"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."

So go the early words of Don DeLillo's masterful postmodernist novel White Noise. But the desire could easily apply to both The Sea and Cake's song and video, "Weekend." Mop-topped teens are kicked out of the house and into the world, where they ride bikes, jump into lakes, goof off, light fireworks and generally forget their Xboxes, all to the Chicago supergroup's kinetic soundtracking.

The Sea and Cake's newest release Car Alarm, out October 21 from indie powerhouse Thrill Jockey, is packed with similar tracks that struggle for definition even as they ask you to kick back and enjoy the hyperactivity.  The quickness of the effort is deliberate: Band members Sam Prekop, Archer Prewitt, John McEntire and Eric Claridge are busier than ever. Prekop is a new father, McEntire has Tortoise and producer-for-hire duties to worry about, Claridge is a busy painter and Prewitt  has a solo career to look after.

As a result, Car Alarm was pounded out in three short months, and sounds like it was born to run. Enjoy it. Life is short.

Sir Paul McCartney has some new tricks up his sleeve. His Paulness is readying a third record with dance music producer Youth under the moniker The Fireman -- the first collaboration between the two to feature vocals. The Electric Arguments, slated for a November 17th release, is the first Fireman album the two have released in ten years.

"Last year, McCartney and Youth went into the studio with no master plan, no record company restraints and no set release date to work to," wrote a McCartney representative. "Thus Electric Arguments emerged organically: 13 eclectic tracks, each written and recorded in the space of one day.
"

The 66-year-old former Beatle and god-like genius is holding nothing back, if the first song from the album, "Nothing Too Much Just Out Of Sight," is any indication. The tune, recorded off of English radio, finds Macca running full bore, like he just stepped out of the Maharishi's headquarters after a full session of devotional chanting and directly into an ultra-heavy jam with members of Creem.

If you still sound this vital at his age, count yourself lucky -- or on fire.

Here's the full tracklisting. We're going to try to get another track to preview at some point, or (fingers crossed) an interview with the man himself:

Continue reading "Paul McCartney's Blistering New Sound" »

I spent the end of last week at the Digital Music Forum West conference in Hollywood, California, in part to interview Pandora founder Tim Westergren as part of a keynote address.

To hear the latest about the webcasting royalty situation in Washington that threatens to put Pandora and other webcasters out of business, the plausibility of audio ads been integrated into the service, what it's been like putting Pandora on the iPhone and other key issues, check out the video to the right.

Music teachers, students and everyone in between will find something to love about NoteFlight, a flash-based service for composing, editing and sharing musical scores online that's free to use if you sign up for the beta. We already saw a guitar pedal manufacturer get all Web 2.0 on us, and now someone's done the same for musical notation.

"Making music is not a solitary pursuit -- nearly everyone who works with music eventually wants to share it," stated NoteFlight founder Joe Berkovitz. "As both software creators and musicians, our team knows how painful it is to share notated music online today.  That's because most musical applications treat the Internet as an afterthought: they’re geared to saving your music on your hard disk, not to sharing your music with other people."

Once you've registered for a free account, you can create scores by dragging notes onto a music staff or playing them with your computer's keyboard, edit the notes however you want them, and then share them with others within the site's database, using a simple URL or by embedding a score right onto a web page. Wherever users encounter your score, even if they don't have an account, they'll be able to play it back as if they were on the main site. This video does a fine job of explaining the site's basic features.

Continue reading "Web-Friendly Musical Scores, At Last " »

The last time we heard from San Francisco's chilled outfit Loquat, music from its 2005 debut It's Yours to Keep was being preloaded on SanDisk's Sansa player and rotated on the CW's craptastic soap One Tree Hill.

This time around, music from its imminent 2008 sophomore release Secrets of the Sea is being used for a relaxed video whose ubiquitous balloons recall the 1956 French fantasy The Red Balloon and even Patrick McGoohan's insanely awesome 1967 TV show The Prisoner.

Of course, that is if you are seeking allusions, which Listening Post always is. If you like to avoid that type of thing, you can always just close your eyes and float away on Loquat vocalist Kylee Swenson's ethereal pipes.

