Tinariwen are not from around here. They’re not from a world of autotune and product placement. They aren’t American Idols, or Guitar Heroes. Tinariwen are “people of the desert,” poets and musicians from the southern Sahara, who wandered into UCLA’s Royce Hall stage Saturday night to share the sound and vision of a world apart. Their bodies draped in robes and faces obscured by tagelmust headwear indicative of their fellow Toureg desert nomads, the musical collective shared their songs of revolution and poems of desert solitude driven by Stratocasters and hand claps. Tinariwen opened a gateway to another reality, holding the thread of ancient rhythms and universal songs sung across the continents, and the ages.

Onstage, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib strums a green Stratocaster, clothed in colorful robes. He doesn’t wear the face-covering tagelmust, like the lanky bassist or drummer, instead his hair extends in every direction, salt and peppered with gray, and his face cut deep with lines carved from his 50 years in the desert.

In the dust and rustle of Ibrahims voice, we hear the pain of his father’s incarceration and execution he witnessed as a boy, the scattering of their cattle heard by Malian army, and exile into Algeria. In Ibrahim’s guitar, we hear the dreams of a young boy who built a guitar from a tin can, stick, and a bicycle wire, inspired by the troubadours of the American west, who roamed the range not unlike his own. His guitar is an extension of his voice, with tiptoing notes, soaring bends, and dissonant chords intelligible in any country. Like the droning dirge cast by opening Tuvan throat singers Huun Huur Tu, (who proved that, as death and drone metal afficinados already know, that one person’s burp is another person’s music), Ibrahim’s voice tapped into universal emotions.

Tinariwen’s effervescent beats are driven by handclaps by Wonou Wallet Sidati, her hands bringing together the waving vocals, lumbering basslines, and Ibrahims short bursts of guitar. When Royce Hall’s crowd began clapping along, she would begin to dance toward the edge of the stage. Clothed in black fabric and a headscarf, Sidati’s face and hands became the focal points. Her hands moved like two birds playing in an updraft, before she returned to the microphone so sing a response to Ibrahim’s call. Touareg women have relative freedom–after all, the men wear the veils– and they are important to driving the rhythms of these nomads. This is little surprise, after all, women are inherent beatmakers, every person ever has listened to a mother’s heartbeat for those nine months in the womb. And so goes Sidati’s steady handclap, the extension of her heart, creating the foundation of a song that everyone can dance to. And they did. Halfway through the show, much of the audience left their seats to dance near the front of the stage: white men Ibrahim’s age raised their hands and swayed, a “Jersey Shore” bro-alike yelled “sooooo good” while punching the air, and a woman performs a lap dance (probably learned from YMCA pole dancing lessons) on her seated companion. All this at UCLA’s concert hall. But that’s the power of the rhythm, the lifebeat, and Ibrahim’s electric guitar.

Tinariwen’s story is not a different chapter in rock music’s history, it’s an entirely different book. While displaced in Algeria and Libya in the late 1970’s, the listless, jobless Touareg youth would gather together and sing songs in camps outside of town. Here, amongst other Touareg who also had been displaced by droughts in Saharan villages, they brought together their own nation, an intangible, borderless country that would materialize whenever these nomads would meet. Here, they shared familiar music and stories, and Tinariwen was born from desert jams sessions where the youth played music ranging from Arabic pop to traditional Touareg anthems to Led Zeppelin. Leading the group was Ibrahim, a rambunctious guitarist and singer, who wrote songs about the political struggles of the Touraeg.

Although the troupe uses the tools of Western music, guitars and electric bass, comparisons are inadequate when it comes to Tinariwen. Aligning them with Western music often falls short. Rock ‘n’ roll found its roots in the blues, and blues found its roots in American slavery, but Tinariwan, quite literally is “revolution rock.”

In 1980, when Colonel Gaddafi encouraged Touareg men to join the army, Ibrahim and Tinariwen followed the call. While training, they met other musicians and even built a studio, where they recorded cassettes. They passed out the cassettes, which reached the far corners of the deserts. They returned to Mali in 1990 just as the revolution broke out. They fought for 9 months for freedom, then put down their guns and picked up their guitars once again.

The Tinariwen who joined Ibrahim onstage is no longer the Tinariwen of the past. The original members have passed on or moved on, but the band itself is comprised of the Touareg raised on those desert cassettes. They continue the lineage and songs that brought the rebels and the outcasts together. As they bring the songs that started a revolution to the Western ears, the temptation to remix, remaster, adapt, option, and exploit Tinariwen is ever-present. But please don’t. Just share the songs, sing the songs, and let their music wander like it always has. Tinariwen’s crossed huge distances and difficult times to get here. Let them enjoy this oasis in the dunes. Like Ibrahim sings in the show-closing “Cler Achel,” “I spent the day and still the following night, I spent the whole season travelling.”

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By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly’s blog, West Coast Sound, Feb 23, 2010

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IN 1972, George Carlin famously ranted about seven words that couldn’t be uttered on television. The verboten expressions were offensive to the sensibilities of purportedly well-mannered people everywhere. For some in the music world, however, there are not seven forbidden sounds, just a single four-letter word: folk.

The London quartet Mumford & Sons, however, realigns folk’s paradigm with soaring harmonies, banjo, upright bass and a single kick drum. The stigma of a genre seemingly relegated to youth groups and corporate coffeehouses is beginning to heal, as folk continues to evolve and grow. “Folk music suffers from [people’s perception] that it is a soft art form,” says keyboardist Ben Lovett. “But I think it’s the hardest to write and perform. You can’t hide behind fancy frills and bells and whistles. You’re not singing about something you don’t care about.”

On Mumford & Sons’ U.S. debut, Sigh No More, the band culls its stripped-down sound from three self-produced EPs released since 2007. Marcus Mumford is essentially a one-man-band as he confidently croons and strums the guitar while stomping a tambourine and bass drum with his feet. Joining him are Lovett on keys, Ted Dwane on upright bass and Country Winston Marshall, who plucks the banjo with rapid-fire precision.

To complete Sigh No More, the band worked with Marcus Dravs, who has produced Björk, Peter Gabriel and Arcade Fire albums. “[Dravs] really encouraged us to think hard about the songs before we recorded them,” Mumford says, “to play the best we could, and to be self-controlled with the kind of crazy ideas that new, over-excited bands get the first time they go into a studio.”

Although the influence of Arcade Fire in Mumford’s powerful voice is undeniable, Mumford & Sons’ sound is shaped more by the distinct colors of folk in Britain. “American folk was partly born out of the ever-evolving forms of blues and civil unrest, whereas British folk has more classical origins from composers like Haydn infused with traditional Celtic music,” Lovett says. “But it’s important to our music to digest everything around us, from music to literature to everyday life. If you put all that stuff in, the music you write will only be richer.”

Sigh No More is emboldened by riches. The lush vocal harmonies concluding “White Blank Page” rise to the sky as the instrumentation falls away, leaving the voices to tower like a Sequoia that withstood a forest fire. “Roll Away Your Stone” shifts from a ballad squeezed deep from Mumford’s lungs to a swirling square dance, best performed from back porches or in veterans’ halls. Squeezeboxes, floor stomps and tambourines evoke an intimacy carved out by Mumford & Sons. These songs are invitations to spaces long forgotten.

With rhythms more at home in the Laurel Canyon of the 1960s, it’s hard to believe that the band comes from the urban sprawl of West London, but it embraces this dichotomy. “We are both urban and rural folk,” Lovett says. “We live and breathe the city of London and whichever cities we have the fortune of visiting on tour, but we run for the hills when we can and relish the space and the beauty of our countryside.” In London, they are not alone as folk rock revivalists; along with rough-folksters Noah & the Whale and the honey-voiced Laura Marling (with whom Mumford occasionally drums), Mumford & Sons are in good company. But unlike their cohorts, Mumford & Sons stays true to songs of old that were hummed in the times of yesterday, plucking strings connected to history and the heart.

“We’re not writing coffee table music,” Lovett says. “We want to write with a purpose. We want to write music that matters.”

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By Drew Tewksbury

from “Getting To Know,” Filter Magazine, Issue 39 2010

View a PDF of this Article from Filter Magazine

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It’s a hot day in Venice Beach, the hippy stalwart, faux bohemian enclave sitting on Los Angeles’ coast. We’re gathered in this magazine’s American headquarters preparing to photograph the subject, Talulah Riley, along the Venice canals. As the makeup artist curls her eyelashes and paints her nails, Talulah broaches a discussion of dreams.

The actress, who stars in the recent Richard Curtis film Pirate Radio, is undoubtedly a dreamer. Playing the under-aged temptress aboard an offshore pirate radio station, Riley snatches scenes away from her heavyweight co-stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, and Kenneth
Branagh with effortless magnetism. Charming not only the film’s protagonist but also his veteran mentors, Riley manages to blend an ingénue’s wide-eyed innocence with a seductress’ sizzle. It’s clear, she knows what she wants and more often than not, she knows how to get it. But for those things still left undone, she has a list (in descending order): 1. Climb to the top of Macchu Picchu and ride a horse at sunset. 2. Sleep in a bed of caribou fur at Sweden’s Ice Hotel. 3. Swim in a bioluminescent bay at
midnight.

Riley may not have experienced the glowing micro-organisms (Pyrodimium bahamense) of Puerto Rico, but the 23 year-old actress has already checked off some impressive tasks on her to-do list. Star as the lead in the successful redux of U.K. film series, St. Trinian’s? Check. Sign on for Christopher Nolan’s next film, Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Caine? Been there. Get engaged to Paypal founder and multimillionaire Elon Musk, owner of commercial spaceflight and rocket company Space X, and visionary electric car company Tesla? Done that.

In comparison, my dreams seem much more modest.
I tell her of my dream to visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where plastic Biblical figures mingle with pterodactyls, mastodons, and other animals anachronistically coexisting in the seven days of creation. She gets excited and says that she may make an addendum to her list, while looking at the ceiling as the makeup artist draws a thin line under blue eyes.

