Tabla maestro Zakir Hussain is joined by very special guests exploring the profound impact that jazz has had on both western and Indian music. He is joined by Shankar Mahadevan (Vocal), Louiz Banks (Piano), Sanjay Divecha (Guitar), and Dave Holland (Bass).
Zakir Hussain is considered one of the greatest musicians of our time. Along with his legendary father and teacher, Ustad Allarakha, he has elevated the status of his instrument, the tabla, both in India and around the world. A favorite accompanist for India’s leading classical musicians and dancers, Zakir is also widely recognized as a chief architect of the world music movement with his many historic collaborations, including Shakti, Remember Shakti, Diga, Planet Drum and his ever-changing musical feast, Masters of Percussion. In Summer 2012, Zakir was named Best Percussionist in the DownbeatCritics’ Poll.
For more information about the artists, please visit their web sites:
http://imgartists.com/artist/zakir_hussain
This is s $3 show curated by XRAY.fm! RSVP to join us for this Red Bull Sound Select show by clicking this link!
8pm | $12.00 day of show
JUST $3 AT THE DOOR WITH RSVP IN ADVANCE ATRED BULL SOUND SELECT !
RSVP does not guarantee entry, so we recommend arriving early.
After three years of non-stop international touring with the likes of the XX, Grimes and the Gossip, when it came time to record their sophomore album Olympia, Toronto-based band Austra had evolved into a complex collaborative effort between its six members. "Previously, I would flesh out songs before I brought them to the band, but this time I left them bare and let the others fill them in" explains Katie Stelmanis, the principal songwriter/vocalist.
Olympia is also the first confessional record for Stelmanis as evidenced by the heartfelt lyrics of piano driven lead single "Home" (stream now). "Home" expresses the anxieties of waiting up all night for a lover to return. "I was mad and upset and the song just wrote itself," says the singer. The album touches on a range of sentiments that stem from a relationship ending, a relationship beginning, and friends' struggles with addiction and motivation. Despite the sometimes dark lyrics written in collaboration with band member Sari Lightman, Olympia is bubbly and buoyant-- fundamentally a dance record, which Stelmanis says was the band's aim all along. "We are really into dense harmonies and big beautiful melodies, but I also love techno and dance music. I wanted to bring those elements together."
Though Olympia is filled with electronic and synthetic sounds that reference everything from Trax Record classic cuts to Yazoo's Upstairs At Eric's, it's free of programming and loops. Everything was played live by the band in the studio and all of the percussion including a wild set up of marimbas and congas is drummer Maya Postepski. "Maya played a huge role in the production of the album," says Stelmanis, who has been playing with the drummer for eight years since their previous band, Galaxy. "There is a major percussive element running through every song," Stelmanis laughs, "this is the album where we discovered rhythm."
Grammy-nominated harmony duo The Milk Carton Kids have announced the May 19, 2015 release of their third album, Monterey. A refreshing alternative to the foot-stomping grandeur of the so-called “folk revival,” an understated virtuosity defines The Milk Carton Kids and their new album. The two years since the release of their last album, The Ash & Clay, have been significant ones for the group. In addition to a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, The Milk Carton Kids won Duo/Group of the Year at the Americana Music Awards in 2014.
Their featured performances and interviews in T Bone Burnett & the Coen Brothers' concert documentary, "Another Day/Another Time,” brought the band its widest audience and their 55-city North American tour last year sold out months in advance. Cultural purveyors from Garrison Keillor to T Bone Burnett to Billy Bragg have hailed the duo’s importance among a group of new folk bands, both expanding and contradicting the rich tradition that precedes them. Yet while some of the band’s many accolades reference a specific genre, the duo quickly transcends those tags with clear inflections of jazz, classical, even the dark lyricism of modern “alternative."
