Bon Iver who will be featured in Walker’s sold out Rock the Garden 2008 recently stopped by The Current Studio for a Minnesota Public Radio/ KCMP live session.
You can download from Live Indie Sessions here.
Add a Comment
Japanther had a show last night at Europa, a rock venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn - a heavily Polish neighborhood reminiscent of Minneapolis’ Northeast (home to the ultimate Nye’s Polonaise). I’ve seen Japanther several times before, once at the Walker as they performed in Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, a collaboration with Dan Graham and Tony Oursler. The performance was an interpretation of the cult-classic 1968 film Wild in the Streets, starring the late-great Shelley Winters. The puppet/rock show/installation/video piece was visually stunning, and a big to-do as Walker re-configured the Cinema to fit the needs of the Out There 18 performance.
Maybe it was the age-centric material I’ve previously seen them in, but last night all I could think was “Don’t Trust Anyone Under Twenty.” I stood in the back, occasionally sitting down (my back was hurting), I wore a bike helmet on my ride over, and I snickered to myself that the kids are still body-surfing. Long story short: I felt old and tired. And sadly, Japanther’s set kinda did too. This was the same show they’ve been playing for years. Loop a line from a vintage stoner-flick and mouth the words, sing distorted vocals into pay-phones receivers, have technical problems and stop mid-song. I’m all for a rough-and-tumble, but if Cat Power learned to pull herself together for a live show and I think it’s high time these guys do the same. It doesn’t take long for quirky to morph into gimicky.
I don’t want to be a total hater, though. There were shimmering moments that did remind me of the importance of releasing adult inhibitions. They opened the set by drumming along to Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison. The slam-dancers wearing gorilla and wrestling masks were going CRAZY. And the high-schooler yelling along to every word lost his mind, like, at least three times. All those crazy kids seemed like they were having a good time, even though it was past midnight on a school night. Inspired, I went helmet-less on the ride home - wild in the streets.
Electronic one-man band Martin Dosh steps out of the background and into the spotlight
In a booth at a neighborhood pub in south Minneapolis, a slumped and bearded Martin Dosh is staring into his beer, tapping his fingers on the table, and talking about a coming performance at the Walker Art Center. It’s an evening devoted entirely to his music. The May 3 event has a title, “The World of Dosh,” and he’s effectively been asked by the museum to curate a tribute to himself, with special appearances by past and current collaborators like whistling indie-rock song-master Andrew Bird and underground hip-hop phenomenon Jel.
“He’s been this enigmatic, brilliant figure in the background,” says Philip Bither, curator for performing arts at the Walker. “He’s somewhere between the worlds of experimental music and pop.” Bither lists the genres Dosh’s music and collaborations have inhabited: contemporary classical, electronic, improvisational jazz, hip hop, and rock. “He’s somebody who can find links between all of those styles and do something fresh and intelligent,” says Bither, “and that’s rare.” Read more here.
- Jeff Severns Guntzel.
The World of Dosh at Walker Art Center
Saturday, May 3 at 8pm & 11pm
click here for tickets or Have a listen!
You may remember New York-based artist Mika Tajima and her noise-band moniker The New Humans from their performance at the Walker Grand Re-Opening party. They performed their piece Grass Grows Forever in Every Possible Direction in the space age Skyline Room (the eyeball of the Ice Cube Monster). Blessed be an installation that results in leftover beers. We had Budweiser for weeks.
Mika Tajima/New Humans are featured artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Beyond the Whitney, Tajima is currently exhibiting in tandem at The Kitchen (NYC) and COMA (Berlin). I recently had the pleasure of meeting with the artist at her performance/installation The Double at The Kitchen.
The piece explores multiplicity, boundaries, translations. As viewers enter the gallery, they are confronted with a partition running the diagonal-length of the room, built from panels inspired by Herman Miller’s cubicle-zygote Action Office invented by Robert Probst. Along the panels are Xeroxed images of an artist painting landscapes on the Iraq wall, Tajima’s own extrapolations on Action Office designs, gigantic mirrors, comically poetic press releases filled with the Utopian dreams that inspired Action Office, and promo posters from the Mick Jaggar cult film Performance.
