yvynyl

Posts tagged longform

Read the latest Letter to YVYNYL

Manett wrote to me about her life growing up in Guam. Seems as though people who are raised in such remote places have an ongoing love/hate relationship with their roots. People feeling comfortable remaining put in a gorgeous natural place may feel suffocated by it’s smallness. Guam is a distant land, many time zones away from the rest of earth, and that separation feels palpable every day being a kid growing up there. She has music to help her understand it, and here’s what she wrote me about how these thoughts effect her songs.

Dear Mark,

…It was a big deal when a sibling would leave the island for college in the mainland U.S. We’d see them go through the airport gate and vanish for months. Phone calls were long-distance back then, and the enormous time zone difference, not to mention the impending culture shock, made it easier to simply let go of any expectation of contact…

(read to the whole piece while listening to her music here on my Medium)

Read the latest Letter to YVYNYL from VALES:

This isn’t the first time Asa Horvitz wrote to me. About two years ago, he sent me a heart-felt letter about the tough times he was going through. But then things got worst for him, and in search of healing he left his band, spent time at the coast and did a lot of soul searching. Making new music helped him (and time in wild places) put the perspective he needed to get better.

Dear Mark,

…Every day I’d take my old Toyota pickup truck and drive up this canyon, where I’d park, and walk along a tributary of one of the rivers. Dominic had worked on these rivers, counting salmon populations and monitoring water quality, and everywhere I went I felt traces of him — he seemed to be everywhere and missing from everywhere all at once — such a strange feeling! Sometimes I’d walk all day, just letting my feet carry me. I cried a lot. And there was a strange tunnel vision effect… I could only feel out a few days ahead of time, or even a few hours, a few moments… everything was close and dark…

(read more on Medium)

Desert Car - Bloody Murder

Philadelphian Brian Hall was almost murdered by a stranger on the street, wrote music about the experience, and sent me this story:

Hi Mark,

“Bloody Murder” is a short song from my perspective as a victim of attempted murder. One evening on October 8, 2008… It started out as a typical evening, I met up with some friends for happy hour in Center City. After leaving the first bar, standing on the corner of 13th & Locust, a man approached us. He was a complete stranger. He directed some threatening language at my female friend, something about knocking her teeth out, then pulled out a 12" hunting knife and plunged it into my abdomen.

By some combination of miracle and modern medicine, I survived. The knife pierced my stomach and pancreas. I was just a few blocks from Thomas Jefferson Hospital. The emergency response team was quick, the surgeons were skilled, I was lucky. The head surgeon later told me that the knife missed my aorta by less than a centimeter. I would have bled to death in minutes.

One friend stayed with me as I lay on the sidewalk waiting for the ambulance. One friend followed the guy… about a block away, he saw a police officer and yelled for his help. My friend described the arrest as something from a movie - he and the officer chasing the guy into the lobby of a hotel, the officer drawing his gun just as the man was about to board an elevator. He was convicted of attempted murder and imprisoned.

It’s amazing how significant an impact human beings can have on one another. People we don’t even know can kill us. People we don’t even know can save our lives.

The facts are the facts, but I’ve never actually written it out before.

Anyway, we released this song on vinyl 7" with Good Behavior last week. Whether or not you like it or wish to share it with people, I wanted you to have it. So be on the lookout for the record!

I appreciate what you do immensely!Hope to see you around.

Brian

Read more Letters to YVYNYL (see most popular)

// Is That The Way You Wanna Be Loved //

\ hanging out with TOPS \

I don’t know how eating pizza together became the focal point of our 2014 CMJ experience, but pizza it was. And it seems to be a perfect universal connector for hungry bands on tour. TOPS and I spent some time together as Tumblr’s guests on Scott’s Pizza Tour which is the place to go for any passionate fan of ‘zza.