This past year, The Milk Carton Kids were asked to pay tribute to Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris — Cash on the Joe Henry-produced remake of “Bitter Tears,” and Harris with their standing ovation performance at the tribute concert “The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris,” among luminaries including Kris Kristofferson, Mavis Staples, Alison Kraus, Iron & Wine, and Harris herself. If Cash and Harris taught us that American music is meant to be taken at its expansive word, without confines or borders, The Milk Carton Kids appear to have taken the lesson to heart.
All of the things. Come see all episodes of the first season of The Lyric Project, including two premiere episodes and a few remixes of early episodes. The event consists of live performances, give-aways, and dancing.
Event Page, $3
When it came time to make the fourth Telekinesis album, drummer/songwrit- er/principal architect Michael Lerner found himself in a predicament that will sound familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in the lore of rock bands. In just under five years, he had released three fantastic records—Telekinesis! (2009), 12 Desperate Straight Lines (2011), and Dormarion (2013)—each more ambitious than the last. He had toured all over the world, shared stages with great bands (Death Cab for Cutie, Portugal. The Man, Aimee Mann and Ted Leo’s The Both), and enthralled fans of his infectious, ebullient power pop. Newly married and happily ensconced in the home studio he’d assembled in his West Seattle basement, Lerner found himself asking the question that has haunted modestly successful bands down the ages: What do you do after the rock and roll dreams you had when you were 19 have come true? The obvious answer was to make another Telekinesis record—that was his job, after all, and he was grateful for it. So he got to work. It didn’t go well. At least not at first.
“I went down to the basement,” Lerner recalls, “and started playing the same chords I always play... I just felt like I’d exhausted everything I knew. I was not excited at all. I just could not make another power-pop album.”
He sought inspiration in music that bore little relation to the familiar Telekinesis sound, and soon found it in the swooning, synth-driven pop of early ’80s UK bands like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and Glasgow’s The Blue Nile (whose 1982 debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, Lerner had been given by Merge honcho Mac McCaughan), as well as more up-tempo numbers like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s 1977 disco master class “I Feel Love” and, even further afield, Drake’s 2013 summer jam “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” Though Lerner is a drummer with a strong affinity for loud electric guitars, he found himself irresistibly attracted to the powerful atmospheres stirred up by the gorgeously inorganic sounds and simple arrangements of these wildly disparate inspirations. A new idea began to take shape, as did a somewhat obsessive collec- tion of old synthesizers and drum machines.
Lerner dedicated himself to learning the intricacies of antiquated keyboards with names like the Roland JX-10 (the very model Angelo Badalamenti used to com- pose the music for Twin Peaks), the Teenage Engineering OP-1, the Moog Sub Phatty, the Elektron Octatrack, and even a Speak & Spell. “If you buy a guitar,” observes Lerner, “people always say ‘oh, there’s a song in that guitar.’ That’s how it was for every piece of equipment I acquired over the last two years.” Finding the songs was one thing; making sense of the elaborate technical requirements that would allow him to sync the multiple generations of machinery with digital record- ing software was another. There were plenty of easier ways to go about the process, sending MIDI versions of the vintage sounds and letting a computer do the heavy lifting, but that would have missed the point. There was joy in getting his hands dirty; part of the process was to invent the process. It took months of diligent effort (“pulling my hair out, for real”), but when the literal and figurative dust settled, what emerged looked and sounded like a legitimate breakthrough. The previous three Telekinesis LPs had been recorded fast, on tape, in professional studios with accomplished producers—Chris Walla on the first two, Jim Eno on the third—at the helm. This new one had been painstakingly assembled by Lerner alone, work- ing without a map, using an entirely unfamiliar palette of sounds, and discovering an entirely different tonal vocabulary in the process. And though the total running time is a tidy 33 minutes, it had taken what seemed like forever to get there (hence the album title).
