RECOMMENDED

The three Chicago bands—Moonrises, Wumme and ONO—set to take the Bottle’s stage on Monday the 16th represent dramatically different takes on music. Of course, somewhere, each of these ensembles has been referred to as psychedelic. With such unique practices setting each group apart, there’s bound to be at least one band concertgoers will love and at least one they’re likely to hate. Moonrises sports Plastic Crimewave Sound’s guitarist out front in a trio sans bass. It’s not probable a cover of “Light My Fire’s” on the way, but Moonrises skirts jazzier intentions as well, churning out tunes not dissimilar to Moon Duo. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Perou

By Arvo Zylo

The first thing to know about lead musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is that s/he (the preferred non-gender identification) is a combination of two people who address themselves as “we.” Breyer P-Orridge had a longstanding, fruitful and intimate relationship with a woman named Lady Jaye. In search of a way to consummate their love for each other and unsatisfied with simply saying “till death do us part,” they wanted to actually consume one another. And, in essence, they did. They went to plastic surgeons and exchanged each other’s skin, made each other’s cheekbones look alike, got breast implants for the same size cup, and so forth. Since Lady Jaye passed on from stomach cancer in 2007, Breyer P-Orridge considers h/erself an embodiment of both people, and to some extent, a connection to Lady Jaye’s place on the other side. Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye called their project “Pandrogyne,” and part of the intent was to transcend the trappings of the body and to nullify the concept of gender. Some people consider themselves to be a man stuck inside of a woman’s body, or a woman stuck inside of a man’s body, but to Genesis, s/he is simply “stuck in a body.” It’s not transgender as much as it is post-gender. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

About the same time the world messed itself while listening to Panda Bear’s “Person Pitch” in 2007, Animal Collective’s other half went and issued an album with his now ex-wife, múm’s Kría Brekkan. Avey Tare’s “Pullhair Rubeye” didn’t attract the same sort of misguided attention as “Person Pitch,” and certainly not the kind of frenzy “Merriweather Post Pavillion” garnered a few years later when the world caught up with what Animal Collective had been doing for just about a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

John Butcher/Photo: Andy Newcombe

RECOMMENDED

The squeaks and assorted grizzled noises stumbling out of speakers from any John Butcher recording aren’t haphazard. They’re not carefully planned either. Free improvisation finds the UK-born multi-instrumentalist endlessly searching for the next note, pitch or sound to pull out of the horn he’s blowing. There’s even a tendency to add a bit of electronic manipulation in order to fill out improvs. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Some of the best and some of the worst music sounds like it was made by artists on a boatload of drugs. Cameron Stallones’ “Sun Araw,” a solo recording endeavor and live road-act, deals in both. Stallones started dishing out albums under the auspices of Sun Araw in 2008. Working on as many Not Not Fun Records-associated acts as humanly possible (Magic Lantern and its high-viscosity recording endeavors deserving of particular distinction), a torrent of releases followed, too many to keep track of unless one falls under the heading of collector-scum.

Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a town where Steve Albini remains important enough to comment on rap groups he’s never heard, nor cares about, a band like Swans should draw a healthy crowd. Much in the same way Albini’s earliest groups dealt in post-industrial rock-hatefests, Michael Gira and his New York-based Swans have steadily churned out weirdo theatrics for the last several decades. With a hiatus that allowed Gira to rev up his Young God imprint, Swans haven’t influenced current touring troupes in a musical sense so much as Gira’s served as paean to how destructive slow songs can be. Paired with Gira’s band is former Sun City Girls’ guitarist Sir Richard Bishop and his collected Freak of Araby Ensemble. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

On 2009’s “The Amber Sea,” Myrmyr, an East Bay duo made up of Marielle V. Jakobsons and Agnes Szelag, explores space and a wealth of possibilities gifted through electronic processing techniques. While not a difficult listen or remotely stuffy, the six compositions offered a somewhat academic take on new music—Jakobsons being schooled at Mills College makes sense after hearing the disc. Earning positive responses from the album, which was after all an interesting confluence of occasional accordion, tiny instruments, strings of every variety and distant vocals, still finds “Fire Star” a surprising, and welcomed, extension of the duo’s vision. Read the rest of this entry »

