Archive for the ‘Peter Bibby’ Category

Noiseweek: Steve Von Till, Null, METZ and Bibby

Friday, May 8th, 2015

The sights, sounds and words of the week in noise.

NEWS

The Bakery’s final show is tomorrow. It’s shitty that we’re losing another fundamental venue that’s hosted a wealth of life is noise shows — Russian Circles, Sleep, Clark, My Disco, Barn Owl, Slanted & Enchanted and a buttload of others — not to mention some amazing other locals and internationals. But at least we get to celebrate in style, with the return of The Wednesday Society, Sex Panther and The Sabretooth Tigers, along with Injured Ninja presenting The Epic of Gilgamesh, plus Fait, French Rockets, DJs Craig Hollywood & Wil Bixler, Rachel Dease, Mudlark and more. Head over to the Facebook event for more details.

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Beat is reporting The Espy in St Kilda is also closing its doors soon, but only for a little while. From May 17, the venue will cease its live music operations to allow for renovations with an aim to reopen by the summer.

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Some good venue news! Wick Studios in Brunswick is set to open its doors on May 17 — just as the Espy begins its hiatus, funnily enough. As Beat reports, the former 13-room rehearsal studio/warehouse now boasts a recording studio, 15 rehearsal rooms, two live music spaces and a photo/video studio. The space will also be home to in-house industry services, including A&R, marketing, legal and graphic design personnel. They’re celebrating with a launch party which you can check out on Facebook.

READ

Swinging the Chain: A Conversation with Bill Ward | Steel for Brains

“It was very profound when I realized it, and I couldn’t deny the affection that I had for drums and drummers and just the look of a drum. Everything about drumming I was fascinated with. Not only drum patterns but the way that the drums looked; the way they shined in the sunshine in marching bands. Just everything about drums for me as a child was something that was very attractive, and I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew that I just got a good feeling when I listened to Gene Krupa. It was Krupa when I was a child and then later it was Louie Bellson, but when I listened to Gene or I listened to a lot of the big swing bands, or then later when I listened to the more rock and roll bands from the United States and people like Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and of course Buddy Holly – when I listened to these people I was just completely involved in what they were playing. ”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor — There’s Only Hope | Exclaim

“Twenty years on, very little is really known about GY!BE beyond the fact that they are one of Montreal’s most cherished and powerful instrumental bands, with a virtually flawless and majestic discography. They incorporate film abstractions in their music and, with its textual ruminations, diagrams and photographs, their album artwork has made bolder and more provocative political statements than some songwriters’ hard-laboured lyrics. In simply going about their business, the band have been accused of terrorism by both the FBI and the Canadian music industry. And, while they’re often perceived as gloomy and self-serious, they battle through all of that noise, stubbornly brandishing hope as their unshakeable emblem.”

Art-Rock Adventurism: The Complete 4AD Story | The Vinyl Factory

“Independent labels with proven longevity are, almost without exception, reflections of their patrons. So it goes with the four cornerstones of Britain’s post-punk apocalypse – Rough Trade, Factory, Mute and 4AD, and three of them (Factory being retired years before Antony Wilson’s death from cancer) still survive today. Out of that trio, 4AD’s current success is more on a par with its original incarnation than its peers. Compare 4AD ‘Past’, which embraced the likes of Bauhaus, The The, The Birthday Party, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance, Throwing Muses, Pixies, The Breeders, Lush, Red House Painters, Belly and Mojave 3 to 4AD ‘Present’, which currently includes Grimes, Bon Iver, Deerhunter, The National, Ariel Pink, Future Islands, tUnE-yArDs, Scott Walker, Daughter and Purity Ring. But with Rough Trade and Mute still manned by their original founders (Geoff Travis and Daniel Miller respectively), 4AD is the only one of the original quartet to have survived with a new label head replacing its original spearhead Ivo Watts-Russell.”