And yet, for all the new methodology and instrumentation, the DNA of Ad Infinitum is oddly familiar. The melodic hooks that have endeared Telekinesis to the world of pop music aficionados are flagrantly front and center. The pinging pong of an instrumental figure on album opener “Falling (In Dreams)” sounds almost like a permission slip for Lerner to let loose with a soaring head voice in the chorus. It’s a chilling entrance to an album that soon veers into the much faster new-wave thrills of “Sylvia,” the ironically technology-averse retrofuturism of “In a Future World” (which sounds like the missing link between Speak & Spell-era Depeche Mode and the birth of Erasure), and onward. The hyperactive gem “Courtesy Phone” proves that no matter how many stylistic obstacles he places in his own path, Lerner’s knack for perfect power pop is irrepressible. But the high- energy dance rhythms of “It’s Not Yr Fault” and the gorgeous, McCartney II-esque polyphony of “Ad Infinitum Pt. 1” are totally unprecedented in the Telekinesis oeuvre. The whole album is a relentless marriage of old and new, memory and imagination, deconstruction and rediscovery.
While artists like M83 and Blood Orange (among many, many others) have made fruitful use of vintage sounds and production techniques in recent years, Ad Infinitum is a different animal. It’s less like a time capsule and more like a time machine. In the movie version of the story, Lerner would stumble on his way down the stairs, hit his head, and wake up in 1983, and the only way he could get back to the present day would be to make a record using available instru- ments. Then he’d wake in 2015 to discover he’d been in his basement studio all along. And the record he’d made in that strange dream state would turn out to be Ad Infinitum, the most ambitious and assured Telekinesis release to date.
‘band’ Say Hi). Back then he’d taken his exposé deep behind the trenches of post Buffy vampire life (death?) with his record Impeccable Blahs. There, he found a culture ripe with individuals as complex, moral, stupid and romantic as their human counterparts.
They just happened to get their sustenance from drinking
blood. But that was before the complications the Twilight series introduced. Suddenly, things were different. Garlic wasn’t really a thing any more, mirrors couldn’t be relied upon to not have reflections and, gasp, apparently the cloud cover of the Pacific Northwest was enough to give them a we-can-now-walk-around-in-the-sunlight loophole? Let’s just say things didn’t really sit quite right with the vast majority of blood suckers. They rebelled. Subtly at first. But, before us humans knew it, they’d infiltrated the very fabric of our society.
Bleeders Digest is their story. It’s polaroids of their patience, resilience and wrath. In opening track “The Grass Is Always Greener,” the vampires are content with coexisting until the song’s protagonist cartoonishly hurls a giant boulder at them (thanks a lot, Jenny). By the time we reach the chugging anthem “Pirates Of The Cities, Pirates Of The Suburbs,” the fang-ed demons have driven most of us from our homes in a bloody wash of brute force and Darwinian eminent domain.
But all is not lost. Behind closed doors, some vague but jovial remnants of humanity sprout anew. They’d never show it to the outside world, but mansion-roommates Aldo and Tina fill their daylight hours sailing sofas and penning crosswords for the New York Times in “Creatures Of The Night.” It’s a fun distraction from the necking they’ll do once the sun goes down … Which actually brings us to our next point.
Is there a better metaphor for intimacy than the vampire? The sharp teeth and fluids, the romance of eternity. Besides, it wouldn’t be a Say Hi record without some good stories of lovin’. Throughout Bleeders, we see things from the vampire’s perspective. On “It’s A Hunger,” our protagonist literally starves for what the female gender offers to all five of his senses. Elsewhere, as on “Galaxies Will Be Born,” the seduction of immortality is eclipsed only by the tenderness of the act of turning, itself.
And so, from his tiny home-studio in Seattle, WA, Say Hi updates the vampire genre with another chapter via eleven rump-shaking vignettes and a giant still-beating heart.
Say Hi is Eric Elbogen. He lives in Seattle, WA and has been making records since 2002. His ninth, Bleeders Digest, is a record about vampires and the sequel to Say Hi To Your Mom’s Impeccable Blahs. It will be out on September 18th via Barsuk Records, with a lengthy North American tour to follow. All are welcome, but please
check your fangs at the door.
BED
For fans of The Delgados, Grandaddy and Sonic Youth.
