We are thrilled to announce that MAGNET has relaunched as a monthly print magazine. We encourage all existing subscribers and industry people to email us their current mailing and email addresses ASAP. (Please put “MAGNET Contact Info Update” in the subject line.) Issue #84 features Nada Surf, Damien Jurado, Barry Adamson, Craig Finn, Kathleen Edwards, Mark Lanegan, Patrick Wolf, Phenomenal Handclap Band, Chuck Prophet, the Azusa Plane and more
Perhaps best known for the NPR series From The Top, musician Christopher O’Riley is far more in-tune with music than most of the world. Not only does he host and mentor young musicians, O’Riley also transcribes and arranges songs by Radiohead, Arcade Fire and more for the piano and, more recently, the cello. O’Riley has just released a new album with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Shuffle.Play.Listen. (Oxingale), a tribute to contemporary composers and some of the most modern musicians. Owing to his virtuosic abilities and interesting outlook, we invited O’Riley to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
O’Riley: My collaboration with cellist Matt Haimovitz on double-album CD set Shuffle.Play.Listen and its eponymous and ongoing concert tour (this and next month find us together in Canada and the U.S.) was a natural meeting of two musical paths. Matt’s been known to take classical works, like Bach’s cello suites, to unlikely venues such as the old CBGB and other non-classical venues, juxtaposed with my introducing classical concert halls with my own takes on Radiohead, Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Nirvana, et al. In exploring our mutual musical loves, the first name to spontaneously spring up was John McLaughlin. Matt actually was joined by John on his cello-ensemble, Grammy-nominated Meeting Of The Spirits. So, for our first concert, I meticulously transcribed McLaughlin’s hyper-virtuosic guitar solo from his Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “The Dance Of Maya” from The Inner Mounting Flame and our very first concert together, a year ago in Billings, Mont., featured it as the show closer to an intrepid and enthusiastic crowd there at the Alberta Bair Theater.
“A Lotus On Irish Streams” was another natural choice for us, as it was a relaxed and inspiring improvisational environment (one can find numerous live performances of great variety and beauty by John, Mahavishnu keyboardist Jan Hammer and the violinist Jerry Grossman) for novices like the classically trained Matt and me. Nice to have our session video of same as this was the one-take track on Shuffle.Play.Listen.
Video after the jump.
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In case you weren’t already jealous of Andrew Bird for his awesome violin skills, pop sensibilities or good looks, a short video has dropped of him prepping new album Break It Yourself (out via Mom + Pop on March 6) on his amazing farm in Illinois. The clip also features a little snippet of an unknown song off the record, played with acoustic guitar on a rickety little staircase. Watch the video below.
Ever wonder what will happen during the last five minutes of late-night TV talk shows? Here are tonight’s notable performers:
The Late Show With David Letterman (CBS): John Fogerty
Rerun from November 17. The ex-Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman performed “Green River” and “Fortunate Son.”
The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (NBC): Tom Morello With Ben Harper
Rerun from November 18. Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello played “Save The Hammer For The Man” with Ben Harper.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! (ABC): Seal
Seal is plugging new release Soul 2.
Last Call With Carson Daly (NBC): Portugal. The Man
Rerun from December 6. Portugal. The Man performed “Got It All” and “All Your Light (Times Like These)” from latest LP In The Mountain In The Cloud.
Conan (TBS): They Might Be Giants
TMBG is plugging new album Join Us.
Perhaps best known for the NPR series From The Top, musician Christopher O’Riley is far more in-tune with music than most of the world. Not only does he host and mentor young musicians, O’Riley also transcribes and arranges songs by Radiohead, Arcade Fire and more for the piano and, more recently, the cello. O’Riley has just released a new album with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Shuffle.Play.Listen. (Oxingale), a tribute to contemporary composers and some of the most modern musicians. Owing to his virtuosic abilities and interesting outlook, we invited O’Riley to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
O’Riley: Radiohead has, especially in the more Thom Yorke-primary pieces, shown a proclivity for deconstruction: Like “Spinning Plates,” on record an amalgam of reversed vocal recording spliced in with recordings of Yorke’s singing backward; in live performance, an ingenious piano/vocal piece (for which I get credit for unwarranted originality only by being super-fan familiar with the released live version on the EP, I Might Be Wrong).
More recently, one got a bigger does of this live/studio disconnect when Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser, was released. To my ears, the album sounded like someone too enamoured of his laptop, while the live versions of The Eraser songs sounded like a songwriter at his creative peak.
I had a similar adverse reaction to Radiohead’s latest release, The King Of Limbs, even to the point of doubting the intrinsic worth, as songs, of so many of the Limbs works, so obscured and alienating did I find the production environments for each song, only to be happily thwarted by the extraordinary verve, mastery and sheer great songwriting in the subsequent live performances of Limbs material, on SNL, Colbert Report and here on the BBC, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich curated series, From The Basement. The performance of “Give Up The Ghost” inspired my own piano take on the piece, downloadable here.