Continue reading "Loquat's Red Ballons Deliver Haunting Poptronica" »

Four childhood friends from Flint, Michigan who started jamming in a basement as an apparent means of seeking refuge from a city with "staggering unemployment and one of the nation's highest crime rates" now comprise the band Kinetic Stereokids, whose debut album (2007's Basement Kids) earned them gigs opening for …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, Explosions in the Sky and Secret Machines.

Now, the subterranean foursome is readying a three-song EP with their next batch of songs: the pretty "Have a Nice Day," the more explosive/experimental "Blunder" and a live rendition of "Explosions Were Heard," recorded during a life appearance on Seattle's much-loved KEXP radio station.

This is guitar-based music for listeners who have become accustomed to having their music spiced up with samples; the songs are streaked with one-time melodic appearances and vocal snippets from various sources. But unlike some bands that over-rely on the sample, these guys share an extremely musical sensibility that suffuses each element with little handmade sonic easter eggs, such as the laughing Wii baby, processed fiddle and chimes.

Credit, to a certain extent, the consummate mastering skills of one Jeff Lipton who also put the finishing touches on albums by Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and Wilco, although without the band's hard-won skills, of course, it'd amount to little more than putting lipstick on a pig.

Kinetic Stereokids - "Have A Nice Day":

Of all the world's recording artists, Japan's Cornelius could be the one best-suited to the surround sound format, considering how much sonic information he packs into his songs. The guy must have a million-track mixing desk in his studio for dealing with all of the melodies, rhythms and sound effects that make up each of his tracks.

Cornelius' latest release, Sensurround, is available as a 5.1-channel DVD that comes with a CD of B-sides, giving the listener a surround sound experience for the home that includes striking visuals from artist Tsujikawa Kochiro, Takagi Masakatsu and the Groovisions collective. I've seen/heard the DVD version and it's truly immersive, varying from hypnotic to striking, but always beautiful.

If you're planning on throwing a party in your space age bachelor pad -- or you want to create the illusion of such -- the Sensurround DVD will do the trick.

For one week only, you can stream the entire thing (albeit in two-channel audio) from Pitchfork.tv, for free.

See Also:

• Album Alert: Cornelius - Sensuous
• Video: Cornelius Plays Theremin with Audience Member's Hand
• Set Up Your Surround Sound Speakers the Right Way

Photo: Camera Obscura

Just because the idea of assembling the worst album covers of all time has been done quite a bit over the past few years doesn't mean we can't always use yet another gallery of cringe-worthy covers.

The Chicago Tribune is the latest publication to try to capitalize on this traffic-friendly strategy, with a fifty-image-strong list of the worst album covers the music business has to offer, from artists such as "King of All Taverns" Little David Wilkins, the apparently emotionless Cody Matherson, literal chick-digger Jonah Jones and the eponymous Joyce.

We've seen some of these before, but the list is a hoot unless you're somehow already tired of this sort of thing, in which case it might be time to move on to another meme.

See Also:

• Digitization Of Album Art Is About New Possibilities, Not Smaller Graphics
• Edible Album Covers Feature Public Enemy, Velvet Underground
• Sixties Album Covers Repurposed for Action Figure Art
• Designers Work to Rescue a Dying Art Form -- the Album Cover
• Album Cover Mash-Up

Electro-Harmonix, which makes a wide range of much-loved guitar pedals from the Big Muff to the Memory Man, has revamped its website by incorporating YouTube videos and an integrated blog. The result puts many other gear manufacturers, with their difficult-to-navigate, occasionally flash-based websites, to shame. And it all started pretty much by accident.

"Originally, I had been looking for some of our own clips, clips that we had produced on YouTube," said Scott Matthews, son of Electro-Harmonix founder and CEO Mike Matthews. "I stumbled onto a user video and I thought it captured something that we couldn't even ever really hope to produce in one of our clips, which was just a genuine moment. This guy was playing one of our pedals and just had this huge, happy smile on his face. He wasn't somebody that we were paying to produce a demo for us -- he wasn't even trying to explain anything about how the pedal worked or anything like that. He was just using it and having a genuinely happy moment":

Continue reading "Guitar Pedal Manufacturer Goes All Web 2.0" »

More than sixty British artists, including Radiohead, The Verve and Iron Maiden, have joined forces to create the Featured Artists Coalition, a trade group they say will press for the right of performing artists to control their work and keep more of the money their work generates.

