Archive for the ‘Fait’ Category

Noiseweek: Hardcore Architecture, Flying Lotus, Windhand & Fait

Friday, September 4th, 2015

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

READ

Inside Hardcore Architecture | Pitchfork

“Chicago-based artist and teacher Mark Fischer of Public Collectors has given us a strange and revealing new window on MRR and the ‘80s underground with Hardcore Architecture. Hardcore Architecture explores the relationship between the architecture of living spaces and the history of American hardcore bands in the 1980s. On his Tumblr, Fischer unites band info, demo tape, and record reviews culled from MRR issues from the ‘80s with Google Street View building images of the original contact addresses for bands. The juxtaposition of punk/hardcore/metal band names, ranging from the familiar (Sonic Youth, Judge, Didjits) to the unsung (Public Enema, Abra Cadavers, Death Puppy) plus text samplings from MRR’s quick hit reviews (“thrash” is inescapable) against images of fairly innocuous, sometimes charming, and often suburban homes (Fischer removes the exact street addresses from his postings for privacy reasons) gives us a different perspective on hardcore and its proponents. Ultimately, the blog tells a story about hardcore as a loose but passionate nationwide cultural network.”

How Flying Lotus Built Brainfeeder, His Spiritual Little Empire | The Fader

“This latest turn in Flying Lotus’ career hasn’t come out of nowhere. Born Steven Ellison, Steve to his friends, he has spent most of the past decade as the figurehead of the beat scene, an awkward term for a movement that sprung up in the late 2000s following years of experimentation at the edges of hip-hop and electronic music by artists such as Prefuse 73, Dabrye, and Madlib. A network powered by the internet and manifested through various physical nodes—the biggest of which remains Ellison’s hometown of Los Angeles—the beat scene reconfigured independent hip-hop by moving the focus away from rappers to instrumentals, and drawing on a wider sonic palette. It also helped make Ellison a household name, following a string of critically acclaimed albums on British label Warp Records and regular tours that had him circling the globe. In 2013, he was given his own radio station on Grand Theft Auto V, the fastest selling entertainment product of all time. He started 2015 with a six-month residency on BBC Radio 1. And now he has his own corner of a late night comedy show on U.S. television.”

LISTEN

Windhand — Hyperion

Windhand channel True Widow in this latest cut from Grief’s Internal Flower, which is shaping up to be a ripper of a record. It’s a surprise it took so long for that beautiful mix of doom and shoegaze to become in vogue, and her it works so well, with those ethereal vocals sailing atop an ocean of thick, plodding fuzz. And how fucking heavy is that riff? Grief’s Internal Flower is out September 18 through Relapse.

WATCH

Fait — Solace

Fait’s latest clip is low-budget — all harsh light and smoke machines in a darkened sound stage — but it’s an apt accompaniment for Elise Higgins’ latest offering of slow-burn builds and unresolved tension.

The Last Audio Cassette Factory

In this fascinating micro-documentary, Bloomberg Business profile National Audio Company, the Springfield, Montana, factory which now stands as the last bastion of audio cassette manufacturing. It’s a fascinating look into the staying power of analogue, the reversal of predicted technological trends and the business sense of defiant stubbornness in the face of presumed obsolescence.

Eat a Bag of Mix: Darrell Sundai (Fait)

Monday, March 30th, 2015

Eat a Bag of Mix is the name of a feature here on life is noise where we get a DJ, musician, producer, industry figure or just someone with good taste in fucked-up and weird music to give us a mix of music that has influenced them, or tunes that are currently rocking their world. This week, our bag-of-mixer is Darrell Sundai, a Perth musician and pocaster who’s been kicking around town in bands for the last ten years, the latest of which is Fait. In his own words:

I have played drums in Fait since early 2014. I have also filled in for quite a few acts in Perth as a session drummer (Hyla, Voltaire Twins) and recorded drums in LA for Husband’s latest album. I love podcasts and the format of podcasting, and I’m obsessed with opening up communication and dialogue between other creatives/artists on my podcast Mission Control. I am also quite open about consuming marijuana (everyone has a ‘party mix’ to get drunk, so why not a smoking mix?) and this is pretty much 11 tracks of what I like to vibe and reflect on.

Eat a Bag of Mix — Darrell Sundai by Lifeisnoiseeditor on Mixcloud

Fait join a stellar line-up of Perth acts of Drowning Horse, Puck, Mt. Mountain, Chris Cobilis and DX Wil Bixler at The Bakery this Thursday, April 2, to celebrate five years of life is noise. Tickets on sale now through lifeisnoise and The Bakery.

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.

*

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.

READ

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: Fait at The Bird

Wednesday, August 6th, 2014

faitSaturday August 2, 2014 Review by Matthew Tomich If you’re cognizant of  local music in this city and you haven’t heard of Fait, you’re probably not playing attention. On the back of little more than hype and an amazing debut […]

Fait, Rachel Dease & Childsaint play The Bird this Saturday

Thursday, July 31st, 2014

faitBefore embarking on her first Australian tour, Fait – the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Elise Higgins – will play an intimate show at The Bird this Saturday alongside Childsaint and Rachel Dease. If you haven’t heard of Fait yet, you’ve been […]