GUEST EDITOR

Imperial Teen has been around for longer than you think; roughly 15 years to be exact. Wielding its own distinct brand of pop/rock, the quartet has since crafted a solid niche for itself on the indie scene, particularly thanks to the experience of seasoned pros Will Schwartz, Roddy Bottum, Jone Stebbins and Lynn Truell. Known for its complex lyrics and catchy hooks, Imperial Teen has made a solid mark in the music world during its run, especially with new album Feel The Sound (Merge). We decided to test that experience by inviting the band to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Schwartz.

Stebbins: Alameda is an island just outside of San Francisco. Its a super-cute little city that has a sorta old-fashioned Midwestern feel. There’s an enormous defunct naval base on the west side of the island that hosts one of the best antique fairs I’ve ever been to. It happens on the first Sunday of every month. An epic treasure hunt. Looking for a six-foot plaster Indian? Check. Can opener from 1918? Check. 1970s caftan? Check. And thats just what I’m looking for. The people watching is fantastic, too. If you visit the Bay Area, it’s definitely worth a trip. Wear comfortable shoes and sunscreen.

Video after the jump.

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Imperial Teen has been around for longer than you think; roughly 15 years to be exact. Wielding its own distinct brand of pop/rock, the quartet has since crafted a solid niche for itself on the indie scene, particularly thanks to the experience of seasoned pros Will Schwartz, Roddy Bottum, Jone Stebbins and Lynn Truell. Known for its complex lyrics and catchy hooks, Imperial Teen has made a solid mark in the music world during its run, especially with new album Feel The Sound (Merge). We decided to test that experience by inviting the band to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Schwartz.

Bottum: I’m taking part in the ride this year: 500-plus miles on bikes from S.F. to L.A. to raise money and awareness for this tired old disease that continues to take lives. I’m training now and totally into bumping it up for the cause. Super frightened of the biking fashion, bike shorts specifically, but here I go. Check out my page, and if it makes sense and you can find it in your heart, please think about sponsoring me. No amount is too small. Or just give me a shout of encouragement. Cheers.

Video after the jump.

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Imperial Teen has been around for longer than you think; roughly 15 years to be exact. Wielding its own distinct brand of pop/rock, the quartet has since crafted a solid niche for itself on the indie scene, particularly thanks to the experience of seasoned pros Will Schwartz, Roddy Bottum, Jone Stebbins and Lynn Truell. Known for its complex lyrics and catchy hooks, Imperial Teen has made a solid mark in the music world during its run, especially with new album Feel The Sound (Merge). We decided to test that experience by inviting the band to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Schwartz.

Stebbins: Palm Springs is my happy place. The mid-century architecture there is so amazing! The terrain looks like a movie set. There’s an enormous snow-capped mountain that rises straight up into the bluest sky you’ll ever see; it’s breathtaking. It’s a place where in the winter you can sit by the pool for awhile then take the tram up the mountain for some snowshoeing or skiing!! I love the dry heat, pools and old school “hollywood on vacation” glamour.

Video after the jump.

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Imperial Teen has been around for longer than you think; roughly 15 years to be exact. Wielding its own distinct brand of pop/rock, the quartet has since crafted a solid niche for itself on the indie scene, particularly thanks to the experience of seasoned pros Will Schwartz, Roddy Bottum, Jone Stebbins and Lynn Truell. Known for its complex lyrics and catchy hooks, Imperial Teen has made a solid mark in the music world during its run, especially with new album Feel The Sound (Merge). We decided to test that experience by inviting the band to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Schwartz.

Bottum: I love Brazil; it’s my favorite country. I’ve traveled a lot in my life, and it’s one of the few places that doesn’t rely on America for inspiration. The Brazilians are their own people: sexy, confident and totally musical. My friends in Rio told me about the musical based on the life of Tim Maia when I was down there in October, and I went and saw it. It was all in Portuguese and I didn’t understand a word, but you know: artist struggles, artist records, artist succeeds, artist does drugs … I got the picture. It was the songs, though, that bowled me over. Maia is kinda like Isaac Hayes but sweeter. His era was ’70s soul. He was a big man who loved pizza and pot and sex, and he died onstage. I haven’t stopped listening to him since I came back.

