This fall, the mighty super-group Tomahawk resurfaces with its first new music since Anonymous re-imagined Native American music in 2007.
Oddfellows reunites the three main players — guitarist Duane Denison, vocalist Mike Patton, and drummer John Stanier — but adds the potent abilities of jazz standout and Mr. Bungle and Fantômas bassist Trevor Dunn. There’s more news coming soon from Ipecac, but in the meantime, even fan-boys gotta shout: Tomahawk’s back!
Last winter, Secret Chiefs 3 — the East-meets-West super-group known for its mysteriously cloaked and ever-rotating lineup led by guitarist Trey Spruance of Mr. Bungle and Faith No More — took off for a European tour with some folks from the APATT Orchestra, a large-scale ensemble that seeks unusual settings for collaborations with other artists.
In a new hour-long tour film, you can catch all the on- and off-stage adventures of SC3 and APATT as they bring their wild instrumentation abroad. Adventures include, but are not limited to, parades with giant motorized elephants, steam-punk carousels, and unsuccessful rock-on-string fights.
Jono El Grande: Phantom Stimulance (Rune Grammofon, 2/1/11)
Jono El Grande: “Borrelia Boogie”
[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Jono_El_Grande_Borrelia_Boogie.mp3|titles=Jono El Grande: “Borrelia Boogie”]The off-kilter art rock of Norwegian bandleader, composer, singer, guitarist, and kazoo player Jono El Grande is like candy to fans of Frank Zappa and whimsical, progressive rock. In his 10 years of playing with The Luxury Band (née The Jono El Grande Orchestra), he has released four albums, including the multi-layered Neo-Dada in 2009 and the raucous Phantom Stimulance this winter.
Though he has enjoyed success in his native Norway, Jono’s delightfully eccentric music isn’t yet as well known overseas. Here he opens up about composing, why there’s no such thing as a “live favorite,” and how songs can take more than a decade to record.
According to your label, only one song on your newest record, Phantom Stimulance, is newly composed, with the rest being unreleased live favorites, compiled to commemorate your 10 years as a bandleader and 15 as a composer. Why did you decide to record these songs to celebrate this occasion?
There are two brand-new compositions on the album, not one — “Borrelia Boogie” and “Rise Of The Baseless Press-Base Toy.” The other songs are completely rearranged versions of songs that never reached an album and new arrangements of earlier-released songs that have evolved so much on stage during the years that they deserved to be released again, with new titles. “Live favorites” is a term that the record company came up with. Even if this record is presented as an anniversary, it is nevertheless the music that is most important. Always.
Why hadn’t the songs on Phantom Stimulance been recorded previously? Were they more suited to live performance than the studio? Are there any live favorites still yet to be recorded?
I am a composer who likes to develop compositions over time at live shows by adding new themes and parts to them. My working process is very often like this: I write the basic scores at home, then the band rehearses the music, and then we play the material live and mold it until I feel that it is ready to be recorded. And I never know exactly when each song is ready. The reason why these tracks haven’t been recorded previously is that, on earlier albums, there were other compositions that I felt were more ready than ones on Phantom Stimulance. You may call them “live favorites” — to me these tunes were the hard ones, the ones that I had to work a little extra with to make them worthy to be immortalized on an album. We used 40 to 60 tracks on each song. “La Dolce Vidda” contains 10 drum tracks, I think.
It was actually quite the same with Neo-Dada. Some compositions there date back to the ’90s. And to the last question: yes, there will be more “live favorites” to be released in the future. I just have to compose them first.
Growing up on a US military base in Japan, Kevin Kmetz overcame his gaijin status to become a master of Tsugaru-shamisen — but his band’s metal-infused genre-bending has drawn the ire of more than a few purists.
Led by multi-instrumentalist Julian Curwin and buoyed by a healthy sense of humor, The Tango Saloon is a Western-, Gypsy-, and jazz-inflected tango juggernaut.
Given identifiable credits such as Faith No More, Tomahawk, and Mr. Bungle, the words “Patton” and “incognito” don’t seem to follow each other. But Mike Patton‘s newest project, Mondo Cane, stems from just such a union — with Patton disguising his American accent and assimilating to a new culture.
Strip down, way down, the layers of the moody energy of Brooklyn post-rock metal trio Dysrhythmia’s fifth album, Psychic Maps, and you can hear an indication of the agility responsible for the band’s deep intensity.
With a history that has spanned Indian, Persian, surf, metal, spaghetti western, and electronic music — and so much more — Trey Spruance‘s unparalleled Secret Chiefs 3 is releasing a new album in late May, this time inspired by the Italian giallo horror/erotica films of the 1960s and ’70s.
With a demolishing dose of horn-heavy chug metal, Jerseyband stands as the logical result of loose forerunners such as John Zorn’s Naked City, Mr. Bungle, and Estradasphere. The seven-piece band’s progressive fusion touches on jazz, groove, big-band flair, and math rock, making a sonic concoction as wild as its live shows.
Formed in 1991, Farmers Market is a Norwegian quintet that specializes in Balkan-jazz fusion. Led by multi-instrumentalist Stian Carstensen (accordion, guitar, banjo, kaval), the group has sporadically functioned over the last seventeen years, releasing just three albums (one live) before Surfin’ USSR.