The Wire Magazine Now Legally Old Enough to Rent a Car Anywhere in The World, Holds Massive Month-Long Birthday Fiesta
By Liz Louche on 10-31-2007
Are you one of those people who stresses about their birthday? It comes once a year; you want it to be super fun and amazing, but there are so many things that could go wrong! Like, what if you pick an inconvenient time for the birthday dinner, and nobody comes except for your annoyingly perfect sister and her fiancé Kevin, the amateur inventor? What if your birthday coincides with a fun national holiday and everybody would rather be trick-or-treating/watching football/decking the halls? What if you show up at the bar thinking it’s punk rock karaoke night, but instead it turns out to be a Best of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movie retrospective? These are all valid concerns.
But not for much longer! Experimental music magazine The Wire has found a solution to those once-a-year birthday blues. You see, the clever people over at The Wire have decided that the best way to celebrate the magazine’s 25th birthday is not to try and squeeze everything into one short night, but to keep the party going through a month-long series of special events. Over the next few weeks, a variety of venues throughout London will host concerts, workshops, exhibitions, and films related to avant-garde music. You could attend a gig in an art gallery, a church, or even a town hall! It’s that experimental!!!
Last weekend, former Swans frontman Michael Gira and Boredoms got the party started with a special performance at Shoreditch Town Hall. Soon after, The Wire received a healthy round of birthday spankings from Matmos and the Soft Pink Truth. So who else is scheduled to help blow out the birthday candles?
All events are in London, UK:
11.01.07 – Lydia Lunch - St Giles-in-the-Fields Church
11.03.07 - Charles Linehan Dance Company and Harlassen + John Wall and L Gamble + Unknown Devices – Finsbury Town Hall
11.04.07 - Pymathon + Tomutonttu + Lau Nau + Kuupuu – Bush Hall
11.05.07 – Resonance Radio Orchestra – London Theatre Arts Basement
11.09.07-11.11.07 – Atlantic Waves – Institute of Contemporary Arts
11.12.07 - Sunny Murray + John Tchicai + Han Bennink + Spring Heel Jack + John Edwards + Orphy Robinson – Conway Hall
11.13.07 – The Road to Who Knows Where (film night) – Roxy Bar and Screen
11.15.07 - Metadub Special: Kode9 and Spaceape + The Bug with Flow Dan, Warrior Queen and Ricky Ranking + Shackleton + Appleblim – Plastic People
11.17.07 - Rafael Toral's Space Project with Roger Turner + Trapist + Klangstaub + Bo Wiget and Luigi Archetti – Bush Hall
11.18.07 - Jackie-O Motherfucker + Polly Shang Kuan Band + Axolotl + The Sound Of The Exquisite Corpse + Pumajaw + Birds Of Delay + Weyes Bluhd - Cargo
11.19.07 - Sonny Simmons with Tight Meat + Jooklo Duo – Red Rose
11.20.07 – Extraordinary Lives (film night) – Roxy Bar and Screen
11.22.07 – Christian Marclay (pictured) – Bush Hall
Ongoing events:
11.04.07 - 11.18.07 (Sundays)–Drop-in workshop: the Sound of the Exquisite Corpse - Toynbee Studios
11.10.07- 12.09.07 – Savage Pencil: New drawings, sculpture, primer illustrations (art exhibition) – 96 Gillespie Gallery
The Mars Volta Take Goliath to Bed(lam); Announce New Album, Webisode, and New Year’s Performance
By Joseph Coscarelli on 10-31-2007
Forgiving the lofty concept nonsense, Deloused In the Comatorium had its moments. The debut LP from The Mars Volta was the first in the line of bilingual prog-rock records, including the subsequent Frances the Mute and Amputechture, each featuring a fair share of spacey six-minute outros, keyless guitar "soloing," and glass-shattering high-notes courtesy of vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala. And so the afro-ed portion of At The Drive-In keep on keepin' on with a brand new album, titled The Bedlam In Goliath (produced by the band's guitarist, Omar Rodriguez Lopez), to be released January 29, 2008.
To celebrate, the band has planned a New Year's Eve show/extravaganza at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. For a taste of the record and what you might be hearing as the clock strikes midnight to bring in '08, check here for a new webisode from the band, which features a new track called "Wax Simulacra."
