Shuffle No. 9b - Superchunk

sh uffle FeltBattery + Pinche Gringo + calculator + Henry Flynt

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Megafaun: From Apprentices to Ambassadors See Part 1 MoogFest: Asheville’s Electronicapalooza Hopscotch: A Look Back at the Festival

superch un k Indie Icons Aging Loudly

04 Hopscotch Revisited 06 FeltBattery 07 Calculator + Pinche Gringo 12 Greensboro’s Legitimate Business 13 MoogFest ‘Comes Home’ 14 Anti-Art Appalachia 16 Reviews

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Publisher Brian Cullinan Editor In Chief John Schacht Assistant Editor Bryan Reed Design Gurus Taylor Smith Patrick Willett Photo Editor Enid Valu Sales Vance Carlisle James Wallace Website CJ Toscano Contributing Writers Rick Cornell Corbie Hill Brian Howe Jordan Lawrence

JG Mellor Topher Manilla Fred Mills William Morris Chris Parker Ryan Snyder Jesse Steichen Chris Toenes Patrick Wall Contributing Photographers Angela Owens Bryan Reed Brian Howe Interns Richard Finlan Shuffle Magazine P.O. Box 1777 Charlotte, N.C. 28224 shufflemag.com 704.837.2024 All content © 2010 Shuffle Magazine

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

Cover: Courtesy of Merge Records This page: Photo by Bryan Reed

Issue #9

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ile the inaugural Hopscotch Festival under: Smashing Success. Three days of gigs featured just about every imaginable genre in every conceivable venue, from rail-thin Slim’s with its driveway-high riser to Raleigh’s impressive open public space, City Plaza. The days and nights were like avatar-strolling through the “shuffle” function: Post-rock maestros Tortoise after the riddims-rock of Floating Action? Sure, let’s do it. Some paint-peeling heavy from Pontiak after some free jazz from the Jeb Bishop Trio?

Yes, please.

There were Big Draws, of course: A reformed Public Enemy, Canada’s electric Broken Social Scene, L.A. noise-artists No Age and Animal Collective’s sound-manipulator Panda Bear.

Locals The Love Language and the Rosebuds shared that big stage, and acquitted themselves just fine. No surprise there, since regional acts provided many of the weekend’s finest memories.

One of our featured cover artists this issue, Megafaun, transported from venue to venue like Spock, Kirk and Bones: The trio played packed mid-afternoon revivals, hushed evening improv sets, and after-hours jam sessions. At the other end of the spectrum, Red Collar and MapleStave left their day party stage splattered with busted guitar parts and blood; Temperance League nearly did the same during theirs the day before. The sneaky heat generated by Kingsbury Manx’s melodic crescendos worked as a perfect buffer between Bellafea’s molten rhythms and the lustrous pop of Schooner.

And so on and so on: “3 days. 10 venues. 120 bands.”

In the end, Hopscotch worked because it treated the locals with the same respect afforded the Big Draws, tacit acknowledgement that a vibrant music scene exists only when you water the roots. In that spirit of regional pride, we asked some artists who played – and writers who observed — to contribute some of their reminiscences. Excerpts follow, and we thank them with the promise of a cold beverage next time we cross paths.

—Editor 2 Hopscotch shuffle Nine

Seth Kauffman (Floating Action) I breathed a sigh of relief for Southeast culture when I heard it sold out. I like the scene that bands like Megafaun have created there.

When I lived there around 2004, trying to get Choosy Beggars going, NOBODY cared about live music... there was no scene...no good bands...and no bands helping each other out. Of course, that changed as soon as I moved away…but…

Brent Bagwell (Black Congo, NC) Hats off! There was beer everywhere....and band after band! It was like a secular paradise. My favorite performance was probably Double Dagger - those cats turned it out at the Berkeley Cafe, absolutely leaving the stage scorched! Maybe even better than the shows at night, though, were the day parties. Notable in my mind was the Friend Island Hometapes Party at the Pour House. Free Pop-Tarts and a crazy lineup. A standout there was Pattern Is Movement, who seem to be playing at some new level of great.

Maria Albani (Schooner/Organos) Motor Skills at Remedy, strangers pissing, The Flute Flies, free vitamin water, not having to shit in a porta-potty, Juan Juevos’ bare chest, BSS, Schooner playing w/ The War on Drugs, weed with Andrew & Benton, late night hot dogs, bourbon, Dexter Romweber Duo (holy holy shit), hula hoops, sleeping standing up…

Jason Kutchma (Red Collar) I saw (curator/organizer) Grayson Currin everywhere, but not in the sense of ‘seeing him everywhere’ having a brew, cajoling, devil-horning bands. Instead, I saw him walking, constantly walking, from venue to venue, making sure everything was going as smoothly as he could. Top notch.

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1 Red Collar 2 Kelly Crisp of the Rosebuds 3 Bellafea 4 Public Enemy 5 Panda Bear 6 Broken Social Scene All Hopscotch Photographs by Enid Valu

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4 Paul Finn (Kingsbury Manx/Odessa Records) Thursday, I got off work at midnight and had a few missed calls from various members of Shit Horse. Next thing I knew, they were at my house and I was basically kidnapped and brought to Raleigh. Once there we went to the Ruby Red warehouse and NAPS was playing. After that Shit Horse showed their video and then played the most ass-kicking 30 minutes of rock & roll I have seen in some time. I left the show around 4 a.m. with crazy Tom Kingfisher who got us lost for an hour because we Chapel Hillians don’t know our way around Raleigh...

Bryan Reed (Assistant Editor, Shuffle) The vast majority of bands I saw seemed to have brought their A-games. But Public Enemy still delivered the festival’s most memorable (musical) spectacle, from the drumline and step dancers that introduced them, to Flavor Flav’s surprising (-ly awesome) drum solo, to the rain-damp crowd pumping fists to every beat of “Fight The Power” and “911 Is A Joke.” The day before, Black Congo NC saxophonist Brent Bagwell donned a black baseball cap, complementing his blue button-down shirt, and put the cop-like ensemble to work directing traffic on Wilmington Street while downing a PBR outside Slim’s as Harlem played inside. The confused drivers, hilariously, heeded his instructions.

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Corbie Hill (Shuffle/Independent Weekly) The Helping Hand Mission Marching Band materialized out of thin air while we were waiting for Public Enemy to start, a drum major with a brilliant gold mace leading dozens of dancers and an amazing drum corps through a few thousand happily surprised music fans. On the other side of the coin, Sleepy Sun played weakly and without emphasis while vocalist Bret Constantino snaked his arms a la Jim fucking Morrison. This Cali band’s wholesale focus on image and spectacle rendered its fantastic tunes unrecognizable and boring.

Patrick Wall (Columbia Free-Times/ Shuffle) Tortoise delivered perhaps the most intense, propulsive and aurally energizing set of the weekend. I thought my head was going to spin off a couple times. (Raekwon’s tribute to Ol’ Dirty Bastard on Friday, too, was touching.)

On the other hand, Des Ark’s Saturday Local Time set was a trainwreck, plagued with screeching monitors, false starts and rambling, sleepdeprived self-deprecation. It was too painful to watch after three aborted songs.

Jordan Lawrence (Shuffle/Independent Weekly/Churchkey Records) My favorite moment came in transit. As I hurried away from Friday headliner Panda Bear to catch a set at Berkley Café the Animal Collective singer started “Take Pills.” Echoing through buildings, which enhanced the song’s already entrancing reverb, Panda Bear engulfed Raleigh in good vibrations –Hopscotch’s downtown takeover was complete.

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Feltbattery Behold the Hive Mind Thirty-two-year-old sound artist Benjamin Trueblood (a.k.a Feltbattery), a resident of Hillsborough and Waldorf School teacher, has a voluminous and endlessly digressive mind. It’s like talking to Wikipedia (except, one suspects, more accurate, and certainly more eloquent), falling through link after conversational link. You get why he feels the need to organize vast networks of data into holistic musical systems.