I tell my vision of Jesus wielding a blow torch and a machine gun, firing indiscriminately in the air while riding the back of a reared up brontosaurus. She imagines Jesus nestled against the bosom (if they have one) of a T-Rex, held lovingly in those good-for-nothing, limp little dino arms. Riley, it seems, is the quintessential 21st century British girl: she’s quick with a joke, holds her own with the boys, and drops names of philosophers easier than shout-outs to Jay-Z. She’s smart, and witty; a girl to share afternoon tea or to get a book recommendation, and as she leaves the room to change into her dress, I think she may just be one of us, a regular person. But when she returns, she stands tall in the doorway in a gorgeous black dress, all leg and long slender arms, backlit blond air glowing in the daylight, the room goes quiet.

Talulah Riley is far from ordinary.

Riley entered the world’s stage as Mary in Pride and Prejudice, having been snatched up almost directly after high school. Her career progressed quickly, jumping from project to project, including stage adaptations with Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic, cameos and starring roles on British television.
“I don’t feel like I’m that great of an actress; all I get to play are British school girls, which, essentially is me.” But in every constrained motion, in those breath-stealing moments before a kiss in Pirate Radio, and sassy quips in St. Trinians, she is a woman in control, an actress on the verge.

A week later we meet for afternoon tea at Musk’s Bel Air estate (Elon is parasailing in Egypt for the weekend), perched upon a hill from which the ocean is a thick blue line scrawled on the horizon. “Sorry for this look,” she says, “I’m auditioning as a slutty secretary in a little bit.” She’s wearing a tight ray skirt and a pinstriped shirt buttoned pretty far down. From where I’m sitting on the couch, catching glimpses of her between sips of tea from a “Late Night with David Letterman” mug, Riley radiates charm. She has an infectious laugh that seems to start somewhere deep inside her, bubbling up long before you ever see or hear it, a slow tsunami that washes over her as she scrunches her nose and as laughter dances out from her coy smile.

Then she talks of dreams again. She was always a dreamer, she says, with her face buried in books or in conversations with the animals at her Gloucestershire family farm. “I’ve always wanted to drive up the coast to Big Sur,” she says, holding the mug tightly. “If you’re going to drive through Europe, you need a VW camper with a mattress in the back; you want to do it old school. America’s big and you want to do it in a big way, in a Winnebago,” she pauses, cracks that slow smile again, and suggests, “or a Tesla.”

We seem to have the same idea, and moments later we head to the garage, past her father, who is reading Harry Potter in the kitchen. “It’ll leave your heart and kidneys behind!” he says about the Tesla Roadster’s rocketlike acceleration while Riley grabs the keys and walks barefoot down the stairs. “Here’s the Batmobile,” Riley says of her future car (“We’re getting another one soon, so this one will be mine”), unplugs the cable and starts it up not with a rumble but a whisper. Riley tears through the Bel Air curves, and I laugh uncontrollably; only on rollercoasters have I felt this velocity. As she presses the gas with her bare foot, and her hair flies wildly, I begin to wonder — she has her dream job, a dream car, and her dream guy, so if all your dreams come true, what do you have left to dream about?
For Riley, the well of dreams is bottomless.

“Elon asked me to go to Mars. I’m thinking about it.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from Intersection Magazine, Winter Issue 2009

View a PDF Tear Sheet of this Article

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A show is never just a show in Los Angeles. It’s a plague, or a slow-burning forest fire creeping across the city days before a performance takes place. It starts as hype metastasizing across online social networks and water cooler conversations, then becomes a scramble for tickets, followed by a wait in line, wallowing with others mired with doubt: “Are we going to get in?” The emails, tweets, and texts started days before: “You going to Yeasayer?” The main event will own the stage for a fraction of the time spent thinking about, planning, and traveling to the concert, so this better be worth it. But for every hoop you jump through to see a performance at the Natural History Museum, like Friday’s Yeasayer and Warpaint, fortune favors the brave.

First Fridays at the Natural History Museum has become one of those distinctly L.A. events that defines a season. Coachella ushers the end of Spring. Summer starts when the Hollywood Bowl opens and revival films begin in the cemetery. But winter belongs to the Natural History Museum. Amid Friday’s rain and cold, the Museum was was cozy and intimate. For those lucky to get in (the show sold out quickly), this second installment of First Fridays was a fine time to gather with your closest corpses (living and taxidermied).

L.A.’s own Warpaint enveloped the audience with the driving rhythms of their ethereal and full-bodied rock. Dual singers and guitar players Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman traded chugging strums and soaring vocals. Kokal, the blonde on stage right, emitted a voice powerful and aching, sometimes warbling or slow-climbing. On “Elephants” Wayman quickly finger-picked crystalline arpeggios, clearing the way for Kokal to lonesomely sing, “I’ll break your heart,” while thick bass of Jenny Lee Lindberg, and Stella Mozgawa’s killer drumming lit the flames that propelled Warpaint as precisely interlocked machine.

With their straight-forward set up, just guitars, bass, and drums, Warpaint refreshingly created rock that wasn’t poppy, but still swarmed with hooks that dug deep to the heart. Enrapturing and evocative, their airy and slightly foreboding sound opened doors to introspective spaces far away from the stuffed marmots and caribou of the North American Mammal hall. Ending with their stripped down Sonic Youth-sans-noise, “Krimson,” Warpaint redefined the way rock is written, and written about. Their guitar playing isn’t cocksure, and the bass isn’t ballsy. They don’t swagger or strut. They rock but aren’t rock stars. And they aren’t just an all female band, whose prowess is defined by their sex. They’re not a riot grrls, a chick band, or Lillith Fair fodder. Warpaint is a distinct rock band whose songs stand on their own. They do not exist in comparison to male bands, or as a minority in the rock world. They are what they are. So music writers, let’s take an oath.

I, (state your name), do solemnly swear, that as a music writer, I will forever refrain from calling a musical act made up of women a “girl band.” I will stop highlighting women who play guitars as oddities, or note that a female drummer is good “for a girl.” Let’s not marvel in their ability to rock, as though it were lightning unable to strike the same spot twice.

Let’s grow up.

Signed, (Your Neighborhood Music Writer)

As for Yeasayer, they’ve grown up a lot since they piqued indie media interest in 2007. Their often reported arrogant demeanor and navel-gazing experimentalism has fallen away, as they fine tuned their multi-genre mixing into a more streamlined unit. The five piece filled the stage with keyboards, drums, guitars, and even cowbell on a podium. The Brooklynites served up a dancey set, infused with electonic beats, organic instrumentation, with Chris Keating leading the sonic circus on vocals. The heavy bass of Ira Wolf Tuton, who was dressed in a wifebeater (we should stop using this term too, right?) while sporting some sort of midieval hair cut, rumbled and popped.

Shifting from dubby fretless bass to rafter-quaking synth bass, Tuton held the band together, whose disparate elements (and egos) led them astray in the past. Now, on the eve of their new record release, Yeasayer shows the same focus that appears on the forthcoming “Odd Blood.” The rhythm heavy “Ambling Amp,” provides a lighthearted bounce, and the Arcade Fire-ish “I Remember” centers around an ascending piano line and falsetto vocals. They also gave some crowd favorites including their swaying single, “Tightrope.” For a band that was subsumed in so much hype, they have apparently learned to not take themselves so seriously. Brooklyn can be insular, but the world is not. So as Yeasayer forges on into more inclusive direction, making more music to dance to, we say to Yeasayer:

Welcome to the world.

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly’s West Coast Sound Blog Feb 8th, 2010

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So much for the Southern California sun. The rain has been pouring for days, clogging the freeways and prompting tornado warnings, delivered awkwardly by local meteorologists. But here at Bethany Cosentino’s home in LA’s Eagle Rock neighborhood, it’s warm. She sits on the couch and pets her Garfield doppelganger, Snacks, while a space heater and two candles keep things toasty. Warmth is important to Cosentino: It’s the reason she left New York City, and it’s the way she describes the sound of her band Best Coast.

“There’s something warm about the lo-fi sound,” she says, clutching Snacks, her wool socks resting on the coffee table near a pair of broken sunglasses (not that she needs them on this gloomy day). Best Coast is the 23-year-old’s sun-kissed fuzz-pop band, her vehicle for resurrecting the 1960s Spector sound, infused with some Sonic Youth. Imagine a Ronnettes record blasted through a blown-out speaker or Kim Gordon if she had the voice of a girl-group chanteuse.

“This is Real” features Cosentino’s oohs and ahhs over jangly chords, in a song fit for Marty McFly and his mom to dance to at the Enchantment Under the Sea Ball. It has fuzzy guitar, soaring vocals, and, yes, analog warmth. But Cosentino’s songwriting process begins digitally. “I usually will bring a guitar out here,” she motions to an empty chair with a blanket adorned with a lion’s face, “and will lay down a few guitar tracks into GarageBand, then I’ll send them to Bobb.”

“My first project sounded like Jenny Lewis meets Tori Amos—y’know, the kind of music a 16-year-old girl makes. Then I got into punk.”

That’s Bobb Bruno, a musician, producer and longtime friend of Cosentino’s (not her former babysitter contrary to popular belief), with whom she crafted Best Coast’s sound. Bruno is a staple of LA’s music underground, performing with psychedelic sage Imaad Wasif and as a solo act opening for Wilco and Fiona Apple—sometimes dressed in a Takashi Murakami-styled bunny suit. Cosentino and Bruno were ensconced in the music scene surrounding LA’s all-ages venue the Smell, where Cosentino played with the drone-y experimentalists Pocahaunted.

“When I was about 16, I started working—at the Hot Topic at the Burbank mall, actually—and I started thinking more about music,” Cosentino says. “My first project sounded like Jenny Lewis meets Tori Amos—y’know, the kind of music a 16-year-old girl makes. Then I got into punk.”

The La Crescenta native’s father was a musician, who, she says, also works at the church Miley Cyrus frequents. He encouraged her to train classically as a vocalist, so Cosentino took opera classes and did session work during her teen years. Then came Pocahaunted, followed by an extended stay in New York.

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, then Cosentino’s year in the chill of Gotham helped her fall in love with California again. “It was too intense there,” she says. “Within two days of coming back to California, I started writing Best Coast songs.” On her MySpace page, written shortly after her return, she sums up her vision: “So, I am back in California, and I thought what could be more fitting than to record a bunch of songs about summer and the sun and the ocean and being a lazy creep? So, this is what I’m doing.”

