Yeasayer
Tanlines, Daedelus
Wed, September 12, 2012
Doors: 5:00 pm / Show: 6:00 pm
Rumsey Playfield
New York, NY
$32 advance / $35 day of show
Tickets
This event is all ages
Rumsey Playfield: Fifth Ave at 69th St. Rain or Shine Event, General Admission, Standing Room Only
http://www.bowerypresents.com/event/125057/
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Yeasayer
Yeasayer’s third album, ‘Fragrant World,’ is a hulking beast of a record. Keyboards clank and wheeze, tiny claps stumble against busted drum machines, and there’s very little obvious guitar. It’s an album that grapples with the schizophrenia of the modern world by gathering piles of electronics and molding them into something huge and often gorgeous.
After touring endlessly in support of 2010’s ‘Odd Blood,’ Chris Keating, Ira Wolf-Tuton and Anand Wilder holed up in Gary’s Electric Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to record ‘Fragrant World,’ working away as the borough transitioned from fall to winter. While ‘Odd Blood’ played with electronic textures and future paranoia, ‘Fragrant World’ fully immerses itself in those themes, virtually dripping with worry, love and concern for the planet we live on. Keating bleats and yammers his lyrics—sometimes, like on “Longevity,” piling so many effects on his voice that the music takes on an otherworldly sheen. In direct contrast are Wilder’s vocal contributions, which hover serenely over droning synths on “Blue Paper” and later weave in and out of staccato hand claps, and what sounds like a vintage computer dying, on “Devil and the Deed.”
Across the album’s 11 tracks, genre mashing is taken from a broad spectrum of sources: updated takes on dusky pop, jittery funk, exotic keyboard experimentation, haunting whirs of backward organ, exuberant bass, etc. “I wanted to make a record that was legitimately, to use a bad word, funky,” Chris Keating told ‘Under the Radar’ magazine. Even at its darkest, that statement holds true. On their first single and album centerpiece, “Henrietta,” Keating is in great form. The track is loosely based on Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose cells were cultured by a doctor in the 1950s without her permission. Those cells would later go on to be the most commonly used human cell line for medical research. Keating teases out universal ideas from bizarrely specific moments in history, repeating the refrain “We will live on forever,” referencing Lacks’ story directly, contrasted against a darkly optimistic worldview. It’s a risky move, but it pays off.
It’s a testament to their sound and the unique identity they’ve carved out for themselves in the music community. They’ve managed to grow and expand into what they are now without losing touch with what made them so compelling in the first place: their willingness to pull from every musical source imaginable. Whether it’s the warped and clipped alien-dance-floor banger “No Bones,” which has strong ties to Timbaland’s most experimental work for Aaliyah and Missy Elliott, or the Gothic, almost industrial pulse of “Reagan’s Skeleton,” Yeasayer are truly making 21st-century music. Couched in healthy fear, yet unafraid to move forward and expand, pulling in new influences just as frequently as new worries, Yeasayer have created a difficult, dense and beautiful record. It’s as much a synthesis of the last three decades of pop music as it is a new way of grappling with the end of time.
‘Fragrant World’ was produced by Yeasayer.
After touring endlessly in support of 2010’s ‘Odd Blood,’ Chris Keating, Ira Wolf-Tuton and Anand Wilder holed up in Gary’s Electric Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to record ‘Fragrant World,’ working away as the borough transitioned from fall to winter. While ‘Odd Blood’ played with electronic textures and future paranoia, ‘Fragrant World’ fully immerses itself in those themes, virtually dripping with worry, love and concern for the planet we live on. Keating bleats and yammers his lyrics—sometimes, like on “Longevity,” piling so many effects on his voice that the music takes on an otherworldly sheen. In direct contrast are Wilder’s vocal contributions, which hover serenely over droning synths on “Blue Paper” and later weave in and out of staccato hand claps, and what sounds like a vintage computer dying, on “Devil and the Deed.”