Peeking through the perforations of angled panels, you sense the other side is operating with a similar vocabulary. Turning the bend, the audience sees that Tajima has crafted each panel as a double-sided artwork. With this system, the artist cleverly criticizes Probst’s design: a Cubicle Problem that due to over-privatization, people often create double-work. But this obstruction is more than a comment on office workers making the same PowerPoint - Tajima intends this incision into the space to highlight how “an architecture of isolation is a violent gesture”.
Just past the wall, a swinging lampshade casts dramatic light beams on two mirrors… another homage to Performance (as evidenced by the film’s trailer).
On my initial walk-thru of the installation, I thought, “How am I gonna make this relevant to the Performing Arts blog?” At first glance, Tajima is blending elements of interior design, film history, installation, architecture, screenprinting, sculpture… kinda a little bit of everything except performance. This is a calculated move by Tajima, who continually agitates expectations, employing a widely varied methodology which she calls her “rubric of practice.” Whether opening up for Motorhead in Norway, or exhibiting at the premier American biennial, Tajima instigates audiences to question what they plan on experiencing.
She is well aware of audience expectations of a performative artist having a show at The Kitchen, a vanguard of New York’s performance scene. As we walked around the installation, she’d highlight different components of the installation (the lampshade, the poster, the rotating panels) and define each one as a performance. In an effort to combat the notion that performance should entertain or even that something should “happen”, she creates a space that hints that something could happen, or did happen. As we spent more time in the gallery, more of these moments of performance began to emerge. A large stage-like space framed by the wall and the lampshade, myself posing in the mirror, sneaking into a nook between the gallery wall and a panel to look at an image. Tajima says she’s exploring the Artaud-ian notion of audience as performer, wherein viewers experience the artwork around them.
Tajima also disrupts expectations at a macro level, in that her projects often stretch beyond traditional modes of duration or location. This desire to create a “continual monument” - a concept inspired by the radical Italian 60’s design collective Superstudio - manifests throughout her body of work. For instance The Double is one project occurring in both NYC and Berlin concurrently, assembled by similar components with slight variations. Also, the video piece in the Biennial extends from Disassociated, her installation/performance at Elizabeth Dee Gallery.
Tajima’s goals and tactics are reminiscent of recent Walker artists Jerome Bel or Tino Sehgal. What I love about this work is how it forces organizations and audiences to ask core questions - Why have we divided artwork into defined genres? Why do people pay for a cultural experience, and how/why do we market these experiences? How have our expectations for aesthetic experiences been shaped and manipulated?
Long story short - the next time Motorhead comes to town, be sure to check them out. Their opening band is full of surprises.
all images are courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Pitchfork Media, the groundbreaking, national on-line bible for all things indie-rock gives a shout out to the Rock the Garden line up, the Sculpture Garden, and Walker’s upcoming Dosh engagement to boot.
“The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden– adjacent to the Twin Cities’ Walker Art Center– is one of the more beautiful spots in the Midwest (that picture doesn’t really do it justice). Featuring ornate landscaping and gargantuan sculptures from the likes of Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, and others, it’s a surreal, almost magisterial spot, and sounds just about perfect for a concert.
What luck, then, that in celebration of its 20th birthday, the Sculpture Garden is hosting a pretty great one. On June 21, the New Pornographers, Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, and hometown heroes Cloud Cult will, rain or shine, hit the outdoor stage for the Rock the Garden celebration. Happy birthday, place with the big cherry spoon!
Oh, and if you happen to call the Twin Cities home or happen to be in town for a Twins game or something, you’ll have a chance to see local boy Dosh– along with Andrew Bird, Jel, Fog, and others– at the Garden’s World of Dosh concert May 3.”
Posted by Paul Thompson See the complete article here.
Click here for tickets to Rock the Garden and World of Dosh.
Andrew Bird, the headliner of this years Rock the Garden, blogs on the New York Times music opinion page.
How to write a song and other mysteries: Words Will Tell
“In about a week I will load up my car with amplifiers and guitars and drive to Nashville to begin recording my next record. I don't drive much anymore and I'm glad for that except that I used to write a lot while on the road. Solitude, boredom, and the desperate need to entertain oneself are ideal stimuli for songwriting.
