (bells) and Shakuhachi (flute)
05. Kumano Codex 4: Odaiko (big drum) , Konchiki, Mokugyo (Buddhist wood
block), Hyoushi-gi (wood block) and Shakuhachi
06. Kumano Codex 5: Kin (Buddhist bells)
07. Aiki no Okami: BPM machines (2 machines), Plasma Thermin, Springer FX
and Norito (Shinto chant)
Quick confession: sometimes I zone out when listening to a mix full of new tracks. Don’t get me wrong — new music rules, and I always toss mixes into my iTunes library, but after listening to a track or two off someone else’s mix, my attention tends to wander. Hell, it’s wandering now; I’m thinking about how it’s supposed to snow this weekend and how I might be getting a cat soon and how much I could use a cup of coffee.
But anyway, mix CDs. That’s how I first heard “Fun And Interesting” by The Chap, a song off their 2008 7-inch of the same name. Last year, the slightly off-the-wall synth-pop group released We Are the Best, a greatest hits compilation, and on March 6, they’re set to release their seventh LP, We Are Nothing, on Lo/Loaf Records. Check out the video for “What Did We Do?”; it’s a charming and catchy track off the new album.
We Are Nobody tracklist:
01. Rhythm King
02. What Did We Do?
03. Better Place
04. Talk Back
05. We Are Nobody
06. Curtains
07. Painkiller
08. Running With Me
09. Hands Free
10. Look at the Girl
11. This Is Sick
Austria’s Donau Festival has announced that their 2012 artist-in-residence, CocoRosie, will partner with Australian filmmaker Emma Freeman for a special live performance called Harmless Monster. The conceit is that you, the PEOPLE, can send in any video (without sound) that’s under five minutes, and if your video is chosen, CocoRosie will play a live score to it during the performance. The puppet masters in charge of selecting the film docket are Freeman (naturally) and Rupert Casady, one of the alter-egos of CocoRosie member Bianca Casady, who enjoys tarot cards and can see the future.
Without any additional constraints beyond the absence of sound, the possibilities of what you could send in are literally endless. CocoRosie tend to like unicorns, fake mustaches, and parasols, so if you can squeeze any of those items into your clip, you’ve probably got a winner on your hands. With Rupert on the judging panel, though, the final selections are technically already known…. If you think he’s conjured up a vision of your work, submissions should be sent using MediaFire to harmlessmonster.donau [at] gmail.com before March 30.
The festival goes from April 28 to May 5, with the Harmless Monsters concert taking place on the opening night. Other highlights on the bill include performances by Atlas Sound, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Squarepusher, among many others.
I know this is a contentious position to hold right now, but I think major labels might be… kinda shitty??? See, pretty much immediately following the death of singer Whitney Houston, the price of Ultimate Collection, her (you guessed it) ultimate collection of greatest hits, kinda-sorta-maybe, um, went up. Like significantly. Like from £4.99 to £7.99 (sayeth The Guardian), or roughly $8 to $12.
Yikes. Okay, so then, Whitney’s fans did what all civic-minded people do in 2012 and (you guessed it again!) complained on the internet. And on Sunday afternoon, the adults that run Sony responded, presumably by texting their nine-year-old children from the golf course and asking them to issue a statement because their parents were too drunk. The idea that these kids cooked up is that the price set on Ultimate Collection before Houston’s death was actually cheaper than it was s’possda be this whole time and that they were just finally (coincidentally) fixing it now. Yeesh. They also suggested that maybe when the record ascended iTunes’ sales chart in the hours following Houston’s death, the evil, fascist, artificially intelligent mainframe computer that runs iTunes raised the price itself automatically because of its popularity.
Yeah… uh, but then after that, I guess the parents came home, because Sony just admitted they raised the price. And then, after that, the price went back down to where it was because of spooky action at a distance. The end. OR IS IT???