Video after the jump.

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Imperial Teen has been around for longer than you think; roughly 15 years to be exact. Wielding its own distinct brand of pop/rock, the quartet has since crafted a solid niche for itself on the indie scene, particularly thanks to the experience of seasoned pros Will Schwartz, Roddy Bottum, Jone Stebbins and Lynn Truell. Known for its complex lyrics and catchy hooks, Imperial Teen has made a solid mark in the music world during its run, especially with new album Feel The Sound (Merge). We decided to test that experience by inviting the band to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Schwartz.

Stebbins: I collect old stuff. I love things from the ’50s and ’60s. My favorite thing that I own is my trailer. It’s a 1966 Shasta Compact, only 10 feet long! It’s tiny but has a bed/table and a full kitchen, even an oven! I love to bust out some trailer baked goods at a campout or rally. There’s something about baking in a trailer that cracks me up. So not roughing it! For me, its about decorating and socializing more than actually “camping.” It’s my own little house on wheels. Trailer folk are friendly! They’re known to enjoy a drink and a song around the campfire. I belong to a group of ladies who have old trailers called the Trailerettes.When you roll into a campground in a tiny old trailer, you instantly have a bunch of friends. You can’t help but smile when you see one!

Video after the jump.

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Imperial Teen has been around for longer than you think; roughly 15 years to be exact. Wielding its own distinct brand of pop/rock, the quartet has since crafted a solid niche for itself on the indie scene, particularly thanks to the experience of seasoned pros Will Schwartz, Roddy Bottum, Jone Stebbins and Lynn Truell. Known for its complex lyrics and catchy hooks, Imperial Teen has made a solid mark in the music world during its run, especially with new album Feel The Sound (Merge). We decided to test that experience by inviting the band to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Schwartz.

Bottum: Every year in late January, a huge glass squash court goes up in the west wing of Grand Central Station in Manhattan, and the top squash players in the world play and compete for the title at the Tournament Of Champions. I’m an avid squash player and enthusiast, and I go every year. It’s the kind of the place to be for lovers of the sport. Location is key: Commuters on their way to work, trudging through the terminal are like, “What the fuck?” Understand, the court is glass. Phenomenal.

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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: Composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he named Fourth World, which he describes as “coffee-colored classical,” a mysterious, unique hybrid of musics that unfolds between the polarities of ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western. In the last two decades, his connoisseur recordings, built around a completely unique voice-like trumpet style (developed in studies with Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath), have inspired a generation of collaborators like Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Kronos Quartet and Ry Cooder. His trumpet performances show up on records of world stars like Björk, Baaba Maal and Ibrahim Ferrer. Film and theater credits include scores for Wim Wenders (Million Dollar Hotel, with Bono), the Netherlands Dance Theater (Lurch), Peter Sellars (Zangezi) and the theme for hit TV show The Practice. His 1999 acoustic audiophile recording, Fascinoma, produced by Cooder, with bansri flute master, Ronu Majumdar and jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson, inspired a new generation of European musicians and, especially, trumpet players like Arve Henriksen, Erik Truffaz, Paolo Fresu and Nils Petter Molvaer, all acknowledging Hassell’s influence, leading beyond the gravitational pull of Miles Davis.

In 2005, Hassell began touring with a new band, which he named Maarifa Street, playing to new European audiences from Norway to Madrid to Rome to Berlin who were astonished at the discovery of this atmospheric music that defies category. His performance at the Vienna Kunsthalle, the cathedral of classical tradition, was hailed as “the concert of the year” in Der Standard. Early 2009 brought a reconnection with the prestigious ECM label with the release of a new CD, Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street, and a Carnegie Hall concert in New York. Critical raves in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and the European press signal the growing awareness of a master musician and a music without borders whose freshness comes increasingly into focus as time passes.