Across the album’s 11 tracks, genre mashing is taken from a broad spectrum of sources: updated takes on dusky pop, jittery funk, exotic keyboard experimentation, haunting whirs of backward organ, exuberant bass, etc. “I wanted to make a record that was legitimately, to use a bad word, funky,” Chris Keating told ‘Under the Radar’ magazine. Even at its darkest, that statement holds true. On their first single and album centerpiece, “Henrietta,” Keating is in great form. The track is loosely based on Henrietta Lacks, a woman whose cells were cultured by a doctor in the 1950s without her permission. Those cells would later go on to be the most commonly used human cell line for medical research. Keating teases out universal ideas from bizarrely specific moments in history, repeating the refrain “We will live on forever,” referencing Lacks’ story directly, contrasted against a darkly optimistic worldview. It’s a risky move, but it pays off.
It’s a testament to their sound and the unique identity they’ve carved out for themselves in the music community. They’ve managed to grow and expand into what they are now without losing touch with what made them so compelling in the first place: their willingness to pull from every musical source imaginable. Whether it’s the warped and clipped alien-dance-floor banger “No Bones,” which has strong ties to Timbaland’s most experimental work for Aaliyah and Missy Elliott, or the Gothic, almost industrial pulse of “Reagan’s Skeleton,” Yeasayer are truly making 21st-century music. Couched in healthy fear, yet unafraid to move forward and expand, pulling in new influences just as frequently as new worries, Yeasayer have created a difficult, dense and beautiful record. It’s as much a synthesis of the last three decades of pop music as it is a new way of grappling with the end of time.
‘Fragrant World’ was produced by Yeasayer.
Tanlines
Mixed Emotions is the debut album by Tanlines, a Brooklyn NY duo composed of Eric Emm (vocals, guitar, keyboards) and Jesse Cohen (drums, keyboards, bass). Initially born as a production project based out of Emm’s Brooklyn-based Brothers Studio, Tanlines has evolved into a deeply personal, unique electronic pop group.
But before there was Tanlines, there was just Eric and just Jesse, working in separate bands and projects until their paths crossed in 2008. Jesse’s former band had recorded at Eric’s studio; the two got along famously and struck up a friendship. “We have complementary qualities. It’s like a lot of duos, I think. We have different personalities, but we just innately understand each other,” says Cohen. The pair began making music together almost on a lark, deciding one night to remix a song for the band Telepathe, with whom Eric was working at the time, and put it on the internet that same evening for no reason beyond simply doing so. Suddenly, the song was making rounds on the web and being championed by various tastemakers. Their second song, “New Flowers,” written for one of Jesse’s friends’ art projects, had the same reaction, resulting in excellent UK label Young Turks (The XX, SBTRKT) emailing the band to release a single in 2009. “It was at that point that we thought, ‘Okay, this is a real project now,’” says Cohen.
Shows around the world followed, including amazing sets at the likes of The Guggenheim, The Whitney, the New Museum and more in their hometown of NYC (“Our genre was ‘Museum House’ for a while,” jokes Emm), and an opening slot on Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas’s solo tour in 2009. Effortlessly cool Parisian label Kitsune released a Tanlines single, while American label True Panther released the Tanlines’ first EP in 2010. They booked a three week tour in Europe, excited from the exciting things that had been happening to them, only to play some of the most disappointing shows of their career. “It was eye opening,” says Emm. “We realized we had a lot of work to do.” The inspiration for said work came in the form of albums the duo brought with them to listen to while driving through Europe. “We brought R.E.M. records, skate punk records from the 80’s, Born in the USA, stuff like that. Emm says, “listening to them, I became very aware of the lasting resonance of a good song. A good song transcends production trends. That’s what we were missing, and I wanted to start making songs that would have a life of their own.”
Upon returning from the European tour in the spring of 2010, Cohen and Emm returned home to New York to find an eviction notice for the recording studio that Eric and his brother (one-time trance producer Joshua Ryan) had built from the ground up eight years prior. The building had been sold and there were plans to convert it into a homeless shelter (...which was ultimately never built). For two years, the studio had been their figurative, and sometimes literal home (the spare bedroom often housed Jesse Cohen after late night sessions). With all of that change and uncertainty in mind, Tanlines began to work on their first proper album.
