I attended a variety show at which noted cartoon voice actor H. Jon Benjamin performed, sort of, as the musical guest.

Since the brilliant FX spy cartoon Archer might be intended as a vicious Aqua Teening of intelligence agencies and our decade of national security hysteria, you have to wonder whether lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin may have been trying to do the same to overly serious electronic music when he took the stage last night as the musical guest for Elna Baker and Kevin Townley’s popular variety show The Talent Show. Or maybe he’d giggle a bit at the idea of his goofy show spawning such a pretentious opening line—and wouldn’t that be glorious, with his fantastic baritone.

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My NYC field recording project Cast In Concrete found a kindred spirit in Mark Johnson of Playing For Change, who travels the world facilitating collaborations between otherwise disconnected buskers and street musicians. He was kind enough to share with me some of the insights he has picked up over the years.

“It occurred to me that the best music I ever heard in my life was on the way to the studio, not in the studio. And what New York City can teach you is that the best music and great art, it’s just everywhere. People always say to me, ‘How do you find all these musicians?’ And the truth is, by showing up. Great music is everywhere, so those people that show up are the ones that get to find it.”

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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.

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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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.

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.

Some thoughts (eight, to be precise) on the latest installment of Blip Festival, the awesome annual chiptune festival. (I went last year too.)

Fighter X: Youngish probably-hipster dudes in tight pants and floppy hair shoveling out manic, skittering Game Boy duels. Even if they sometimes came across as a sort of sleazy fun-loving Europop compared to their fellow performers (hey, there’s a place for that stuff too), the lengthy continuous set was very impressive, as was their tendency to abandon tending to the devices and instead jump around the stage or go crowd surfing, especially given that they have such small memory banks. The Game Boys, I mean.
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I’ve been glued to Four Tet‘s lovely new album There Is Love In You for the past couple weeks (“Love Cry”, wow) and I chatted with Kieran Hebden for New York Magazine’s Vulture blog.

Many rock bands have moved toward incorporating electronic sounds over the past decade or so. Do you think that has left listeners more open to your music?
Yeah, definitely. When I started out ten years ago, people thought about electronic music and they instantly thought about quite extreme ends of it. Synthesizers and drum machines, lots of digital processing. Nowadays, everything is mixed together a lot more, and people don’t even know what they’re listening to.
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Legendary hip hop producer Just Blaze just closed down his Baseline Studios facility, where a lot of crucial Jay-Z records were made over the past decade or so, and he sent out an open invitation for people to drop by on the last night. I went, and I was so struck by the way he was interacting with his fans that I wrote about it for the Village Voice.

A surprisingly small turnout all things considered (the extent of Just’s influence, in particular), but that just made it more intimate and personal: Just just sat around in his control room surrounded by everyone, giving demos on how to use his MPC and turntable, with a Rick Astley LP for the latter. (Biggest laugh of the night: He called one dude over to the MPC, only to be asked, “Hey, you got those Just Blaze sounds on there?”) Eventually he pulled together a quick and dirty beat for his fans to freestyle over, joking with them as he encouraged them all to join the cipher while rapping a little himself, liberally quoting Wu-Tang’s “Triumph,” and even reading lyrics off a flushed Queens fan’s phone. (“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” the latter gushed later.)
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Some cool recent pieces:

At the Indaba blog, I jovially report on the tremendous recent drop in price of Pro Tools and consider how emerging online functionality could shape audio production software in the near future.

For Tape Op, I complain about Simon Cowell some more and then ponder McNugget rappers Das Racist and — wait for it — the implications for audio professionals of the remarkable remix of “Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell”.

In related news, I’ll be hanging out with the Tape Op guys at stand #849 at the AES convention in Manhattan today.

First, although I’ve been published by the Voice a few times before, that was the first article which was long enough to get me into the table of contents. It’s crazy to see my own name next to those of Rob Tannenbaum, Tom Robbins, J. Hoberman, and of course Michael Musto.

Second: predictably, the Anamanaguchi guys and I spent a lot of time discussing synthesizers during the interview, but since that material wasn’t really appropriate for the Voice, I instead sent the tech talk to Create Digital Music, an awesome and remarkably high-traffic niche blog which consistently publishes some of the best coverage of music technology you’ll find anywhere.