“When I’m With You,” from her 7-inch on Black Iris, encapsulates the carefree spirit of Best Coast. It feels like summer sunsets in Topanga Canyon, faded ’70s photographs, and slow swaying to Melanie or Janis Joplin. Produced and recorded by Lewis Pesacov, of LA’s polyglot party bands Fool’s Gold and Foreign Born, the song captures a firefly in a Mason jar, creating a single that should glow brighter with time. Pesacov is recording Best Coast’s debut full-length due out later this year.

Music mags and blogs have raved about “When I’m With You,” but Cosentino is wary of the hype. The pigeonholing of Best Coast as purveyors of the “California Sound” has created too many expectations, she says, “Sometimes I’m not in the mood to write something sunny. Sometimes I feel more minor-key.”

As for Best Coast’s subject matter, Cosentino likes to keep it simple: boys. “When I was first writing songs, I would try to find the perfect metaphor for telling a boy I liked him without really saying it,” she explains, “but now I just say it.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from O.C. Weekly, Feb 4th, 2010

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Trepanation, as the procedure is called, is an ancient medical maneuver that’s been chronicled in 16th-century German engravings and found in unearthed skulls dating back to prehistoric France. Medieval doctors believed trepanation — drilling a hole in a living person’s skull — was a way to get demons out, and early 20th–century neurologists prescribed it as a cure for mania.

In 2007, the very nonmanic French singer-actor Charlotte Gainsbourg sustained a head injury while waterskiing. Persistent headaches prompted her return to the doctors, who, after conducting neurological tests and an MRI, discovered a massive brain hemorrhage that was caused by the accident. The prognosis was serious, Gainsbourg explains: Blood clots, and a small hematoma, had gathered around her brain, “like the one [late actress] Natasha Richardson had,” threatening her life. To save her, the doctors drilled a small hole into her skull in order to release the blood.

The procedure worked, and in coping with the shock of it all, the singer learned that maybe those medieval doctors were on to something. “[My realization] wasn’t that dramatic as the surgery itself,” she qualifies, “but I was very, very close to death. I thought I was very courageous toward life and death, and I didn’t really care, but when it happened, I realized how scared I was.”

A native French speaker, in English, Gainsbourg saunters through sentences, tiptoeing from word to word like she’s crossing a creek one stone at a time. Twenty years passed between the creation of her first and second albums, and she rarely performs live. But then, she’s never had to make music in order to eat. During those two decades she was busy becoming an A-list celebrity in France where, as the daughter of beloved late crooner and mischief-maker Serge Gainsbourg and French actor/chanteuse Jane Birkin, she has been in the spotlight for much of her life. She’s steered that good fortune in fascinating directions. As an actor she’s worked with a long list of esteemed directors: Michel Gondry, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Todd Haynes and Lars von Trier. “I’m not an artist,” she protests. “I’m not even a musician. I can play the piano, but I’m not that good, anyway.”

Still, while getting her MRI and lying in the tube, Gainsbourg started to think about songs. “When I was inside that machine,” she says, “it was an escape to think about music. It’s rhythm. It was very chaotic.”

She stored the memory away, and after she recovered, serendipity put her in the path of Beck Hansen, whom she met at a White Stripes concert in L.A. She and the singer-songwriter had a brief conversation, initiated by their common bond, producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, U2, R.E.M.), who had worked on Gainsbourg’s 2006 return to music, 5:55, and three of Beck’s most critically acclaimed records, including Sea Change. Gainsbourg and Beck met again, backstage at a Radiohead show in Paris, which prompted her to explore the possibility of making a new record. She called Beck and was soon working with him in his Silver Lake home studio. Casually, the two began to record, minus any concrete expectations.

“It wasn’t planned that we’d do a whole album together,” she explains, “but Beck was inspired by my accident.”

He worked the instrumentation and co-wrote the lyrics, and Gainsbourg provided the inspiration by explaining what she’d experienced in the hospital. “Take my eyes and paint my bones/Drill my brain all full of holes,” she breathily whispers on “Master’s Hands” over Beck’s lurching guitar rhythms, producing what would become the first track on IRM (or imagerie par résonance magnétique, the French translation of MRI).

In the same session, they recorded “In the End,” a stripped-down acoustic ballad that layers Gainsbourg’s wafting hums and smoky vocals over glockenspiel and strings arranged by Beck’s father, David Campbell. But the sound, as with many of IRM’s string pieces, faintly resembles the sensual, warm string sections of Gainsbourg’s father’s. (Beck, in fact, sampled Serge’s “Cargo Culte” on his track “Paper Tiger,” on Sea Change.) “I think they use strings in an entirely different way,” she says of her father’s propensity to use arrangements as a punctuation, as opposed to the Beck family’s more atmospheric runs.

Finally, Gainsbourg and Beck pieced together “Heaven Can Wait,” a poppy piano-driven stomp that would become IRM’s first single. (Its bizarre, wonderful companion video is by Los Angeles director Keith Schofield.) When these initial songs were complete, Gainsbourg and Beck parted; he needed to finish his own album and she was working on film projects, most notably her shocking, award-winning performance in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

As she let those initial sessions breathe, the singer decided she wanted more and asked Beck if he’d do the whole album. The phone call didn’t surprise the musician. He’d been continuing to write music with Gainsbourg in mind, and in the next 18 months, they built IRM’s stylistically disparate but impossibly cohesive vision. So she returned to Silver Lake.

“[Beck] wakes up with a new idea every day,” she says. “Beck wrote all the music and most of the lyrics, but I was reacting to what he was doing. I could have continued forever, but we stopped when the album made sense.”

The function of IRM, like that of the machine that inspired it, was to penetrate her head, Gainsbourg explains. “It was a chance to look at memory and looking into the brain in a more abstract, more poetic way.”

The album avoids the kitschiness of Beck’s genre chop jobs and funky electro-soul breakdowns but maintains his style throughout. Like the best producers, he helps Gainsbourg to speak for herself.

“My creativity comes out with others,” she acknowledges. “That’s why it is such a pleasure to be involved with Beck. I can’t do anything on my own. I like the idea of entering someone else’s world. I find more freedom inside someone else’s work rather than being completely free, and able to create anything.”

Yet, with the album complete, Gainsbourg faces a new obstacle: her first-ever American tour. Since that first time she sang with her father 26 years ago, on the notorious hit single “Lemon Incest,” she has rarely performed live. She says her father and mother, actress and “Je t’aime … moi non plus” singer Birkin, only performed after many years of commercial success. “My mother was my age when she went onstage,” she says. “She had about 10 albums by then. Even then, I saw her terrified backstage.

“It’s very disturbing, in a way, to put yourself out there. One side of me wants to be daring and wants to do it, and to be able to do it. Another part says, ‘You don’t know how to do anything.’ ”

By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, January 27, 2010

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Machine Project presented an improvisational music class throughout January that was based on experimental “game” by visionary jazz innovator (and antagonizer), John Zorn. Cobra, as Zorn named it in 1984, is a complex systems of cards, hand symbols, and, yes, hats that signal various actions to be performed by a musical group. No musical experience necessary (which was good for this West Coast Sound correspondent, whose only lessons in bass playing came from sitting in front of a 1990’s boombox) and a wide swath of abilities and instruments showed up. From upright basses, trumpets, and bassoons to tambourines, accordions, and ukuleles, each class created a different dynamic as musicians brought various instruments through the door. How would the trombone interact with melodica? What kind of duet involves a bass guitar and a jaw harp? What happens when two accordions attack? In Cobra, chaos and beauty could coexist.

The first sessions featured pianist Rory Cowal, who taught guided improvisation through unconventional techniques. He instructed musicians to play along to a sentence he read from a book, and selected two musicians to musically complement and antagonize each other. Then musician and composition doctoral candidate, Isaac Schankler, led the Cobra sessions, first teaching a simplified version of Cobra, then acting as prompter.

Schankler stood at the front of the room with a table of various cards. He held up a “Pool” card, and without any communication, instruments began to chime in. An accordion oom-pahed, while a vocalist whistled or gurgled, then a saxophone’s skronk would raise up the volume, and suddenly drop away as Schankler signaled for a cello solo. The cellist plays a slow melody for twenty seconds, then Schankler motions for one loud note from all instruments. The piece is over.

Later Schankler introduced the notion of guerrilla tactics, where musicians in the group could overthrow him, and become the prompter.

Do you play along or create something new? Do you stay safe or take a chance? Does your instrument define you? How do you get your voice heard? Who drowns you out?

Cobra’s rules are complex; John Zorn encourages accidents, misinterpretations, and mutations, but the lessons are simple:

-Know when to start

-When a system is failing, tear it down and start again.

Try Cobra on for size.

By Drew Tewksbury

from LAWeekly.com Jan 27, 2009

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Timothy Norris

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It all started with a WTF moment.

The stage lights set the Wiltern aglow in a lavender haze, four video screens blasted ambient images, but the Cold War Kids were nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t one of those Sun 0))) moments, where mystique was the goal, instead technical problems made the Cold War Kids begin with a hiccup. Trudging on through the false start, Long Beach’s finest (sorry, Sublime), rolled out a relatively reserved show for a band who used to really rock it.

If we set the Wayback Machine to 2007, we’d see the Cold War Kids owning the stage, Nathan Willet leading his bandmates in sweat-drenched, flailing homages to Bijou porch-stompers. But four years later the Cold War kids have cooled off a little.

(Same Venue in 2007, same band though?)

Their self-described brand of soul-punk, has evolved lately, largely leaving both soul and punk by the wayside. Willet’s pipes still are the finest in rock when it comes to lung-busting crooners, but the new material feels a little “Top 40″ and mainstream. Maybe that’s their goal. There’s nothing wrong with getting big. But can they still rock by taking it down a notch?

They debuted the piano heavy, “Audience,” singing an ode to an “audience of one.” The Wiltern’s audience swayed and chatted over drinks, but only got semi-raucous when The Cold War Kids dropped their phenomenal anthem, “Hang Me Up to Dry.” The song from their 2006 album Robbers and Cowards, still has the power to move. The simple bass riff interlocks with the drums, laying down solid foundation for Nathan Willett’s howling voice that could raise a congregation’s hands to the rafters, or to God, or to whatever.