Trueblood’s last album, It Had Wings, resulted from his protracted study and recording of birds. His new one, Behold a Golden Throng (forthcoming this fall from Migration Media), also has wings—stingers too. “The hive” pervades the record’s form and content, with field recordings of bees blended with other sound sources into a sort of super-swarm.

After finishing It Had Wings, Trueblood spent a summer working on a friend’s farm in Efland, and recorded the sounds of the “feral honeybees” that lived there. His interest in bees started around age 18. His mother gave him a Joseph Beuys book that included watercolor drawings of bees and a reference to the polymath Rudolph Steiner, the grandfather of Waldorf education. Trueblood attended a Waldorf school in Chicago but avoided the writings of Steiner: “Teenagers don’t listen to their grandparents,” he quipped. He started listening.

Steiner had many esoteric ideas about bees. One was that a beehive operates just like a human head, except the hive is open to the world. He also predicted that humans would develop mechanized approaches to beekeeping, and problems would appear in

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the bee population as a result. A disturbance in the bee population was analogous to a disturbance in human minds and bodies.

All this came to pass. In industrial beekeeping, it’s common practice to harvest the honey and feed the bees sugar-water.

“The chemical components are almost exactly the same,” Trueblood explained, “but at the nutritional and probably molecular levels, it’s completely different.” Readers will remember the colony collapse scare a few years ago, an ongoing crisis that was never properly explained. “If honeybees cease to exist,” Trueblood remarked, paraphrasing Einstein, “humans will have four years to live.”

Trueblood started re-reading Steiner, as well as other papers on colony theory. “I read about how hives and ant colonies make very limited choices that lead to bigger meta-choices,” he explained. “Bees swarm, bivouac, and send out scouts to look for good hive-building locations, who then go back to inform the bivouac in their wiggle-dance way. When fifteen scouts arrive at the new location, there’s a tipping point, and the swarm goes there to build the new hive.” Unsure how to use his bee recordings, Trueblood wondered if swarm theory could work with people.

He sent recordings to various friends and asked them to respond. “I thought maybe there was a social force that works within groups that would create the final sounds if I solicited as much input as possible,” Trueblood explained.

“At first, I didn’t get much back, and I realized that as humans, our basic gesture is to be an individual.” But slowly, material came trickling in—first articles and pictures, then sounds.

Some of the friends were electronic musicians, which explains the increased

By Brian Howe presence on this record of beats, manipulated frequencies, and stretched pitches. Still, Trueblood wasn’t sure how to proceed.

“The question in swarm theory,” he said, “is who makes the decisions. There is a beauty to how bees organize themselves that goes beyond Darwinism. If the idea isn’t coming from a hierarchical system, but from the will of the group—this idea that humans bang their heads against—where does the inspiration come from?”

He found the answer in an unexpected way upon discovering bees living in the walls of the 19th-century church next door to his house. He could see the workers coming and going, but never the colony. But he knew they were there, working and organizing. He realized that bees accomplished everything not by thinking, but by doing. He went back into the recordings and found the orders hidden there. He started to work with his voice, inspired by some humming therapy he’d done in a birthing circle with his wife, Stephanie. He wound up with four long pieces and broke them into 21 parts, because the worker bee takes 21 days to mature, and he’d started to hear the album as the life-cycle of a female worker bee.

“Bees take in nectar and use acids inside them to change it into different substances,” Trueblood explained, “which are all on a continuum—wax, royal jelly, honey.” All of these substances are created individually, from a common origin, and used collectively.

It’s hard to imagine a better analogy for how Feltbattery’s latest sonic treatise moves with all the grace and mystery of a swarm. shuf9

Photo by Brian Howe

Calculator Songs About F*cking Calculator frontman Tyler Morris adjusts his glasses and picks at a plate of soft tacos at a Mexican restaurant down the street from the West Columbia house he shares with his bandmates. He’s picked it, in part, to rib Calculator guitarist Grayson Venters, who can’t stand Mexican food.

It’s a fitting act from someone who started one of the Carolinas’ most promising young rock bands as a lark.

“At first, [Calculator] was a joke,” Morris admits between sidebars on The National’s High Violet, well-endowed musicians, getting in trouble in strip clubs, and the relative merits of Coors Light. But, Venters adds, “We’re suddenly a serious band.”

Early on, though, Morris and bassist Jared Buchholz burned through a laundry list of

drummers and guitarists after starting the band in 2008.

“We were bullshitting around,” Morris says of the rotating cast and the band’s cavalier approach to its music. But for a while, it worked. Over two EPs, Subtraction by Addition and Classic Acid, Calculator proved an adept and adroit indie rock ensemble capable of penning memorable, Pixiesinspired tunes. Even if, as Morris admits with a sheepish grin, they’re metaphorically about fucking.

But as members left and the joke wore on, it took some kind of epiphany — like the one Buchholz claims to have experienced at Bonnaroo, of all places — to convince the band to stay together, stay in town and reconfigure Calculator.

“I’m glad we did,” Morris says. “We’ve figured out who we are and what we want to do. It’s made

me realize the value of time and patience. I mean, I’m not going to die tomorrow.” He takes a long draft from his oversized mug of beer. “Not that I know of.”

After the Classic Acid lineup flamed out, Morris and Buchholz recruited Venters and drummer Michael Crawford, and quickly set to work writing new material. The result: En Shape, the band’s newest EP and first in a series of three, which finds the recalculated quartet at its most mature and fluid. The four songs are minimal yet more technical, exploring space and texture on “Night Trot” and perfecting slowburn rhythms on “Romantic Organs” and the exquisite “White Rhino.”

Not bad for a joke band. shuf9 Photo Courtesy of Ashleigh Lancaster

Pinche Gringo Keepin’ It Real Josh Johnson stacks his equipment on the small, steamer-style suitcases it travels in. With drums at his feet and a red Gretsch hollowbody in his lap, Johnson — performing as he has for three years as Pinche Gringo — thumps boom-chick beats like an exploding heart, and shoots Chuck Berry riffs like an adrenaline IV. His frizzy brown mane obscures his eyes as he barks into an old red microphone like he’s midexorcism. His is a primitive sort of punk blues, and he plays it rough, fast and messy. But the songs are so filled with grit and determination, they’ll dent your brainpan.

“It’s just me, my amp, a kick drum, a snare

By Patrick Wall

drum and a guitar,” the portable performer says.

“I can plug into one outlet anywhere and put on a performance. It’s a lot of fun that way. It keeps it more real.”

The mobility is fitting, too. Pinche Gringo began when, shortly after ending his drumming duties with Chapel Hill’s The Spinns, Johnson found himself burnt out in Raleigh. Frustrated and in need of a change of scenery he met a darkhaired girl named Sarah Dougherty at a bar. They shared an inclination to move to Mexico City and, on a lark, decided to do it together.

In Mexico, Johnson tried to form bands with the locals but it didn’t work out, though he did

By Jordan Lawrence play alongside the likes of Los Explosivos and The Halfways. “I didn’t speak Spanish at all,” he admits. “It was kind of hard to communicate.”

So he stopped looking for bandmates. He picked up the guitar, an instrument with which he had little prior experience. Occasionally, Dougherty, aka The Lovely Sarita, lends her airy vocals and auxiliary percussion. But for Johnson, balancing the guitar and drums still requires a substantial effort to control. As he smashes his strings like they were snare drums, he struggles to stay in his element. It’s a genuine fight, but it’s the battle that gives Pinche Gringo its impact.

The last thing you’ll want is a cease fire. shuf9 Photo Courtesy of Josh Johnson

Remember i t R i g h t

By Bryan Reed he Nasher Museum of Art is a grand work of contemporary architecture, situated comfortably on the pleasantly wooded campus of Duke University in Durham. In the museum’s pentagonal, glass-ceilinged foyer, one sculpture towers above the rest. It’s a stack of LPs reaching toward the ceiling like a rock-geek ziggurat. This fall, The Nasher plays host to The Record: Contemporary Art & Vinyl, an appropriately titled exhibit featuring works of art inspired by, built from or incorporating vinyl records. Inside the exhibit, works by artists of different media congregate to celebrate sound. Jasper Johns’ work shares a hall with 9th Wonder’s; Xaviera Simmons’ with David Byrne’s.