Along with ongoing concerts and new recordings, Hassell has recently intensified work on a long-awaited book, The North And South Of You. Part of that work has been done in a series of public “Conversations” along with Eno, his musical collaborator from 25 years ago. These have taken place in London’s Southbank Centre, the Sydney Opera House, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and, most recently in March 2011, to inaugurate the opening of a digital arts center in Paris, La Gaite’ Lyrique.

Very broadly, the theme of the book is about the loss of pleasure as a guiding principle in our lives and how the evolution the north and south of the planet and the evolution of our body’s north and south are echoes of one another physically, metaphorically and psychologically.

Jon’s been an idol of mine since his work with Eno and Harold Budd changed my world of musical conception. He became a friend a few years back, and I’ve never been so honoured as I was recently to hear his fractal remixing and riffing on a performance of mine of Alexander Scriabin’s Guirlandes. He is a true original, and master of many media.

Video after the jump.
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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: 2011 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of film composer Bernard Herrmann, known for his iconic musical (and pure musique concrète in the case of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds) landscapes/backdrops for films like Citizen Kane, Cape Fear, Taxi Driver (his last) and memorable and numerous Hitchcock works. Psycho has long been a favorite film of mine, and Herrmann’s score is perhaps more indelibly inscribed on my memory than even the violently etched black-and-white images Hitchcock created. In scoring Psycho for strings only, Herrmann mentioned the intent on keeping a “black-and-white” texture in the spareness of his chosen ensemble. In transcribing a 20-minute suite of pieces for piano, I chose the ebony-and-ivory continuation of that thought. In music so rich, it is astonishing, when putting the notes down on the keyboard, to find the musical materials of Herrmann’s work so bare-motivic, archetypal and ultimately economic. Though I haven’t yet recorded the sequence commercially, it’s become a staple of my concert repertory. This live performance was captured at a live taping of my NPR radio program, From The Top, hosted by the EG Conference last spring in Monterey, and shot and edited expertly by Reid Mangan.

Video after the jump.
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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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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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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: Kris Saknussemm’s soon-to-be-released novel of the road and redemption, Reverend America, is centered on the travels and travails of a retired child evangelist albino orphan named Casper (known in his healing days as Reverend America) and his wanderings as guardian angel and inadvertent and occasional avenger. I’d become aware of Kris’ work via his first novel, Zanesville, his subsequent bizarre-noir novel Private Midnight and his exuberant alt-historical Enigmatic Pilot. We’d become Facebook friends, where I found him to be equally knowledgeable and perhaps even more impassioned about things musical more than literary. So when he asked if I would contribute some original work to fill out a CD to accompany the release of Reverend America (I’d not written anything original since high school, being presently and for decades consumed either by interpretations classical or reimaginings on the non-classical side), and with his own keen idea of how music might intersect his prose, I told him I’d have to be an idiot to not know how to write something for him.

The book is filled with lonesome sounds, from the distant locomotive horns to the century-plus refugee from an old-age home fire tootling wisely on the harmonica. I found mp3 transcriptions of locomotive horns, with their distinctively and plentiful variations of piled thirds, and used some of my faves as the harmonic language of the Prelude and Variation.

The other musical thread of the book has to do with all the hymns and indigenous music surrounding the young Reverend’s revival tours. Most of the titles are fictional. “Time Of My Time” seemed to me the most evocative, and so took that as my cue to explore some kind of Southern gospel, O Brother, Where Art Thou? piano (and potentially vocal) work.

Phil Abrams (an accomplished and celebrated actor; lots of recent TV stuff) made the video after listening to my piece more times than I’ve played it.

Video after the jump.
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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: Another of my daisy-chain of recommended writers, Megan Abbott appeared as an epigrammatically quoted chapter head in a Ken Bruen noir novel. Who knew my curiosity would lead me to the richness of her indelible noir contributions, Queenpin, Die A Little, Bury Me Deep and my favourite L.A. noir of all time, The Song Is You? And how would one have predicted, save for the intuitive and exhaustive empathy of her writing, here infusing the mind of her teen protagonist in a novel of, if not for young adults, such a quintessence of horror in lost innocence, of a maturity of such knocks instead of nuturings? A brilliant, beautiful book. Her next, Dare Me, comes out this summer. Thankfully, one can keep up with Megan’s musings at the Abbott/Gran Medicine Show.