"Songwriting is a way to approach unanswerable questions, these experiences that don't have easy conclusions," says Austin Crane, the 27-year-old multi-instrumentalist and songwriter behind Valley Maker. "It's a way to dwell on history and ask these big questions with other people."
Distinctive finger-picking, unconventional tunings, and plaintive vocals anchor Crane's music. Throughout this record, longtime collaborator Amy Godwin intertwines her voice intuitively with his; the end result sounds less like two individuals harmonizing than one who sings with astonishing depth and dimension.
Despite being recorded on different coasts during concurrent summers, ambient noise imbues When I Was A Child with cohesion via a sense of being in the same room with the musicians. This immediacy particularly enriches "By My Side," which began life in Columbia, South Carolina as a skeletal figure repeated on fourstrings. When Crane and his friends reconfigured the song between sessions at Archer Avenue Studio in Columbia, SC and at the Unknown in Anacortes, Washington, it blossomed into the version heard here.
Music opened up the world to Austin as he approached adolescence. "My dad gave me my first guitar when I turned thirteen, and I started playing in bands with friends almost immediately." Initially fixated on keeping abreast of the newest indie music, his tastes settled and matured as the Internet directed him towards key influences like Bill Callahan (Smog), Will Oldham (Bonnie "Prince" Billy), Chan Marshall (Cat Power) and Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia).
Valley Maker began in 2010 as Crane's senior thesis project at the University of South Carolina. He'd achieved a modicum of local popularity fronting a band that bore his name, and needed a moniker to distinguish his new material, eventually lifting one from Callahan's "Say Valley Maker" (on Smog's 2005 album A River Ain't Too Much To Love). "For me that song paints a picture of floating down this river as part of your life, and you know it's going to end, and you're facing that futility and figuring out what it means to respond to it."
For now, Crane is excited to invest more energy into sharing Valley Maker with the world. And the open-ended nature of this songwriting project permits him to showcase it live in different configurations: solo, in a duo with Godwin, or as a full band. "My hope is that there are more Valley Maker records to come, and some of those may be stripped down and sparse, and others built-out and full. It's nice to be able to shape-shift a little." Because as When I Was A Child affirms, when the questions you ask - and the art they inspire - remain fluid, moments of great truth and beauty ensue.
Michael Henchman's latest EP Near and Far is a mostly-acoustic project, continuing to explore characters finding their way along wayward paths, such as the sweetness of finally coming home from across the country, being free yet not free of love, hard times on the prairie, and stepping into a larger life after loss of a parent. Traveling since childhood, and formerly living many years in Alaska, Michael paints both the tangible and the intangible - what is perceived directly and what is laid across a wider cinematic landscape - in his ongoing fascination with far horizons and how the heart becomes entangled by time and distance; with what is both near and far.
The Back Fence PDX storytelling series is showcasing 5 Tradeswomen telling their true stories about their lives and experiences as well as raise much needed funds for Oregon Tradeswomen. There will be a raffle and other fun surprises.
Hosted by B. Frayn Masters & Mindy NettifeeAdvance tickets and more info at http://BackFencePdx.com/.
Founded in 2003, Decibel Festival has become a unique platform for exposing attendees to leading-edge multimedia art from around the globe. With a focus on live performance, interactive multimedia art, state-of-the-art sound and technology based education; Decibel has solidified itself as one of the premier electronic music festivals and promotional organizations in the world. The five-day festival program averages over 25,000 attendees a year.
Outside of the annual festival program, Decibel Events producers over 60 events per year, ranging from intimate club performances to massive international festival stages. For more information visit our events page at http://dBFestival.com/events
db 2015• 80+ audio/visual performers hailing from 15+ countries
• 25+ individual concerts ranging from club events, after-parties, theater a/v showcases, boat parties and park events
• 10+ workshops geared towards audio technology
• 3 workshops geared towards visual technology
• 3 lectures from marquee artists and educators
• Interactive industry happy hour events
• The return of our dB in the Park event at Volunteer Park
As an organization, Decibel has prided itself on providing free technology-based arts education to the public. Over the years, the dB Conference has played a significant role in fostering emerging talent while bridging the gap between the music industry and festival attendees.