Tonight, the Nasher’s most buzzed-about showcase embraces the live act, too. Superchunk, the famed indie rock band, is slated to perform outside, on a sloped lawn, to an amassed crowd of (mostly) aging Gen-Xers and their spawn.

This is the band, formed as the 80s became the 90s and borne on the success of the perennial anthem, “Slack Motherfucker,” which seemed to define both the sound and ethos of independent rock in the early 90s. Twenty years later, Superchunk celebrates something of a comeback with Majesty Shredding, the band’s first proper album in nine years. This museum’s special event is the album’s release party.

And in this era of indie rock romanticism, reunion tours starring the 90s’ greatest almost-hits — Polvo, Pavement, Guided

By Voices, Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine, et al. — the museum

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seems like it’d fit yesterday’s heroes as comfortably as a pair of worn canvas sneakers and a three-day stubble, or at least as well as the Cat’s Cradle.

But a funny thing happened. Superchunk didn’t take the stage as a band of 40-somethings going through the motions to keep an aging fanbase interested. The foursome blazed through an ample hour-plus of old and new songs, bouncing about as if the band’s members were younger than the band itself. They brought Mountain Goats head John Darnielle and a horn section onstage for the brand-new “Digging For Something.” And they made clear that this band is as vital now as it ever was.

But still, in this era of 90s-revivalist talk in the music press, and given the coinciding reissue of early albums No Pocky For Kitty and On The Mouth a month prior to the new record, the timing does seem kind of suspect.

Superchunk leader Mac McCaughan is skeptical of any sort of 90s revival, though: “I see people writing about that, like there’s a 90s revival or something, but I look at what’s popular, and it’s all over the map,” he says. “I don’t see that 90s-sounding guitar bands are more or less popular than anything else.”

His bandmate, Laura Ballance, Superchunk’s bassist, disagrees.

“Part of what fuels that, though, is bands like My Bloody Valentine and Pavement getting back together and doing shows. It sparks people going back and listening to those records or thinking about that time, and it does start to feel like a 90s revival.”

Pointing out that 1990 was 20 years ago, she compares this

Superchunk’s return to the studio, Majesty Shredding, reminds us that the iconic indie rockers never really left in the first place

latest trend to the surges in nostalgia for 70s or 80s fashions in years past.

We can certainly accept the impact Superchunk had during its career, from its formation in 1989 to its last — until now — LP, Here’s To Shutting Up, in 2001. Reissues were certainly warranted, especially since they were more or less out of print and due for an update. “We figured if we’re going to redo them, we might as well remaster them and make them sound better — which I think they do — and get rid of the jewel box packaging — which I hate,” McCaughan says.

At this point, the band’s influence is felt by any music fan even tangentially interested in what we know to be indie rock — especially considering this is the band that spawned Merge Records, one of indiedom’s most influential labels, and home to Arcade Fire, Spoon, Neutral Milk Hotel, Lou Barlow, M. Ward, et al. And for proof of Superchunk’s lasting appeal, one need look no farther than the grassy knoll full of bobbing, graying heads and dancing children at the Nasher.

But, if Majesty Shredding isn’t a reunion-tour cash-grab (and it’s not), or a fad-baiting slab of retro-rock nostalgia (and it’s not), the question is: Why now?

“We’ve been gradually building up to this point where we’re like, ‘Yeah, we should do this,’ ” Ballance says. “We’ve been playing more and more shows and I think through the course of doing that we realized, ‘Gosh, it’d be nice to have some new songs to play, and we haven’t made a record in a long time.’ ”

Photo courtesy of Merge Records

The thought of making another record never really disappeared in the nine intervening years. But Ballance and McCaughan kept busy with the demands of running Merge and their families, and McCaughan was writing, recording and touring for his other band, Portastatic, too. Guitarist Jim Wilbur held down a job managing online auctions for the local used books and records store Nice Price Books — “all from a dial-up,” Ballance laughs. Drummer Jon Wurster moved to New York and became a sideman-in-demand, filling stints behind the kit with The Mountain Goats, The New Pornographers and Bob Mould, among others, and finding time for comedy with Tom Scharpling.

“Time just kind of goes by more quickly than you think it’s going to,” says McCaughan. “All of a sudden it’s, ‘Maybe we’ll make [a record] this year,’ and ‘Well, maybe we’ll make one this year.’ ” And this, as they’d have you believe, just happened to be the year that the stars aligned and Superchunk’s members could find the time to cut an album. “We decided to wait for a year when we were doing an Arcade Fire record, and a Spoon record and a She & Him record, to decide to do a Superchunk record, too,” McCaughan laughs.

But Majesty Shredding was made possible by more than a handful of open dates on a calendar. McCaughan’s work in Portastatic had reached a plateau after 2006’s Be Still Please — “I was kind of out of ideas for that,” he says, “and that kind of

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coincided with everybody being ready to start the Superchunk thing.”

And, technically, the band never really broke up. “We never had like a ‘last show,’ ” McCaughan says. “We’ve been mildly active since 2002 or the last time we did a tour…ever since then we’ve still done stuff here and there.” They’d toured behind the 2003 singles compilation Cup of Sand, and released “Misfits and Mistakes,” a song recorded for 2007’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. That song was reprised on 2009’s Leaves In The Gutter EP (whose “Learned To Surf” makes a second appearance on Majesty Shredding).

The Crossed Wires 7-inch, also from 2009, marked the band’s first session with Carolinas-based producer Scott Solter — and proved pivotal in the process that went into Majesty Shredding.

The band would convene on weekends, rehearse for a day or two, then record for a day or two. Basic tracks were laid down at John Plymale’s Overdub Lane studio in Durham, and overdubs at McCaughan’s home studio. Then, the tracks would be sent to Solter for mixing. “It worked for that single,” McCaughan says,” so we just kept moving in that same way, where it was never like we were biting off too much.”

“We just did it until we ended up with an album.”

With Portastatic sidelined, and the Superchunk album now slated to become a reality, McCaughan found a new focus in his songwriting. “If you don’t think there’s going to be a possibility of making a record, you don’t bother to do it,” he says. “But once it is a possibility, you figure, ‘OK, now let’s write some songs for that.’ ” So the album’s 11 songs came together, sounding a whole lot like a poised, confident and legitimately rocking set of tunes that could have sprung from any moment in Superchunk’s career.

“Digging For Something” boasts one of the most inescapable whoa-oh-oh hooks the band has ever crafted, while the muchpraised “Fractures in Plaster” drops the tempo for a convicted ballad helmed by a fuzz-laden, winding guitar melody. “My Gap Feels Weird” sparks an adrenaline rush like 1993’s “Precision Auto”; “Rose Marie” jangles and lumbers like 1994’s “Driveway to Driveway.” These songs are more controlled, more sturdy in their approach than their predecessors — but no less exciting or vital.

“One of the things that’s been fun about the shows we’ve done over the past three years is that we can just fly somewhere and just essentially bring guitars and distortion pedals, and just plug in and play. It’s very easy that way,” McCaughan says. “We definitely didn’t want it to be a record where there had to be a keyboard, or there had to be this, or there had to be that in order to execute the songs.”

That directive answers for Majesty Shredding’s straightforward, guitar-centric sound — in contrast to the more lush, complex arrangements the band dabbled in as the 90s drew to a close.

Here’s where the strings take a step back. In Majesty, though, those textural ideas are synthesized, and offered as subtle complements to the band’s trademark punk-pop burst.