Video after the jump.
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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: The horror-king mantle worn for the past century by Howard Philips Lovecraft has found its most worthy successor in Thomas Ligotti, a writer wholly consumed by the unseen, thankfully mostly undiscerned, reality behind the scrim of all our lives, a writer of philosophical depth as well as darkness, the Jean-Paul Sartre of 21st-century existential hell horror. Most recently read Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, which I consider the greatest short-story collection in the genre and includes as lead story “The Frolic,” on which a subsequent film has recently become available. I’ve devoured all his extant, printed works, including Noctuary, The Nightmare Factory, Grimscribe: His Life And Works and my first foray into Ligotti’s work, his own twisted version of The Organization Man: My Work Is Not Yet Done.

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Jason Miles has been around for a long time, programming synths for and jamming with the likes of Miles Davis and Luther Vandross, let alone producing other side projects over the years. DJ Logic has been around, too, working with ?uestlove, Vernon Reid, Marcus Miller and many more. The two have been through a lot together, traveling the world from Japan to Marrakech before finally releasing the first Global Noize album in 2008, later joined permanently by Indian vocalist Falu on their latest, A Prayer For The Planet (Lightyear/EMI). Global Noize will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Logic and Miles.

DJ Logic: This is a great album from beginning to end, with amazing production from the Bomb Squad. It’s also a soundtrack to what we are experiencing today at Occupy Wall Street and around the world.

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Jason Miles has been around for a long time, programming synths for and jamming with the likes of Miles Davis and Luther Vandross, let alone producing other side projects over the years. DJ Logic has been around, too, working with ?uestlove, Vernon Reid, Marcus Miller and many more. The two have been through a lot together, traveling the world from Japan to Marrakech before finally releasing the first Global Noize album in 2008, later joined permanently by Indian vocalist Falu on their latest, A Prayer For The Planet (Lightyear/EMI). Global Noize will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Logic and Miles.

DJ Logic: Morocco was one of my favorite places to visit and play. It showed me how global music was in a variety of ethnic culture, food and art. This was also the place my partner Jason Miles and I started the idea for Global Noize.

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Jason Miles has been around for a long time, programming synths for and jamming with the likes of Miles Davis and Luther Vandross, let alone producing other side projects over the years. DJ Logic has been around, too, working with ?uestlove, Vernon Reid, Marcus Miller and many more. The two have been through a lot together, traveling the world from Japan to Marrakech before finally releasing the first Global Noize album in 2008, later joined permanently by Indian vocalist Falu on their latest, A Prayer For The Planet (Lightyear/EMI). Global Noize will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Logic and Miles.

Miles: The Fillmore East and Cafe Au Go Go were my second homes from 1967 to 1969. I saw so many shows there. Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone, Super Session, Paul Butterfield, the Electric Flag, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Chicago, the Mothers Of Invention; the list goes on and on. It set me up to know that along with the great jazz artists of the time, I was turning into a hybrid musician. One who appreciated all great music.

Video after the jump.

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Jason Miles has been around for a long time, programming synths for and jamming with the likes of Miles Davis and Luther Vandross, let alone producing other side projects over the years. DJ Logic has been around, too, working with ?uestlove, Vernon Reid, Marcus Miller and many more. The two have been through a lot together, traveling the world from Japan to Marrakech before finally releasing the first Global Noize album in 2008, later joined permanently by Indian vocalist Falu on their latest, A Prayer For The Planet (Lightyear/EMI). Global Noize will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Logic and Miles.

Falu: I love South Indian cuisine. Whenever I’m feeling a little melancholy, I go (usually alone) to eat it. It is simple, but quintessential comfort food for me. My favorite restaurant in NYC is Saravanaa Bhavan on 26th Street and Lexington Avenue.

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