The festival includes several artists from Portland's electronic scene, such as Natasha Kmeto, Manatee Commune, Sean Pierce, Strategy, Dylan Stark, as well as Archivist and Joseph Gaard, featured in the Portland-based music label Blankstairs.
For more info
http://dBFestival.com
http://facebook.com/DecibelFestival
http://twitter.com/dBFestival
http://soundcloud.com/DecibelFestival
http://youtube.com/DecibelFestival
Evolving the sound of their first two full-length records, Mazes (2011) and Circles (2012), Moon Duo -- Ripley Johnson, Sanae Yamada and John Jeffrey -- have developed their ideas with the help of their newly acquired steam engine, Canadian drummer John Jeffrey (present on the band‘s last release, Live in Ravenna). The unchartered rhythms and tones present on this record are reflective of Moon Duo’s strive for equilibrium in this aforementioned new environment. You can hear it is the result of months of wrangling with a profound feeling of being unsettled – there are off-kilter dance rhythms, repetitive, grinding riffs, cosmic trucker boogies and even an ecstatically pretty moment. Mixing with Jonas Verwijnen in Berlin, allowed for a creative catharsis and dissolved the album’s formal technique into a cool and paradoxically sane sound of confusion.
Shadow of the Sun is available now. In a nod to a great pop tradition, “Animal” will appear as the A-side of a 7-inch, packaged with each copy of the vinyl edition, and exist as the final track of the album on the CD and digital versions. The song has an early West Coast punk viciousness to it that is entirely unique to the Moon Duo catalog.
Nurses
Spectrum Control
Electric guitar, amplifier, effect and loop pedals, ebow, cassette 4-track.
Meredith Axelrod is a singer and multi instrumentalist who specializes in American roots music.
As a solo artist, she has headlined her own shows at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood, CA, opened for the Cheap Suit Serenaders at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, opened for David Bromberg at the Sweetwater Music Hall, and toured as far as Australia and New Zealand. Because of her distinctive voice and style of singing, Meredith was featured on the weekly public radio series Voice Box with Chloe Veltman.
Believe You Me and dB present a Decibel Festival Pre-Party feat. three dB2015 performing artists:
JON CHARNIS (dj)
Innervisions / All Day I Dream - Los Angeles
http://dbfestival.com/artist/jon-charnis
NORDIC SOUL (dj)
Decibel / Studio 4/4 - Seattle
http://dbfestival.com/artist/nordic-soul
ANDY WARREN (dj)
Believe You Me / - Portland
http://dbfestival.com/artist/andy-warren
Doors at 9PM / 21+ bar / $10
The Liquor Store
3341 SE Belmont St, Portland
http://www.theliquorstorepdx.com/
For more info on the 2015 Decibel Festival
http://dBFestival.com/
http://facebook.com/DecibelFestival
http://twitter.com/dBFestival
https://soundcloud.com/decibelfestival
http://youtube.com/DecibelFestival
http://instagram.com/dBfestival
DJ Klyph with Neka & Kahlo, Mic Capes, Jon Bel, and Theory Hazit.
Also featuring Zoo? and a beat set by Stewart Villain
A part o TBA!
Mike Love regards the music-making process as magical at the point of surrendering one’s ego. He perceives each song as a complex, fully-formed personality that becomes realized not by him, but through him. As he describes, “I credit myself more for just being the conduit for the music than actually writing it. Once I made that realization, there has been an endless flow of musical creation; there’s never been a time when I’ve sat down to write something and nothing has come out.” This perspective also transforms obstacles into opportunities, as in the case of the song “Step Lightly”: Love and his band soldiered through technical difficulties until dawn, resulting in memorable final takes of the backing vocals. In their live shows, it manifests as a give-and-take of energy with the crowd, selecting songs and interpretations in response to the vibe rather than insisting upon a pre-determined set. An eternal student, Love’s openness and humility provide a healing force that can’t help but make converts out of listeners.