If nothing else, the album makes patently clear that Superchunk, even today, is no preservation hall monument, no museum artifact. No matter what decade, Superchunk’s noise is still their life and still their voice. shuf9

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Photos by Bryan Reed

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Giving Greensboro the Business

New venue offers underground music relief in tough times

By Ryan Snyder There have been few constants in a turbulent 2010 for the Greensboro music scene. It was a year that saw more music establishments shuttered, one key venue threaten to close, and a handful open and shut almost simultaneously. But one of the bright side-stories appears to be Legitimate Business.

Located in a shantytown of nameless, locally owned bookstores and gift shops off of Glenwood Avenue, Legitimate Business sprang up in late 2009 as a practice space for a group of loosely-associated acts—Resister, Torch Runner, Low Sky and Braveyoung—and quickly evolved into a haven for underground music, featuring a number of national touring acts on the cusp of breaking through.

A small collection of musicians from the aforementioned bands oversee the scant administrative functions, including Ben Saperstein and Zac Jones, guitarists for both the heavy post-rock outfit Braveyoung and the uncompromisingly aggressive Low Sky. But what’s been built here is far more than a forum for its own acts. Jones says he’s never known a place quite like it, which he attributes to Legit Biz’s wholly communal approach. “The key element is that we’re all in touring bands,” Jones says. “It’s not only awesome for people to come and hang out and do whatever, but it’s also awesome for bands to come to.” Touring bands that perform are guaranteed a meal and a place to stay amongst their small collective.

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Admission is entirely donation-based and nearly all proceeds go to pay the bands.

Elsewhere the news is not so good. The area that Legitimate Business occupies was previously, if briefly, home to a thriving underground scene, but Seven Day Weekend folded after a brief run of shows and The Hive’s bookings have gone by the wayside in favor of their art and education focus. Around the corner, one of the last remaining record shops in Greensboro, Jackson Lee’s My Favorite Things, padlocked its doors near the end of August. Its closing left Remember When as the last remaining dedicated vinyl shop in town.

On the for-profit front, seminal concert club The Blind Tiger announced in early June that its lease was not going to be renewed — after 22 years in business. Shortly after, though, the lease was extended through the summer, then again indefinitely as it finalized plans to move to the former location of Diaper Dandy at 1819 Spring Garden St. There are no concrete dates set for the move to happen, but club co-owner Don “Doc” Beck projects early December. The Green Bean coffee house carries forward its national bookings, and thanks to world-funk auteurs The Brand New Life, is incubating one of the city’s few open jazz jams. And thanks to UNC-Greensboro’s WUAG, Artistika keeps a steady stream of national artists on the club’s bill.

On the record release front, Braveyoung

Photo by Angela Owens

and Low Sky, essentially the same band with different foci, also have albums of their own on the horizon. Their full-length debut as Braveyoung — before the precursor to a ceaseand-desist letter compelled the band change its name from Giant —We Are Lonely Animals is the long-awaited follow-up to their Bloom EP. Alter ego Low Sky recently released Led Zeppelin House Show, a limited-run cassette born of their desire to play fast, angry music and their love of the format’s warm sound.

Torch Runner will also welcome its LP, untitled as of now, sometime this Fall.

On the independent hip-hop tip, Iconoclast Studios head JJ the Jenius recently scored Season 3 of The Cartoon Network’s hit show The Boondocks with an assist from local emcees Ed E. Ruger and Metaphor the Great.

Look for Ruger’s vocal fireworks in the strip club scene of “The Story of Lando Freeman.”

Ruger’s next album Ziplocked & Loaded is due out in early December, followed by a dubstep collaboration with DJ Phillie Phresh. His compatriot and Mightier Than The Sword label head Ty Bru will celebrate the release of his own album, Triple Bypass, shortly thereafter.

The album to look out for now, however, is a collaboration between Greensboro emcees Veteran Eye and ethemadassassin, collectively called Veteran-Assassins. Their self-titled debut follows the trail of two MC hitmen “out to take out whack emcees who perpetrate.” shuf9

Ryan Snyder covers the Greensboro music scene for YES! Weekly

Matmos

Oscillation Celebration MoogFest ‘Comes Home’ To Inventor’s Digs For as long as there’s been “electronic music” there’s been a schism between music created by performance and music created by manipulating pre-existing sounds. Robert Moog took an enormous step toward bridging that gap when he released his modular synthesizer in 1964. It wasn’t the first modular synthesizer – Don Buchla holds that distinction – but it was the first with keyboard-type control, gearing it toward live performance.

Musical purists still chafe at the synth’s canned tone, though, or its use in making inhuman, digitized sounds. And that debate continues, as the science of creating sounds with integrated circuits rather than strings and tubes has continued advancing with sequencers, laptops, and software like Ableton Live. Yet more and more musicians – like most of those playing Moogfest in Asheville, N.C., Oct. 29-31 — have been able to integrate those worlds in ways more like a performance and less like hitting “Play.”

RJD2, aka Ramble John Krohn, came up as a hip-hop producer skilled in the art of cut and paste. He got his start in Columbus, OH during the late ‘90s as the DJ for Megahertz (featuring rappers Copywrite, Camu Tao, Tage and Jakki tha Motamouth), and went on to work with a series of rappers (Blueprint, Soul Position, Cage, Doom, El-P, and Aceyalone) before branching out to create his own instrumental soundscapes.

“What I do by and large comes out of a discipline of studio rats,” Krohn says. “It’s based around recorded experiments, and at its core I feel it’s almost not set up to succeed in a live venue.”

As such, Krohn would often hear that he

wasn’t really a musician — all he was doing was playing other people’s records. It put a chip on his shoulder. But the situation changed, beginning with his second album, Since Last We Spoke. He’d emptied his cupboard of great album samples on his 2002 debut, Deadringer, and realized he needed to create his own. He started collecting keyboards, and recorded about 30 percent of Last We Spoke live. By 2007’s The Third Hand, the entire album featured Krohn playing live instruments and even singing. Then he formed an actual band to back him, and performed his music every night. That experience informs his latest, The Colossus, released in January.

“The sheer woodshedding aspect did monumental things for me.”

There still persists a large following that prefers RJD2’s DJ shows to band shows, but he’s trying to bridge that gap. At Moogfest, he’ll be performing with four turntables and two samplers.

“There’s a lot of playing my MPC because that’s the easiest way to afford a level of improvisation,” he says, “There are mistakes and it lets people know it’s not just a ‘press play on a CD and go’ kind of thing.”

For music experimentalists M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel of Matmos, the process is different, driven in part by the duo’s different aesthetics.

Schmidt began in noise/punk bands. Daniel, who also began in a noise act, was drawn to the pulse of dance. Together over the last dozen years they’ve forged an odd, looped sound that’s definitely electronic, but hardly straightforward.

Dotted with found sounds and strange samples – 2001’s A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure is made from the sounds of surgical instruments

By Chris Parker recorded during surgery — it’s both beat-driven and experimental.

“I was never interested in being dance music,” says Schmidt. “Drew’s knowledge and interest in it drove us into a place where what we did was interesting to people who were making electronic dance music, and yet I think I sort of forced us to be weirder than that.”

MOOGFEST 2010

When October 29-31 Where Asheville, N.C. Appearing Friday – DEVO, MGMT, Big Boi, Panda Bear, RJD2 and more; Saturday — Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, Four Tet, Matmos and more; Sunday — Cee Lo Green, Hot Chip, Sleigh Bells, El-P, DJ Spooky and more.

Tickets Daily, $75; Three-day festival pass, $184.50 www.moogfest.com

RJD2

When live, they like to retain the sense of surprise and subvert the technology’s predilection for predictability.