LISTEN

Steve Von Till — A Life Unto Itself

Even when it’s stripped of the crushing weight of pounding drums and punishing, gargantuan guitar riffs in Neurosis, Steve Von Till’s intonations demand attention. It’s one of those voices — powerful, foreboding, authoritative, and almsot prophetic in its seriousness — that stops you in your tracks and compels the listener to focus on every utterance, every syllable, every breathy whisper. With an acoustic guitar and occasional flurries of percussion atmospherics for backing, the Neurosis co-vocalist’s meditations on this, his fourth solo record, are well worth a listen.

Null — I

The strength of 65daysofstatic lies in their masterful marriage of the electronic and the amplified, where dancehall synthetics and artillery-strength guitar riff intertwine in a beautiful, chaotic mess. But they’ve always been a rock band with electronica tendencies; not the other way around. Late last year, guitarist Paul Wolinski released his new solo foray into experimental electronica with Full Bleed before following up with Midiflood the next month. Now Simon Wright has ventured out with his own solo project under the moniker of Null, an ambient, glitch-heavy and machinic experiment that sounds perfect for a neo-noir technological dystopia. Unlike the exploits with 65daysofstatic, this is not comfortable or uplifting music; it’s moody and unsettling — peculiar enough to maintain interest and confounding enough to keep you on your toes.

WATCH

The View From Here: Peter Bibby and his Bottles of Confidence

The Perth hills’ crown troubadour checks into the RTRFM studios with a few familiar faces for a 20+ minute live session. It’s an unusual setting for the now Melbourne-based songwriter — Bibby and offices don’t seem like they’d go together — but it makes for an oddly relaxing afternoon listen.

METZ — The Swimmer

METZ continue their love affair with uncomfortable viewing in the video for The Swimmer, a jerky, frenetic and enraged piece of forward-reverse cinema.

Noiseweek: Melvins documentary, Michael Gira on electronic music, Peter Bibby, Fait and more

Friday, March 13th, 2015

The sights, sounds and words of the week in noise.

NEWS

By now you’ve probably seen the trailer for the forthcoming HBO-produced Kurt Cobain documentary, but there’s another piece of film in the works on another tremendously influential Washington act and one of Nirvana’s greatest influences: The Melvins. The Colossus of Destiny is about halfway towards its $75,000 crowdfunding target on Kickstarter, and surely I’m not the only one who finds it absurd that the three-decade story of this band has yet to be given the feature treatment. Throw a penny or two its way over the next month and help tell a tell that absolutely deserves to be told.

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We were bummed to learn earlier this month that blackened-doom Chicagoans Indian had called it quits, but it’s not all gloom as the currently-on-hiatus fellow Chicagoans Lord Mantis are resurrecting with two members of Indian, rounding out a previously liquid lineup and giving the now-quintet some forward momentum.

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Swans’ Michael Gira Sounds Off | Electronic Beats

“We’re one of the best rock bands ever. I know that. I just know it. Swans have congealed and are one of the most volcanic, eruptive, virile rock outfits ever. I think one of the things that makes what we do so powerful is that it’s generous.”

33 Musicians Discuss Their Favourite Radiohead Songs | Stereogum

Mark Smith of Explosions of the Sky/Inventions:
“I always revisit Kid A and try to recapture the feelings I had when I first listened to it. It’s not possible — now I just hear the combination of experimentation and songwriting and depth that is somehow beautiful and scary and human and alien and illusory and random and planned all at once. But back then, my first listen was just confusing, my second was confounding, my third was love, and my fourth was infatuation. “Idioteque” in particular — the lyrics about scaremongering and “This is really happening” — seems like it’s pleading with us. I couldn’t get enough of it, and it hasn’t lost any of that effect for me. I love watching their old live performances of it, this insane urgent trance with Thom dancing and Jonny seemingly plugging and unplugging cables into a telephone exchange (or so I thought back then). It’s still my favorite thing Radiohead have ever done, but insanely, I still think they’re growing and evolving so I won’t be surprised if that changes.”