He is perhaps best known for the solo performances with loop pedals that he began at the urging of his wife, showcasing his uncanny vocalizations of instrument sounds and his genius knack for harmonies. But Love is equally at home with other musicians; in fact, guest artists who have inspired him throughout his career play a pivotal role on his newest and strongest album to date, Love Will Find A Way, due out September 1st on Love Not War Records and recorded at Soul Sound Studio and Studio Ala Moana in Kane’ohe, O’ahu, Hawai’i.
Tender Loving Empire has a third location. The grand opening of the new store on NW 23rd Ave (between Glisan and Hoyt) will include snacks and frosty beverages, jams by DJ Jimbo, and raffles every half hour.
Man Man
MAN MAN
Shilpa Ray
Wednesday September 16, 2015 8:00 PM
Hawthorne Theatre
All Ages | Bar w/ ID
No refunds or exchanges.
Get tickets here
http://www.mikethrasherpresents.com/dbmonkey/event.cfm?cal=thrasher&id=129610
Soundcontrol PDX presents UK's Nightingales!
The Back Fence PDX: MAINSTAGE show has been playing to packed good-looking audiences since 2008. In 2013 OPB aired a mini series of our stories. Stories are also podcast on Rooftop Media, Spotify, Sticher and our new radio show will air on XRAY.fm starting in 2015. The evening features local and out of town storytellers telling true personal tales based on the night’s theme. Former storytellers range from a blood-spatter expert, a pet photographer, a park ranger, funeral director, a former Scientologist, to scientists and doctors, to New York Times Best-Selling authors, film actors/writers/directors, and people we’ve met on the street. MAINSTAGE stories have never been told publicly. In some cases, not even to significant others.
Doors open at 6:30
$15 General Admission | $18 At the Door | $22.50 VIP (seating in the first five rows in the center section - available in advance only)
La Luna Nueva
Multidisciplinary arts festival
Celebrating Hispanic Heritage month
September 12-28, 2014
La Luna Nueva or, New Moon, is a phase in which the moon is between the earth and the sun, present but invisible to the eye. The beauty of the moon is unseen, waiting to be revealed…La Luna Nueva is also Portland’s only Latino arts & culture festival, a time for Milagro to open its doors and invite all to enjoy the beauty of Latino arts and culture from around the world! Join us for evenings of Andean dances and legends, eye-opening Hip hop theatre, live Theatre for all ages, reflections of the unifying and universal impact of war, visual art exhibits and many more fun events for the whole family!
http://www.milagro.org/1-Performance-Presentacion/2014-15Season/la-luna-nueva.html
The SEASON 3 cast of NSS is excited for the return of guest host and performer — from the Moth Radio Hour, DAN KENNEDY!
Along with regular cast members, Emmy-Nominated Director of The Making of South Park; Six Days to Air/Author of Turtleface, ARTHUR BRADFORD, International Poet/Moth Hour Storyteller/Producer+Host BackFencePDX, MINDY NETTIFEE, WEINLAND Frontman/Alialuja Choir Co-Founder, ADAM SHEARER, Runner-up in Portland's 2015 Funniest Person contest, Co-Creator of Hurricaine Comedy & special guest BRI PRUETT, Musician/Songwriter/In the Band Bitch'n, EMILY OVERSTREET, PICA Time Based Art Favorite/Host of the Moth StorySLAMs, ANDREW DICKSON, and Voted Best Storyteller/Spoken word for 2015 WW's Best Of/Producer+Host BackFencePDX, B. FRAYN MASTERS all performing all debut work at the 11th of September season 3 Kick-Off at DISJECTA!
COMEDY. VIDEOS. MUSIC. RAUCOUS READINGS. WEIRD STUFF.