“For us, we work on two laptops that are not synced on purpose so we have to adjust tempos on the fly and clocks can pull out of sync with each other in real time,” Daniel says. “Things are estimated and approximated. It gives us the ability to build but also to collapse the music in a way that it won’t if it’s engineered. I think like any tool it’s in how you use it.” shuf9

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Outside the Outsiders Anti-Art philosopher Henry Flynt changed ‘Hillbilly’ Music’s DNA

By Jesse Steichen Henry Flynt is an avant-garde composer and philosopher. He grew up in Greensboro, N.C. during the 1940s and 50s before leaving for Harvard, then New York City’s avant-garde arts community, and returned to observe and write about the Civil Rights sit-ins in the 60s. But the region’s indigenous music played a key role in his life afterward. Now 70 years old, his music has ranged from rock (influenced by time spent with the nascent Velvet Underground,) to minimalism, raga and avant- explorations of country and blues music. From the mid-60s to mid-80s, Flynt made some of the most daring, strange music out there. Read his essay “The Meaning of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music” online at henryflynt.org to delve further into this unique artist’s work.

Shuffle sat down with Flynt at his friend’s Upper West Side apartment overlooking Central Park to discuss his musical maturation, his dealings with and break from the avant-garde scene of the early 60s, and why he ended up outside the outsiders of the music world.

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Photo by Diane Wakoski

Shuffle: Growing up in the South, was there a vibrant arts scene at all?

Henry Flynt: All my energy was going into classical music. I was the concertmaster of my high school orchestra and a member of the Greensboro symphony. I paid no attention at all to the surrounding ethnic music. When I was young I believed what I was told — the idea was that if you were an intellectual and you were aware of the academic syllabus, then music was some sort of science that progressed like computer technology. It was all based on theory. Classical music wasn’t about entertainment. I find it difficult to say what it was about, aside from the idea of some sort of progress in forms and technology. At that point in my life, I wasn’t asking, “Is this good?” There was kind of a social ladder of intellectual accomplishment that I was trying to climb. I wasn’t asking, “Is this the wrong ladder?”

S: You were involved in the civil rights movement at some point…

HF: In ’59 or ’60, I was listening to jazz in an attempt to familiarize myself with this “inferior” musical form, just to see what the noise was about. While I wasn’t that excited about jazz, with the exception of (John) Coltrane and (Ornette) Coleman, I happened to stumble across Samuel Charter’s book on the country-blues and [the book’s] accompanying album. I was totally blown away; it turned my whole view of everything upside down. I had to ask myself, “If Robert Johnson is the best musician ever born in the U.S., then why was he at the bottom of the social ladder?”

Somehow the whole thing was stood on its head…There was an opportunity to visit Greensboro, so I did that. That was in the middle of the 1963 sit-ins.

S: You named one of your albums Back Porch Hillbilly Blues, yet you

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put this out as an album of high-minded avant-garde…

HF: Well, it’s sort of all the other way around. I arrived at my anti-art HF: “Hillbilly” is the only word that has enough edge to denominate views as a product of my contact with the New York avant-garde. what certain musicians I admire were doing…Check out the Louvin The first time I ever met John Cage was when he came to my Brothers’ original of “If I Could Only Win Your Love” as compared performance at Yoko Ono’s loft. He could go back and forth to the Emmylou Harris cover. Edge! To call the Louvin Brothers between being extremely gracious and extremely snide. The “country music” is pathetic. minute that he thought you were challenging him, he would really S: But using this [country] instrumentation within minimalism and the try to one-up you immediately. avant-garde was a bit of a statement about where music comes from…

[At the concert at Ono’s loft,] I was introduced to Cage and HF: I was looking at ethnic music from the South, African-American I said, “Perhaps I’m intimidated by meeting you just before I music…it needed to really be pushed, to be up to “standard.” My have to perform.” He said, “Perhaps I’ll be intimidated by you model for this was Ornette Coleman’s relationship to jazz. I decided after you’ve performed.” That was a very generous thing to say. that rock needed [a push]. Finally, after everything is over, I’d like However, after it was all over, he said, “Why are you wasting your to think of myself as a rock musician that sometimes does long time trying to play jazz?” I told him that I prefer Little Richard instrumentals. I wanted to push ethnic music and rock, rockabilly, and Bo Diddly to jazz, and he said, “Who’s that?” Someone R&B, whatever. Practically everything I did involves very selfexplained who they were and he said, “If you like that, what are conscious formal and technical experimentation. you doing here?”

People see the title “Hoedown” [on the Spindizzy album], they My anti-art position was the product of carefully analyzing hear it, they hear violins, and they conclude that they’re hearing what it was to be in the New York avant-garde. In mid-1961, a Virginia Reel, but they don’t realize how very far away this is.

[Fluxus founding member] George Maciunas was what I call a They’re hearing something that’s just not there, and not hearing “moderate Modernist.” He had an art gallery on Madison Avenue, what is there. I create illusions. If people knew how calculated and he wanted to have “evenings” in his art gallery. His invited everything was… there’s usually something very atypical. The curators were [avant-garde composers] La Monte Young and basic material in “Hoedown” is an African-American boogie; it has Jackson Mac Low, but [Maciunas] also wanted to have wellnothing to do with a white [Virginia Reel]. It was a product of a known Columbia University composers. La Monte and Jackson long period of experimentation. There are several layers there, so asked him, “Why do you want to have those idiots?” He said, the rhythm never settles down to a stationary image. The last step “Well, I’d like to have something in the series that reflects my own was to decide that the two violins should play without hearing each personal tastes.” La Monte and Jackson said, “Oh, no, no, no, we other, something that would never be done in a music department. can’t have any of that.” They made it clear to him that “moderate S: You berated composer John Cage for following in the European Modernism” was just not acceptable in this subculture. musical tradition. What is it about the tradition you dislike? This “problem” of the avant-garde was all coming from La HF: I’m preparing to go and take part in an academic conference in Monte and a few other people. I decided that in some kind of London about Communist parties outside the Communist Bloc and utopia, art would not exist. My argument was that it was like the what their connection to music was. In the US, you start with Pete fashion designer who says, “Wear my clothes to be yourself.” The Seeger and work back to Marc Blitzstein, Clifford Odets, Aaron artist is saying: “Accept my work as your mental content…in order Copland and Woody Guthrie. But they told me that when they talk to be yourself.” That doesn’t make any sense, especially not in about the Italian Communist party, they’re going to talk about Luigi the avant-garde. The avant-garde was trafficking in artworks that Nono. That rubbed me the wrong way. His music was by far the were not worth doing. The amazing thing is that they were able most advanced formally, and in terms of technology, it was at the to take these “nothings” and intimidate people. They could stick very cutting-edge on a world level. it in somebody’s face and say, “You don’t understand that? Then It was like when Stockhausen made the string quartet go up in you’re just a philistine.” You had to learn that a dash on an index helicopters… maybe somebody thinks that, technologically, that is card is more profound than Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. That very advanced, but it has no musical value whatsoever. The question was the whole game. “Anti-art” is the conclusion I was driven to. of what does or does not have musical value is a question of S: You quit music, or at least stopped recording, sometime in the emotion and spirituality in music. European “serious music” has no mid-80s. doctrine on those points, it has nothing to say, it’s silent. They just HF: The height of my musical activity was in the mid to late 70s. assume that what they know how to do, because it’s complicated, It was a unique moment in my life in 1975 when I had a band because it looks like physics, that it is the “highest,” the “best,” the [Nova’billy] with five or six sidemen. That lasted for six months, “most refined.” They have no frame of reference to speak about then it just fell to pieces. I think a couple of them went on to a emotion and spirituality in music… punk band…I had very sharp political and cultural oppositions I’m completely in favor of the idea that the composer is a person to punk. At that moment in time, it was a fad, and to lose my involved in formal and technological experimentation, but it’s under sidemen to punk was the final humiliation. The idea that you the guidance of whether or not the result has musical value. It has to glorify the criminal element, crime at the street level…the idea take you to a place that you’ve never been before musically. that there would be an entertainment fad which would glorify S: You were associated with the Fluxus movement, but you had a that segment of society…I perceived everything with a leftist vibe philosophical break with them, and then you had your “anti-art” and from the point of view of the dogmatic left. I was horrified by thing for a while. the entire direction. shuf9 Henry Flynt albums can be purchased at locustmusic.com, recorded.com, and Ampersand Records.