"It is time for artists to have a strong collective voice to stand up for their interests," stated Brian Message of Courtyard Management, which manages Radiohead and Kate Nash. "The digital landscape is changing fast and new deals are being struck all the time, but all too often without reference to the people who actually make the music.

"Just look at the recent [agreement] on file-sharing between labels, government and the ISPs. Artists were not involved. The Featured Artists' Coalition will help all artists, young and old, well-known or not, drive overdue change through the industry in their interests and those of fans."

Artists stand as much or more to lose than other elements of the music industry if anti-fan policies gradually drive people away from thinking of music as an art form that's important in its own right and not just as a way to sell body spray or enhance videos. It only makes sense that they should have a say when policies are enacted to restrict music from being shared online, among other important decisions.

Continue reading "British Musicians Join Forces to Press Artists' Rights" »

Our favorite hatchet-voiced harpy continues to dominate cable news channels even as the global economy slipped another few hundred notches on Monday morning.

There's just something about this lady that we cannot seem to get enough of, no matter what else is going on, even if divining what she's driving at isn't always the easiest thing in the world.

A remix contest created with MixMatchMusic's remix contest widget lets anyone re-sequence sound bites from the former Miss Alaska contender to make it sound as if the words are strung together in some sort of intentional order.

Continue reading "Remix Sarah Palin" »

Listening Post would like to wrap up its coverage of the momentous return of My Bloody Valentine with one of its noisiest progeny. But to be honest, A Place to Bury Strangers sounds more like MBV's influence The Jesus and Mary Chain, just with the amps cranked to 111. The pedals? They're specially designed by APTBS guitarist and vocalist Oliver Ackermann, who founded the effects and music factory Death By Audio in 2002, shortly before his power trio set about becoming the loudest band in Brooklyn. It has since built pedals for bands as different as Wilco and...My Bloody Valentine.

A Place to Bury Strangers is currently on tour throughout October and November, and puts on one of the roughest shows on record, louder than My Bloody Valentine, depending on the date. The band is also busy at work following up on its acclaimed 2007 self-titled debut, which is so fuzzy it belongs in the zoo.

I caught up with Ackermann about his live-work life, MBV and JAMC, and why shoegaze started out cool but ended up totally sucking.

Continue reading "A Place to Bury Stangers Rewires Noise Rock" »

Did you know the ex-Beatle had an ambient side project with Killing Joke bassist and Chinese Democracy producer Youth, called The Fireman? More importantly, did you know the duo's next effort Electric Arguments is as raw as sushi?

Well, at least one of its songs is. That would be "Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight," a snippet of which UK tabloid The Sun previewed here. It is harder than anything I've heard from McCartney since "Helter Skelter."

Of course, The Sun's slant on the tune is that it's a hate rant against McCartney's former wife Heather Mills, a sensational claim that is backed up by some of the woman-done-me-wrong lyrics. But who cares about that crap? It's awesome to hear McCartney turn it loose again, four decades after The White Album. There's much ground to make up for after "Say Say Say."

Continue reading "Paul McCartney's Fireman Project Gets Hot and Mad" »

At the Digital Music Forum West, four digital music entrepreneurs pitched their products to a crowd of digital music insiders with a seven minute time limit.

Here's what they had to say (all quotes paraphrased).

Continue reading "Liveblog: Four Digital Music Startups Make Their Cases" »

What's the latest with putting music on cellphones?  Executives close to the situation shared their views on the topic at the  Digital Music Forum West in Hollywood, California.

Here's what they're saying (all quotes paraphrased):

Continue reading "Liveblog: The Future of Mobile Music" »

"I feel like my heart is going to explode," my wife screamed. That was right before she headed for the bleacher seats, hoping to hide from the sonic assault of My Bloody Valentine's live show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which concluded its U.S. comeback.

She wasn't alone: I saw figures in those bleachers hunkered over their knees. Dazed individuals in the crowd, wobbling with their fingers in the ears. Strobes lights pounded our eyes, widescreen visuals tickled our brains and, over it all, My Bloody Valentine's roaring music vibrated our spines as if Kevin Shields was riding a nuke, Slim Pickens-style, straight into the throng. It was madness.