That album, Mixed Emotions, is a testament to the benefits and pitfalls of life’s changes, getting older, and being pushed out of one’s comfort zone. The band that was born out of a studio suddenly found themselves without a home base, forced to reevaluate themselves. Emm honed his voice, a confident and tranquil baritone, and focused on lyricism, something he had not done seriously in the past. Many of the songs on Mixed Emotions began as simple songs written on a guitar, with the band later adding their palette of electronic and organic sounds afterwards. “A great song can stick with someone for their whole life,” says Cohen as a means of explanation. “As a musician, you have the opportunity to create that, and that is the thing that you chase. When we were forced to really figure out what we were trying to do with our album, our music in general, and our lives broadly, it was obvious.” Emm attributes his newfound lyrical earnestness and immediacy more directly- “I just reached a point in my life where I wasn’t afraid and didn’t give a shit.”
Emm sings stories about loss, the passage of time, and the lessons and warnings of accumulated knowledge gleaned by someone who has spent an entire lifetime in music. “Real Life,” one of Mixed Emotion’s most bombastic songs, has Emm countering with the searching lyrics: “For a minute I was lost / I looked away/ I was looking for a home / I was looking for a role.” Emm, who by his own account has lived “an extremely unconventional life,” quit school at 15 to play guitar and skateboard, joined his favorite band and toured around the world at 19, and built a studio that hosted some of the area’s most notable underground acts in the mid 2000s, found the displacement both bittersweet and liberating. The lyrics that poured out of him reflect both earnest excitement and wisdom- they are about recognizing the sadness of a loss while still accepting that nothing ever really changes for good. On “Brothers” he sings “You’re just the same as you ever were / You fight and you don’t wonder why it makes no sense, I’m just the same as I ever been / But I’m the only one who doesn’t notice it”.
“This process,” Cohen says, referring to the agita of recording in the midst of the studio loss and its subsequent, sudden adulthood, “felt more like making a movie than an album.” Ultimately, the final step of mixing the album took them to an entirely different musical universe, the Miami-based studio of legendary mixer Jimmy Douglass (Timbaland, Aaliyah, Justin Timberlake, Television, Roxy Music) in whom the band found an unlikely kindred spirit. It was a journey that pushed the band to expand their sonic ambitions and away from the comfort of their previous experiences.
Perhaps that’s why Mixed Emotions feels so vivid—sometimes painful, sometimes transcendent—a very precise labor of love. It obscures and blurs the lines between synthetic and organic sounds, real and fake, happy and sad. It is the sound of stadium pop in small spaces. Before deciding on the name Mixed Emotions, Tanlines’ debut was called ;( (pronounced “winky-sad’), an emoticon of their own creation and the unofficial mascot of the band. A winky-sad is used to indicate something that is sad, but that you can still make a joke about. Musically, it is perhaps a happy-sounding song with melancholic lyrics. It’s the acknowledgment that most things are many things at once. It is Mixed Emotions ;(
But before there was Tanlines, there was just Eric and just Jesse, working in separate bands and projects until their paths crossed in 2008. Jesse’s former band had recorded at Eric’s studio; the two got along famously and struck up a friendship. “We have complementary qualities. It’s like a lot of duos, I think. We have different personalities, but we just innately understand each other,” says Cohen. The pair began making music together almost on a lark, deciding one night to remix a song for the band Telepathe, with whom Eric was working at the time, and put it on the internet that same evening for no reason beyond simply doing so. Suddenly, the song was making rounds on the web and being championed by various tastemakers. Their second song, “New Flowers,” written for one of Jesse’s friends’ art projects, had the same reaction, resulting in excellent UK label Young Turks (The XX, SBTRKT) emailing the band to release a single in 2009. “It was at that point that we thought, ‘Okay, this is a real project now,’” says Cohen.
