Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. “I don’t think any of us are particularly dying to evoke the month in which we wrote the songs,” says Ira Kaplan, singer and guitarist for veteran New Jersey trio Yo La Tengo. “I think if you sound completely up […]
Marc Masters
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Questioning Merge
Former Chicago Tribune reporter and current Gawker contributor John Cook first saw Superchunk play in Madison, Wis., in 1994, where he “immediately fell in love and bought every one of their records the next day.” His fandom led to a friendship with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance, and now a creative collaboration on a book […]
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’70s commune band YaHoWha 13 opens the fold with a Drag City collection
The Source Family might seem like the average hippie commune: In the early ’70s, World War II veteran Jim Baker opens a vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles, devises philosophies from a mix of Eastern religions, adopts the names Father Yod and YaHoWha (“was, is, will be”) and gathers followers to live, work and meditate together. […]
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So, is that Merge Records book any count? Absolutely.
I worried when I saw that the history of Merge Records, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, was co-authored by Gawker reporter John Cook and the Durham/ Chapel Hill label’s founders, Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan. It seemed like a recipe for bias or lack of candor, perhaps reading less like an intimate portrait […]
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Baltimore’s Ponytail, a class project gone wild, gets social
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Is Ponytail a rock band or an art project? Sitting backstage at DC9, the Washington, D.C., night club where the group is about to perform, guitarist Ken Seeno contemplates the questionbut not for long. “We studied art. We like art. […]
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SXSW09, Day 4: Fantastic Gimmicks [Marc Masters]
When it comes to musical performance, there seems to be a thin line between showmanship and gimmickry. I prefer bands who play great music with their heads down, but even with my favorite groups whose unique stage acts approach gimmickryWolf Eyes, Boredoms, Prurient, etc.–the difference is that I could close my eyes and still enjoy […]
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SXSW09, Day 3: Ordinance-free noise, solar power, and other alternative sources of energy [Marc Masters]
My favorite surprise about SXSW is that most of the live music booms out of the clubs and onto the streets with no complaining neighbors or disgruntled cops showing up. Apparently, this is somewhat routine in Austin even when SXSW isn’t happening, but it’s a bit of revelation for someone from D.C., where just one […]
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SXSW09, Day 2: The Real World, Austin [Marc Masters]
Traveling can be frustrating: Visiting any place is great, but I want to know what it’s like to live there, and that’s pretty tough to do without spending time with locals. It seems almost an impossible task at SXSW, as daily life in Austin gets masked by layers of bands, filmmakers, industry types and reams […]
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SXSW09, Day 1: Who are you? [Marc Masters]
This is my first trip to SXSW, and as daunted as I was in advance by who to see, where to go, and how to get there, so far there has been a more frequent question that I didn’t anticipate having to ask: Who the hell is this playing in front of me right now? […]
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Our exclusive interview with[out] Jandek
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. It’s been almost three decades since I first got the idea not to interview Jandek, the prolific Texas improviser who avoided any public appearances for the first 26 years of his career. His identity remains unknown, and he’s done two […]
