When a friend asked me if I wanted to attend the AMPLIFY electronic music festival in New York City, I thought it was going to be a bunch of people making music on their laptops, which can sound really amazing but look really boring. The first laptop show I ever witnessed put a bad taste […]
Finn Cohen
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Bull City Venue Blues
When I was 16, my family moved into a bigger house, providing me with an entire floor to myself. There were five entrances/exits, two of which were on my floor. The possibilities suggested by such a scenario were quite liberating to my nocturnal habits, so when Beck played at the Duke Coffeehouse in April of […]
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Limited Edition
Success for an independent record label could be defined at the very least as breaking even on each release, increasing a band’s popularity even slightly, and having its name on the lips of the record buying public. These goals are more than a little difficult to achieve for most small labels, even in one’s own […]
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A Long-distance Band Playing Faraway Music
An Idyll Swords record is akin to a mix tape of traditional Turkish, Afghan, Indian, and Chinese folk music compiled by Led Zeppelin circa Physical Graffiti. So if “Bron-Yr-Aur” and “In the Light” made your 16-year-old heart pump with Viking fervor, despond no more. Such aesthetics may have been forsaken in some circles, but there […]
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The Strange, Beautiful Sounds of Malt Swagger
Depending on the time of day and one’s mood, downtown Durham can display both Byzantine menace and the sorrow of a city ignored, helixed together with a growing sense of isolated pride. If such could be transformed into sound, Malt Swagger would be the band to do so. In fact, they’ve been steadily creating that […]
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Sounding Green
If the Greenhornes were asked to talk about themselves as a band, they would probably say, “Uh … ” In fact, that’s what they said when I asked them to. But how can you blame them? Why should they explain themselves when their music speaks for itself? When they roll into town Thursday, Dec. 5, […]
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Handpicked by the Gods
Can great rock music be created by accident? There’s nothing wrong with preconceived ideas and driven individuals carefully crafting their visions; we wouldn’t have half the cultural influences of the past 200 years without that sort of motivation. What’s more endearing is when circumstances align themselves just so, putting totally different people in together with […]
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Fugazi
Washington, D.C.’s Fugazi has carried the torch of brutal honesty and humility for seven albums over almost 15 years. The Argument, their eighth, is a record that perfectly captures the diseased and decaying state our nation was in well before the events of Sept. 11. What’s more striking, though, is how chillingly accurate the album […]
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Stroke of luck?
What makes pop culture so captivating are the neutralizing forces of attraction and repulsion that occur when watching famous people do their thing. Moral standards are lowered while the level of absurdity seems to rise, leaving us, the spectators, feeling as if these “artists” live in a vacuum of indifference created by their own fame. […]
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Our Band Could Be Your Life
It’s a cloudy day at the end of May and I’m in the back of a 1985 Chevrolet G20 van on the way from Oklahoma City to Lawrence, Kan., on day 10 or 11 of a month-long tour. The view is, shall we say, extremely panoramic as we barrel across the isolated and very flat […]