Shows around the world followed, including amazing sets at the likes of The Guggenheim, The Whitney, the New Museum and more in their hometown of NYC (“Our genre was ‘Museum House’ for a while,” jokes Emm), and an opening slot on Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas’s solo tour in 2009. Effortlessly cool Parisian label Kitsune released a Tanlines single, while American label True Panther released the Tanlines’ first EP in 2010. They booked a three week tour in Europe, excited from the exciting things that had been happening to them, only to play some of the most disappointing shows of their career. “It was eye opening,” says Emm. “We realized we had a lot of work to do.” The inspiration for said work came in the form of albums the duo brought with them to listen to while driving through Europe. “We brought R.E.M. records, skate punk records from the 80’s, Born in the USA, stuff like that. Emm says, “listening to them, I became very aware of the lasting resonance of a good song. A good song transcends production trends. That’s what we were missing, and I wanted to start making songs that would have a life of their own.”
Upon returning from the European tour in the spring of 2010, Cohen and Emm returned home to New York to find an eviction notice for the recording studio that Eric and his brother (one-time trance producer Joshua Ryan) had built from the ground up eight years prior. The building had been sold and there were plans to convert it into a homeless shelter (...which was ultimately never built). For two years, the studio had been their figurative, and sometimes literal home (the spare bedroom often housed Jesse Cohen after late night sessions). With all of that change and uncertainty in mind, Tanlines began to work on their first proper album.
That album, Mixed Emotions, is a testament to the benefits and pitfalls of life’s changes, getting older, and being pushed out of one’s comfort zone. The band that was born out of a studio suddenly found themselves without a home base, forced to reevaluate themselves. Emm honed his voice, a confident and tranquil baritone, and focused on lyricism, something he had not done seriously in the past. Many of the songs on Mixed Emotions began as simple songs written on a guitar, with the band later adding their palette of electronic and organic sounds afterwards. “A great song can stick with someone for their whole life,” says Cohen as a means of explanation. “As a musician, you have the opportunity to create that, and that is the thing that you chase. When we were forced to really figure out what we were trying to do with our album, our music in general, and our lives broadly, it was obvious.” Emm attributes his newfound lyrical earnestness and immediacy more directly- “I just reached a point in my life where I wasn’t afraid and didn’t give a shit.”
Emm sings stories about loss, the passage of time, and the lessons and warnings of accumulated knowledge gleaned by someone who has spent an entire lifetime in music. “Real Life,” one of Mixed Emotion’s most bombastic songs, has Emm countering with the searching lyrics: “For a minute I was lost / I looked away/ I was looking for a home / I was looking for a role.” Emm, who by his own account has lived “an extremely unconventional life,” quit school at 15 to play guitar and skateboard, joined his favorite band and toured around the world at 19, and built a studio that hosted some of the area’s most notable underground acts in the mid 2000s, found the displacement both bittersweet and liberating. The lyrics that poured out of him reflect both earnest excitement and wisdom- they are about recognizing the sadness of a loss while still accepting that nothing ever really changes for good. On “Brothers” he sings “You’re just the same as you ever were / You fight and you don’t wonder why it makes no sense, I’m just the same as I ever been / But I’m the only one who doesn’t notice it”.
“This process,” Cohen says, referring to the agita of recording in the midst of the studio loss and its subsequent, sudden adulthood, “felt more like making a movie than an album.” Ultimately, the final step of mixing the album took them to an entirely different musical universe, the Miami-based studio of legendary mixer Jimmy Douglass (Timbaland, Aaliyah, Justin Timberlake, Television, Roxy Music) in whom the band found an unlikely kindred spirit. It was a journey that pushed the band to expand their sonic ambitions and away from the comfort of their previous experiences.
