The Phantom Family Halo: April 30, 2012 Knitting Factory – FLAC and MP3 Downloads + Streaming Songs

May 17, 2012
By


[Photos by acidjack]

After catching them back in January on the cusp of the release of their latest record, When I Fall Out, back in January, I relished the chance to catch The Phantom Family Halo after a few more months of touring on the record. Opening for the legendary Japanese psych-rock band Acid Mothers Temple (that recording [HERE]), the band took the Knitting Factory stage with a poise and confidence equal to that veteran band. The combination of a cool light show and a clean house mix gave a fervent power and energy to the most-new material on offer. “Vital Energy” was not only the name of one of the best songs of the night; it was an accurate descriptor for the band’s entire performance that night. As I did back in January, I continued to marvel at how the band could switch gears between a more psychedelic, exploratory style and a harder, punkish bite, even within the same song. Much of the credit for that goes to frontman Dominic Cipolla, whose vocals are angrier and more aggressive, and kept higher in the mix, than those of many of the band’s genre contemporaries, giving them a harder edge. This show was a step forward all around from the January show, and makes for the ideal introduction to this band. The only thing better would be seeing them for yourself.

I recorded this set in the same manner as the Acid Mothers Temple recording, with AKG large diaphragm microphones. I preferred the house mix and the mics’ performance on this set over the AMT set, and think that this was the best recording of the night.  Enjoy!

Stream “Vital Energy”
[audio:https://www.nyctaper.com/P1106PFHalo0212/03 Vital Energy.mp3]

Stream “Broken By the Way”
[audio:https://www.nyctaper.com/P1106PFHalo0212/09%20Broken%20By%20the%20Way.mp3]

Direct download of MP3 files [HERE] | Direct Download of the FLAC files [HERE]

Follow acidjack on twitter

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request.

 

The Phantom Family Halo
2012-04-30
Knitting Factory
Brooklyn, NY USA

Exclusive download hosted at NYCTaper.com
Recorded and produced by acidjack

AKG C 414 B-XLS (cardiod, slightly ROC, at SBD, 7.5ft, POS)>Aerco MP-2 + Soundboard >> Edirol R-44 [Oade Concert Mod]>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (mixdown)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ)>Audacity (set fades, tracking, additional EQ, amplify and balance)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 [intro music]
02 Sun Behind the Sun
03 Vital Energy
04 Light Year Girl
05 White Hot Gun
06 [tuning]
07 Dirty Blade
08 Masters of the Universe
09 Broken By the Way

If you enjoyed this recording, PLEASE SUPPORT The Phantom Family Halo, like them on Facebook, and order When I Fall Out and their other official releases from Knitting Factory Records [HERE]

Liturgy: May 4, 2012 St. Vitus – FLAC and MP3 Downloads + Streaming Song

May 15, 2012
By


[Photos by Robert Kidd. Check out more of his excellent work [HERE]]

The band Liturgy are no strangers to controversy. And given the band’s latest change in sonic direction, the Brooklyn “transcendental black metal” band can count on more of it.

As with artists like Horseback, Liturgy, and particularly frontman and founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, refuse to hew to genre conventions, instead using black metal as the underpinning for their aesthetic while engaging in formal experimentation. Perhaps because of this, Liturgy find themselves the only metal band playing the Pitchfork Festival, the only metal band on Thrill Jockey, and – it can’t be avoided – the only black metal band that has ever appeared on this site. Sharing a stage with Vampire Weekend and sharing a label with bands like Tortoise and Matmos is apparently not much of a cred booster in the black metal scene. But political bullshit aside, just throw the band’s last record, Aesthetica, on your turntable or iThing, and dare to say it isn’t stunning.

Of course, one of the defining characteristics of Aesthetica was the hyperkinetic drumming of Greg Fox (who took the stage with Oneida at our 5th Anniversary Concert on Saturday, and also appeared at the Notekillers’ Jonathan Toubin benefit we covered awhile back). In September of 2011, Fox announced an amicable split from the band so that he could pursue other projects, including his solo effort GDFX and his new band Guardian Alien. One might have expected Liturgy – especially being a metal band and all – to have moved to replace Fox with a new drummer. Hunt-Hendrix didn’t. Indeed, what was once a four-piece now consists of Hunt-Hendrix, guitarist Bernard Gann, and a Macbook Pro. In case you weren’t taking notes, I mentioned that this was a band that defies convention. But what about the music itself?