Brian Cook of Russian Circles Interviewed | Ponto Alternativo

“I find the more polished realms of rock music to be really fucking boring. The more you autotune, beat map, and edit music, the more it winds up like electronic music. It winds up being music made on a grid. No offense to electronic music meant there, it just seems to defeat the purpose of being a living, breathing rock band. I’ve brought this up in the past a bunch, but I’ll repeat it here: when These Arms Are Snakes recorded with Jack Endino, the guy who recorded all the early grunge classics, he had a very casual attitude towards our takes. The record we did with him (our split with Harkonen) was the loosest recording we did in our career. Jack’s theory was that the tiny inconsistencies in tempo and pitch were what made all the classic rock records so enduring. The brain recognizes the flaws on a subconscious level, and those imperfections keep the brain interested in the song way longer than if it had been polished and quantized to perfection. We want things to be tight. We don’t like obvious fuck-ups to slide by in our music, but if you listen closely to our records there are weird little mistakes and flubs all over the place. We had a particularly hard time finding the balance between making things sound raw and live in a good way versus a bad way when we were making “Empros”, but hopefully we’ve found a good middle ground now.”

“What are we to the Stars?”: Neurosis’ Steve Von Till Gets Deep on the Majestic Splendor of Idaho | Noisey

“I think some of those are the most powerful metaphors as poets and writers and songwriters, I think. Depending on your perspective on any given day, that which seems so important to us in any given moment is so minimal in the grand scheme of things. What are we to the ocean? What are we to the stars? What are we to the wilderness? Pretty pathetic little creatures, really. [Yet] part of that is the glory that allows us to create art and music, it’s this… I don’t know? Bizarre evolutionary trait to consider our own existence instead of just going with our instincts. I think art is a strange combination of both. I think it’s part instinctual and part self-reflective. I think the natural world provides not only these great metaphors—that’s probably how I use it most is emotional metaphors. It’s in nature where I, personally, find—with the one exception being making music, is where I find the most solitude and the most peace of mind. Walking through nature and just being, and soaking it in, and trying to be a part of it.”

LISTEN

Steve Von Til — A Life Unto Itself

Speaking of Steve Von Til, he’s just released the first cut from his latest solo album due out in May, the beautiful and folk-tinged A Life Unto Itself. Von Til’s voice is just as compelling singing what is essentially a ballad as it is exorcizing demons over the cathartic noise of his Neurosis bandmates, and on this seven-minute number he channels the soundscaping of Earth with just two guitar tracks and intoxicating story-telling.

Lightning Bolt — Fantasy Empire

NPR are currently streaming the new Lightning Bolt record in full, and at first listen it’s a rip-roaring collection of the duo’s most frenetic work to date. The mid-section on “Over the River and Through the Woods” might be the best three minutes of music I’ve heard this year.

WATCH

Peter Bibby — Goodbye Johnny

Who would’ve thought that the foul-mouthed, gravel-voiced troubadour who once spent his weekends annihilating his lungs on Perth stages as one half of Frozen Ocean would be touring the world so soon? Bibby’s on his way to SXSW this week and with that journey comes the video for Goodbye Johnny, a lo-fi home video about being unable to farewell the song’s namesake thanks to potent influenza. Again, just think about this: Entertainment Weekly is writing about Peter Bibby. What a wonderful world.

Fait — Slow Glow

Fait seemingly appeared from out of nowhere last year with the moody Surrender To and they’ve now returned with their first fully-formed conceptual clip in Slow Glow, a brooding and striking piece of short cinema filmed across the sprawling West Australian landscape. From lush meadows to endless deserts to crashing waves on a violent coast, this feels like the visual track to the kind of dream you don’t want to wake up from. (P.S.: Fait play our five-year anniversary show at The Bakery on Easter Thursday.)

Live Review: The Growl at The Ellington Jazz Club

Monday, September 9th, 2013

The GrowlFriday September 6, 2013 – Review by Jessica Tucker There’s nothing as extraordinary as that feeling when you’re sitting in a room listening to a band when, unexpectedly, they create this mesmerising rapture that freezes your body, widens your eyes […]

Peter Bibby, Inglorious Busker

Friday, September 7th, 2012

Time for another edition of our series of sneak peaks at the Inglorious Buskers of This Is Nowhere.

This time, Frozen Ocean’s Peter Bibby takes to the (figurative) stage to give you a taste of what you can expect on Sunday, October 14.

You can also check out previous clips from Rachael Dease and Andrew Ewing.