Indiana-based alt-rock quartet Murder by Death is currently touring the US with Fake Problems and Buried Beds. During the month of February, the band was joined by The Builders & The Butchers and Damion Suomi & The Minor Prophets. And on April 4 of last year, Murder by Death released its fifth full-length album, Good Morning, Magpie, on Vagrant Records.
In a recent tour stop at the packed Subterranean in Chicago, cellist Sarah Balliet, clad in genre-appropriate Western wear, infused the band’s freewheeling rock with a shot of electro-country, while vocalist Adam Turla sang songs about zombies, whiskey, and the devil. Photographer Wallo Villacorta was on the scene to capture the action.
Morrow: Conceived as something of a live piano-and-drums experiment, Grand Pianoramax is the principal project of pianist Leo Tardin. Once “a New Yorker from Switzerland” and now “a Berliner from America,” Tardin uses a small arsenal of instruments — grand piano, Fender Rhodes, K-Station, harmonium, Phillichorda — to achieve a diversity of sounds for his duo’s spacey, funky, classically infused music.
Smooth Danger is the duo’s third and newest album; released overseas last fall, it sees a US release in a few months. Though it doesn’t depart much from its predecessors, it cuts back a bit on guest vocalists, allowing the duo’s music to better stand on its own. And it deserves to, thanks to its combination of killer melodies, synthesized grooves, and classical piano that overlay tight, rapid rock and boom-bap beats from new drummer Dominik Burkhalter. (The former drummers, by the way, were no slouches: Deantoni Parks [The Mars Volta, Meshell Ndegeocello] and Adam Deitch [Talib Kweli, John Scofield].)
Even for someone like myself, who has the very briefest experience with Saturday-morning cartoons like Transformers, Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots Two is a highly enjoyable send-up of the genre and a silly little slice of nostalgia. Something about recasting transforming robots as incompetent, bickering armies, or featuring a robot with a gun for an arm as having an existential crisis, works perfectly as both an absurd tribute and satire of shows that were, even in their heyday, thinly disguised means of selling toys.
The graphic novel continues the story of Incredible Change-Bots, in which the Fantasticons and Awesomebots destroyed their own planet through war and then traveled to Earth, which they also destroyed. The sequel continues in the same endearingly nonsensical vein. The leader of the Fantasticons, Shootertron, was left behind when the rest of the Change-Bots left Earth and tries to regain his memory with the help of farmers and the ridiculously ineffectual US government that wants to use him as a weapon.
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One of the most important figures in DJing and turntablism over the past two decades, J Rocc is finally releasing his debut effort of original cuts titled Some Cold Rock Stuf. Original in all senses of the word, J Rocc has amazed audiences from Los Angeles to Tokyo with a distinct style that began by co-founding the landmark DJ crew the Beat Junkies in the early ’90s with Melo-D and Rhettmatic.
Along with fellow beat junkie Babu, and the likes of Mix Master Mike and Q-Bert of the Invisible Skratch Piklz, J Rocc was a part of the pioneering scene that brought respect back to the DJ, establishing the turntable as instrument while forging a new path towards instrumental hip hop.
WORM is a venue, record shop, and production space in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Perhaps it’s more accurately described as an evolving bastion of the arts, with a new, larger location opening later this year in the center of the city. The new space, designed by 2012 Architects, with one part (a metal construction at the entrance) by Joep van Lieshout, will be “a super-avant-garde institute for sustainable recreation.” We spoke with shop owner and collective co-founder Mariëtte Groot to try to get to the bottom of the seemingly bottomless entity that is WORM.
What are the origins of WORM? What came first: the store, the studio, or the venue?
WORM started in 1999 when three iniatives joined forces: Dodorama (venue plus shop for experimental music), Popifilm (organizers of experimental film screenings), and Filmwerkplaats (Film Lab).
What is the Avant Garde Institute?
To be exact: we call ourselves Institute for Avantgardistic Recreation. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek; all we mean to say is, “We like art that is adventurous and playful.” We want as many people as possible to join in and play. The word recreation is meant as leisure, as well as “to create again.”
Daniel Bernard Roumain: Symphony for the Dance Floor
The acronym DBR might sound like a spinoff of PBR, the bargain-priced, hipster-approved lager, but it actually belongs to something even more buzz-inducing: the music of violinist and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain. This classically trained musician gets W.A. Mozart aficionados to buy hip-hop records along with symphony tickets and makes clubgoers rock out to sounds inspired by Johannes Brahms and Ludwig van Beethoven.
His latest opus, Symphony for the Dance Floor, is a fusion of electronica, symphonic sounds, and lots of hip hop, created via collaboration with choreographer Millicent Johnnie and photographer Jonathan Mannion (whose shots of Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Eminem have appeared on the most memorable album covers of the past 15 years). The piece premiered at Arizona State University on February 5, 2011 and will be performed again this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.
ALARM spoke with Roumain about Symphony for the Dance Floor, his curious moniker, and how playing the violin can start a revolution, both in the musical world and the sociopolitical landscape.
What was on your mind when you began composing Symphony for the Dance Floor?
I’d been thinking a lot about the concept of performance. There’s a lot of art-making and art consumption in mainstream America right now. There are shows like American Idol, America’s Got Talent, and Glee that have revealed a real excitement about performance in the US, and even in Europe and Asia and East India. So Symphony for the Dance Floor is a response to this unique movement that’s happening, one that makes singing shows the first, second, and third most-watched programs. That’s really unusual and remarkable, and I’m excited for what it means for the violin and for composers.
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During his 10 years of deejaying, DC the MIDI Alien has racked up an impressive résumé. He’s worked with Immortal Technique, AZ, and Wordsworth as well as remixed Nas and others. In 2008, he formed the group East Coast Avengers with MCs Esoteric and trademarc, and their gritty, politically charged debut Prison Planet garnered them national media attention with its lead single, “Kill Bill O’Reilly.” DC returns this February with a semi-solo LP, Avengers Airwaves, which further cements him as a force to be reckoned with in the hip-hop world.
DC produces the record and brings in a gaggle of rappers to provide the rhymes — from his East Coast Avengers bandmates to Jedi Mind Tricks’ Vinnie Paz and DJ Premier acolyte Termanology. DC’s production style is decidedly old-school: the songs are built on steady, mid-tempo drum beats with only a few looped samples. Standout track “Man Made Ways” exemplifies DC’s old-school skill — an echoing, droning organ loop creates an atmosphere of paranoia and foreboding, punctuated by bursts of loud, crunching guitar. The production doesn’t falter throughout, recalling early RZA with DC’s ability to create maximum effect with minimalist beats. Although DC doesn’t speak a word on the record aside from skits, the album has every right to bear his name on the cover.
