Following up on last year’s 77Boadrum, the even has expanded and gone bi-costal. This year, you’ll get live drumming in both NYC and Los Angeles. The LA venue will be at the La Brea Tar Pits, nestled in the heart of the city. For NYC, the everyone will be gathering at the Williamsburg Waterfront. The west coast event will be conducted by Soft Circle contributor and 88BoaDrum artistic director Hisham Bharoocha; east coast duties will be handled by local act Gang Gang Dance. Both cities will be performing an 88 minute piece that will begin this Friday 8/8/08 at, yep, you guessed it…8:08pm. Personally, LA wins for the simple fact that they have Hella’s Zach Hill. I doubt they’ll let him solo, but one can dream.
I had the chance to catch The Boredoms a few years ago at 2006’s Intonation festival, where Eye conducted a mini version of the past two years events. Leading a circle of 6 drummers on the outdoor Chicago stage, the whole event was surreal and hypnotic. Amongst an lineup that smashed stoned hip-hop up against Robert Pollard’s tequila fueled antics, The Boredoms brief but electric set was the peak of an otherwise wonky festival.
Available at the show will be first-come, first-served hand screened “Nike Sportswear 88BoaDrum NSW Tee.” Woo Nike sponsorship! Each of the event shits will be hand screened on site, featuring designs by Boredom’s lead noisician Eye. Supposedly, the performers may be getting some custom kicks too.
While the event is free, it looks like most all the tickets from the website have been distributed. There may still be tickets at the physical distribution centers for each event:
LA:
Amoeba Music
6400 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, Ca 90028
323.245.6400
LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
(323) 857-6000
NYC:
Sound Fix Records-Brooklyn
110 Bedford Ave @ N.11th St. , Brooklyn NY 11211
(718) 388-8090
Other Music-Manhattan
15 East 4th Street, NY NY 10003
(212) 477-8150
Volunteering is also an option; one I may be engaging in just to make sure I can participate in what will be an undoubtedly amazing event. Drop a line to volunteers88BoaDrum@gmail.com to see if there’s still slots open.
If all else fails, there’s always the Craigslist vultures of NY and LA.
Though I far prefer the cute soaring chorus of ‘Left Behind’ over the grunge-lite camp of ‘Rat Is Dead’, but the latter will do for a label sanctioned freebie. Sub Pop has released the song to give us a taste of the recently released CSS album entitled Donkey. The cutesy buzzsaw riffs do the job, but the better choice is the first single ‘Left Behind’.
It’s a song fully formed; utilizing the smatterings of studio polish to round out their sound, rather than corrupt and bloat it. The hook is a genuine winner, mashing Lovefoxxx’s soaring vocals with the punkish guitar riffage. Case in point, my room mate just walked by, ushered by my repeated playing of the track, air-guitaring along with the chorus. I think it’s exactly the kind of reaction the song intends to illicit, given that the song’s sugary coating will grind it’s way into your memory quite easily.
It’s been nearly 2 years since Scottish post rock masters Mogwai have released a proper album. Mr. Beast came out in early ‘06 and except for that wicked riff in the middle of ‘Glasgow Mega-Snake’, was honestly a pretty wobbly affair. The following years saw the band doing the soundtracks for football doc Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait and the vaguely metaphysical Aronofsky film The Fountain.
September 23rd of this year will see the release of The Hawk Is Howling, a new album released via Wall of Sound. In honor of the impeding release, a single has been set free on the internet…like an eagle or hawk. Get it?
The overall dynamic remains the same, but the consistency of the atmosphere has shifted somewhat. A distinctly electronic texture sits atop the usual Mogwai formula. It’s a slight twist, something that counterbalances the inherent same-ness that made Mr. Beast disappointing. While there’s nothing wrong with the Mogwai structure, but there’s something to be said for a band subtly adding to the usual to create “new”.
Look for the new release on September and check out the track listing below.
1 I’m Jim Morrison, I’m dead
2 Batcat
3 Danphe and The Brain
4 Local Authority
5 The Sun Smells Too Loud
6 Kings Meadow
7 I Love you, I’m Going To Blow Up Your School
8 Scotland’s Shame
9 Thank You Space Expert
The day job called me a way for a significant length of time to deal with the thrill ride that is Comicon International. About a month and a half of prep outside of my normal book load, followed by 5 days of blissfully uncomfortable nirvana that is akin to being forcibly penetrated by a rainbow.
Yeah, that was from the final day of SDCC ‘07. It kinda feels like that after you work from setup to breakdown.
Anyhoo, I was drinking a solitary whiskey on the rocks of the evening, sitting outside at the Hyatt (yeah, too lazy to adhere to the boycott…it’s ok I didn’t pay for the drink) checking Google Analytics out of nervous boredom. Thanks primarily to Demi of This Next and her massive Stumbleupon influence, I found myself with a sizable spike in traffic. Moments later, my friend Andrew came running up looking like he’d witnessed the birth of his child, when he’d actually bumped into a slightly inebriated Joss Whedon *and* had a chance to chat with him.
Comicon is full of fun moments like that; it’s a surreal, democratic blend of fan, creator and furry all waiting in the same slow-moving line for a shitty convention center hotdog. Now that the madness is finally over, and the job has subsided a bit, I’m back to bring the posts up to a more regular frequency. Thanks to all those that have been stopping by!
This year I had a new phone around to snap a bunch of wacky pics. Enjoy the blurry fun over at my Flickr
Stumbling around the internet in search of music is a pastime of mine. There’s a lot of methods to scrape out the strange & new nuggets from around the web. A ton of sites offer free downloads, contained within mailers or in the nooks and crannies of their websites. A few of my favorites do come from a email lists: Oh My Rockness deals out a handful & Filter gives you one each Monday when they send out their email list.
A lot of times, I’ll just grab whatever freebies the web has to offer, shove them in my iTunes and let random work its magic. Via this method a lot of weird and interesting things that I probably wouldn’t have give the proper time to have gotten my ear. This week I’ve assaulted several times by The Death Set and their song ‘Negative Thinking’. From the Kraftwerk-by-way-of-an-Iowa-methlab drum programming to the earnestly fuzzy vocals, the song drips with a minimalist intensity that, once adjusted to, is inescapably charming. Each time the song would pop on, the chopped up samples scattered over the intro would always make me think that early 90’s industrial mp3’s had found their way into my library*. Once the buzzsaw guitars appear the whole affair propels itself forward, propped up on the chanting vocals and an almost calming layer of keyboard. Maybe they’re something like Atari Teenage Riot for the modern days, who knows, but like most of the other bands from Baltimore that have popped up on the radar lately…the key is the jittery, infectious fun.
The Death Set follows that unspoken citywide manifesto to a T.
* As a result of this post, I will now devote my free time to writing a virus that forcibly downloads Front 242 & really early Thrill Kill Kult onto your computer. Look for it 4th quarter ‘08.
CSS - Rat Is Dead (Rage)
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