When Willet pleaded for a death row pardon during “St. John,” the sense of urgency, and passion dripped with the swagger of classic Cold War Kids. With a jammy cover of “Long As I Can See The Light,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, they gave another shout out to the songs of the South. But the South Bay residents have largely abandoned their swaggering, backyard sing-a-longs, for more streamlined pop-rock sound. Cold War Kids aren’t becoming Coldplay, yet, but they are definitely growing up.

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Aproper dive bar should be as much about the spirit of its characters (aka alcoholics) as about the lack of polish. I had found a favorite in Rae’s Lounge in Culver City, only to show up one day to locked doors and a notice that it was soon to become the Westside branch of the Bigfoot Lodge, that synthetic log cabin-style bar in Atwater Village. In search of a new haunt, I headed to a minimall on Sepulveda that is home to two of the last remaining dives in L.A.: Roger’s Exciting Tattle Tale Room, with its red, white, and blue backlit sign, and the Scarlet Lady Saloon, its name spelled out in hokey western script.I’d heard there was a feud between the joints, so I sought answers at the aquarium shop, one of two businesses separating them. “In the 20 years I’ve owned this store,” said Ruben Peters, “I’ve never set foot in either place.”

“Some guy got stabbed in the Tattle Tale,” chimed in a (heavily inked) employee. Later I learned the shanking occurred in the parking lot of the adjoining vacuum cleaner store—a fact that didn’t give me much comfort.

I stepped inside the Scarlet Lady at noon. The cowboy motif yielded to a 1970s sports bar complete with a NASCAR-shaped light over the pool table and a dartboard flashing like a slot machine. Watching over the bar was Red, clad in sweat shorts with a braided ponytail sprouting from his balding scalp. Ted Danson he was not. When I mentioned the Tattle Tale, his convivial face turned somber. “I don’t know what their problem is,” he said, “but Roger won’t let his employees in here.” I decided to cross enemy lines.

I pushed open the heavy Dutch doors of the Tattle and waded toward a bar stool, blinded by darkness so thick it had a smell. “Do people still smoke in here?” I asked the bartender, Joanie Pleasant, a name I’m not sure she’d earned. She reached up and wiped the low wood-paneled ceiling with a cocktail napkin to reveal a yellow streak of nicotine. An enlightening trip to the gentlemen’s room uncovered vending machines with glow-in-the-dark condoms and 50¢ matchbook-size pictures of naked ladies. Back at my stool, I became ensnared in a conversation about gout. “Uric acid!” shouted a man with a belt bisecting his spherical stomach. My hour at the Tattle stretched into five; time was obliterated over Pabst Blue Ribbon and stale peanuts, and I was left with this thought: Do these warring bars understand that they are a dying breed that thrives on breakfast whiskey and bad lighting? The only war they should be waging is with time itself.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Los Angeles magazine, September 2009

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Yaghmai strummed the guitar chords and sang the opening lines of “Biss”: “They say he’s coming back again/he’s coming for the rest of us.” His delicate voice shifted to minor key and wavered like Antony Hegarty’s falsetto as Larroquette looked down, tucked his dark hair behind his ear and triggered a cymbal-smashing beat punctuated by synths. A chopped-up, robotic vocal sample fell away, leaving Yaghmai’s multilayered vocals as a centerpiece.

Jogger’s cut-and-paste aesthetic aligns jagged beats with Yaghmai’s precise harmonies. The latter’s guitar, violin and vocals are fed through Larroquette’s effects pedals, samplers and laptop, where he tweaks the incoming sounds live. In essence, Larroquette helms the digital sphere and Yaghmai handles the organic analog. No two performances are the same, and much is done on the fly as the pair creates songs, some of which are narratives, others musical movements, hulking like icebergs as guitar finger-picking melts away and rolling snares emerge and coalesce into a driving beat. The audience members nod their hats and hoodies, some tapping feet next to backpacks, obviously approving of the relatively new addition to L.A.’s eclectic-electronic underground milieu.

Jogger put in their time in the scene’s crown jewel, the Low End Theory club at Airliner, and developed the complex technology of their live show during a European tour with Daedelus. Their debut full-length album, This Great Pressure, is the first release on Magical Properties, Alfred “Daedelus” Darlington’s new label.

“This Great Pressure captures the best of Los Angeles’ sprawling, many-limbed scene,” Darlington says. “It isn’t from anyplace, and yet it whispers, as much as it yells somewhere.”

“For each new segment of a song, we’d essentially create a new band for it,” Yaghmai said

A few weeks earlier, Larroquette and his cohort were sitting in lawn chairs in Yaghmai’s West L.A. home. Construction workers moved two-by-fours from tables, cleaning up sawdust from the studio-in-progress. Fog rolled in from the ocean, touching the treetops with mist. “Thanks for your help, guys,” Larroquette yelled to the workers as they left for the day.

Both men grew up in L.A., and the musical roots of Jogger were laid down in living rooms, garages and homes across the city over the course of their long friendship. Like Jogger’s dual-digital and analog dynamic, the pair comes from different backgrounds. Larroquette is the outspoken, free-spirited son of actor John Larroquette (best known for his character Dan Fielding on the sitcom Night Court), while Yaghmai is a lifelong instrumentalist with a well-studied, understated demeanor. He’s also a working musician who recently toured Europe with Charlotte Gainsbourg, played with the Bird and the Bee, and has done session work on various film scores. He once had a run-in with pop queen Shakira at the Latin Grammys. “It might have been a Shakira look-alike,” jokes Larroquette.

“It was a Gypsy number,” Yaghmai explains. “There were wagons around and I was lying on these stairs. Then, as she comes down the stairs I would stare at her. I was supposed to serenade her, then salsa away while flames shoot up over my head.”

The gig never happened, though. They canceled the performance because of 9/11. Larroquette explains: “Apparently, they hate us for our freedom, violin serenades and pyrotechnics.”

Since 2005, Larroquette has hosted a successful comedy podcast, Uhh Yeah Dude, with friend Seth Romatelli. The two provide dramatic readings of craigslist casual encounters, hilarious personal stories, and offer, says Larroquette, a “weekly roundup of America through the eyes of two American-Americans.”

Although his musical background involves 100 percent less Shakira than Yaghmai, to Larroquette, music is no joke. He is self-taught (“I was the worst guitar student ever,” he confesses) and gleaned programming and synth experience from working in a keyboard shop with a loose lending policy.

“A lot of our music was driven by the gear we would get from that shop,” Yaghmai says. “We’d get a new piece just to see what it did.”

“Then we were, like, ‘We need this in our lives,’ ” Larroquette adds.

Yaghmai: “For each new segment of a song, we’d essentially create a new band for it.”

Jogger was born from this spirit of experimentation. They perfected the technological aspects of live mixing and guitar integration and began recording material. Larroquette’s meticulous attention to detail helped to create the frenzied beats driving the duo. “Sometimes I’ll even make the beats by programming everything one note at a time,” Larroquette says while pointing to notes on an imaginary musical scale in front of him.

It wasn’t until Yaghmai’s high school friend Daedelus gave them a nudge that they began to get serious. In early 2009 he invited them to put some tracks on Friends of Friends Vol. 1, a compilation of experimental digital sounds, then took them on an international tour. From those beginnings came This Great Pressure.

“They have been making this record (or some version of it) forever, and just needed someone to impose deadlines to force their completion,” Daedelus says.

Jogger isn’t just all over the musical map; the duo redraws it completely, delineating a new sound for a future L.A.

Daedelus sums it up best: “Kids should be growing up with these sounds.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Weekly, December 9, 2009

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Inside the Ethiopian Merkato, everything smells like sage. The market sits in the middle of Little Ethiopia, a half-mile stretch of Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants, Jewish thrift stores and an erotic-cake shop. Along the Merkato’s walls, DVDs and CDs showcase the profiles of African pop stars, and baseball hats emblazoned with green, yellow and red decals of the continent are stacked neatly against a shelf. The aroma of curry greets customers as they walk in the door, and, for a moment, the sage mingles with the restaurants’ scent wafting down Fairfax Avenue.

In front of a case of glass pipes and fake gold jewelry, Luke Top and Lewis Pesacov kneel and rifle through a bucket of cassettes. Top wears a fedora and Pesacov’s sunglasses rest upon his head. The two members of Los Angeles musical collective Fool’s Gold carefully inspect the Merkato’s choice collection of African hits. A young black child leans on the display, and stares at them, mouth slightly ajar. “Are you guys,” he starts, stops, squints his eyes suspiciously and continues, “famous?”

“Not quite yet,” Pesacov says, smiling, hands still full of tapes.

“We’re in a band, and we’re just trying to sound like this guy,” Top adds, holding up a tape with an African man, whose white robe fades into a cloud scape. “We’re not there yet,” Pesacov tells the boy, “but we’re getting there.”

As a matter of fact, Fool’s Gold’s self-titled polyglot pop album does sound like Mahmoud Ahmed (“Nadine”), the beloved Ethiopian soul singer on the cover of that tape. But their sound also gleans the rolling congas of Cuba (“Poseidon”), the guitar gymnastics of Mali’s Tinariwen (“The World Is All There Is”), and the saxophones from Detroit soul (“Night Dancing”).

“Some of our songs are a heartbeat, some singing and a melody, it’s so simple,” Top tells me over a lamb plate at Messob Restaurant, across from Merkato. “Purely visceral and emotional.”

The band members, a 10-person collective of friends and neighbors, represent a cultural cross-section. Some come from L.A. bands, including drummer Garrett Ray, guitarists Matt Popieluch and Pesacov of eclectic rockers Foreign Born; Brad Caulkins, saxophonist from Jail Weddings, and flutist Mark Noseworthy of Pink & Noseworthy; and Mike Tapper, ex-drummer from We Are Scientists. Keyboardist and backup vocalist Amir Kenan immigrated from Israel when he was young, and became friends with Top at a summer camp in Reseda when they were 10. The percussion team adds international flavors to the musical gumbo, with Argentine pop star (and Latin Grammy nominee) Erica Garcia, Ghana-trained percussion leader Orpheo McCord (who also plays with Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros), and Brazilian/Mexican visual artist Salvador Placencia.

“Some of our songs are a heartbeat, some singing and a melody, it’s so simple. Purely visceral and emotional.”