Vijith: Do you write using a guitar or a Nintendo?
Pete: The music is pretty melodic, so it’s pretty transferable from instrument to instrument. Anything I write on guitar I can put on the Nintendo, and anything I write on the Nintendo I can usually play on guitar – unless it’s way too fast, which it usually is.
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Even speaking strictly as a reader, I really can’t recommend CDM highly enough; publisher Peter Kirn is both a music software programmer and, by day, a professional writer, so the posts are always informed, insightful, and far more literate than most studio trade rags. If your interest in creative technology tends elsewhere, you may want to check out Peter’s other sites instead, including Create Digital Motion, which is aimed at animators and visual artists, and the community-oriented Noisepages.

And now, a couple recent items — both related, in a way, to dramatic changes in pitch — for those brave souls willing to follow me out to my geekiest musical fringes.

From the audio engineer: at Tape Op, “In defense, unsuccessfully, of Autotune,” wherein I ultimately give up and instead go on a Google expedition to find the haunting voice from the competing software‘s demo video.

From the academic: at Indaba, a comparison of approaches in pop and jazz for analyzing key changes.

Some activity of note on various blogs other than this one:

First, at PopMatters, a quick look at NOBOT‘s awesome score for the delightfully depressing animated short Subprime.

Also, for the past couple months, I’ve been contributing some posts to the blog run by Indaba Music. Their conceptually remarkable project pairs a social network for musicians with an online audio editing platform to facilitate collaborative recording over the internet; think Apple GarageBand running as a Java blob in your browser with Facebook Lite spackled on top.

Now, I’m just on board to feed occasional articles to the community of participating musicians, but the the geek in me is fascinated by this intersection between web development and audio production. Music distribution has been radically transformed by communication technology in the past decade, and now we’re starting to see the creative end change as well — Ableton recently started hosting a repository wherein Live users can share their sessions, and scripts and patches for Max, Pd, and other software platforms are now sometimes shared via Subversion, a kind of version-controlled incremental super-FTP which was previously the domain of hardcore programmers. That’s to say nothing of the online libraries and torrents used for distributing the tools, of course, which are plentiful, if sometimes of dubious pedigree.

As you can see from my archive, however, the Indaba posts are not always technical — some of my favorites thus far have discussed the insect response to Led Zeppelin and the social elements of Green Day’s latest album release and even attempted to earn back the $12 I wasted on seeing the goofy Star Trek prequel. That said, I’m also quite happy with the epic treatise on my favorite delay pedals, mostly because I can’t get away with that sort of post anywhere else.

Well, except for the new blog run by the magnificently eccentric DIY music-making mag Tape Op, that is; you can also occasionally find me there in between articles for the print edition, which aren’t made available online. I should probably post more frequently since I’m the guy who talked the editor into launching a blog in the first place, but if anything, I need to spend less time and energy talking about these things and more time using them.

I just reviewed last night’s impressive performance by Peter Bjorn and John for the Village Voice.

Even their most immature tunes were updated with startling verve and grandeur. Foremost among these was “Living Thing,” which turned into an energetic cross between “Not Fade Away” and “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Second place goes to “Object Of My Affections,” if only because of its audience participation segment, which somehow actually had everyone clapping on the correct beats. “Young Folks” didn’t fare nearly as well; ever heard several hundred people try to whistle in unison? “Lay It Down” drew some cheers with unruly lines like “Shut the fuck up, boy/You’re starting to piss me off.” But it wasn’t a fight song, or at least not a serious one — it was a party anthem, the sort of drunken spat between friends that gets worked out the next morning over hangovers and cold Pop-Tarts. Carpe diem, kids; even the worst memories from the best years of your life are worth holding onto.
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My buddy Colin Steers is currently a contestant on Bravo’s Make Me A Supermodel. I first met him because his old high school band, Body For Karate, used to record at the Music Resource Center back when I was a staff member there in 2005. They were remarkable; PopMatters wanted to know more, so I rounded up some MP3s and posted them on the Sound Affects blog.

Some thoughts on the debut of The Roots as Jimmy Fallon’s house band

I hit the streets for CMJ with several other PopMatters writers, and we all threw up some posts every night onto the Notes From The Road blog. Mine included Vivian Girls, Dexter Romweber, Giveamanakick (pictured above, as they were the best of the bunch), Annuals, Minus The Bear, and Dragons Of Zynth.

I’m now occasionally contributing to a new PopMatters mp3 blog called Sound Affects. Check it out if you are getting tired of the whole dancing about architecture situation — given that pictures are worth a thousand words and all, songs must be worth a cool million, and I get to actually post mp3s there.

Thankfully, these posts are automatically aggregated by my author archive.