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Reviews Listen to This Superchunk Majesty Shredding Merge

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gnited by a shock of escalating feedback and coiling guitar parts, a rush of delirious rhythmic momentum, and a hook so huge it stretches nearly back to 1989, Superchunk’s first LP in nine years wastes no time finding what opening track “Digging For Something” is really after: Renewal. The quartet that helped put indie rock and Chapel Hill on the map sounds as energized as the foolish kids who thought their “Slack Motherfucker” (and friends) worthy of a DIY cottage industry – one that now sits atop the indie label heap, by the way. But these 11 tracks don’t trade on the disheveled, smartass misanthropy and drunken-hookup/even-drunkerbreakup fervor of those youthful LPs. Instead they buzz anew with a more powerful urgency – the clock isn’t just winding down, it’s hauling ass. Punk-flavored assaults like “Crossed Wires” and “Learned to Surf” (both released in different incarnations recently) or the 153 nitro-seconds of “Rope Light” roil with that knowledge, guitars-drumsbass drafting and colliding in their rush to the finish line.

The shape-shifting propulsion and six-string angst of “My Gap Is Weird” are most reminiscent of early Superchunk, only now the snark is leavened with an adult’s wistful learning: “Time and transition is a wave that will put you overboard,” McCaughan tells the corner youngsters. But despite how well McCaughan still channels his inner ‘Chunk, things like Portastatic and Here’s Where the Strings Come In happened, and certain tracks incorporate those elements – though without subverting the parent band’s aesthetic. The strings do come in, for instance, on “Fractures in Plaster,” but only to accent the guitar décor, which includes a marvelous fuzzy outro of Kirk Kirkwoodmeets-Ira Kaplan feedback. Elsewhere, the spiky guitar counterpoint and marching toms of “Winter Games” sound like a (beefed up) two-song Portastatic mashup, though hints of McCaughan’s now-shelved solo project waft in occasionally on other tracks – though they mostly serve as a reminder that this is Superchunk’s record. Still, it’s easy to miss young Superchunk’s endearing sloppiness and why-the-fuck-not risk-taking – think of the shambolic outro to Foolish’s “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything?” But in Majesty we get the precision of a well-seasoned act that’s obviously still in love with indie rock’s spirit, even (or especially) if it’s sometimes fueled by cussedness - just ‘cause you’re older doesn’t mean life’s shit washes off any easier with that wisdom-soap.

As McCaughan sums up on the poignant album-ending rocker “Everything At Once,” your elders need the rock, too, because however more complicated the problems, it provides the same life-affirming answer: “So here’s a song about nothing and everything at once/oh the minutes and the months/the feedback and the drums/oh the feeling noise becomes.” Well said, and well played, Superchunk.

—John Schacht

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Battle Beasts Werewolf in a Blender Self-released If Battle Beasts meant to represent itself as a reckless, high-energy, way-too-fuckingloud band, then Werewolf in a Blender makes the point with grand eloquence. This is a daring record by a bass and drums act not ashamed of its own chaos. Recorded and mixed improperly — intentionally — the instruments bleed all over each other and are distorted to the point of demolition. “On the Run” alternates seamlessly between skate video-friendly heavy punk and NES action game triumph. “Lord of Destruction” is defined by a call-and-response between a distorted demon voice and some kind of digitally delayed bird-person. The drums stutter and gallop under a wash of mercilessly distorted bass overtones. Yet it’s in these juxtapositions that Battle Beasts really holds its own.

Making a noise rock record that honors the genre’s roots in 80s hardcore is something to be done right or not at all. And this duo did it right.

Corbie Hill

Black Congo, NC Live in Miami 1984 frequeNC Despite the name and title, Black Congo, NC, who are actually from Charlotte, recorded Live in Miami 1984 in the living room of the Yauhaus one day during Winter 2008.

Yet it’s a bright, breezy hour of slowly expanding and retracting songs touched with African influences. The

guitars and percussion catch air currents, vocals remain a little bit behind the beat (just enough to turn you on), while sax and synths add heft to the arrangements without weighing them down. Just as “Dot” reaches the highlife, it floats gently towards earth before zipping heavenward. As the album progresses, direct references to African music fall away, yet the buoyancy remains.

The album peaks at its center, with “If Your Heart” developing out of a haze into joyous, unstoppable momentum that only slows briefly before the insect-like percussion of “Persimmon Valley” buzzes and slinks into an even more cathartic peak. Live in Miami 1984 overflows with life.

Jesse Steichen

Double Negative Daydreamnation Sorry State Restraint still doesn’t feel like a proper adjective for Double Negative, but control does. The band’s power over its own chaos is the one trait that betrays its members decades of experience. But because this band steers its maelstrom like Pecos Bill might a cyclone, doesn’t mean there’s anything held back here. Daydreamnation finds the band at its most dynamic, stretching buzzing chords like a slow recoil; stepping into stop-time riffs and buttressing Kevin Collins’ vocals with harmonic echoes. The sounds the band has wrestled from its instruments — Justin Gray’s throbbing, buzzing bass, Scott Williams’ shoegaze-dense and needle-sharp guitar stabs, Brian Walsby’s roiling percussion and Collins’ manic expressiveness — belie its traditional assembly.

But since day one, Double Negative has been smarter than your average hardcore band. Now, they’re that and more. And as the three years

of tribulation leading up to this sophomore LP seem to be violently exorcised through these 13 cuts, the adage proves true; this was definitely worth waiting for.

Bryan Reed

Gigi Dover & the Big Love The Avocado Sessions Self-released As a stylistic overview of the breadth (and wealth) of contemporary Americana, Charlottean Gigi Dover’s latest scans with a satisfying assuredness; there’s enough programmable potential to keep Triple-A radio types, both listeners and M.D.s, in clover. Such a cursory analysis, however, does Ms. Dover and her band of merry men — Eric Lovell, David Clark, John Spurrier, Jason Atkins — a disservice, for in The Avocado Sessions’ diversity lies not its ‘mersh appeal, but its aesthetic reason for being. From moments of quintessential twang (the funky, B3-powered “Love Stove”) and Memphis strut (“Future” — check the Jordanaires-like backing vox), to dreamy psychedelia (“Ode To Barry”; pure Tom Petty/Mudcrutch) and perky Western Swing as seen through Django Reinhardt’s eyes (the appropriately titled “Paris”), these songs literally breathe, like 3D characters coming right off the screen, with Dover and her sensual Rosanne Cash/Margo Timmins vocal chops in the lead temptress role. Existentially speaking, this avocado’s one tasty fruit.

Chomp, chomp.

Fred Mills

Filthybird Songs for Other People Holidays for Quince Southern Skies, the 2007 debut by Alamance County’s Filthybird, is complex. It’s piled with vocal overdubs and vibrant guitar haze. It’s gorgeous, but it blunts the power of the band’s greatest asset: the soaring voice of Renee Mendoza.

Songs for Other People gives the singer her due. Built on bouncing bass lines, and guitar and organ that pierce rather than muddle, it’s filled with irresistible alt-country that’s as strong and clear as well-distilled moonshine. And Mendoza’s pipes, finally given the chance to shine, awe and soothe in equal measure. Starting quiet, her voice swells quickly to a rich warble, like ripples expanding on a pond. It’s a malleable tool that feels just as right chuckling through a “bless-your-heart” kiss-off (“Now I Know Better”) as it does navigating the existential puzzle of creation (“Mostly of Waves”). And with the band’s luxurious but relaxed backdrop, it all goes down smooth and easy.