“It comes from the same place, you know, the slave trade brought people from all different cultural points, like West Africa, Cuba, to Louisiana, to Brazil,” Pesacov says. “And there’s a point where they all overlap. Music from the Congo was really influenced by Latin music. So there is a place where African drumming overlaps with drum-line music in New Orleans, and where that overlaps with Samba in Brazil.”

Fool’s Gold is an extension of this cross-pollination, but not a means of culture-vulturism purveyed by other musicians, looking to capitalize on the next big craze, Top says. “It’s not like Diplo just playing a sample. We’re actually playing this music and digesting this music through our bodies,” he explains, diffusing the authenticity argument waged by so many music writers upon American bands with African influence.

“Ethiopians are influenced by Western music,” Top says, “and we’re bringing it back here, redigesting it into Western music. It’s a cycle.”

“It’s a dialogue. We’re praising it, and lifting it up. Through learning to play it, living and breathing it,” Pesacov says.

Pesacov’s musical background is far more heady than the others’: He studied under American avant-garde composer Mark Randall Osborn in Germany. “I’d spend seven months just writing one piano piece,” Pesacov says. When Randall Osborn died in 2002 in a traffic accident, Pesacov picked up his guitar again. “I haven’t figured out how it informs what I do now,” he says. “When I’m onstage [with Fool’s Gold], I’m not thinking. It’s coming from the body, not the mind.”

“That music lives in the brain, whereas Fool’s Gold lives in the heart,” Top interjects.

Top plays bass and sings lead vocals. His voice soars high or wavers like a shaking leaf as he sings in Hebrew. Like Mariah Carey, Ahmed and, more recently, Dave Longstreth from Dirty Projectors, Top practices melisma, the vocal act of singing a single syllable and extending it over many notes. This vacillating vocal style appears in African-American gospel and R ’n’ B, but is largely absent from most American music, especially rock. It’s the sound, to reduce it to its barest element, that sounds “foreign.”

“Ethiopian pop and Eritrean pop? I don’t know why I love it so much or identify with it, but I just do,” Top says. “Why do I feel this shit, why do I have to do this shit?”

Here, in the idea and culture of Ethiopia, Fool’s Gold takes root. After all, Ethiopia is a land of origins and sanctity. It is the cradle of civilization, home to Lucy, the 3.2 million–year-old Australopithecus skeleton, and early–20th century Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, exalted as god incarnate by Rastafarians.

Top’s mother, he says, thinks he has a spiritual connection to Ethiopia’s Jewish heritage. The Beta Israelites of Ethiopia believe themselves to be the lost tribe of Israel, and Emperor Selassie traced his lineage to King Solomon. Though many Ethiopian Jews were airlifted back to Israel in Operation Moses in 1984, and Operation Solomon in 1991, Top and Pesacov dream of going back and playing Hebrew Ethiopian soul for those left behind.

The decision to sing in Hebrew was natural and unexpected, says Top. “When we started the band,” he explains, “[we] just jammed with no vision. Then it just seemed organic to sing in another language, because the music we were listening to [at that time] was in another language. So I was, like, BTW, I know another language.”

Top was born in Israel to an Iraqi mother and a Russian father. He came to California at 3 years of age, and lost the connection to his Israeli roots. “I grew up thinking I had no home,” he says, “and I didn’t really identify with the people here. Singing in Hebrew now helps me explore this side I barely know. It allowed me a freedom. There was a bit of a security blanket in knowing that people couldn’t understand what I was saying. They were connecting with the pure sound of my voice.”

Fool’s Gold aren’t world music, but they are worldly. They represent real stories of L.A., about immigration and assimilation, outcasts and innovators, co-existence. “Growing up with this strange duality maybe led me to seek out different [cultures] to identify with. I really identify with this meld of Eastern and Western music, it’s everything I am. I think we’re punk.”

Photos and Test by Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, October 9th 2009

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The underside of freight cars smells like wet dust. The cold metal rail digs into your knees while you hide between tanker cars, waiting in darkness for a pickup truck to pass. The sound of tires on asphalt grows closer as the truck passes, its headlights flashing from behind a tanker car’s wheels.

Jaber, a graffiti artist, waits patiently, then picks up his backpack clanging with spray cans, affixes his paint mask, and says, “I think we’re cool, let’s go.”

He walks quickly across an empty track and grabs the tank car’s ladder. Hand over hand, Jaber climbs atop the black tanker. The pickup truck is nowhere to be seen, but the Port of Long Beach is in full view. Red flames burst from smokestacks set against a sea of lights, and freight cars line the tracks like steel sausage links on rails. It’s an industrialized version of hell, half Blade Runner and half Hieronymus Bosch, but for Jaber and the countless freight writers across the world, the train yard is their home.

“When I’m out here, I really get time to think,” says Jaber, who gave his graffiti name but did not want to be further identified. He climbs off the tanker and returns to a mural he has started on a primer-gray boxcar. He sets out his cans in a line, looks at the series of lines and angles scrawled across the car. Over the next 45 minutes Jaber sprays colors and designs that are difficult to see in the darkness.

He is creating a “burner,” a multicolored piece that spans most of the boxcar. Burners are a distant relative to hobo codes, the markings written on freight trains by train-hopping hobos of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those codes are some of the earliest forms of graffiti in California, written in coal on trains and under the oldest bridges, where traveling hobos slept.

For most of his life Jaber has walked along the tracks to tag his signature image — a cartoonish profile (possibly a self-portrait) — on the underbelly of trains and on industrial complexes. Now in his early 30s, Jaber makes his living with his art, selling canvases of his works, live painting at events, and working in the film industry.

When he has the time, he returns to his roots in the train yard. He never hits a “holy roller,” a car carrier named for the small holes in its metal walls, which would allow paint to penetrate and damage the autos. He also is careful not to cover train identification numbers or other markings essential to the rail officials.

“If you do it right, they don’t really care and your piece can run for years, all across the country,” Jaber says.

He was right. Earlier that day, Jaber spotted a car he had marked in 2007. “I remember that very night,” he said, smiling slightly at the sight of his old friend.

Los Angeles city officials are trying to end freight writing. In August, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich told the L.A. Times about an “end of days scenario” for graffiti crews, in which injunctions would make it illegal for taggers to hang out together. It’s the same tactic the city uses on gang members.

“If you want to tag, be prepared to go to jail,” Trutanich said, “And I don’t have to catch you tagging. I can just catch you … with your homeboys.”

A spokesperson from Trutanich’s office tells L.A. Weekly that the plan is just in “an exploratory phase,” and his office claims that 32 million square feet of graffiti were removed in 2007-2008 at a cost of more than $7 million.

Like Jaber, many graffiti writers are not “homeboys,” and they don’t tag over city murals or private property. With the evaporation of school art programs in underserved communities and the inaccessibility of high-priced art programs — where an MFA is almost always required — the wall, billboard or freight train presents a better opportunity for artists to get seen.

The periodic fetishization of graffiti by the art establishment — from Basquiat and Banksy to Shepard Fairey — sends the message that street art is more than a hobby. It can become a lucrative and important branch of America’s folk-art lineage.

Union Pacific railroad has a different view. The painting of freight cars is illegal and unsafe, and violators are subject to arrest by Union Pacific police, says Tom Lange, communications director.

Jaber knows all of that. But it doesn’t stop him.

“That’s it,” he says of his work, moving back from the boxcar. He holds up his camera and takes a picture. In the flash, Jaber’s mural comes into view: the jagged blue letters unfolding like feathers or vines, the imperial-purple waves crashing behind the text, and black script reading “Lost Angel.”

Then darkness returns. Jaber puts the camera in his backpack and leaves the train yard and his burner. Tomorrow the train might be gone, but in the unsaid mantra of the freight writer: What you create comes back to you.

Photographs and text by Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Weekly, Nov. 4th, 2009

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In the twilight hours, that liminal space between sunset and sunrise, the eyes and ears are prone to trickery. The imagination takes over; hazy objects resemble ghosts, and faraway sounds evoke werewolves. But on the precipice of Sunday morning, amid Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s tombstones and mausoleums, the misty fog and leaning palm trees, Bon Iver provided an ethereal soundtrack to sunrise.

It was dreamlike as indie folkster and Wisconsonite Justin Vernon walked onstage with his band, Bon Iver, around 6 a.m. It was almost completely dark when the band opened with Brian Eno-esque layers of sound — their guitars and beards bathed in an icy hue from the blue stage lights — and awakened the slumbering (and some still partying) masses sprawled across the lawn. “We’ve never done anything this weird before,” Vernon said, between the slow-burning stomps and sweet falsetto acoustic solos from Bon Iver’s 2008 album, “For Emma, Forever Ago.”

Bon Iver’s performance capped off six hours of events curated by the band, including Vernon’s handpicked music (a play list ranging from Dirty Projectors to Sam Cooke) and films (”Bottle Rocket” and “Planet Earth”). The audience began to arrive around midnight, the witching hour, with blankets, picnic baskets and wine in hand. Some young women, apparently straight from the club, stumbled across the damp lawn in heels and miniskirts, and Vernon-styled bearded guys in T-shirts roamed from blanket to blanket, searching for their own picnic crews. By 4 a.m., much of the commotion had ceased and the huge quilt of mismatched blankets had become an outdoor slumber party. After a quick nap*, the wake-up call began with a beam of floodlights cutting through the fog, and the droning sounds of Buddhist monks blessing the stage and the audience with guttural chants.

The crowd was captivated, showing a solemn reverence as the band become more illuminated as the sun crept over the horizon. Details hidden in darkness were now revealed; the saw-toothed roof of the adjacent Paramount studios became Bon Iver’s backdrop, and audience members began to recognize friends sitting right next to them, who they couldn’t see just an hour earlier**.

Each song captured a distinct moment in the spectrum of dawn. The sky was faded purple during the swaying, sing-along “Skinny Love”; it was peach when Vernon sang the heart-wrenching croons of “Re: Stacks.” By the time Vernon strummed the lonesome, reverbed-out chords of the show-closing “Wolves,” after a set shared with friends-in-folk Megafaun, the haze overhead had shifted from a yolky yellow to concrete gray.

