DE STIJL RECORDS

From gallerist Carol Greene’s recollections :

…Lines of string partitioned the storage space into geometric symbols, which formed a kind of “Qvartic” structure in which members of the band were situated. At the room’s center was a diamond black box, mirrored on its surface and tilted at an angle – part sculpture, part prop, part devotional object, yet it was unknown what deities were being conjured that evening… A kind of primitive brutality was played out with blood packs, partial nudity, boned horns – yet NNCK’s signature structural quality and hypnotic rhythms maintained their presence amidst the chaos that overtook the evening. The resulting recording reflects just that…

Haley Fohr / Circuit Des Yeux has been invited to Finland to perform at Flow Festival. Flow is an annual music festival taking place in Helsinki yearly in mid-August. The music presented at Flow is a strong and varied selection of up and coming and established artists from indie-rock to soul and jazz and from folk to contemporary club sounds, both from the domestic and the international scene. Alongside great music, Flow is about urban spaces, arts, cosy decoration, good food and drink. Flow takes place at the historic Suvilahti power plant area close to Helsinki city centre.

MESSAGES
with :
BITCHIN’ BAJAS (Chicago/ Drag City)
FABRIC (Chicago/Spectrum Spools)
ANCIENT OCEAN (NY/Sonic Meditations) w/ Special Guest Mark Demolar (of Woodsman)

DJ Steve Lowenthal

Body Actualized Center
143 Troutman St.
Brooklyn, NY

Today is Orthodox Easter, falling as it does this year on Cinco de Mayo. To mark the occasion of the official “release” of their back catalog online, The No-Neck Blues Band has issued the following statement, in typical hyperbolic fashion:

A fitting introduction to a convoluted legacy. If you have the records, check the history and videos. If you’ve heard the name but not the sound, browse and choose with caution. For even more so than yesterday, the digital night is long, and full of terrors.

Here is The No-Neck Blues Band. “Why Is Love Wrong?” was recorded in1998 at the 79th Street Boat Basin in NYC, and later released on a 2CD called The Birth of Both Worlds. This video was directed by Adam Mortimer. This gig would eventually result in the turmoil of angry restauranteur and pissed off patrons with Garden Burgers.

This Sunday, May 5, 2013 is Orthodox Easter. It’s a holiday that represents many things — sacrifice, ritual, rebirth, equinox, etc. — and as it has no fixed date within any civil calendar, it is a happening rife with signifiers befitting the concerns of New York City’s No-Neck Blues Band. This year is particularly significant as it marks 20 yrs of insistently anonymous and, perhaps, deliberately ambiguous activity from NNCK. In very large part, the only discernible and seemingly concrete information about The No-Neck Blues Band has resided in the physical object of any of their actual releases. It’s been argued that the sphere of authenticity is outside that of the technical, and that the original is independent of the copy, and we’d further the idea that if you don’t have the record, you don’t really have dick. It might also be said that No-Neck Blues Band and (for one example) iTunes should perhaps never share the same sentence. But for reasons not dissimilar to the significance of Easter itself, NNCK have decided to embrace the ephemeral, and to stave off the eventual absence of any intrinsic, ritualistic value, by choosing to release the entirety of their back catalog into The Digital World. So what you have here is the motherfucking lode of NNCK content and perception revealed. But even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. Discovering and following the path that bygone artifacts have traveled has always been a lure for the curious, but in the shittiness of this current digital age, it’s also just become far too easy. What yr buying here, should you choose not to just steal it, lacks any essential worth. But hey, who are we to judge ? Insightful ontributions, however, some priceless, from Jan Anderzen, Michael Chapman, Neil Michael Hagerty, Harmony Korine, Hisham Mayet, Jerry Yester, and numerous others. Take yr time.

Frieze Magazine pays a studio visit: C Spencer Yeh

The prolific New York-based musician and artist C Spencer Yeh talks about the development of his work, his Burning Star Core project, and approaches to using voice, violin and abstract sound.