I'll spend days at my farm creating loops with my violin where I record a phrase and layer on top of it, often starting with pizzicato followed by multiple string lines. This is a handy compositional tool I also use in performance. I can follow any whim and instantly hear how it works in counterpoint with other ideas. It's perfect for someone who plays by ear and improvises as I do and who is too impatient for notation. This helps keep ideas fluid and ephemeral but with an instant gratification playback option. I've found that I can be completely satisfied for weeks by the simplest four-bar phrase repeating over and over again. It's a fragile thing where your perception of it can change it completely. You can reconstruct all the elements the following day, note for note and go by physical memory but the feel can be elusive.” - Andrew Bird Click here to read more.
Have a Listen on his website’s A/V page or myspace.
Rock the Garden!
Featuring : Andrew Bird, The New Pornographers, Cloud Cult, and Bon Iver
Walker Art Center/Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
Saturday, June 21, 2008 | 4:00 pm to 11:00 pm
For more information / tickets click here
Andrew Bird, playing in Austin 2007 | Photo by Gary Miller
David Torn performing his new album at Joe’s Pub.
A night of chaos and coalescence
(At the Regattabar jazz club in Cambridge) On Thursday night, all hell broke loose. David Torn, a ridiculously adventurous electric guitarist who sculpts his sound with electronics, brought his quartet Prezens to the club, and a heavy metal concert nearly happened. It was loud and crazy. To compare these musicians to a rock band, however, is to do them a disservice. They play a brand of free jazz that’s primal and sophisticated.
Torn, alto saxophonist Tim Berne, keyboard player Craig Taborn, and drummer Tom Rainey engaged in extended improvisations that developed without predetermined structures or song titles. Their atonal, polyrhythmic jams reeked of chaos, and yet there was, in fact, structure beneath all the madness. Rainey bashed out irregular rock beats. Taborn stabbed the keys of his Fender Rhodes, eliciting blurts and beeps. Berne blew furiously, sometimes in circular patterns, sometimes randomly. Torn - wearing a Russian fur hat - did everything to his guitar short of ripping off the strings. When he ran out of phrases, he dragged the pick up and down the neck, manipulating the noise by twiddling the knobs on the bank of equipment that separated him from the audience.
It was the kind of music that could make a laid-back jazz aficionado go out and break stuff.
- The Boston Globe
read the complete article here or have a listen.
Performance Information
Prezens Quartet (David Torn/Tim Berne/Craig Taborn/Tom Rainey)
and Drew Gress’ 7 Black Butterflies featuring Ralph Alessi
Date: Friday, March 28
Time: 8:00 pm
Place: McGuire Theater
Click here for tickets and more show information.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, the entire US tour by Lenine, including the May 1 performance at Cedar Cultural Center, has been canceled. We sincerely regret any inconvenience this may have caused. For a refund, please call 612.253.3556.
This Saturday, December 1, you don't want to miss this rare opportunity to experience a powerful band of musicians unlike any other on the jazz scene today. Walker Performing Arts Curator Philip Bither, in talking about the group and his excitement in presenting them at the Walker, says "This band is SMOKING. They somehow combine great high jinx, tight charts, wild innovation in solos and arrangements, infectious joy, huge musicianship and virtuosic big band power. Can you have amazing fun and have your mind stretched all at the same time?....this band can do just that. You have to see them to believe them."
Northrop Jazz Season and Walker Art Center present
Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra
Saturday, December 1, 7 & 9:30pm, McGuire Theater
*Student Discount at the 9:30pm performance! Provide your valid student i.d. to purchase a $10 ticket! Now that is a deal!
Millennial Territory Orchestra is making their way to the Walker! Their hip and unpredictable sound of this maverick band has attracted diverse audiences around the country. Fun, loose, witty, and raucous are just some of the words used when describing MTO's music. Although they perform some jazz classics the word "traditional" is definitely not in this band's vocabulary. This funky collection of multi-talented musicians manages to deliver innovative translations of some unexpected tunes.