Guitarist David Carriere, lead singer Jane Penny, bassist Madeline Glowicki and drummer Riley Fleck were in the early days of a several week tour, full and happy. I’ve hung out with the Montreal musicians when they passed through Philly earlier this year, but carbo-loading all afternoon followed by a sit-down chat before their set at The Delancey in Manhattan worked well for solidifying our relationship.

We met up in the rooftop bar, and even though it was pouring rain while the water trickled in between the slats, we had the chance to have an ‘official’ interview. I turned on a tape deck - okay, I’m lying, it was my iPhone - to record some drips of our conversation which I’ve poorly transcribed here.

Let’s start with a bit of history: Jane and David have known each other since middle school, but didn’t hang out until she moved to Montreal after graduation from McGill University, where she met Riley. “The two of them just told me, ‘you are our friend, you’re down, so you should come play with our band.’” said Jane. “I sang the whole first record all out in one night.”

yvynyl: Had they heard you sing?

Jane: No! haha!

Jane laughs a lot. She’s got a deep, full bodied chuckle that comes out frequently and with flourish.

David: Riley and I were both playing music for a long time. We were in a series of bands back then - a math rock band once. I played in a hard core band. We were called The Girls Club, but it was really ‘no girls in the club’ and sounded like a Slayer scream, totally higher, but I lost my voice. It killed my voice.

Riley: I like dancing more than singing. I don’t sing,” adds Riley. “Dancing is like playing the drums when no drums are around. Legendary drummer Buddy Rich quit and started tap dancing instead, but eventually he went back to drumming.

yvynyl: What influenced your sound?

David: When we started the band, we had a concerted effort to make something opposing to something everyone else was making. We wanted to use the idea of restraint, but how we can let them speak for themselves without forcing anything into people’s face. People always want to put in their own ideas instead of channeling them.

Jane: I feel like if we invoke anything, it’s just that we want to show that we’re a ‘great band’. When people talk about Fleetwood Mack or Blondie it was about people coming together to make something ‘greater than themselves’. To be a band, and to be a proud of that, but not to be a generic ‘all male’ bands. It has an economic power, the visual aspect of it. There’s a tendency for ‘one person’ or a ‘group’ and it’s nice to have a ‘group’ having an individual’s power. It’s not pursued today enough.

Riley: It’s an interesting comparison to Fleetwood Mac, but David doesn’t sing like Lindsay Buckingham and Jane’s not really like Stevie Nicks.

Jane: I don’t think I’m a part of their ‘emotional’ category. I like music that’s playful. It’s nice that what we do is warm.

Just then Maddy pops into the conversation dripping wet having just pulled into NYC on the bus…

Riley: Have you ever heard “Travelin’” by the Jeremy Spencer Band? It’s like a country pop song by a former member of Fleetwood Mac. Before Stevie Nicks was on Fleetwood Mac, they were on tour, in LA or something, went to a psychic, but afterwards Jeremy disappeared and they couldn’t find him. Turns out he ditched the bands and joined the Children of God! His head was shaven and he was wearing a robe and everything and he’s been in the cult ever since. He still made good music!

David: Goes to show, being in a cult probably makes you a great musician!

Jane: Reminds me of The Source Family! There are a lot of great cult music bands!

David: I feel like a lot of great musicians are in cults. And of course the ultimate cult of all time, the Juggalos!

Jane: There’s that one band we cover now and then…

David: No, that’s not a cult. Agincourt. That which is a one-off play, not really a band. Check it out! The song “Get Together” is awesome.

yvynyl: Maddie, how are you connected to these guys?

Maddie: Me and Jane and David all met at Segal’s, the grocery where I worked. Riley used to come in and buy only 5 jars of peanut butter - were you just eating peanut butter?

Riley: No, I put it on bananas…

Maddy: So then I was drunk at a party and I was bragging to Jane about how I was jamming at my step-brother’s band, and then the truth came out that i didn’t play the bass in reality, so it was then and now that I’m continuing to learn the bass.