Video after the jump.
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The chaotic sounds of Black Dice will return once again on April 10 when the band drops Mr. Impossible (Ribbon Music), its sixth studio album. Rather than improperly describing the experience, here’s the band’s official line about Mr. Impossible: “The album is the soundtrack to a substance-fueled teen basement show … on Mars.” If you’re curious just what that sounds like, download LP track “Pigs” below.
“Pigs” (download):
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Each week, we take a look at some obscure or overlooked entries in the catalogs of music’s big names. MAGNET’s Bryan Bierman focuses on an album that, for whatever reason, slipped through the cracks in favor of its more popular siblings. Whether it’s new to you or just needs a revisit, we’ll highlight the Hidden Gems that reveal the bigger picture of our favorite artists.
Before they brought their exploding psychedelic orchestras to the masses—everywhere from 90210 to SpongeBob SquarePants—the Flaming Lips were just four weirdoes in the heart of middle America, trying to bridge the gap between punk rock and the trippy ‘60s pop they grew up with. Their self-titled debut EP owes as much to Black Flag as Jefferson Airplane, and it kick-started the journey of our generation’s greatest band. The story of the group, and all those involved, is as all-American as you can get—hoping to give their children a better future, Tom and Dolly Coyne moved away from the coal mines of Pittsburgh to Norman, Okla., in 1961. They were a large working-class family with five kids, with Wayne only weeks old when they trekked across country to their new home. Wayne, along with little brother Mark (who came a year later), spent his formative years playing football with the older Coyne boys, soaking up the sounds of their Zeppelin and Who records like little brothers are supposed to.
As he grew older, Wayne became more interested in music and painting, using the money he made from working at Long John Silver’s and selling pot to buy a guitar. Mark Coyne became the star quarterback of the high-school football team, but he wasn’t your stereotypical jock. Wayne has described him as “a very intense person … He has boiled and drank his own blood. Has rescued countless animals … He consumed over a hundred doses of LSD one summer when he was 13 years old.” With Wayne on guitar, Mark on vocals and their friend Dave Kostka on drums, the boys started their own band, but still they knew that something was missing. Michael Ivins grew up only a few blocks away from the Coynes, attending the same school as Mark, but they had never met before. Michael was an extremely shy kid who became fascinated with the punk and new wave of XTC and the Buzzcocks. After decking himself out in punk gear, even sporting a bleach-blonde afro-mohawk, Ivins bought a bass from a local pawnshop with the hopes of starting a band, though nothing ever came of it. By chance, Michael’s little brother threw a party in late ‘82, which Mark Coyne and his friends had crashed. After spotting Michael’s strange getup, Mark struck up a conversation, and invited him to jam with the nascent band. A few days later, Ivins arrived at their practice space—an old grocery store, which now housed Tom Coyne’s office supply business. The boys took up shop in a former meat locker in back, where they crudely jammed on Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and garage-band standard, Neil Hefti’s “Batman Theme.” For the next few weeks, they would practice relentlessly, while Wayne started writing and demoing the group’s first songs.
Perhaps best known for the NPR series From The Top, musician Christopher O’Riley is far more in-tune with music than most of the world. Not only does he host and mentor young musicians, O’Riley also transcribes and arranges songs by Radiohead, Arcade Fire and more for the piano and, more recently, the cello. O’Riley has just released a new album with cellist Matt Haimovitz, Shuffle.Play.Listen. (Oxingale), a tribute to contemporary composers and some of the most modern musicians. Owing to his virtuosic abilities and interesting outlook, we invited O’Riley to guest edit magnetmagazine.com this week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
O’Riley: Cellist Matt Haimovitz’s peripatetically touring in all sorts of genres and combinations, centered by his position on the cello faculty at Montreal’s McGill University. We were privileged to record our double-album CD set, Shuffle.Play.Listen, at McGill’s wonderful studio/experimental sound laboratory, the MMR Studio, for five days last June. In light of Montreal being the home as well for the band Arcade Fire, it was a natural choice to include, as we did, two tracks by the band on the non-classical of the two CDs. There were two mini-HD cameras archiving most of the five days’ sessions, so we ended up with a lot of footage for live performance video. (Good evidence of there being no overdubbing, as one might suspect, given the complexity and sheer speed of this arrangement.) Matt actually took on even more virtuosic responsibility, as he became envious of my constant 16th notes. It’s justifiably one of the more popular tracks on a recording of which I’m most proud.
Video after the jump.
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Incredibly danceable synth tunes and leopard-print spandex: That’s what you’ll find in the Asteroids Galaxy Tour’s new video for “Heart Attack,” off Out Of Frequency (BMG Rights). The Danish pop band has been making waves with its special brand of infectious pop. The clip is all flashing lights and glitter, featuring blonde bombshell/vocalist Mette Lindberg having a total blast. The background alternates between every color of the rainbow and retro geometric patterns. Lindberg’s fashion taste brings viewers back to a more psychedelic time period. Watch the video below.
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