As of today I am no longer working at the Hook, because they’ve decided to shutter all music, arts, and culture coverage as a drastic cost-cutting measure. This is a pretty surreal development, both because it takes them so far from the usual blueprint of an alt-weekly paper and also because the music section I operated performed quite reliably for several years as their #2 source of web traffic (after the news blog run by the full-time reporters, obviously).

The really upsetting part is seeing all the work we all put in behind the scenes go down the tubes for good. Expanding the online culture coverage was a really ambitious project for which we designed some awesome technological features — for example, the calendar listings controlled a podcast that could shoot MP3s from the bands performing that evening directly onto your iPod each morning, and we later started syndicating our content back out separately for each venue so the promoters could use it on other sites to make their own jobs easier. Even several years after the initial launch, I have yet to see another publication or web outlet try anything remotely comparable. I’d hoped to eventually find myself handing off the keys to an excited intern instead of watching the whole endeavor shut down, because landing that job at 23 was one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

With all that said, it’s very hard for me to be angry about any of this, since I quite literally owe my writing career entirely to Hawes. On to other projects now. I am extremely excited about them.

I went to Cycling 74‘s big Max/MSP conference on behalf of Tape Op, who arguably have no business at such an intensely specialized event.

The most notable new addition is the certainly the optional new “Gen” object add-on, which blurs the lines between Max patches and the compiled C code used to create custom external objects, and then there’s also a partial implementation of the HTML5 JavaScript API into the canvas element which should allow… HEY!! WAKE UP!! OK, there are probably better places to find out about all that. So instead, I just wrote down the best one-liners.

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It was fantastic and I learned a lot — enough to compel me, finally, I think, to actually patch together some of my ideas instead of just admiring the platforms from afar (don’t get too comfy, SuperCollider, because eventually I’m coming for your ass too).

So maybe that’s the big landmark for post #100 on this blog. I didn’t have much time last night when all the drinking and writing was done, but my resolve did manifest in a blitzkrieg attempt to program an alarm clock in Pure Data that would wake me up the following morning with a reminder to get this show on the road. Surprisingly, it did not take me long at all. Even more surprisingly, it actually worked, and I made it to my 10am appointment on time.

I’m sure I will eventually find this patch extremely embarrassing. But, well.

Just in time for Halloween, here’s a roundup for eMusic about some of my favorite murder ballads.

Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue – Where The Wild Roses Grow

“Why do they keep calling me the wild rose?” she keeps asking. “My name is Elisa.” You know the drill — boy meets girl, boy kills girl, boy plants rose between girl’s teeth. But what makes this so fascinating are the dueling accounts whereby both killer and victim describe in parallel each of the three days leading up to the murder. He says, “I kissed her.” She says, “He hit me with a rock.”

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Unfortunately I couldn’t include it in the roundup, but this article idea came to me while I was listening to “Old Judson,” a fantastic song by Charlottesville songwriter Peyton Tochterman‘s short-lived mid-00′s bluegrass trio Fair Weather Bums, in which peppery mandolin runs and subtle vocal harmonies populate a small world of places and characters only to slowly darken them on the way to the big reveal at the end. I really want more people to hear this.

Moments before the clock runs out on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, here’s an introspective and retrospective piece for the Voice about one of my coping devices at the time. If you like it, you might also proceed on to the companion interview with a somewhat confused rock star.

The most violent guitars turn up on a song about suppressing the urge to retaliate and trusting in cosmic retribution. This, of course, was not the way the 9/11 aftermath played out.

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I enjoyed the Bush reunion show way more than I thought I would.

My second concert ever was Bush’s tour in support of Sixteen Stone. (I can’t bring myself to tell you the first.) This necessitated an extra ticket for a friend’s parent, who drove a van full of kids up to the arena an hour away while we giggled in the back about girls and whatever, and then sat up in the stands while we went down to the floor to explore our first-ever mosh pit. We promptly discovered crowdsurfing. “The rest of you guys, sure — but I swear, every time I looked down, Vijith was floating across the crowd,” said Jefferson’s dad after the show. As an awkward 14-year-old who couldn’t play any sports and took forever to work up the guts to admit to anybody at school that I was trying to learn to play the guitar, that’s as proud as my moments got. Bowery Ballroom in 2011, though? Totally different story — I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but it was upsetting to realize as soon as I entered that it looked and smelled like a room full of Shinedown fans (hair gel, beer, sweat, shame).
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An exciting new project! For my new Village Voice column Cast In Concrete, I wander around NYC recording buskers and street performers, then write about them and post the MP3s on the Sound Of The City blog. Here’s the first installment, wherein I happen across the wonderful Sistine Criminals in Washington Square Park.

Well, here I am writing about chiptune music again, which must mean it’s time for the Blip Festival, NYC’s annual video game music bonanza. This time I previewed the lineup with a roundup of the specific game systems and the artists that use them.

