Not surprisingly, we are big fans of the music of Liz Harris. Mirroring, who released an album earlier this year, paired Harris with Tiny Vipers’ Jesy Fortino. Her work as Grouper has ranged from the ethereal to the jarringly surreal; 2011’s A I A (released on CD by Kranky this year) is probably the best overview of her work as a whole.
Remember that time last year when John Zorn released A Dreamer’s Christmas? And rather than being an ear-shredding deconstruction of holiday standards, it turned out to be…well, all kinds of pretty? We do. And in the interest of being seasonally relevant, we figured we could do worse than cueing up his band’s version of “The Christmas Song,” which finds Mike Patton in full-on crooner mode. Enjoy. Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, Google + and our Tumblr.
Through January, the Brooklyn Academy Of Music is holding their annual Next Wave Festival. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone to a number of performances there; some thoughts on three of them follow.
This was a strange year for me and music. There were albums aplenty that I enjoyed, but I’m also a little frustrated to look back at this list. It feels…maybe too comfortable, in a way? Two returns to form by artists whose music I’ve enjoyed for ages. (Three, if you count the Forgetters album.) I’ve had more daring top ten lists; this reads like what it is: the favorite albums of someone raised on punk rock with a fondness for […]
METZ are a noise/punk band from Toronto, currently on tour promoting their self-titled debut LP. Though they’ve long been a respected band in the Toronto scene, they’ve garnered a huge amount of fresh buzz in a short period of time, due to their recent signing to legendary Seattle label Sub Pop. As anyone who’s ever attended one of their gigs can attest, they are masters of the wall-of-sound technique and consistently deliver one of the most blistering live shows around. I got […]
Photo by Adam Whitney Nichols Neil Young is an old man. This is something that happens to rock stars, and seems to take a fair number of them by surprise. Some reinvent themselves into irrelevance, some settle into catatonic nostalgism, and others simplylose control. Young, by these standards, has aged surprisingly well. His two hour set at the Sean Carter Memorial Rustodome this Monday was, with some misguided theatrical exceptions, a triumph: Young seems to be the rare aging musical titan whose newer work […]
Ian Svenonius comes to Brooklyn on Monday, January 28th, for a presentation/performance/seance where he channels the spirits of dead rock stars to talk about some of the key issues regarding the genesis and evolution of rock ‘n’ roll music to celebrate the release of his book Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group: a how-to guide (with illustrations). The event is co-sponsored by Akashic and will feature an introduction by Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s Jason Diamond. Much more info to come. RSVP […]
I used to have more time to myself, so it was perfectly acceptable for me to spend an extra day traveling simply because I wanted to ride an Amtrak train for seventeen hours rather than simplify things by taking a three-hour airplane trip to the same destination. The inconvenience was worth it for reasons I’ve never really been able to explain. While the ugly and cramped Amtrak cars weren’t much different from the airplane cabins I was forgoing, there was something I was trying to find […]