As I tweeted at the time, “New @LITVRGY is genre-defying, uncomfortable-making next wave shit. You may hate but you will respect.” Listening to this recording of the show, I think that is still accurate. If you’re the type of person that likes things in tidy boxes, you’ll turn this off the second the beyond-humanly-fast drum machine beats kick in at the start of  “Pagan Dawn” from 2009’s Renihilation. What you are hearing is further from convention than the band already was, and what you’re hearing bears more weird similarity to Sleigh Bells (who the band recently toured with) than anything even remotely styled “metal” that you’ve heard before. Some people won’t be able to get past that.

But if you stick around, and set aside your preconceptions, what you hear is a brash move that could pay big dividends. First of all, the ultrafast beats make the music, if possible, even more intense than it already was, and it still rocks. Aesthetica’s “Generation”, in particular, worked well in the new format, with the beats integrating well with the dual guitar assault of Hunt-Hendrix and Gann. The crowd at the metal-friendly Greenpoint venue St. Vitus – one of the overall best venues I have been to in NYC, incidentally – seemed to agree. The band played only four songs, each a fairly long composition, with three Aesthetica tracks joining “Pagan Dawn”. In my view, this set only hinted at the new setup’s potential; once the band creates new material actually designed for this arrangement, I think they are capable of blowing the boundaries wide open. With several big festival slots on the way (besides Pitchfork, the band are also playing the more metal-oriented Orion Festival in June) plenty of fans of a variety of genres will get a chance to hear this daring new sound. I predict that the open-minded will be rewarded.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK41 microphones and a soundboard feed by Nick, the house engineer of St. Vitus. Not only is this venue aesthetically spot-on (and with a great bar), but it is also one of the city’s best-sounding. I look forward to coming back.

Stream “Generation”
[audio:https://www.nyctaper.com/L5005Liturgy2201/03 Generation.mp3]

Direct download of MP3 files [HERE] | Direct Download of the FLAC files [HERE]

Follow acidjack on Twitter

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request.

Liturgy
2012-05-04
St. Vitus
Brooklyn, NY USA

Exclusive download hosted at NYCTaper.com
Recorded and produced by acidjack

Schoeps MK41>CMC6>EAA PSP-2 + Soundboard >> Edirol R-44 [Oade Concert Mod]>Audition (align, mixdown)>Audacity (set fades, tracking, amplify and balance, downsample to 16/44.1)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 Pagan Dawn
02 High Gold
03 Generation
04 Sun of Light

If you enjoyed this recording, PLEASE SUPPORT Liturgy, like them on Facebook, see them on tour this summer, and buy their records directly from Thrill Jockey [HERE]. 

Cymbals Eat Guitars: April 3, 2012 Bowery Ballroom – FLAC and MP3 Downloads + Streaming Song

May 14, 2012
By


[Photos by acidjack]

We have featured Cymbals Eat Guitars several times on this site (most recently, a headlining Bowery show from last year), and we have always found their willingness to take risks refreshing. Not content to simply rework the more poppy sound of their breakout album, Why There Are Mountains, the band remain unafraid to take things in a more caustic direction. This Bowery Ballroom show found the band opening for Cursive (which we recorded, and will post if the band gets back to us about approval…), but the packed house for their set suggested equal fervor for these Staten Island natives.  The set focused on material from their latest record, Lenses Alien, but this also included some earlier favorites like “Indiana” and of course, “And the Hazy Sea”.

We recorded this set with a four-mic setup, but I thought the Sennheiser MKH-8040 source was sufficiently good to stand on its own.  We hope you agree. Enjoy!

Stream “And the Hazy Sea”
[audio:https://www.nyctaper.com/C2140CEG2990/06 And the Hazy Sea.mp3]

Direct download of MP3 files [HERE] | Direct Download of FLAC files [HERE]

Follow acidjack on Twitter

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request.

Cymbals Eat Guitars
2012-04-03
Bowery Ballroom
New York, NY USA

Recorded by nyctaper and acidjack
Produced by acidjack

Sennheiser MKH-8040>Edirol R-44 [Oade Concert Mod]>24bit/48kHz WAV>Audacity (set fades, tracking, EQ, amplify and balance, downsample)>FLAC (level 8 )

Tracks
01 Definite Darkness
02 Another Tunguska
03 Rifle Eyesight
04 [unknown]
05 Indiana
06 And the Hazy Sea
07 [unknown]
08 Shore Points

If you enjoyed this recording, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Cymbals Eat Guitars, visit their website, visit their MySpace page, and purchase Lenses Alien and their other records from the links at their web store [HERE].