Then there was silence, as the fog burned away and people in the crowd rubbed their eyes from the sunlight. No tweet, text or photo could replicate the feeling of a cemetery at daybreak.
The night didn’t move; it floated. And they walked out past obelisks and funeral gardens, dazed like awakening from a dream.

*Some people were unaffected by the wake-up chants. One young lady snored loudly throughout Bon Iver’s set, unfazed by her friends poking at her ribs.
**This Pop & Hiss correspondent was sitting next to actor Devon Gummersall — a.k.a. Brian Krakow from the 1990s teen ennui-drama, “My So-Called Life.”

By Drew Tewksbury

from Pop & Hiss at the L.A. Times.

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The pop music of Iceland has, more often than not, reflected the starkness and beauty inherent in the frigid climate and craggy terrain. For the music and arts collective múm, its folk-infused glitch-pop has gleaned influence from its surroundings. The 2002 album, Finally We Are No One, was even recorded in a lighthouse. On the newest album, Sing Along to Songs you Don’t Know, however, múm has pulled its influence from the political landscape that erupted recently during Iceland’s financial meltdown. During this period of upheaval, múm created Sing Along to Songs you Don’t Know as a respite from the protests on the streets of Reykjavik; the peacefulness of the music, the group’s most subdued album to date, was a space of quiet amid the political clamor. Here, Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason, one of the band’s principal members and multi-instrumentalists, speaks about the album, language, and what the world needs to learn from Iceland.

What are the major differences between Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know and your other albums?

Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason: It is by any stress-o-meter our most tranquil album, it’s simpler and from some angles it’s almost transparent—but only from some angles. This is what is most sets it apart. Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy was probably the most complex of all our albums because of the shear amount of instrument tracks, but making albums like Summer Make Good were just as draining process. No album has flowed as easy for us as this one.

In the past you’ve recorded albums in both English and Icelandic. What language do you think better conveys the emotions in your songs?

We seem to reach more people with english lyrics, so we have scrapped the Icelandic lyrics for a while at least. But actually I write much more in Icelandic than in English: poetry, lyrics and fiction. It’s obviously a whole different thing for me to write in my mother tongue.

What kind of commonalities have you heard coursing through Icelandic music, both contemporary and traditional?

I’m not sure, but I think there is a strange balance of people taking their music very seriously and very lightly at the same time, which is something I have noticed running through it all. Other than that I can’t really think of any threads that run through Icelandic music, it’s very open and very diverse whatever way you look at it.

Why did you decide to record some of this album outside of Iceland?

That wasn’t really a decision we needed to make, we will record anywhere that suits us, anywhere that’s beautiful, where it is quiet and we can relax while we work, eat, sleep, read and drink. And I think this is what we will keep on doing and we are really open to coming and recording anywhere that chance will take us. If someone wants to lend us their house, we will be there.

You’ve recorded in many different environments, including a light house during the recording of Finally We Are No One. Describe the locations where you recorded this album.

Most of it was probably done at home in our bedrooms. Quite a lot of it was recorded in Gunni’s parents summer house, which is in a very quiet place about two hours from Reykjavík. We recorded quite a lot in the week we spent in a 14th century house in the Estonian country side surrounded by lakes. Most of the drums were recorded in Finland, where our drummer lives and bits and bobs were recorded in Berlin and upstate New York.

In what ways does your living and studio environment color the sound of your albums?

We don’t really think about what influences the music that much, dissections and autopsies like that aren’t really apart of any creative process. So we let others think about stuff like this. But we very rarely record in conventional studios, except when we really need to or when they are exceptional studios. Things tend to get much more stressed in recording studios, simply because there, time literally seems to be money. That’s not healthy, time shouldn’t really equal money, especially not when creating music.

Between the release of Go Go Smear the Ivy in 2007 and this record in 2009, Iceland has undergone a great deal of change. Economic and political strife have become part of the island’s landscape. In what ways did these events hinder or help your creative process?

Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason: Through the collapse of the financial system and the government there was an amazing eruption of energy in the people here and we feel blessed to have been witness to it, even though as time passes there hasn’t been as much change as we had hoped for. Far from it. But times of turmoil always release creative powers, so I think it influenced everyone in Iceland. Staying out in the streets, banging pots and pans, screaming and protesting will bring out the best in anyone.

How has the collapse of the Icelandic government affected the funding for the arts? What kind of affect has it had on small music acts and larger bands there?

We have never really had a proper art funding system here in Iceland, at least not for “pop” music. múm has really only once received a grant from the government and it was unsubstantial, so I think it won’t have much affect on the bands around us. Some of the banks started sponsoring the arts in one way or the other, but we steered clear of that.

Apart from sharing the same throw-away culture, I think Iceland and the US couldn’t be more different and I don’t think there are many lessons a confused ex-colony can give a morbidly obese super-power.

You recorded this album partially in Finland and Estonia, two countries that are quickly becoming innovators in technology. In the few years since Estonia shed its Russian occupancy, it has seen an incredible rise in living standard and industrial importance. Its path seems similar to that of Iceland after its independence. What can Estonia learn from Iceland’s current political and economic strife?

Not to trust the hypnotized disciples of Friedman and not to give in to the sirens of mass privatization. Icelanders got charmed in to a trance like state where nothing mattered more than owning the newest things and the biggest cars and when they woke up from the trance, they felt violated and hurt, but had no idea who to blame. We lost so much to liberal economic vandalism, but the biggest thing we lost was our self-respect.

What can America learn from Iceland?

Apart from sharing the same throw-away culture, I think Iceland and the US couldn’t be more different and I don’t think there are many lessons a confused ex-colony can give a morbidly obese super-power. Everyone living in the west have many lessons to learn and the best way to do so is being open to new ideas, new feelings and emotions. We probably won’t get anywhere by dictating morals or lecturing each other.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Filter Magazine Online 09.24.09

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“My life is an open book,” she says, pouring soy milk into her drink.

“My childhood, like most people’s, molded how I view the world and how I create,” Lov says, instructively, before opening her metaphorical tome and reading from it. Lov was 4 when her mother won custody of her and her older brother after a bitter divorce. Lov’s father fought hard to get them back, even threatened to kidnap the children if he had to. Lov’s mother, she says, warned the court that her father was volatile, but he found a sympathetic judge and finagled five visits with his children during their preschool recess. After the fifth visit, he earned time alone with the kids — and made good on his threats by kidnapping the two children and leaving for Israel.

“I remember being in the airport and he told us, ‘If for some reason I’m not on your flight, just find someone official in the airport, and they will take care of you,’ ” Lov says. “We freaked out and prayed: ‘Please, God, let him get on this plane.’ Then he went up to the stewardess and charmed them into helping my brother and I onto the plane. Once onboard, he left us and sat in an empty seat. We saw him sit down and we cheered.”

As a 5-year-old, Lov couldn’t process what had just happened; this was her father, the man she trusted. When they landed in Tel Aviv, her life was uprooted. “We were immediately put into first grade, and I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew,” Lov says. “I was very isolated. I hated school, but music was my thing.” Her father introduced her to the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, and Lov would record entire radio shows with a tape recorder and sing along. “Besides my dad being a criminal, he was the one who encouraged me to be creative,” she says.

“He said I was funny, and that my voice was good,” Lov continues, while sipping her iced coffee. “But that other side was terrible.” She and her brother bore the brunt of his temper and physical abuse. He couldn’t stay out of jail, and the women in his life were not the matronly type.

When Lov was 11, her father met a woman who convinced him to return to America — Minnesota. After six years abroad, Lov had to relearn English and integrate herself into school; she had to relearn how to be an American kid.

But her father became more erratic, and her isolation grew. “Everywhere he went, he’d leave a path of destruction,” she says, “but music was my sanity. It was the thing I could turn to to escape.”

She and her brother eventually moved in with her uncle in California, leaving her father behind for good. “My uncle saved my life,” she says, “going from chaos and welfare to a stability that I never knew existed.”

Lov first gained attention for her songs with the Devics, which she founded with Dustin O’Halloran in 1998. When he became involved with solo piano projects in the mid-2000s, Lov forged her own path. too. With the help of Zac Rae, who produced Fiona Apple and Annie Lennox, she began work on her solo album, Seasoned Eyes Were Beaming, a melodic musical diary enriched with swaying string sections (“Fountain”) and tinkling toy pianos (“Touched”), all sewn together with Lov’s simple strums and bittersweet lyrics. The album, re-released by Filter records in late August (after a false start from her former label Nettwerk, which first released the album earlier this year), will literally accompany Lov as she tours with indie crooner and sometime-collaborator Sea Wolf. She plans to take the stage with only a guitar and a record player, which will provide the backing tracks. These minimal, intensely intimate shows don’t scare Lov — nothing seems to shake her. Instead, she thrives on baring her soul. “I always feel vulnerable onstage, but that’s the beauty of it,” she says. Then again, she’s had some experience with difficult emotions.

At 15, Lov reunited with her mother after 10 years. By this point, her mom was a stranger. It was difficult, Lov says, but they grew closer as time went on. When she was 16, her father killed himself. “But I’ll save that story for the book,” she backtracks, perhaps after seeing that I’m a bit exhausted.

Lov smiles and jokes while cleaning our coffee cups. “I was never that kid in all black, writing-poetry-in-the-corner girl,” she explains. Instead, Lov’s music cuts through the fog of isolation and sends out hope with each song, like messages in bottles. “When I was a kid, listening to the Smiths helped me know that others could feel [like I felt], and that I was okay. Now, I feel that I need to give back to what was given to me and balance darkness with hope.”

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By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, September 09, 2009

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It’s 11 a.m. on a Saturday. Good morning.

Bassist Nick D’Itri leans on his amp near a broken-looking organ crouched in the corner. Guitarist Greg Buensuceso runs through a lick in front of his Orange amplifier. At the center of the room, Brandon Pierce sits behind his drum set and trash-talks Maranga as we walk in. Maranga wastes no time getting started. He strokes his long, reddish beard once, straps on his guitar and rips into the strings. What comes out is the Southern rock–brushed “Come Down Halo,” from the band’s recently released split 7-inch single with Sea of Air. Singer Sam James Velde, former member of rock outfit Bluebird, shakes his hair and lifts one hand to the rafters while the other clutches the mic stand. Here, in the privacy of their practice space, they rip through the Allman Brothers–tinged dual guitar lines and growling bass of “Choose Your Side,” and the rowdy, roadhouse blues of “Good Bye Gone.” “We sped up too much on that one,” Maranga tells the other guys, most of whom were friends from their high school days in Thousand Oaks.