Perhaps that’s why Mixed Emotions feels so vivid—sometimes painful, sometimes transcendent—a very precise labor of love. It obscures and blurs the lines between synthetic and organic sounds, real and fake, happy and sad. It is the sound of stadium pop in small spaces. Before deciding on the name Mixed Emotions, Tanlines’ debut was called ;( (pronounced “winky-sad’), an emoticon of their own creation and the unofficial mascot of the band. A winky-sad is used to indicate something that is sad, but that you can still make a joke about. Musically, it is perhaps a happy-sounding song with melancholic lyrics. It’s the acknowledgment that most things are many things at once. It is Mixed Emotions ;(
Daedelus
Alfred Darlington isn't your average cookie-cutter musician. From how he looks (early Victorian Dandism), to how he makes music, to how he expresses himself and views the world, his is a very individual, a 'bespoke' outlook.
Alfred was born in Santa Monica in 1977 to an artist mother and psychologist father. Musical from very early on, as a child he was classically and jazz-trained in a number of instruments, but his interests were broad and varied – less a prodigy than a renaissance boy whose obsessions ranged from Greek legend to the mountains of Wales. As a 15 year old he finally persuaded his parents to take him to the Principality. Whilst in a YMCA in London he flipped the radio dial, found a pirate radio station and taped some UK rave and hardcore. "It was my first 'Eureka!' moment in music," he says.
Back in the US he joined local rock bands, jazz bands and ska bands, which he enjoyed but felt limited by,too. At home he was listening to Warp, Ninja and your harder electronic stuff. He started DJing out the more leftfield side of drum and bass and making his own rudimentary productions. They were meant to be drum & bass but they kept turning out different and from his outsider's experiments his own style was born. He chose the name Daedelus as he had a childhood obsession with invention, and what was he doing, after all, if not tinkering and fiddling and experimenting like the "gentleman inventors" of old?
In 1999 he started DJing on Dublab.com for his "Entropy Sessions" and began dropping in his own early demo productions. Carlos Nino (of ammoncontact) had the show after him and usually pushed Alfred out the studio as quickly as possible as he was not so into Daedelus' confrontational DJ style, but when he heard a tranquil Daedelus production he took, in typical Nino style, Daedelus under his considerable wing around the LA scene. Nino placed
Daedelus tracks on two influential compilations and then persuaded Plug Research to release his debut album, "Invention" in 2002, Remixers included Madlib, who later took Daedelus' accordian parts and used them on the Madvillain record, closely followed by his "The Household" EP on Prefuse 73's Eastern Developments label.
In 2003, he was booked to play a show in San Diego by Brian Crabtree and Peter Siegerstrong and they asked him to test out an early prototype of the Monome box. "It's a Non-traditional electronic instrument," Daedelus explains. "Basically it allows for massive improvisation." Since then Daedelus has continued to use this revolutionary box, bringing much genuine liveness to the sometimes static world of performed electronic/dance music.
In 2003 he did "The Weather" album with Busdriver and Radioinactive and the remix album "Rethinking the Weather" on Mush records (home of cLOUDDEAD, also on Big Dada/Ninja Tune). 2004 saw the release of "Of Snowdonia" on Plug Research, the album with which Daedelus says he first "felt true artistic confidence, finding a true voice. I was finally in the right zone."
There was certainly no let up in his creativity. Also in 2004 he released the concept album "A Gent Agent" on tiny German label Laboratory Instinct. The 2005 album "Exquisite Corpse" on Mush album featured the likes of TTC, Mike Ladd, MF Doom. Ninja signed Daedelus for UK/Europe (a relationship which has reached its full expression on "Love To Make Music To," his first album for the label worldwide and put together with the help of their team). In 2006 "Denies the Days Demise" came out, a record showcasing his love of Brazilian music. Last year he released his first live album, "Live At the Low End Theory," and "The Fairweather Friends EP". Later this year will see the release of his collaboration with his wife, Laura Darling, as Long Lost!
And while his reputation has grown internationally, his place in the LA scene has also solidified. The musician that many of the hottest names in the city turn to for everything from bass clarinet licks to advice on obscure electronics, Daedelus has worked extensively with Taz from Sa-Ra, the pair of them opening for the likes of DJ Assault, Justice and Two Live Crew as well as appearing in Erykah Badu's most recent video.