Nanoloop 2 for the Game Boy Micro somehow packs unbelievably sophisticated filters and oscillators for subtractive synthesis into a gorgeous minimalist greyscale grid, which makes for one of the most soothing and meditative music composition spaces I’ve yet seen on any platform, bigger dogs like Pro Tools very much included. Nanoloop might actually be the best way for non-chiptune musicians to dip their toes into this world–you can’t very well duct-tape a proper keyboard to your acoustic guitar, now can you?
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I’m fantastically excited about my latest essay for the Village Voice (and tickled that they started the “appreciations” tag just for this piece). It can be hard to cut through the torrential weirdness of the British experimental electronic duo Autechre, so they often get filed away as music to academically respect rather than passionately adore. Here, I defend them as a band that’s well worth your emotional investment, filtered through the autobiographical story of my own decision to move to New York City.

By the time Quaristice came around in 2008, just a few months before my big move, almost all the sensible time signatures had been subverted by experimental ambition, and sure, there was probably also a little ego in there too. “Perlence” was an especially difficult track–just two minutes and change, but I still can’t figure out how to count its pulses, and when the inevitable remix came, its running time had been expanded to a full 58 minutes. Even the song titles grew stranger: from “Flutter,” “Chatter,” “Eggshell” and “Further” to “fwzE,” “ThePlclCpC,” and “90101-51-6.” It’s mostly from these obnoxiously antisocial shenanigans that we get the common but misguided notion that if Autechre’s music displays any beauty at all, it comes in a sterile and mechanical form, like a sculpture built from gears or animations made with a glitching graphics card.

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Village Voice concert tidbits about Punch Brothers, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Cut Copy, Patrick Stump, and DeVotchKa.

Blues guitarist Corey Harris has started working on a biography about the life and music of African guitar legend Ali Farka Touré, and I wrote about it for Rolling Stone.

Recently in the Village Voice: Tricky, Infected Mushroom, The Crystal Method, Roger Daltrey, White Lies, and The Carolina Chocolate Drops. SPECIAL BONUS: my Pazz & Jop 2010 ballot; angry comments welcome below.

Whoops, I guess I fell asleep at the wheel on this! Booka Shade, Yo-Yo Ma, Bonobo, and George Clinton.

In the Village Voice for September, little nubs on Vampire Weekend, Fennesz, Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z with Eminem, and Jay-Z with an unusually impressive gaggle of females.

And now right back to the monotony — in this set of previews you’ll find Asobi Seksu and Donna The Buffalo, among others.

A nice break from the monotony of concert previews — kind of a holy-shit moment for me here, interviewing the drummer from Radiohead.

Does your new solo album need a record label even though Radiohead doesn’t simply because the band had spent so many years as a primary project for a major label first?
It hadn’t really crossed my mind, to be honest with you. I certainly wasn’t thinking about it on that political a level. I just wanted the music to be released in a way that I felt happy with. There wasn’t any great intellectualization behind the process, really. And in some ways, the same could be said about how we released In Rainbows — it was just something which, at the gut level, felt very exciting.

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The proper thing to do here is probably to point you toward that solo project, but I’d wager that you’d prefer to spend your time with the band proper. So here’s “Idioteque,” a song on which Phil doesn’t actually perform since he was famously tossed out in favor of a drum machine on that album, except that the music video apparently used an alternate version which does feature live drums, and thus is much closer to the arrangement they use in concert. Eh, whatever.

I promise, I’ve been doing more with my life other than writing concert previews for the Village Voice, even if you wouldn’t know it from looking at my past few months of updates here.

Anyway, this last batch included rounds with Nas and Damian Marley, Heart, The xx, Corinne Bailey Rae, Steve Earle, Wakey!Wakey!, Natalie Merchant, and Iron Maiden.

Pictured above: me, immediately after submission deadline.

In the Village Voice last month, some brief thoughts on Jay Farrar, Annuals, The Budos Band, 50 Cent, and Tortoise.

In the Village Voice last month, some thoughts on Starscream, Parts & Labor, Local H, LCD Soundsystem, and the Reverend Horton Heat.

I have some thoughts on former Everything But The Girl singer Tracey Thorn’s new album Love And Its Opposite in the current issue of The L Magazine. The short version is that you should track down a copy of her fantastic 2007 release Out Of The Woods instead.

It’s been decades since Everything But The Girl decided to start trading in songs for beats, so rather than talking here about how Thorn is now “wearing a different hat,” I’d like to propose a sister metaphor which instead substitutes pants, the reason being that if you hang up your pants for twenty years, you may find when you finally pull them back down that they no longer fit properly. This is the situation in which Thorn finds herself now.

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In the Village Voice last month, some thoughts on Ben Folds, Snoop Dogg, and Dragonette.

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