The Audiozine

The Speaking Piano!

vs.

The Piano Speaks!

Ascending Melody!

I never heard Fela Kuti at Blue Moon, but I definitely ate mango pancakes there with vanilla maple syrup...wait a sec, how did Cville's own Blue Moon Diner get mentioned in this Fela Kuti review???

Exciting weekend ahead. Bad news first: I'm fighting off some kinda nasty bronchitis and I have to work almost the entirety of Saturday. Good news abounds though. First and foremost, this year's Winter Jazzfest falls on Jan 08th and 09th and the lineup looks pretty exciting, lots of musicians I've heard, heard of, or probably should hear. I'm sad that I will be working through Ben Allison's set at Le Poisson Rouge on Saturday, but I should be getting off in time to see Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey, and hopefully a few others whose names are less familiar. There's actually a NYTimes article that has some good samples of a few of the acts from the festival, worth checking out even if you can't make it to the gigs. (Dig that "Galang" cover by Vijay Iyer).

So why not check out some of the Winter Jazzfest's Friday night events if I'm working through part of the Saturday lineup? Well, it's possible I may try to sneak in a Ben Allison set tonight at the Bronx Museum of the Arts at 8 PM, but the main event for the night will likely be a stop by the Knitting Factory to check out Starscream and Anamanaguchi alongside openers The Crayons and Radiates. Don't know the latter two bands, but thanks to Asif/Drew (and also EardrumNYC, who list this as a "featured show"), I've seen Starscream live once before and heard enough Anamanguchi to know that this will be some of the cream of the 8bit crop.

So last night, BK asked me for a top 10 list of best albums from 2000-2009. Narrowing down such a list is impossibly arbitrary, so the discussion naturally spun out into a broad survey of the last ten years' worth of music. Eventually D.G. Rogge, Sherv/Ramin, and a few other good folks ended up taking part in the discussion and after literally hours of listing albums I think we still managed to leave a lot of good stuff out. Here is a partial sampling of stuff we either discussed or that I would've brought up if time had allowed:

Radiohead – Kid A
The Strokes – Is This It
Beck – Sea Change
White Stripes – White Blood Cells (vs. Elephant?)
Interpol – Turn On The Bright Lights
Andrew WK – I Get Wet
Girl Talk – Feed The Animals
Outkast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
Justin Timberlake – Justified (vs. Futuresex/Lovesounds)
Neptunes – (compile their top productions onto one disc)
Jay-Z – The Blueprint (vs. The Black Album)
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Lil Wayne – (compile his best tracks onto one disc)
Dangermouse – The Grey Album (maybe not for the music itself, but definitely for the cultural impact)
Animal Collective – Feels
Madvillain – Madvillainy
J Dilla – Donuts
Dismemberment Plan – Change
Arthur Russell – (the guy was basically rediscovered this decade…that counts, right?)
Daft Punk – Discovery
MIA – Kala
LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver
Ben Allison – Riding the Nuclear Tiger
Arcade Fire – Funeral (vs. Neon Bible)
TV On The Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain (vs. Dear Science, which is my fav)
Eminem – Slim Shady vs. Marshall Mathers LP?
Aphex Twin – DrukQs
Autechre – Confield
Squarepusher – Ultravisitor
Bjork – Vespertine
Missy Elliott – (compile her best work onto one disc)
The Shins – Chutes Too Narrow
Kanye West – College Dropout (vs. Late Registration, which I prefer)
Brian Wilson – Smile
Coldplay – (this was the source of much debate)
Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots (though my preference is their new disc, “Embryonic”)
System of a Down – Toxicity
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Source Tags and Codes
Mars Volta – De-Loused In The Comatorium
Spoon – Kill The Moonlight (vs. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga)
Yo La Tengo – And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War

What have we left out? What albums have no right to be on this list? P.S. I can't let go of this decade without mentioning a few of my personal fav albums, namely Zirafa's Turnstyles, Aaron Albin's Echoes of the Past, Orange Drink's Widowmaker, and Smalltown Dogma's Nancy EP. Each of those albums provided me with enormous inspiration. Thanks guys.

The Sentiment that leads to The Diversions that lead to:

Back around 2002 and 2004, I played a house venue in Hampton, Virginia, called the Rat Ward. It was a rowdy spot. One of the guys who lived there and ran the place hit me up prior to coming to Norfolk. He wanted to play the show with his noise band Head Molt. I'm always down for playing with more experimental acts. With that sort of thing, there's a chance the crowd may not be able to handle it, there's also a chance people will have their minds melted. It's a gamble. So I made sure he understood that people may hate it, and he totally got it. At the show, it took approximately four minutes of their screeching set before people starting booing and throwing garbage on stage. It got the band fired up. Things escalated as the band started screaming a loop of "This is what you paid for!" People started jumping on stage trying to unplug their gear. It was confrontational music in a confrontational setting, and it was exciting. Eventually the band, with the help of some of the extra people on stage, knocked over all of their gear and ended the set at the 15-minute mark.
-- Girl Talk, giving his best-of-2009 rundown to P4k

P.S. Shoutout to Sherv, whaddya think: are Head Molt et al somehow part of the spiritual lineage running thru GKL/RP?

P.S.#2: Shoutout to Hemlock Recs, is the Cheezface collab cassette on Head Molt's myspace page in any way related to the Cheezface who drops jams w/ya?

1) Radian -- Chimeric -- Check out "Git Cut Noise".

2) Clipse

3) Animal Collective

4) Spinnerty in Japan -- Right Click/Download/Enjoy

5) DNA

6) Pepe Bradock

7) Camberwell Now

8) Edan

Took a sick day on this rainy Thursday as the cold virus I've been nursing all week seems to be blossoming into a bouquet of sinus headache, fatigue, and gross nasal congestion. Passing the day with failed attempts at long naps, long meals, financial aid forms, reading for work and non-work. Came across this little gem of an article re: my friend and musical comrade David Baker Benson. The funniest part is that last week Brendan Fitzgerald (the author of the piece and my buddy/semi-boss at C-Ville Weekly when I occasionally wrote for them) called me up to ask if the rumors he'd heard of a DBB Plays Cups show at Random Row were actually true and if maybe I could pass on David's cell number so he could verify the gig's time/place/lineup. Called back and let him know that David's got pretty much no digital or telecom presence. Anyway, props to Brendan, his article does a nice job of summing up a number of the salient, unique, weird, wonderful features of David's ongoing project.

Get excited.

Still remember going to Gallery 5 in RVA and seeing a small festival put together by Patchwork Collective back in (I believe) summer 2006 where an avant-garde orchestra shared time with a steel guitar player whose set happened just before or after one by Brian Jones and a killer free jazz sax player whose name escapes me. The night was capped by a set from The Great White Jenkins, whose rendition of "Brother" was both the first and best performance I've yet heard of it. Anyway, nice to see RVA get a little love.