As for "Love To Make Music To," Daedelus says that this album is "the imaginary memory of a time that never was! It's my drug/love record, harking back to that time in the YMCA in London, when I first heard rave…"
Alfred was born in Santa Monica in 1977 to an artist mother and psychologist father. Musical from very early on, as a child he was classically and jazz-trained in a number of instruments, but his interests were broad and varied – less a prodigy than a renaissance boy whose obsessions ranged from Greek legend to the mountains of Wales. As a 15 year old he finally persuaded his parents to take him to the Principality. Whilst in a YMCA in London he flipped the radio dial, found a pirate radio station and taped some UK rave and hardcore. "It was my first 'Eureka!' moment in music," he says.
Back in the US he joined local rock bands, jazz bands and ska bands, which he enjoyed but felt limited by,too. At home he was listening to Warp, Ninja and your harder electronic stuff. He started DJing out the more leftfield side of drum and bass and making his own rudimentary productions. They were meant to be drum & bass but they kept turning out different and from his outsider's experiments his own style was born. He chose the name Daedelus as he had a childhood obsession with invention, and what was he doing, after all, if not tinkering and fiddling and experimenting like the "gentleman inventors" of old?
In 1999 he started DJing on Dublab.com for his "Entropy Sessions" and began dropping in his own early demo productions. Carlos Nino (of ammoncontact) had the show after him and usually pushed Alfred out the studio as quickly as possible as he was not so into Daedelus' confrontational DJ style, but when he heard a tranquil Daedelus production he took, in typical Nino style, Daedelus under his considerable wing around the LA scene. Nino placed
Daedelus tracks on two influential compilations and then persuaded Plug Research to release his debut album, "Invention" in 2002, Remixers included Madlib, who later took Daedelus' accordian parts and used them on the Madvillain record, closely followed by his "The Household" EP on Prefuse 73's Eastern Developments label.
In 2003, he was booked to play a show in San Diego by Brian Crabtree and Peter Siegerstrong and they asked him to test out an early prototype of the Monome box. "It's a Non-traditional electronic instrument," Daedelus explains. "Basically it allows for massive improvisation." Since then Daedelus has continued to use this revolutionary box, bringing much genuine liveness to the sometimes static world of performed electronic/dance music.
In 2003 he did "The Weather" album with Busdriver and Radioinactive and the remix album "Rethinking the Weather" on Mush records (home of cLOUDDEAD, also on Big Dada/Ninja Tune). 2004 saw the release of "Of Snowdonia" on Plug Research, the album with which Daedelus says he first "felt true artistic confidence, finding a true voice. I was finally in the right zone."
There was certainly no let up in his creativity. Also in 2004 he released the concept album "A Gent Agent" on tiny German label Laboratory Instinct. The 2005 album "Exquisite Corpse" on Mush album featured the likes of TTC, Mike Ladd, MF Doom. Ninja signed Daedelus for UK/Europe (a relationship which has reached its full expression on "Love To Make Music To," his first album for the label worldwide and put together with the help of their team). In 2006 "Denies the Days Demise" came out, a record showcasing his love of Brazilian music. Last year he released his first live album, "Live At the Low End Theory," and "The Fairweather Friends EP". Later this year will see the release of his collaboration with his wife, Laura Darling, as Long Lost!
And while his reputation has grown internationally, his place in the LA scene has also solidified. The musician that many of the hottest names in the city turn to for everything from bass clarinet licks to advice on obscure electronics, Daedelus has worked extensively with Taz from Sa-Ra, the pair of them opening for the likes of DJ Assault, Justice and Two Live Crew as well as appearing in Erykah Badu's most recent video.
As for "Love To Make Music To," Daedelus says that this album is "the imaginary memory of a time that never was! It's my drug/love record, harking back to that time in the YMCA in London, when I first heard rave…"
Venue Information:
Rumsey Playfield
69th St. at Fifth Ave
New York, NY, 10019 40.770516 -73.
http://summerstage.org
Rumsey Playfield
69th St. at Fifth Ave
New York, NY, 10019 40.770516 -73.
http://summerstage.org