When Bernstein talks about playing with the MTO his excitement is not containable. "These days I have more of a jazz audience. But until recently my whole audience was 22 year-olds, just having a great time. Even now, my favorite moments at an MTO concert are when some 21 year-old college girl comes up and says, 'I was crying. I had tears in my eyes.' They want to go out in New York and experience something and they've never really experienced live music before--and when they feel that thing where something is actually happening in front of them, it gives you that emotion, that feeling that you can't get from TV or from a computer." More info about the group can be found here.
Steven Bernstein has had a career that is versatile and cutting edge. He has worked with almost every type of musician from Marianne Faithful to Bill Frisell to Courtney Love. For this performance he leads a group of artists whose experience and talent are hard to match. Together these musicians create a sound that is both adventuresome and accessible for any music lover. Check out the line up:
Playing guitar is Matt Munisteri whose technique has been described as "homespun" and "remarkable." He has played all over New York working with artists such as Wynton Marsalis, Madeline Peyroux and leading his own band Brock Mumford. Matt is singer as well and has appeared several times on A Prairie Home Companion.
On the bass is Ben Allison who was quoted by the Boston Globe as being "one of today's best young jazz musicians." His most recent album Cowboy Justice was number one on the CMJ National Jazz radio charts for 4 weeks in a row and remained in the top 20 for four months. Ben has been the leader of the bands Peace Pipe, the Ben Allison Quartet, Medicine Wheel, and the Kush Trio.
Performing the violin is Charlie Burnham whose playing was described by All About Jazz as "it leads you down some open roads and dark alleys, and brings you to some spots you may not have known even existed." He has worked with Cassandra Wilson, James Blood Ulmer, Henry Threadgrill, and many more. Charlie is currently leading his own band in which he sings and plays violin.
In the reed section is Doug Wieselman a composer and a multi-instrumentalist with the ability to play a wide variety of reed, string, and percussion instruments. His music can be heard in the Oscar-winning documentary The Long Way Home. His soundtrack work is compiled on the 2004 release Dimly Lit: Collected Soundtracks. Doug is also the co-leader of the Kamikaze Ground Crew.
Peter Apfelbaum (also on reeds) has been a musician since he was 11 years old and is a product of the Berkley School's Jazz Project. In his senior year of college he formed the 17 piece group Hieroglyphics Ensemble (one of its original members being Steven Bernstein) who had great success. One of these successes was opening for the Grateful Dead in the early 1990's.
Another member of the reeds section is Erik Lawrence. His father, Arnie Lawrence, was a jazz musician and founder of the New School of Jazz in New York City who told Erik to "Play what you feel" which has led him to play in a more improvisational style. He has performed at the Carnegie Recital Hall, the World Peace Festival, and many European jazz festivals. He has played alongside such artists as Buddy Miles, Bob Dylan, and The Band.
On trombone is Curtis Fowlkes who maintains an active and diverse career: in addition to playing with the Jazz Passengers, his collaborators include artists like Bill Frisell, Don Byron, John Zorn, Harry Shearer, Marc Ribot, Jeb Loy Nichols, Sheryl Crow and Cibo Matto. His travels between the spheres of rock, jazz and pop also influenced his solo career, which debuted with a 1999 release on Knitting Factory Records.
Last but certainly not least on drums is Ben Perowsky. He has been drumming since he was three years old. He has his own label El Destructo on which he released a CD by his band MoodSwing Orchestra. Early in his career he worked with the pop singer Rickie Lee Jones and jazz star James Moody. He is currently working on a variety of projects with a variety of musicians one being his dad Frank Perowsky.
This Saturday October 27th at Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater
An eccentric and an outsider, photographer Mike Disfarmer took portraits of the residents of Heber Springs, Arkansas, in the 1940s, chronicling heartland America’s working poor.
Inspired by these arresting portrayals of postwar rural life, guitar genius Bill Frisell created an evening of new compositions.
His atmospheric and innovative musical language offers a perfect complement to the photographer’s images dissolving across multiple screens framing onstage.