In other words, pure, unadulterated rock.

From pounding Loveless anthems like "Only Shallow,' "I Only Said," "Come in Alone," "When You Sleep"  and "Soon" to Isn't Anything burners like "(When You Wake) You're Still in a Dream," "Nothing Much to Lose" and the no-holds-barred brutality of "Feed Me With Your Kiss" and "You Never Should," the reunited legends went for brutal noise and never looked back. The piercing, furious guitar solo alone for "You Never Should" exploded from Shields' Jazzmaster like a sonic Ludovico technique. I've been to so many concerts, quiet and loud, in my lifetime that there is no point in counting them. But this was the first one I've ever been to where I finally had to break down and put in the earplugs that security was handing out like life jackets.

I needed them. I wouldn't have made it through the deafening finale "You Made Me Realise" without them. You made me realize, all right, My Bloody Valentine. Made me realize what rock in its most aggressive form sounds, and feels, like. I'm still feeling it as I write this.

I understand that some of the band's detractors, and there are many, will argue that My Bloody Valentine has simply cranked up the volume and married it to a seizure-inducing light show to cover up its shortcomings, and I respect that argument. When the Pixies reunited in 2004, their energy was sapped of its original momentum, age having taken hold of Black Francis' vocals and the band's original fan base. I remember what it was like to hear their feedback-soaked anthem "Rock Music" in its original form, what it was like to survive the mosh pit as the band slowed down "Crackity Jones" and "Gouge Away" to soften the crush and swell of bodies losing their centers of gravity and respect for personal space.

But I've never seen anything like this. Ever.

Continue reading "My Bloody Valentine Tried to Kill Me!" »

Digital music executives are covering the digital copyright debate at the Digital Music Forum West in Hollywood, California.

Here's what they're saying (all quotes paraphrased):

Continue reading "Liveblog: Is Digital Copyright Broken?" »

Six executives from some of the top companies involved in social music consumption discussed "social networks, music discovery and recommendation services" in Hollywood, California at the Digital Music Forum West.

Here's some of what they are saying (all quotes are paraphrased):

Continue reading "Liveblog: Digital Music Execs Talk Social Networks, Music Discovery" »

After publicly feuding with iTunes over its practice of not allowing albums to be sold in indivisible chunks, country rocker Kid Rock has allowed the bulk of his music to be sold online for the first time -- but not on iTunes.

Instead, fans can download his music as complete albums for $10 apiece from the Rhapsody MP3 store, or on a song-by-song basis if they have a Rhapsody subscription. In addition, the songs will be accessible via the Rhapsody 25 service, which lets users stream up to 25 tracks for free each month.

Kid Rock finally took the plunge because Rhapsody allowed him to keep his albums bundled, and also, it seems, to keep the latest one, last October's Rock 'N Roll Jesus, album near the top of the charts. It's is currently #7 on Billboard's album chart despite having come out nearly a year ago and having never been available for digital purchase.

Continue reading "Kid Rock Finally Goes Digital" »

Music is in the ear of the beholder.

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech was a rhetorical movement that changed the world for the better. Muhammad Ali's freestyle raps made him a larger-than-life champion of not just sports but civil disobedience. Lennon and McCartney's interviews evolved pop culture as much as their classic tracks.

Producers David McLees and Gordon Skene have collected those and many more for Shout Factory's massive 100 Greatest compilation. Five discs worth, to be exact, divided by speeches, personalities, news stories, scandals and sports. From JFK to Jonestown and Sinatra to Einstein, it covers quite a lot of ground.

It's a hefty slate of materials for history nerds, culture vultures and others interested in the sound of humanity at its best, and worst, moments. And that may not be everyone, but listening to both political parties fumble their way to the 2008 election, it probably should be.

See Also:

• Speaking of The Beatles' Auditory Cheesecake...
• Sad Anniversary: The Beatles Bid Adieu to TV
• John Lennon's Killer Denied Parole (Again)
• Can Obama Turn D.C. Into Chocolate City? Ask the Other Black Presidents
• Democrats Remix Springsteen, Pwn Reagan
• Barack Obama Doesn't Want to Work on Maggie's Farm No More
• Barack Obama's Victory Soundtrack
• Democrats or Republicans: Whose Music Is Better?