NYCTaper 5th Anniversary Show! Saturday May 12 at 285 Kent with Oneida and Special Guests

May 10, 2012
By

Five years ago I established this site with a few goals in mind — that my recordings would be the centerpiece in posts that would profile the artists and would encourage people who read the site and download the music to support the artists. I did not however envision that the site would grow to the extent it has reached today. NYCTaper is now a group of four tapers with countless other contributors. The site continues to pursue the original goals, but with the help of our contributors, our readers and our many friends in the music community, we have become something more. With an enormous amount of help from artists, promoters, venues, booking agents, blogs, and others in the music world, taping has been removed from the shadows and the live recording of artists is now seen as a powerful tool to enhance the relationship between fans and artists. When bands now seek to “be on NYCTaper”, its understood that this is a good thing for an artist. And for us here at NYCTaper, its a humbling experience to realize that our hard work and good intentions have made this site work for a community of music performers and music lovers. We hope to keep doing this and to continue to grow well into the future.

We are celebrating this milestone with a concert curated by one of the artists that represents everything we love in music. Oneida is a band that is truly unique. The band is comprised of five incredibly talented musicians who are untethered by the bounds of conventional music genres and completely free of the traps of the music industry. They have been featured on NYCTaper eleven times (plus two solo projects) and last year we worked with them to offer recordings of their studio Ocropolis sessions to raise charitable contributions for Japanese earthquake relief.

Oneida will headline the show on Saturday, and will be joined onstage by special guests Greg Fox (Guardian Alien / GDFX) and James McNew (Yo La Tengo / Dump). The opening bands for the night are Sightings and Prince Rupert’s Drops.

Here are the details:
NYCTaper 5th Anniversary Concert
285 Kent (google map)
Brooklyn NY
Doors are at 8pm
Admission is $10
All ages are welcome

Advance Tickets are available at Ticketfly [HERE]

Tell us that you are coming by joining the Facebook Invite Page for this event [HERE]

Crystal Stilts: May 5, 2012 285 Kent + April 14, 2012 Rock N Roll Hotel Washington DC – Flac and MP3 Downloads and Streaming Song

May 10, 2012
By


[photo by Jeff Lagasca]

The show on Saturday night at 285 Kent was headlined by another one of this site’s favorite bands and one that we’ve followed for all of our five years. We first saw Crystal Stilts back in 2008, and over the last few years our recordings of them have been featured on the site six previous times from a large variety of venues. After a bit of a hiatus, the band returned in 2011 with a superb new album In Love with Oblivion (Slumberland) and a new EP Radiant Door (Sacred Bones Records), both of which cemented their position as one of best post-punk garage bands around. The style remains consistent — Brad Hargett’s heavily reverbed vocals backed by the sixties influenced guitar work of founder JB Townsend and the adventurous keyboards of Kyle Forester. Their show at 285 Kent is one of the strongest we’ve seen them play to date. The set was not simply the new album, but a full slate of Stilts material, a brand new song and a well-conceived Gun Club cover. The band ended the set with a spacey and stretched-out version of “Prometheus” before returning for well-deserved encore. We are streaming “Shake the Shackles”, a 2010 single that also appears on Oblivion. Crystal Stilts will perform again locally, this time next door to 285 at Glasslands on June 17 for the Sacred Bones Records Northside Festival showcase.

Additionally, for this post we are offering a bonus download of the Crystal Stilts live in Washington DC, a show recorded in April by friend of the site Kubacheck at the Rock N’ Roll Hotel. The show features a setlist quite different from the 285 set with some deep cuts along with more of the new album.

I recorded the 285 set in the same manner as the Woods set and the sound quality is excellent. The Washington show was recorded by Kubacheck with MBHO microphones and a board feed and was mixed by acidjack. The placement of the microphones resulted in a large dose of crowd chatter which has been alleviated by mixing the board feed at a greater percentage. The sound quality of that set is also excellent. Enjoy!

Stream “Shake the Shackles” from 285 Kent:
[audio:https://www.nyctaper.com/C1207CrystalStilts2220/06.%20Shake%20the%20Shackles.mp3]

Direct download of complete shows in MP3 files:
285 Kent (HERE)
Washington DC (HERE)

Download the Complete shows in FLAC:
285 Kent [HERE]
Washington DC [HERE]

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request.