They’re halfway though this Saturday-morning practice session, and the guys have a lot of work ahead of them. Buensuceso also has to get to his grandmother’s birthday party soon, so in these few hours, they’ve got to get it right. Night Horse doesn’t sound rusty, but it’s been a while since the members have all rehearsed together, and one of their biggest shows quickly approaches: Sunset Junction. It’s a crucial moment offering serious exposure for the down-home rockers, a chance to spread their sound to an audience as yet untapped.

Night Horse’s style is familiar but indiscernible; their cocksure barroom vocals and guitar-solo tradeoffs would be at home at CBGB (R.I.P.). “We’re first and foremost a rock & roll band, but we try not to be too derivative,” says Velde. If Night Horse has any derivations, they come from their label, Tee Pee Records, the New York–based outfit that curates the finest in no-gimmick, back-to-basics rock bands.

Photo by Drew Tewksbury
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Founded in 1995 by Tony Presedo, Tee Pee earned high marks for early, seminal releases from drone rockers Sleep and High on Fire, along with weirdos Brian Jonestown Massacre. Presedo parted ways with the label in August 2008 (he now heads up the culinary mash-up Territory BBQ + Records). Under the direction of Steve Dolcemaschio, the “almost-24-year-old” (as he tells me) general manager, the label has cultivated its lineup into an L.A.-centric list heavy on the psychedelic tip. “We are trying to make a label that puts out good music, for the sake of the music,” Dolcemaschio says. Last year he was an intern at Tee Pee, and now he runs the label. The boutique imprint has a staff of four in New York, but supports a roster of eight bands in L.A., six of which were signed or re-signed in 2009. From the Western flavor of Spindrift and the dark, postapocalyptic haunt of label newcomers Black Math Horseman to Maranga and Pierce’s other band, the epic wall of rock experimentalists, Ancestors, Tee Pee’s latest signings are collectively infused with layers and sonic textures usually absent from the endless noodling of some stoner effusium.

Last July, Tee Pee brought together many of its bands for the first annual New Weird America Fest at L.A.’s Nomad Gallery. The show, named after the “new weird America” freak folk-musical phylum that bubbled up around 2003, in many ways marked a new moment in Los Angeles music — or at least a reimagining of movements past. It had been years since Arthur Fest brought the finest experimental, psychedelic and folk musics to L.A.; FYF Fest, although presenting a phenomenal lineup, appealed more to Vice Magazine enthusiasts and American Apparel fans. New Weird America represented a realigning of the new psychedelic sounds with roots in Los Angeles’ far-out history.

“It reminded me of being in the desert, of going to see Kyuss out at a generator party, and that kind of community,” desert sage and songwriter Imaad Wasif told me while at indie radio station KXLU. The Coachella Valley native, with family roots in India, played the New Weird America Fest and looked the part of this burgeoning psych scene. His matchstick legs were shrink-wrapped into jeans, his long, wavy hair fell onto the shoulders of his gray military-looking jacket. At times, he speaks like a mystic. “It’s all about creating this cycle of birth, death and growth,” Wasif says about the spiritual nature of his upcoming album, The Voidist (out October 13), which melds melodic acoustic strumming with swirling psych breakdowns. “I didn’t realize it as a kid, but how my parents raised me, with our food and Indian lifestyle, was almost like a mystic in India,” Wasif says. “All of my songs have an embodiment of a character, which is me, and this oracle. I believe in this androgyny within myself.”

L.A. has long been home to psychedelic spirit; Sky Saxon and the Source family are testaments to this iconoclastic scene. Tee Pee Records reconnects with this heritage. “L.A.’s history with the fringe and psychedelic stretches from Topanga Canyon to the Sunset Strip; hair metal and other genres just derailed it,” Spindrift’s songwriter, Kirpatrick Thomas, once told me (while wrapped in a sleeping bag in their unruly, smelly tour van). It’s true: psych is hardly new, but it’s been a while since the scene has been this organized. As Night Horse and Tee Pee’s other L.A. bands gain momentum, though, it’s misleading to call it a comeback. It’s a creeping tsunami. A (not so) silent swell of tuned-in rockers all riding the same vibration. On any given night in L.A., someone from the Tee Pee label is onstage, in the crowd, or perhaps crashing on your couch — at least until it’s time to get up and practice.

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Photographs and Text By Drew Tewksbury

from LA Weekly, August 26, 2009

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Quentin Tarantino has never been one for subtlety. His over the top, explosive films have stirred up audiences and pushed the envelope for nearly two decades. With “Inglourious Basterds,” opening Aug. 21, Tarantino continues his legacy of genre smashing in an epic about Nazi-scalp-hunting, Jewish soldiers in World War II.

We caught up with Tarantino, and some of movie’s stars, Eli Roth, B.J. Novak, Diane Kruger and Christoph Waltz, to chat about propaganda, German movie stars, and the best ways to scalp.

Brad Pitt was probably busy babysitting
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Quentin Tarantino on his relationship to violence in movies…“Basically the violence that I like makes me laugh. In a particularly savage scene where a character takes another character that I don’t particularly like and bashes his head into the table five times, that totally cracks me up.”

Quentin Tarantino Reflects on Violence in his Films with Drew Tewksbury

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Christoph Waltz on the universality of the film…“You can transpose it to ancient Greece or the Thirty Year War, and it will perfectly hold up. These clashes of forces and these armies trying to undermine each other, and politics being played and vicious people trying to pull all their magic and stunts.”

Christoph Waltz Talks to Drew Tewksbury about seeing himself in a Nazi uniform

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Diane Kruger on seeing the film the first time…“I was surprised how funny it was. I knew that there were some funny moments in the script, but I truly laughed out loud at Cannes, and thought, ‘it’s so inappropriate to laugh right now.’”

Diane Kruger Talks about acting influences with Drew Tewksbury

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Quentin Tarantino on the origins of the script…“I started by wanting to make a movie about a bunch of guys going on a mission. But I want to go beyond it, I want to redefine it. It’s this big group of characters, these historical characters, who mix it up with my characters.”

“I did have a story but the story was too long, it could have been a 12 hour mini series. Then I had to go through these questions: Am I an artist too big for movies? I can never deal with that puny canvas the 3-hour movie… Then I had to get over myself.”

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Quentin Tarantino on Brad Pitt’s character Lt. Aldo Raine…“The whole idea was that this hillbilly is against the code of being a redneck. He’s truly against fascism. He was trying to be an Apache resistance against the Nazis. Where he’s coming from, he wants [Jewish] soldiers because he wants them to enact intense payback. He tells them, ‘we have to be warriors because we’re fighting a holy war against an enemy that wants to wipe your race of the face of the earth. So here we go.’”
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“Hostel” director Eli Roth on being directed by Tarantino…“I had done acting here and there, but it was always a bit part in my own movies or a joke. In ‘Death Proof,’ Quentin’s direction to me literally was ‘We have 2 minutes to lunch, don’t f-it up.’”
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Quentin Tarantino on his influences from war movies…“I got rid of the stuff I never really liked from war movies and kept the stuff I really liked. No tanks, no battle scenes. None of that. I was much more drawn to the cloak and dagger element where people were hiding in Nazi occupied countries and pulling stuff behind the scenes.”
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B.J. Novak on scalping…

“No one would expect me to know how to hold a gun or scalp anybody. That includes me. So when I got there, I tried to own the moment. I looked up ‘how to scalp’ online. I did my homework, and I proved myself as one of the better scalpers.”
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Quentin Tarantino on casting Diane Kruger…“She brought a genuine German movie star quality. You can buy that she starred in a whole bunch of German movies and was a big star. And that’s a big deal, because you don’t just find people on the street that look like old time movie stars.”

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Quentin Tarantino on staying true to history…“The movie is about propaganda and maybe my own movie is propaganda. They were rewriting history, and I am rewriting history.”
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By Drew Tewksbury

from Metromix, August 21, 2009

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Tonight Diplo is unveiling Major Lazer–his pseudonymous collaboration with London based DJ Switch–to a crowd of music insiders. The opening track “Hold the Line” begins with low, surf-rock strumming, followed by the playful, schoolyard singing of Santigold layered over a stomping beat. Santigold (aka Santi White) stands behind him, sipping a drink as her own voice soars from Diplo’s turntable. He wipes his brow and turns up the bass on the mixer. It’s time not only to be heard, but felt. And bass is what Diplo does best. His signature sound is culled from rapid-fire Miami bass and Brazilian baile funk, a largely unheard-of scene that Diplo excavated and served up on club-thumping mix tapes in 2004. Major Lazer’s Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do marks a return to original music for Diplo (aka Wes Pentz) since 2004’s Florida. Not that Diplo hasn’t been busy. In the five years since, he was professionally and romantically linked to M.I.A., produced her Grammy-nominated track “Paper Planes,” founded the label Mad Decent, and helped put Philly’s music scene back on the map. Tonight, Diplo is a hustler.

But 24 hours ago, Diplo was a dork.

Or so he tells me. “Sorry man, I look like a total dork. I was about to go for a run,” Diplo (looking a lot like just Wes Pentz now) says as he stands in the living room of a loft-style house, clad in an inside-out orange shirt and basketball shorts, with iPod in hand. His arm displays a tattoo of the gigantic Jurassic-era sauropod called a diplodocus (get it?). On the balcony overlooking the hills of Silver Lake—the Los Angeles enclave of hipsters and working-class Latinos—is Pentz’s Philly cohort Spankrock (aka Naeem Juwan). Juwan talks on a cell phone, leaning way back and super-slouching in the chair, looking bored as hell. Somewhere upstairs is Switch (aka Dave Taylor)–the house DJ, M.I.A. and Santigold producer, and owner of U.K. label Dubsided. Switch is asleep. It’s 2 p.m. “You know that one movie where the guy alien gives birth to a baby alien?” Pentz asks. “Alien Nation,” I suggest. “Yeah, well, that baby is what Dave looks like when he first gets up.” So we decid not to wake him, but I will catch up with Taylor a week later in New York City.