If Hendrix were a weirdo-SoCal resident dressed up with a KFC carry-out container on his head, he’d have been Buckethead. The masked performer has been releasing albums since the early nineties, a ridiculous number. But since no two recordings sound all that similar, there’s actually a reason for such output. With a wild variety of sounds coming from Buckethead and whoever he’s decided to include as his backing group, the guitarist’s core audience is any manner of stoic music geek interested in collaborations with the funk cognoscenti, to some stoner metal-heads who get off at seeing a bucket-wearing gear-hound play arpeggios. Early on during the guitarist’s career, he was already reasonably renowned for shredding and tapped to join Praxis, which included bassist Bootsy Collins, keyboard player Bernie Worrell and Primus’ drummer Brain. The recordings that ensued reined in some of Buckethead’s more indulgent inclinations, resulting in the band’s ability to smoothly assimilate the guitarist’s soloing, the rhythm section’s funk and a handful of dub. The concoction, on paper, sounds like a number of other ill-fated super groups and countless crossover attempts. But a balance is struck on tracks like “Dead Man Walking,” which retains a nervy sense of aggression while mining deeply grooved rhythms. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dave Cantor

Excised from American popular music more than fifty years ago, the banjo isn’t generally perceived to possess secrets to musical freedom or self-realization. Paul Metzger, an acoustic instrument tinkerer and performer, hasn’t felt the sublime through playing any number of his augmented banjos or guitars. His understanding of the instrument, however, pushes past the normative applications of its vocabulary and attempts to incorporate ideas from non-Western traditions.

“There’re Indian ragas that are 3,000 years old which have a few short compositional phrases and a system of rules and conventions that go along with it. People have been chasing those tunes down for thousands of years,” says Metzger over the phone from his home in St. Paul. “The infinite is available within the finite experience. I’m not real prolific with compositions, because they’re always developing and there are always surprising areas for me to come across. For me that’s a real huge thing.”  His exploring Eastern modes of improvisation began while Metzger was still playing in TVBC, a three-piece rock group coming off like a stoned SST band lost in open-ended modal romps. “Gandhi,” off the band’s 1991 album “Gone,” sounds as if the Sun City Girls’ Richard Bishop called up the Meat Puppets in 1983 for backing support. Read the rest of this entry »

Morton Subotnick

RECOMMENDED

A founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, Morton Subotnick released what ranks as the first commissioned work for synthesizer in 1968 with his “Silver Apples of the Moon for Electronic Music Synthesizer.” Issued as a single song, split into two sides, Subotnick layers enough sound atop sound to arrive at a wobbly electronic exposition serving to inform a spate of modern-day oscillator jockeys. During the two sides of his record, specific themes become readily apparent, if not utterly unstable and fleeting. Similar to classical music from the second half of the twentieth century, Subotnick’s work encompasses all the qualities Alex Ross deems necessary for new music. Listening to “Silver Apples,” the first time or the fiftieth, assigning each pitched sound some sort of personality or associating it with a specific kind of instrumentation becomes unavoidable. While the composer, associated figures from SFTMC, and eventually Mills College faculty were busy extricating those new sounds from an array of influences including hippie culture and San Francisco’s general scruffiness, most other performers on the bill for the Neon Marshmallow Festival were being swaddled or a decade-plus away from being born. Joining Subotnick, who headlines Sunday’s bill along with the likes of jazz-noiseniks Tiger Hatchery, are dissimilar groups like Los Angeles’ Lucky Dragons and Pelt, which soldiers on in the wake of Jack Rose’s death a few years back. Adding in DJ sets by folks like John McEntire and some visual art, the Neon Marshmallow Fest might out-stripe the overpriced and overcrowded Pitchforks of the summer. Of course, difficult music, skirting pop song craft doesn’t sport as wide a fan base, but that’s why such congregations are necessary and important. (Dave Cantor)

June 10-12 at the Empty Bottle, 1035 North Western, (773)276-3600, 7pm. $25-$70