Crystal Stilts
2012-05-05
285 Kent
Brooklyn, NY USA

Digital Master Recording
Soundboard + Audience Matrix

Soundboard + Sennheiser MKH-8040s > Edirol R-44 (Oade Concert Mod) > 24bit 48kHz wav file > Soundforge (level adjustments, set fades, downsample) > CDWave 1.95 > (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3 and Tagging via Foobar)

Recorded and Produced
by nyctaper
2012-05-08

Setlist:
[Total Time 50:16]
01 Dark Eyes
02 Crystal Stilts
03 Flying Into the Sun
04 [new song]
05 Verdant Gaze
06 Shake the Shackles
07 [banter]
08 Love Is a Wave
09 New Fun
10 For The Love of Ivy
11 Prometheus At Large
12 [encore break]
13 Converging in the Quiet

*******************

Crystal Stilts
2012-04-14
Rock N’ Roll Hotel
Washington, DC USA

Exclusive download hosted at NYCTaper.com

Recorded by kubacheck
Produced by acidjack and nyctaper

MBHO 603a (cardiod, FOB, 8 ft)>Sound Devices MP2>Roland R05 + Soundboard>Edirol R09 >>> 2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Audacity (align, time adjust, set fades, amplify and balance, downsample to 16/44.1)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 Shattered Shine
02 Still As The Night
03 The Dazzled
04 Invisible City
05 [new song]
06 Shake The Shackles
07 Half A Moon
08 Converging in the Quiet
09 Dark Eyes
10 Love Is A Wave
11 [encore break]
12 Sugarbaby
13 Prometheus at Large

If you download these recordings from nyctaper, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT Crystal Stilts, visit their website and purchase In Love With Oblivion from Slumberland Records [HERE] and the Radiant Door EP from Sacred Bones Records [HERE].

This Is the Kit: April 18, 2012 Mercury Lounge – FLAC and MP3 Downloads + Streaming Songs

May 8, 2012
By


[Not very good iPhone photo by acidjack]

For obvious reasons, we end up promoting a lot of NYC-based bands on this site. But it is always a rare treat to get a chance to share a recording by a band from overseas, particularly one that is new to us. This Is the Kit is a Paris and Bristol, UK-based project of vocalist/guitarist/banjo player Kate Stables that produces a grown-up brand of acoustic, blues-influenced rock of timeless beauty and grace – think of Cowboy Junkies or Sharon Van Etten as a reference point. Her music isn’t gimmicky or loud, brash or lo-fi.  This is a type of band that you want to listen to, try and focus on what’s being said through the hush (if you’re lucky, and there is, in fact a hush). And sure, your Dad might dig it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t – a great song is a great song, no?

A Mercury Lounge late show can often be a challenge to a band, after the bar has been open a few hours and two other bands have already done their thing. This Is the Kit were opening for Plants and Animals, who themselves had a fairly rowdy crowd. Hearing the opening notes of the spare, magnificent banjo intro of “Easy Pickings”, I feared for the worst. But a funny thing happened- the crowd paid attention, throughout a set that showcased several of the band’s numbers from Wriggle Out the Restless, a record originally released on the UK imprint Brassland and about to be re-released stateside (you can grab it for a steal on bandcamp right now for $3 or more… I suggest more). Out of a uniformly excellent set, it’s hard to pick favorites, but I was partial to the bluesy “rocker” of the group, “Earthquake”, the quiet leadoff track “Easy Pickings”, and the frenetic cross-rhythms of “Spinney” (currently the free track on the bandcamp page). Each of the songs in this set felt distinct, and the band managed to show a lot of different sides during this short opening performance. The next time they’re headlining, I’m there.

I recorded this set in the same manner as the Plants and Animals recording, but the quality of both the house mix and soundboard feed were better for this performance. Given the quiet nature of the set, this recording favors the soundboard feed, and the result is an outstanding and crisp recording.  Enjoy!

Stream “Earthquake”
[audio:https://www.nyctaper.com/T1840ThisKit2012/Earthquake.mp3]

Stream “Spinney”
[audio:https://www.nyctaper.com/T1840ThisKit2012/Spinney.mp3]

Direct download of MP3 files [HERE] |  Direct Download of FLAC files [HERE]

Follow acidjack on twitter

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense.  The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request.

This Is the Kit
2012-04-18
Mercury Lounge
New York, NY USA

Exclusive download hosted at nyctaper.com
Recorded and produced by acidjack

Soundboard + Schoeps MK41>CMC6 >> Edirol R-44 [Oade Concert Mod]>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS5.5 (align, mixdown, balance)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, harmonic exciter (gentle tube), imaging (add width)>Audacity (set fades, tracking, amplify and balance, downsample)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 Easy Pickings
02 White Ash Cut
03 Vitamins
04 Earthquake
05 Two Wooden Spoons
06 [banter]
07 See Here
08 [banter]
09 Misunderstanding
10 Spinney
11 Bashed Out

If you enjoyed this recording, please support This Is the Kit, like them on Facebook, and visit their bandcamp page to buy Wriggle Out the Restless.

SUPPORT NYCTaper




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