Jordan Lawrence

Ben Folds & Nick Hornby Lonely Avenue Nonesuch It may be too easy to say that Lonely Avenue, a collaboration between the Winston-Salem born piano-pop artist and the music-obsessed British author, sounds pretty much like what you would expect if above artist and above author ever decided to team up — but, well, they did, and, more or less, it does. Hornby has always embraced sound as art (see: High Fidelity) and even once penned a music memoir of sorts (Songbook), releasing

it with a companion album (which happened to include Folds’ “Smoke”). Here, Hornby wrote the lyrics and sent them to Folds, who (with some current bandmates) scored, performed, and recorded it all, and then they did the inverse; the 11-song album has a deluxe edition featuring a 152-page hardbound book. And though the first single, “From Above,” is rather spry, Lonely Avenue has its share of classic Foldsian longing and melancholy.

Despite Hornby’s presence, it’s Folds’ world after all.

William Morris

Dylan Gilbert Pangaea Self-released Charlotte’s Dylan Gilbert has already recorded a small handful of albums and, at only 22, is clearly having fun doing so. To get to where Pangaea is, take Josh Ritter, put him in a studio (or maybe a high school homeroom) full of toys, instruments, maybe some pots and pans, some likeminded friends, some caffeinated beverages, and project some playful, memory-worthy home video on the walls. This isn’t to say there’s not some nostalgic longing here, but the mood (both lyrically and musically) is overwhelmingly childlike, with a nod to the simple, the breezy, the innocent. Still, though it feels like a wild attempt to grab youth and plant it in a soda bottle terrarium, it is decidedly open and hopeful. Add to his ability to pen a damn catchy pop song (“My Name is Arthur,” “I Feel Lost”) the willingness to experiment with genre, and you have a solid record that suggests there’s plenty more left in Gilbert’s tank (or terrarium).

William Morris

The Honored Guests Please Try Again Breakfast Mascot The Chapel Hill foursome waited four years to respond to their Tastes Change LP, leaving many to assume the band had dissolved. Guest guitarist/ keyboardist Patrick O’Neill built his confident power-trio Aminal, while the rest of the band went underground. The patient, smoldering earworm “Talk Talk Talk” floated around for a while, but really The Honored Guests didn’t resurface under that banner until this year’s Into Nostalgia EP. This LP, then, could well be viewed as a second try. And the casual ease with which they’ve filled these resonant, breathy pop songs — not far removed from Band of Horses most of the time — is a welcome long-time-no-see. The album emerges as if the intervening years hadn’t, well, intervened, a small but unmistakable step forward in the band’s lush, melancholy indie-pop. This is a graceful showing, more casual and confident than its predecessors, and as engaging as any of them.

Bryan Reed

Dan Melchior und das Menace Visionary Pangs SS Records Dan Melchior’s music often gets an unfairly simplified description. His method of sandpaper-smooth recording and guitar-snarl incorrectly sum up his work, clouding the interesting dialogue within (a recent record was actually named Obscured by Fuzz). Like the best lyricists, he observes the world around him, which has thus far included Surrey (outside London), New York City, and currently Durham.

“I Got Lost” tells a story both figurative and literal when a bus driver warns “watch out for the black hole downtown.”

The narrator in “Intelligent Design Part One” ruminates like a reluctant existentialist — grudgingly — on life and his true, morbid feelings. Not that Melchior minds spitting bile, one of his more focused talents.

With the title, “Mere Pseud Blog Ed,” the album’s final track riffs on The Fall’s violently fierce song name in a spoken attack on today’s armchair critics.

Whether he’s tearing through or thinking deeply, Melchior leaves the door open for grace to walk in through the haze.

Chris Toenes

Mount Moriah The Letting Go Holidays for Quince With Mount Moriah’s anxiously awaited full-length debut still in limbo, we’ll have to content ourselves with this limited edition 12-inch for now. On paper, it sounds awfully slight: The title track, a demo, and a live cut unfurl over twelve unassuming minutes. In reality, it’s startlingly ample.

Heather McEntire and Jenks Miller are both better-known for other projects, but Mount Moriah exceeds the sum of its parts: It’s more bella than fea, and it isn’t accessible by Horseback. McEntire’s and Miller’s predilections for bruising distortion and ambient overload, respectively, fall back to reveal pastorals of piercing simplicity. The “Reckoning” demo tweaks the classic “mama don’t cry” theme to allow for a religious mother and a gay daughter, arriving at a spiritual posture both gracious and defiant. The title track polishes up the folksy vibe with beautifully decaying piano keys, and “Telling the Hour (Live at the Earl)” is a capstone of roiling rock music for Bellafea fans. It’s a scrumptious amuse-bouche portending a feast to come.

Brian Howe

North Elementary Southern Rescue Trails 307 Knox Records North Elementary has crafted a natural sequel to the acclaimed Not for Everyone, Just for You with its sixth full-length. At its zenith, Southern Rescue Trails captivates with a pull as irresistible as it is hypnotizing; see “Sharp Ghost Mind,” with its repetitive, trance-inducing guitar riff and John Harrison’s haunting, slightly unintelligible vocals. Harrison (whose voice carries shades of Damon Albarn) sounds too hushed and grainy to be a focal point, and instead contributes to texture. Compressed guitars and eerie keys smolder atop each other, giving the listener little to hold on to and little choice but to get lost in the spacey orchestrations. While their bread-and-butter remains power pop, North Elementary takes a pleasant detour with “Southern Elevators,” trading overdriven guitars and laser synths for a humble banjo-andfiddle duet that glimpses into the southern upbringing that inspired this album. While a bit dense for casual listening, SRT stands as a cosmic, late-night trip worth taking.

Richard Finlan

Pykrete Liber Novus FrequeNC As Pykrete, Chuck Johnson uses homemade, interlinked analog devices to build cathedrals in the interference between competing signals. A former NC resident, Johnson moved to California to complete a fancy music degree at Mills College, and the four vinyl sides of Liber Novus sound like a master’s thesis on intelligent noise. Rife with

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Reviews (continued)

Featured Review Megafaun Heretofore Hometapes

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hose familiar with Megafaun are likely to already be enamored with the trio’s free-music excursions, folk extrapolations and omnivorous synthesis of sound. For these, Heretofore offers much. The sprawling “Comprovisation for Connor Pass,” which serves as the epicenter from which the rest of the record diverges, could be the most clear distillation of Megafaun’s experimental extremities, reaching from spare, patient melodies into building drones and amassed improv; from folk into rock into jazz. “Crowmeat Bob” Pence joins the song for a surge of reeds-and-guitars skronk, before the lush sounds recalling bands like Efterklang and Slarreffenland dot “Connor Pass”’ conclusion. But the diversions Megafaun explores and experiments with on Heretofore are some of the band’s most adventurous and risky – because they veer so sharply into pop. If “Connor Pass” shows Megafaun’s bent for breaking formal restrictions, “Carolina Days” shows its affinity for the simplicity of a structured pop song. In Megafaun’s most deliberately and completely pop-minded cut, the trio sticks to a jangly, joyous verse-chorus cycle, broken only by a guitar solo about two-thirds of the way in. Mostly, though, Heretofore sways between these poles — between gorgeous, casual folk-pop heavy on hooks and harmony, and a search for new contexts in which to place nontraditional timbres.

The title track might be the best exemplar, as its coaxing triune voice and breezy melodies coast above electronic bubbles and shrieks, and bristly drones. The pop-attuned instincts keep a steady backing and keep the song from losing momentum while guiding the listener through its divergent pathways. But those sounds are there, no less foreign than in any other context, just more approachable.

Indeed, Megafaun’s music has often been considered a sonic bridge between the past and the present. But, really, it’s more of a gateway to timelessness, where the sounds of Piedmont blues and minimalist composition and classic rock and free jazz can commune, and where there’s an audience as familiar with Albert Ayler as with Phish and Charlie Poole. Here, the trio inspires aspirations for that aural omniscience without demanding it. This isn’t about using the avant-garde as a means to make pop more artsy, but to use pop to extend an invitation into the wide world of sound listeners can find if they follow Megafaun into their rabbit hole.

—Bryan Reed

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corrosive timbres and primal rhythms, it’s uniformly visceral, though each side betrays its own deeply considered approach. Side A purrs and judders like a muscle car bombing down a rumble strip, while side B is muttering and austere, like a rudimentary creature learning to speak.

