By Dave Cantor

The greatest myths are good stories. And tales behind the discovery of any band are just decent fiction—or at least realities tweaked well enough to conjure up towering imagery.

Sweden’s Goat isn’t issuing its Stateside debut because of outstanding European festival performances but rather because a band it shares practice space with just shot a video over to Chris Reeder, UK’s Rocket Recordings honcho, and he dug it. That’s only part of the story, though.

“Over the course of the next few months when we were putting the seven-inch together, the band themselves started communicating with us,” Reeder says about his earliest digital interactions with the Swedes. “Then we didn’t really hear anything else from them until about May … when out of the blue ‘World Music,’ all finished and mastered, landed in our inbox.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Dave Cantor

Paul Williams is dead.

And while the journalist’s March 27 passing has little impact on Akron/Family, its new disc “Sub Verses” or the fact that the trio, augmented by Los Angeles-based synth-junkie M. Geddes Gengras, is set to appear at the Empty Bottle on Tuesday, Williams’ death points to a necessity to discuss music differently.

Postmortem, the Crawdaddy! founder is amid some of the widest appreciation he’s been afforded in decades. It’s easy to resurrect the dead’s legacy and reflect on it in an age of digital cataloguing. But what the guy keeps getting credit for is commenting on music in a way that had less to do with picking out what time-signature’s being used and more connected with what those rhythms make a listener feel—how the emotive qualities in a recording work on the person taking it in.

Akron/Family drummer Dana Janssen may or may not be aware that Williams is no longer spinning vinyl and opining, but the Portland-dwelling percussionist says he hopes journalists can eventually write uniquely on his band. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Throw on any Spindrift recording and it’ll easily summon a disturbing image of Quentin Tarantino lounging near a Los Angeles pool, drinking some fruity, alcoholic beverage and contemplating future exploito-projects. The band, led by Kirpatrick Thomas, began its life in Delaware prior to relocating to the West Coast. It hasn’t necessarily been an advantageous move—the ensemble still languishes in the culty realm between underground renown and total obsolescence. That’s not to insinuate Spindrift lacks a creative twitch, making the group a unique entity. There’s really nothing like it. Drawing from film’s dusty cowboy history and referencing enough psychedelia to have its adoptive hometown make sense, Spindrift traffics in short overwrought compositions. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dave Cantor

“My first solo guitar performance was in my backyard when I lived in Philadelphia,” Steve Gunn says over the phone from his Brooklyn residence.

The journey from performing in a band to amassing enough confidence to get out in front of a crowd and express musical ideas can be an excruciatingly difficult maneuver. Inspiration helps, and for Gunn, it showed up in the form of departed guitarist Jack Rose.

“I only played a very short set,” Gunn says of that backyard gathering. “Jack played and a few other friends. That was my first attempt at doing it. Then I didn’t do it for years after that.”

A revival of interest in players like Leo Kottke and John Fahey bloomed during the middling-aughts, while Rose’s renown grew beyond Pelt, the band he’d founded while still in Philly. Read the rest of this entry »

Mako Sica

By Dave Cantor

Operating under the auspices of psychedelia leaves a yawning gap to fill—anything from hazy electronic explorations to heavy-handed rock workouts might manifest itself on a bill with such a broad purpose as the Hideout-hosted Psych Fest.

Headlining the event’s first evening, Mako Sica skirt most hamfisted attempts to conjure a solid understanding of whatever psych might be. Brent Fuscaldo, one of the band’s guitarists, rattles off a litany of music he and bandmates fawn over—everything from jazz to Afro-pop and back again. But it’s only in the band’s application of its interests does the trio’s inclusion on the bill make sense.

“We never really thought of our band as psychedelic music. … It’s hard to describe what we sound like, so it’s nice to be invited to a festival like this,” Fuscaldo says. “We share something with these bands—our music’s hard to define—but I like bills like that, when [music’s] all over the map. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What ties this bill together isn’t necessarily going to be audible to casual listeners. Detroit’s spazzy Tyvek, krauty CAVE and the hard-to-palate Running sound remarkably different, while each act attempts to assimilate music from the seventies and early eighties into some sort of contemporary context. Tyvek and Running deal in more punky strains, the latter pulling on hardcore’s yolk more than the other two groups performing. Tyvek turns over the corpse of early Rough Trade acts, adding in a downer Midwest vibe that dour Brits wouldn’t be able to conjure even if it were their goal. With a headful of their hometown’s history, the ever-shifting Tyvek lineup has been able to dash its jangly paranoia with a garage intent, resulting in weirdly satisfying simplicity. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Formed by two Slumberland alums, Sic Alps began an ambitious career by issuing an unrealistic number of singles over the course of its first few years in existence. The torrid release schedule allowed the band to get some of its more verbose moments on tape while simultaneously readying the troupe for long-form endeavors. The rough edges, though, were pretty much the focus of 2006′s “Pleasures and Treasures.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Dave Cantor

Since 2007, Chicago’s Mako Sica—Polish-born guitarist and trumpeter Krys Drazek, guitarist Brent Fuscaldo and percussionist Mike Kendrick—has released an international stew of rock, jazz and noise, culminating in the pending release of “Essence,” its fourth proper disc.

Earning the opportunity to issue music through imprints like Permanent Records, Plus Tapes and La Société Expéditionnaire, it’d be expected the band has amassed significant attention around the city. It hasn’t. But what brought Mako Sica to the attention of those label honchos is a genuine desire to dash its music with monkish moans and skittering guitar, all supported by intuitive percussion.

The band’s latest offering, “Essence,” sports three extended tracks, including a studio version of “Fate Deals a Hand.” The track, which was initially released on a tape simply called “Live at the Subterranean,” is drawn out a bit in its latest incarnation. But the composition also takes on a lighter tone on the newer recording. Fuscaldo says the track’s studio realization came at a time when the trio was properly prepared to get it down on tape. As a living organism, “Fate” groans in and out of its various sections, vaguely jazzy noodling heaped atop of Kendrick’s free-drumming while Drazek’s trumpet inspires visions of Miles cooling out, slumped over with shades on.

It’s on the version opening “Essence” that Mako Sica more easily approaches a shamanistic vibe, something that’s spread out over the course of its recorded career. Here, Fuscaldo harmonizes with his bandmate’s guitar coloring, bells and sundry percussive noises, making the music seem fitting for play at a monastery or any one of Chicago’s DIY venues. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Listening to the Brooklyn-based ensemble Woods, which is equally fascinated by harmony and sprawling improvisation, develop over the last six years has been a sometimes confusing endeavor. For folks reintroduced to the band since it dislodged its punkier inclinations, going back and taking in tracks like “God Hates the Faithless,” from its earliest long-player, is gonna be startling. The effort ranks as the group’s only foray into gutbucket hollering. Read the rest of this entry »

Sun Araw/Photo: Fabian Villa

By Dave Cantor

Electronic experiments in the States  and Jamaica’s vocal tradition may be one of the few remaining untapped combinations in the music world. Luckily, Cameron Stallones, who performs and records as Sun Araw, was already privy to the work of a North Carolinian who wouldn’t distinguish between acoustic folk traditions and 1950s minimal compositions. Unwittingly influenced by Henry Flynt’s recombination, Stallones generates at the crossroad of disparate sounds.

“Some of that stuff is the most relentlessly psychedelic music—like the violin strobe stuff,” Stallones says of Henry Flynt’s fiddle improvisations, which are set atop looped drones for 1981’s “You Are My Everlovin’.” Read the rest of this entry »