The Bedlam In Goliath tracklist:
If a Free Downloadable Silber Records Halloween Compilation Can’t Bring You Happiness, It Can Bring You a More Pleasant Form of Misery
By David Nadelle on 10-31-2007
The five best things about celebrating All Hallows Eve this year:
5. The remote chance of a Meat Loaf sighting.
4. Those delicious UNICEF pennies people give out!
3. Seeing asinine costumes like this. And this. And this. And this. Oh, and this. Sorry, one more.
2. Silber Records’ Halloween compilation, Silber Sounds of Halloween. We like to give some love to this Raleigh, NC label when we can, because we like the cut of their jib, we like their moxie, and we like their free downloadable compilations full of noise pop, tone drones, and sound massages. With 30 artists and 130 minutes of music, it beats the hell out of a mini Snickers any day. The following songs are yours for the downloading here.
1. Lycia - The Dreaming Body
2. Peter Aldrich featuring Jon Harman & David Williams - Dawn of the Dead
3. Bryce Eiman - Itaint
4. Glissade - Flares
5. The Undermasks - Have You Seen the Ghost of John?
6. Planet Cock - Haunted House Song
7. Rachel Goldstar - Amsterdam
8. Miss Massive Snowflake - Magic at the Beach
9. The Wades - SÃdhe
10. Robin Crutchfield - WitchingAndWalking
11. Attrition - what shall i sing?
12. Sorry Welcome - (Holy Is) The Lamb Who Was Slain
13. Arbus - I Was a Cyborg from Outer Space
14. Tara Vanflower - The Three Witches
15. Remora - A Few Notes from a Grave
16. Paolo Messere/Kiddycar - You Save Me From Understanding More
17. The Elysium Facade - Insanitarium
18. Promute - Rise Up
19. Lauri des Marais - Halloween Ball
20. The Zanzibar Snails - spectres gaping maw
21. Ocean City Defender - Low Tide
22. Cam Butler - Does Your River Run Deep
23. Not Them - Halloween
24. Gorgons - November Eve
25. Small Life Form - What's Your Real Name?
26. Drats!!! - Experiment
27. Mars Field - Fear is a Man's Best Friend
28. Thisquietarmy - As the Creatures Unravel from Within/Vampyr
29. Port City Music - Night Terrors
30. Electric Bird Noise - Moments Like Last Night Make Me Wanna Believe
in Ghost
1. This year and every year... Vincent Price’s “rap” in M.J.’s “Thriller”:
Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y’awl’s neighborhood
And whosever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse’s shell
The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the Thriller!
Boohahahahhhhahahahahahah!!!
Travis Morrison Tour Gets A Rating Of Zero Point – Oh Just Go See The Show Already
By The Friz on 10-30-2007
When the fourth Google hit for your name is an article on how destroyed your solo career is (on account of near universally bad reviews for 2004’s Travistan), it might be kind of a downer. I mean, does Toni Morrison have to endure such scrutiny? Far from it.
But then, a comical barrage of poor reviews was probably the quickest way to turn a smug critical wunderkind into a scrappy industry underdog. A rebranding of the "former Dismemberment Plan lead singer" to an "uncertain, possible, sort of eccentric genius," who, after writing most of the just-released All Y’All in "early 2005," went through "some unsatisfactory attempts to record them" then "stopped working on it" to sing in church choirs and volunteer around D.C.
America loves an underdog. And it’s a great day when you can cast the critics as the bad guys and keep going. "Morrison fights against evil indie empire establishment" in big marquee lights. Great stuff. I don’t even care how the new record sounds; I’ve already bought the hype. Plus, his band’s called the ‘Hellfighters.’
Study Says Music Industry Up! Earth Will Soon Be Available in Only MP3 Or Vinyl Format.
By Valley Girl Magic on 10-30-2007
Looks like the only part of the music industry that's really going the way of the dinosaur is CDs.
Well, like, duh.
Some duder named Chris Anderson compiled this fine little list of stats:
- Concerts and merchandise: UP (+4%)
- Digital tracks: UP (+46%)
- Ringtones: UP (+86% last year, but probably just single-digit percent this year)
- Licensing for commercials, TV shows, movies, and videogames: UP (Warner Music saw licensing grow by about $20 million over the past year)
- Even vinyl singles: UP (more than doubled in the UK)
I've decided that soon the world will completely exist on the internet, and cities will become ghost towns. Vinyl will live on, but only through mail-order, and those vinyl people already never leave their houses anyway.
I guess the fact that concert sales are up kind of contradicts that ghost-towns-with-rebel-vinyl-collectors idea.
But then again, they could just do that "playing a show" thing on a sound stage and stream it. It'll happen.
I also predict the continuing increase of music being written only for ads and various products, to the point that bands cease to write songs that lack some kind of product placement or marketing potential. Cuz you know, people just really want to buy stuff.