Jane: We had some part “Turn Your Love Around” so we’d have to teach her how we’d show the hardest melodic part to pick up. We need to make sure Maddie can play the hardest stuff, which we’d normally show to bassists, so if she can pick up this part, she can! And she did. She had a natural knack.

yvynyl: Where did you first play together?

Maddie: Our first show with me was a sold-out Longbar in Toronto opening up for King Krule. Super fun.

David: Our very first show ever as TOPS was in Halifax - super secluded literally the furthest you can drive to in North America. 14 hour drive. You have to take a feery from Boston. We played in a church with Doldrums on a round-robin set up, and audience would go from band to band. The church had four small stages in each corner.

Jane: That was in 2012?

Riley: That was in May 2011. I remember, because you guys came to pick me up the day after I graduated university.

At this point, our conversation started dwindling apart as more people came into the lovely, albeit wetter-by-the-minute rooftop space. The band had to get ready to start their set, ready for diving into a long week of performances, and digesting the rest of the pizza.

Don’t miss “Way to Be Loved” from their new album Picture You Staring out on Arbutus Records.

Here’s why In On the Kill Taker is Fugazi’s best album

johnvettese:

I wrote this essay while freelancing for Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger between 2005 and 2008; near as I can tell, they never published it. I came across it today while writing about Philly band Cassavetes, who shares its name with a song on the record, and thought I’d post it around these parts. Enjoy.

Historians of 90s rock tend to fawn over Fugazi’s strident independent ethic moreso than its actual music, and it makes sense why.

Even the most committed listener would admit it’s easier to admire a hard-held commitment to anti-corporate, fan-friendly business practices than an inscrutable stylistic mishmash of thrash, arty noise, funk, reggae, Flavor Flav-styled vocal interjections, and a general penchant for being – aw hell, let’s just say it – weird.

Which is what D.C. linchpin Ian McKaye became upon leaving the rigid repression of Minor Threat’s bare-knuckled punk. He and his newfound bandmates’ – in both the short-lived Embrace and the more prolific Fugazi – indulged their assorted musical interests in ways that invited non-descript adjectives like “angular,” or the all-telling “post” prefix (in Fugazi’s case, “post-hardcore”)…both of which are rock writer code for “FREAK.ING.WEIRD.”

Not to say that folks didn’t understand the band. Heads rolled to the slippery dirty groove of “Waiting Room” when it played on 120 Minutes, and hooks like “ONE!TWO!THREE!REPEATER!” had fists flying in the air. Those who heard, knew they were privy to something great. But by the time In On The Killtaker came out in 1993, the media had given up on crystallizing that greatness into much more than “yeah, these are the guys who won’t charge more than $5 a show.” A shame, since that’s the point where Fugazi got really interesting.

Read More

premiere: An Afternoon with Matthew Young

Douglas Mcgowan from Yoga Records directed this piece and wrote me about his experience making it:

“There’s a shot I would have liked to include where I flipped through his dusty, cat-scratched records and it was Laurie Anderson, Nick Drake, John Cale, John Cage, James Brown, Love, the entire Michael Hurley discography including an original "First Songs” on Folkways… Nothing radical, just uncanny good taste. People like to think taste is subjective, but time has a way of proving otherwise. Matthew was on it as it happened. He was a hipster back when the word still meant something.

A lot of times you visit an artist and look in vain for signs of the person who made the record you fell in love with. With Matthew that person is right there. I hope he gets his third album together, I think he will.

Obviously the house is kind of the costar of the video. It’s literally he and his wife Valerie’s personal space and their refuge from the world. All the time we’d been talking on the phone he never mentioned that he lives in this magical place. I came away from the experience of meeting Matthew with a renewed fascination with his incredibly low key approach to being a rad dude.“

Recurring Dreams LP will be out July 22nd on Drag City / Yoga. Records. To read a longer interview from 2003, read it here by Carson Arnold.