Side C breaks up the shorter pieces with an 18-minute epic of ceremonial intensity, and D shifts gears to minimal techno, literalizing the continuous beat tortuously submerged in the first three sides. A noise record of rare breadth and depth, Liber Novus keeps working its magic even after you turn it off: You hear a truck’s air-brakes shrieking on an overpass and think, “Where is that music coming from?”

Brian Howe

The Small Ponds Caitlin Cary & Matt Douglas Are the Small Ponds Last Chance Records This debut EP from The Small Ponds — primarily Caitlin Cary (Whiskeytown, Tres Chicas) and Matt Douglas (Proclivities) — is the sound of orchestral rock and symphonic pop. The neat trick is that the record’s minus an orchestra and sans symphony. They pull it off with sympathetic production and inventive arrangements where handclaps can fill in for a horn section and space is made for Douglas’ piano, organ, and xylophone. And it works exceptionally well when two rich, compatible voices are among the instruments, with Douglas handling the low end and Cary providing string-section lushness. The collaboration clicks lyrically too, as across the five songs the co-writers offer their take on wedding fave 1 Corinthians: 13. Love is as crazy as a horse on a bus, and it surfaces even in the agony of August when “plows can’t cut an honest track.” It can be lonely. And, as depicted on the riveting centerpiece “Bleeding Heart,” it can be a brutal dance. But what gorgeous waltz music.

Rick Cornell

Dylan Sneed Texodus self-released In 2007, Dylan Sneed quit his corporate job to make music full-time; a year later, he left Texas and eventually settled in Hartsville, S.C., where he’s made his living as a songwriter ever since. Indeed, the opening couplet of Texodus, Sneed’s own Odyssey chronicling his journey, sets the scene: “City lights at the back of me/distant as eternity,” he sings in a tender tenor over a simple-yet-elegant fingerpicked guitar pattern, “From where I’m going, from where I’ve always been.” Though he hails from central Texas and has always possessed the erudite literacy of Cat Stevens and the timbre and temper of a clearerminded Townes Van Zandt, the quaintness of the Carolinas suits Sneed just fine. Recorded in a tiny house in even tinier Ehrhardt, S.C., Sneed assembled a cadre of friends to flesh out his earnest Americana tunes; what Texodus lacks in polish, it makes up for in heart and wisdom, and firmly establishes Sneed as a strong Americana songsmiths.

Patrick Wall

Toubab Krewe TK2 Nat Geo Music Last issue Toubab Krewe percussionist Luke Quaranta outlined how the Asheville band’s new album was built from the ground up in the studio rather than relying on road-tested material. Indeed, TK2 displays the free-wheeling nuances of a group seeking out a singular “moment of inspiration,” as he put it.

The group’s African blues/ surfing-the-Sahara sound still

surfaces in tracks such as the slide guit-fueled “Sirens” and the trance-inducing, Ali Farka Toure-meets-Mermen “Area Code.” Yet one moment the Krewe can be heard pitting a grand piano against a kora (“Afro-baroque,” anyone?), with unlikely results; the next, a ska-like beat gradually morphs into a highlife rhythm and then into a subtle Velvets choogle while myriad stringed things chatter in a cacophony of twang. And those are just a couple examples of the sense of exploration on display here.

A physical groove is present and persistent throughout, but in truth, it’s the psychological impact of the larger journey that’s intoxicating.

Fred Mills

The White Cascade The White Cascade Self-released If nothing else, this Raleigh trio possesses a wholly appropriate name: Alternating waves of waterfalling white noise and twinkling, crystalline pluckings build and release, developing a sonic swirl reminiscent of shoegaze progenitors My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. But music of The White Cascade is less aimless post-rock meandering than it is indebted to Brian Eno’s Ambient series, with “Fine As Usual” invoking The Plateaux of Mirror’s eerie calm and “First Moments Upon Entering the Time Capsule” imbuing On Land’s dark drones with sun-scorched psychedelia.

While “Anything U Want” is mostly throwaway C86 slowpop, “Sunblind” righteously cops some of A Place to Bury Strangers’ Big-Muff-thoughRoland-JC120 bombast; not coincidentally, it feels like the most complete song on the EP. But you get the sense that’s not the modus operandi of The White Cascade, which seems content to trade structure for sheer sonic space. And when it works, as on “Fine As Usual,” the results are pretty magical.

Patrick Wall

Transportation Amusement Park Odessa Records Transportation writes about two things: girls and, well… okay, these are all songs about girls. With gently overdriven Americana textures distinctively blended with a soft rock vibe, this album could have come out any summer since 1972. “Pool Parties,” the best of their mirrorball ballads, plays like R.E.M.’s “Night Swimming” as rewritten by Comes Alive-era Frampton. But with lines like “your bathing suit was white,” they’re rooted — if not a little stuck — in a soft focus-take on the 80s. There’s almost zero aggression, even on the six rock tracks. What upbeat influence does manifest is more in line with The Police’s dancehalllite or The Raspberries’ power pop. One deviation, “Let it Out,” is effectively “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in double time.

So maybe Amusement Park is an appropriate title for this optimistic overview of 70s and 80s pop rock. And you can’t fault Transportation’s positivity.

It’s enviable, if nothing else.

Corbie Hill

US Christmas Run Thick In The Night Neurot US Christmas doesn’t welcome impatience. Opening with the 13-minute “In The Night,” a dense, slowly developing piece is the Marion psych-rockers’ gambit. There is no warm-up act, the blues dirge we hear later on “The Leonids” or the heavy, murky swirl of “The Quena” is all in here, layered like a Cliff’s Notes of the album to follow: a summary to be expounded upon later. At one time, USX was much easier to pin down, but here, the lineup

has expanded to include guitars (lots of ‘em, both acoustic and electric), synthesizers, two drummers, bass and violins.

At one time, USX was easy to claim as a lighter Neurosis or a gang of Hawkwind disciples.

But now, as you’re well aware before you reach the second track of this consistently rewarding collection, US Christmas has found its voice within its smoldering tempos, ominously chiming chords and mournful, meandering melodies.

Bryan Reed

Wretched Beyond the Gate Victory Records Wretched, a thrashing Charlotte metalcore band, carry a name that promises repugnance. And while the lyrics (“A backwards creature writhed in guts, in pus, in a mass of putrid flesh”) often deliver, the music is actually pretty unsullied. Between grinding outbursts that pack just enough fury to get your attention, the band’s two guitarists tangle with incredibly intricate leads. But they make their living off clean tones and sprawling guitarmonies, things that aren’t scary or disgusting at all. Hell, one of the most arresting things here is an uplifting orchestral transition.

It’s not that the band doesn’t pack a wallop; they often thrash about quite forcefully. But it’s always calculated, almost cold — more a well-choreographed dance than a hysterical outburst. Wretched boast jaw-dropping instrumental proficiency and a surprising knack for melody, but their impact is more technical than visceral. And they suffer for it.

Jordan Lawrence

Young And In The Way Amen Self-released Amen is a battle waged between opposing, if complementary, influences. With its foundation rooted in bass-heavy bulletspeed hardcore, Young And In The Way’s predilection for expansive, brittle and chilly black metal makes for a captivating contrast. The percussive battery that provides the bulwark for this 7-song 12-inch is the bridge between sides. Frontman Kable Lyall denies black metal’s banshee shrieks in favor of a strangled, throaty howl, pulling the band back into hardcore. But between lumbering, muted riffs, guitarist Rick Contes litters crackling shards of top-string tremolo, widening the band’s perspective. Fittingly, the A-side’s concise bursts give way to the single-song B-side, “The Becoming,” whose grim 14-minute panorama unspools into a three-way tug-of-war among of dark-hued post-rock, frostbitten black metal and crust-flinging hardcore bile.

This is a well-formed work, both divergent and consistent.

And still, its collision of sounds offers great promise for further exploration.

Bryan Reed

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