Far from the complementary drinks and morsels at the Marmont, the sparse kitchen at the rental house (“Pssh, you think we own this place?” Pentz admits) contains only a box of Clementine oranges (affectionately known as Cuties) and a seemingly unused George Foreman grill. Apparently, the lives of globetrotting DJs leave little time for culinary pleasures or a permanent residence.

Diplo and Switch are no strangers to the road, especially to locales traditionally off the beaten path. In 2004, Diplo traveled around Brazil to experience the flavor of the favelas, which he developed into an explosive underground mix CD Favela on Blast. Around this time, he also created the Hollertronix crew in his hometown of Philly. In the mid-2000s, Philly’s scene became a polyglot of names to watch (Amanda Blank, Spankrock, and Santigold) with Diplo at the center. The throwback ‘80s aesthetic—neon, Ray-Bans, white pants—was only beginning. Steve Aoki, DJ Z-Trip, and A-Trak became famous for playing other people’s music, but Diplo created some of his own. He mashed it up.

“I wasn’t making mash-ups for the sake of mash-ups,” Pentz says, while we sit on the porch, Spankrock reclining on the couch inside. “I was interested in doing everything. We just found a way to do it, to make sense, instead of being just iPod DJs. That was so punk rock to me, to loop up some rock and rap all ghetto over it. Now it seems so commonplace, like Jay-Z over Linkin Park or something.”

The mash-up of beats was jarring and a perfect extension of the cross-pollination of musical genres in the late 1990s. Rap and rock were paired in countless excruciating permutations then, but when Diplo mixed Southern-fried crunk (a favorite of the native Floridian) with Brazilian beats and ragga vocals, nothing sounded more natural.

While DJing in London, his beats garnered the attention of then-underground artist, Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A. They eventually became a couple: she was a socially conscious Sri Lankan artist-turned-electro-pop star; he was the white party boy who loved being in the bad part of town (or world). “We were into the same music and movies,” Pentz recalls about her, as the sun bakes us on the balcony. “Except she is a Sri Lankan who grew up in England, and I’m a white guy from Florida.”

M.I.A. was in America finishing up recording sessions for her yet-to-bereleased debut album, and they tried unsuccessfully to make some tracks. Then Diplo decided to just take the a capella tracks, which were later held up for over a year in legal strife, and mash them over beats ranging from baile funk to The Bangles. The underground mix tape, Piracy Funds Terrorism, was America’s first introduction to M.I.A., before her (musically and politically) revolutionary album, Arular dropped in 2005.

Back then, I told people that I produced [Arular], to get them to know who I was, but that was a total lie, - Diplo

“With M.I.A., we made a pop song totally by accident,” Pentz says. “We didn’t aim to have a big record. But she’s so cool, and that resonated with people.” He loaned a baile funk beat for her song “Bucky Done Gun” and got much of the credit for producing the whole album, which he says isn’t exactly the truth. “Back then, I told people that I produced [Arular], to get them to know who I was, but that was a total lie,” Pentz says.

Just another Diplo hustle.

M.I.A. didn’t seem to mind at the time, but presaging her second release, Kala, she set the record straight about Diplo’s participation. The media deemed Diplo the “mastermind behind M.I.A.,” but she says he had little to do with Arular. When pressed to name a chief collaborator, she credited Switch.

For the record, Switch is still asleep.

Of course, M.I.A. went on to become one of the most lauded musical artists in the world, and Diplo went on to create a small empire for himself, including the label Mad Decent, home to his Brazilian sexlectroclashers, Bonde De Role, and other artists from his neighborhood in North Philly.

Then came the Lazer.

For Major Lazer, Diplo and Switch decided to explore the music of Jamaica that inspired them. The album takes cues from dancehall and dubstep, featuring some of Jamaica’s finest and grimiest, including Vybz Cartel, Mr. Vegas, and Einstein. Major Lazer reverse engineers the mash-up and filters Jamaican music through the lens of Diplo and Switch’s production. “I’m interested in taking those genres we used to fuck with, and go deeper into them,” Pentz says, “What we’re doing with Major Lazer is taking those influences and trying to flip them.”

The project began in 2007, when Pentz ditched a “cheesy jam cruise” to stay in Jamaica. There he began to network with Jamaican artists, and convince them that he, a smaller name in Jamaica, could keep up with the established acts he wanted for Major Lazer. With cold hard cash and some powers of persuasion, Pentz got them on board.

Hustle, hustle, hustle.

“Really, [Jamaica] was an indulgence for us,” Switch tells me the following week, traffic streaming past as he stands outside a New York City recording studio, while the Beastie Boys work inside. “When you go somewhere like India , and especially Jamaica , it puts you in a different train of thought , outside of your usual working conditions . They use music as their voice ; they use it for politics , for religion. So, I think for people that are struggling , they can use it to vent frustrations , or to celebrate.”

“When you go somewhere like India , and especially Jamaica , it puts you in a different train of thought , outside of your usual working conditions . They use music as their voice ; they use it for politics , for religion. So, I think for people that are struggling , they can use it to vent frustrations , or to celebrate” - Switch

Major Lazer isn’t necessarily another colonization of Jamaica, and Pentz is all too aware of the effects of his musical tourism. Like the gentrification of the Philly neighborhoods around him, “the Diplo phenomenon” has the ability to gentrify an entire musical scene, as Internet-trawling culture conquistadors snap up the latest flavors from foreign lands. In the way Elvis gentrified the blues, Diplo has been accused of exploiting music scenes, like baile funk, for his own good. But he says it’s different with Jamaica. “[Jamaican musicians] steal from cultures more than anybody,” he says, referring to dub, the prototypical remixing method that originated on the island. “We’re way past the arguments of me being a culture-vulture guy. As long as you pay respect to the artists and keep things right, everything falls into place.”

Everything is falling into place for Diplo. His label is successful, he’s working on a documentary about baile funk, he’s leaving for Angola to record with Buraka Som Sistema, and he’s “doing way better than when I was working at Subway six years ago.” Hip-hop hipsters dance awkwardly to his beats, and in Japan, he says, they don’t dance at all. He’s a hustler. He’s a dork. He’s a hustling dork. But right now, there’s no food in this house, Spankrock is hungry, and Diplo is going out to lunch.

Photos by www.EvanKlanfer.com.

By Drew Tewksbury

from Flaunt Magazine, Issue 104 2009

View the Printable PDF of this Article from Flaunt Magazine

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View my photos and blog from Major Lazer’s opening night at L.A. Weekly’s West Coast Sound Blog

Major Lazer - “Hold The Line” ft. Mr. Lexx and Santigold from Downtown Music on Vimeo.

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Frohawk Two Feathers is a man at the nexus of many truths. On one hand, he’s an alchemist of visual art who turns dull history into golden narratives rich with beautiful subversion. On the other, he’s a performance artist who experiments with music, poetry and alter egos, including the psychedelic sexpot Kent Cyclone. Then there’s Umar Rashid, the mastermind behind it all who percolates the creativity that keeps his many artistic endeavors running.As a visual artist, the Lincoln Heights resident creates evocative illustrations and paintings of fictional aristocrats that take stylistic cues from post-colonial era portraiture. These colorful works — which glean the outsider-art aesthetic of murals and public art — explore the intricacies of race, the malleability of class and the fragility of how history is constructed. Although his characters are fictional — some are absurd inhabitants of the imagined country of Frengland — they are abstractions of a real ruling class that present a visual dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed.

“He is constantly redefining himself and therefore redefining the traditional idea of the artist as someone who makes work solely to be exhibited,” says Heather Taylor of Taylor De Cordoba, the gallery exhibiting his work in 2010. “His whole life is really his art.”

Whether he’s challenging expectations with his personas or rewriting history in his paintings, Frohawk embodies the peripatetic Los Angeles art scene, where genre-obliteration reigns supreme and one medium is never seems enough.

Brand X: What’s the meaning behind ‘Frengland’ and the revisionist history you present in your illustrations and paintings?
Umar Rashid: Frengland is a place I created that presupposes that 18th century England and France never were at war with each other and that they merged into one huge, unstoppable colonial empire. Imagine all the countries they conquered put together. They’d put a flag in most of the world. [For a recent New York show] I made 10 large portraits of people directly and indirectly involved in the 50 Years War (1742-1790), between Frengland of Francis III and numerous belligerents.

Brand X: How would America fit into this picture? We’d never colonize like that, right?

Rashid: Ha. Yeah. Let’s not even talk about Iraq.

Brand X: You also keep a menagerie of personas. There’s Kent Cyclone, the saucy nouveau-griot who spouts truth on Silver Lake stages. Then there’s your “Friday Night” concept album, which extols the activity of a night on the town. Sometimes actors and performance artists can feel spread too thin by having multiple identities. In what ways have you experienced a loss or complication of your own identity?

Rashid: My father was an actor, so I grew accustomed to seeing him as many different people. I would see him fall in love or die on stage over and over again. It put the seed in my head. But sometimes I feel a little spread thin. I’ve been out around town and someone will yell, “Hey, Frohawk!” at me, and it’s at that moment that I, Umar, have to reconcile with it.

Brand X: Music plays an important role in your personas. What are you experimenting with now?

Rashid: I’m writing a treatment for a folk album I’m working on with an old friend, tentatively titled “Crocodile Company.” It’s about a Frenglish soldier in the Compagnie Crocodile who comes back to his island homeland after years of wars to find his town overrun with brigands and his sister kidnapped. He is then elected by the townspeople to exact Rambo-style revenge on the thugs.

Brand X: You’re pretty busy — and you and your wife have a kid on the way too.

Rashid: Soon you’ll see a golden light coming from Lincoln Heights. That means I’ve become a dad.

Brand X: Your greatest work of art?

Rashid: For sure.

Photo credit: Colin Young-Wolff / For The Times.
Painting, titled “Amir” of Sakamoto, Daigoro, Japanese Ambassador to Frenglish Occupied Ottoma and Leader of the Clandestine Yellow Dragon Society, Istanbul, by Frohawk Two Feathers. Courtesy Taylor De Cordoba.

By Drew Tewksbury

from L.A. Times’ magazine Brand X Innovators 2009 issue

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