PETER JEFFERIES
The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World
IND 123 CD/LP/MP3

Peter Jefferies’s extraordinary debut solo album, The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World, first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs – for both the album and a striking 7-inch, “The Fate of the Human Carbine”, released around the same time – it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a handful of years it slipped out of print and out of sight. Roughly 20 years later that situation is being amended by De Stijl with a vinyl reissue that includes the songs from the attendant single and no amount of remastering whatsoever.

Though no one’s gotten around to writing a book on it yet, The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World nonetheless stands as one of the singular singer-songwriter albums of all time, existing on a sparsely populated plane with Pink Moon, I Often Dream of Trains, Blues Run the Game, Our Mother the Mountain and not many others. In a sandy voice that soothes and slashes, Jefferies offers a compassionate, piercingly lucid view of the endeavor of life, all our pain and small glories rendered in tones both harrowing and tender. On piano, drums and percussion, he pounds out melodies that roar, sweep and lilt, accompanied on many songs by the serrated guitars of a variety of players. Featuring a small team of South Island heavy-hitters – all three members of the Dead C as well as David Mitchell (3Ds), Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull (Look Blue Go Purple, Cyclops), Nigel Taylor and Robbie Muir (who’s cobilled on the single) – Last Great Challenge provides a pivot point in Jefferies’s formidable recording career, which included two bands he shared with his brother Graeme in the ’80s, Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, and four further solo albums, as well as stints in bands here (Mecca Normal, Two Foot Flame) and there (Plagal Grind, Cyclops, and collaborations with Shayne Carter, Jono Lonie and Chris Smith).

This immediate and affecting album has been a comfort and a guide for me since it came out. Sit a spell and see if it doesn’t speak to you as well.

~ Mike Wolf, NYC, 2013

WOLF EYES TOUR
CRAZY JIM: NEW SONGS NEW WORLD
FORWARD EVER BACKWARD NEVER
APRIL EUROPE TOUR

April 17 - NL, Arnhem @ Willemeen
April 18 - BE, Antwerp @ Trix, w/ The Soft Moon
April 19 - DE, Bremen @ Friese
April 20 - CH, Neuchatel @ Queen Kong Club
April 21 - CH, Geneva @ L’Usine
April 22 - BE, Brussels @ Magasin4
April 23 - UK, London @ Corsica Studios
April 24 - PT, Lisbon @ ZDB
April 25 - DE, Berlin @ Festsaal
April 26 + 27 - FR, Paris @ Instant Chavires
April 28 - NL, Amsterdam @ OCCII, w/ Sightings

JEAN STREET DEMANDS

»Woofpies is planning a tour,here is a list of our
»demands,

1.100$ or more guantee.
2.hot babes have to be at the house or hotel we stay at.
3.only hot babes.
4.amplifiers will be prvided.
5.a decent P.A. at each show.
5.a vegetarian meal prepared each performance.
6.free beer.
7.limo service to and from each show.
5.security has to tight.
9.all the bands we play with have to suck so we look good.
10.all the bands have to be uglier than us.
11.giant mirrors have to be placed on and around the stage
12.giant wolf heads have to be protruding from the bar entrance,as to make it diffcult to enter and exit.
13.every one not in the audience must wear wolf costumes and howl periodicaly.
14.fresh socks must be provided every day.
15.a new jean jacket with wolf embroidered on back for every show,as we intend to throw it into the audience after each show.
16).no cops.
17).arsenic
18 teenagers must know and love wolf eyes weeks befor we arrive.
19).wolf eyes fan club has to be established,east and west coast.
20.Cortney Love is not allowed at any shows
21.we each need our own scibe.
22.all rights to recordings made before ,during,and after the show,.
23.all quotes phrases and any thing clever i might say is mine and noone eles may put it on a t-shirt.
24.giant pandas will be borrowed from the local zoo
25) wolfs will also be borrowed.
26).2000 white doves to be released before and after each show.

Ok thats it tell me if you can do anything for us,..

forever
»young Jean Street »

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