Click here for Performance Information
Disfarmer: A Biography
by Richard B. Woodward
It’s a puzzle that Mike Meyer, better known as Mike Disfarmer, fell into this gregarious profession and a miracle that he succeeded at it, for most reports indicate that he lacked even basic social skills. The people in the small town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, where he made photographic portraits for more than forty years, remember neither the places he worked nor the man himself as attractive. For a good part of his life (1884-1959) he seems to have been more feared than liked. Click here to read more
This text is excerpted from Richard B. Woodward’s essay "American Metamorphosis: Disfarmer and the Art of Studio Photography" in the book Disfarmer: The Vintage Prints.
click to see the slideshow! Excellent photos by Daniel Corrigan.
Late junction (BBC) presenter Fiona Talkington explains how an exceptional young Tunisian musician found his creative home in Europe, and how his first three albums came about.
A small seaside town in Tunisia in the 1970s. A boy walks along a deserted shoreline picking up the odds and ends he finds lying around: A broken fishing net; a few discarded sardine cans; spokes from an old bicycle. His heart and mind are full of music and he wants to play. It’s as much as his father can do to put food on the table for Dhafer and his seven brothers and sisters. There certainly isn’t spare money for music lessons, let alone for an instrument. So Dhafer makes his own oud, the traditional middle-Eastern lute, using whatever he can find.
You’ve only got to listen to the achingly beautiful
first minute or so of Dhafer Youssef’s last album Digital Prophecy to hear how the passion for music, born in that small Tunisian town, still lives on.
The young Dhafer did what was expected of him and sang, having learnt at the traditional Koran school, but at the same time, he was hearing music on the radio - the only source of entertainment in this small town. “It was just music. That’s all I knew” says Dhafer “I didn’t know what was classical what was jazz and so on. Just music…” And so, on his homemade oud, Dhafer taught himself to play by ear. One day a friend came back from his travels with an electric guitar and a small toy one for his young nephew. Dhafer borrowed the toy for a week, at the same time secretly yearning to get his hands on the proper instrument. Eventually his friend began to lend it to him for a few days at a time: “days when I didn’t sleep, the time was too precious. I just played.” As he began to earn money by singing at weddings, he saved enough to buy his first ‘real’ oud for the equivalent of 100 Euros. This was frowned on by friends and family. “God’s given you a voice, you’ve got to sing.”
But Dhafer had fallen in love with the sound of the instrument. It was the sound of his roots, the country where he was born. “If I’d been born in Africa I’d have been a drummer. In New York- a sax player. But I was born in Tunisia -I play the oud. If I’d been brought up near a piano maybe I’d have played that, but actually I didn’t even see my first piano until I went to Vienna when I was 19.”
Vienna lured him with the promise of the opportunity to study music.
“I did anything I could to earn money. I washed dishes, cleaned windows, worked as an Italian waiter even though I wasn’t Italian. I did anything I could just to keep the music going. But I still couldn’t read music. I went to listen to lots of music: jazz, classical, anything. And I met a viola player Tony Burger who patiently helped me to write my music down, and we would just play together for hours. Then I met the tabla player Jatinder Thakur who really got me into Indian music. This was a BIG discovery. I fell in love with the sound. It seemed so near to my soul, and I played with him every day. He was at the heart of the first quartet I played with.”
“In Vienna, I was still working to survive. But, I have to say, it was the most beautiful time of my life. It was a dream coming true: I was doing my own music, bringing alive the colours in my soul, playing a lot of theater music with people like accordionist Otto Lechner.”
“Then along came an amazing opportunity. The Jazz club Porgy and Bess in Vienna would give a musician carte blanche to do what they liked, one night a month for the next twelve months. A new project every month. I could invite anyone I wanted to play with me so I just thought: ‘why not?’ and asked so many people I admired from all over the world: Iva Bittova, Peter Herbert, Renaud Garcia Fons and Christian Muthspiel for example.”
“It was a huge success and I got to do in nine months what might have taken ten years. I was doing something completely different each month and at every gig, people would come up and ask about the music. Sometimes, things went so well with the musicians that one night at the Porgy and Bess wasn’t enough and we’d go into the studio to record. That’s how my first album, Malak came about.”
“Well, after that, I thought I would go back to Africa in search of my roots, but after a while, I felt that Europe was where my home was. My creativity is in Europe and wherever that is, there is my home. Enja wanted another recording from me and I went to New York for a while and recorded Electric Sufi with a group which included Dieter Ilg, Markus Stockhausen and Doug Wimbish.”
The world was beginning to take notice of Dhafer’s captivating high vocals and intensity of playing and he considered settling in New York.
“But then came September 11th and I just thought in this troubled world I should return to Paris.”
“I began to have more and more contact with Norway and Nils Petter Molvaer invited me to play with him and the singer Anneli Drecker.” This lead eventually to his third album, Digital Prophecy. Here, Dhafer’s profoundly spiritual singing and playing become embedded in the Scandinavian, existentialist world of Norwegian music, embodied in the playing of Eivind Aarset on guitar, drummer Rune Arnesen, Bugge Wesseltoft on keyboards and Dieter Ilg on bass, along with the sampling of Jan Bang. “I just love playing with musicians from the North. They are more African than some Africans and they are an inspiration to me.”
“I am the only one who doesn’t speak Norwegian!” says Dhafer, “but our gigs together are not about what happens for an hour on stage. These are simply great human beings, and how we are as musicians comes as much from the time we spend hanging around: waiting at airports, traveling together, being on the road, in a bus, sharing good food.”
Performance Information
Date: Thursday, September 27
Time: 8:00 pm
Place: McGuire Theater
Price: $22 ($18 Walker members)
Related Links
Dhafer Youssef
http://www.dhaferyoussef.com
Notorious for his hotly debated conceptual dance, Parisian provocateur/innovator Jérôme Bel returns to the Twin Cities November 14 & 15. From CocoRosie to Ranganayaki Rajagopalan, Bach to Chico Buarque, Bel’s current musical playlist is as diverse as they come. See for yourself!
Hope There’s Someone by Antony & The Johnsons
For Today I’m A Boy by Antony & The Johnsons
You Are My Sister by Antony & The Johnsons
Compositions by John Cage
Crazy In Love by Beyoncé
Essa Moça Tá Diferente by Chico Buarque
Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio
Starman by David Bowie
Survivor by Destiny’s Child
Allah Ma’ak Ya Hawana by Fairuz
La Nuit Américaine - Grand Choral by François Truffaut
Fly Me To The Moon by Frank Sinatra
The Girl From Ipanema by Frank Sinatra
J.S. Bach: French Suites, BWV 812-817 played by Glenn Gould
Le tourbillon de la vie by Jeanne Moreau
Cantata ‘ich habe genug’ BWV 82: Aria: ich habe genug by Johann Sebastian Bach
String Sextet No.1 in B flat major, Op.18 by Johannes Brahms
Pais Tropical by Jorge Ben
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde conducted by Karl Bohm
Nouvelle Vague (Disc1) from Jean-Luc Godard
Musiques d’Histoire(s) Du Cinéma from Godard/Jousse
Where have all the flowers gone by Marlene Dietrich
Hung Up by Madonna
Cabo Verde by Cesaria Evora
Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass
Pallavani_Ragga Kalyani by Ranganayaki Rajagopalan
Terrible Angels by CocoRosie
Schubert: Sonata In A Minor, D 821, Argeggione
Spinoza : Immortalité Et Éternité read by Gilles Deleuze
Tosca: Vissi d’arte sang by Maria Callas
Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix - from Samson et Dalila sang by Maria Callas
The Ballad of Lucy Jordan by Marianne Faithfull
A Felicidade / Regra Três / Isso Aqui O Que É by Renato Vargas
No Woman, No Cry (Remix With Steve Marley) by The Fugees
Sunday Morning by Velvet Underground
Life On Mars? by Seu Jorge from The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Stravinsky: Le Rite Du Printemps-Le Sacrifice conducted by Pierre Boulez
J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations
With the Walker’s October 2 concert by Deerhoof nearly sold out, you might need another way of hearing the Bay Area avant-rock trio (and kids’ ballet inspiration). According to Spacelab.tv, the band has just released a free mp3 album of live performances, covers, remixes and other bits of weirdness.