Wussy: March 30, 2016 Trans-Pecos

April 4, 2016
By

wussy-tarbell-2
[photos by Rich Tarbell]

How unlikely, really, that a band that represents its frontman’s second act (Chuck Cleaver was in Ass Ponys), that’s several albums into its career (Forever Sounds is the band’s sixth; Attica, its fifth, could be called its breakout), that comes from a city (Cincinnati) that nobody accuses of being a cultural or media hub, and that seems delightfully uninterested in the posing, PR machine and gimmicks that tend to attract notice, would end up at a career peak here in New York, on a Wednesday night, in Ridgewood, Queens, and a lot of people would show up.

Whether you think of Wussy as a band that defies odds or that is the picture of what hardworking, road-hardened rock musicianship ought to look like probably depends on some combination of your generation and your cynicism level. You don’t have to fall into one camp or the other to admire the 100-minute set on display here, which shot like a cannon from the oddly-lit but accommodating stage of Trans-Pecos last Wednesday. This site has flogged this band incessantly since 2010, and we relished the chance to come full circle and serve as promoters of the show. And, true to Cleaver’s observation when we caught them in 2015, they “suddenly” had a crowd.

It’d be hard to cherry pick all the specific things that were exceptional about this set, but one quick glance at the 100-minute run time should give an idea of where we’re headed. Unbothered by the pesky time limits you find at corporate venues, the band stretched into a set that spanned their career, from 2005’s Funeral Dress to their 2016 album, Forever Sounds. Rarely-played gems like the opener, “Little Paper Birds” from their self-titled 2009 record merged perfectly with regular rotation winners like “Pizza King” and new, shoegaze-leaning favorites like “Dropping Houses” and “Donny’s Death Scene.” We got one but not two encores, the first of which included a rare cover of New Order’s “Ceremony.”

If the setlist came as a welcome surprise, what was on usual display was the band’s hardworking, crowd-pleasing mojo, including Cleaver and Lisa Walker’s wry onstage banter. She was the one, after all, who refused to leave the stage for the pretend “encore break,” preferring instead to use it as an opportunity to play another song. And if that first encore, with “Ceremony” went well, it still wasn’t clear that the band were going to convince themselves to throw it back in for a second, but the crowd wouldn’t let them leave. Two more songs later, and well past midnight, the band finally closed things out for real, and everyone left happy. In the band’s fine tradition, they once again got more than their money’s worth.

nyctaper and I recorded this set with Schoeps MK4V microphones at the stage lip, Neumann KM150s capturing the room sound, and a soundboard feed from engineer David Fine. The sound quality s excellent. Enjoy!

Download the complete show: [FLAC/ALAC/MP3]

Stream the complete show (less banter tracks):

Wussy
2016-03-30
Trans-Pecos
Queens, NY USA

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

Schoeps MK4V>NBob Cables>PFA>Aeta PSP3 + Soundboard (engineer: David Fine) + Neumann KM150 (at SBD, ROC, PAS)>>Zoom F8>6x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (align, mix down, adjust levels)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, compression, tube effect)>Audacity 2.0.3 (track, amplify, balance, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks [Total Time 1:38:03]
01 Little Paper Birds
02 She’s Killed Hundreds
03 Gone
04 Donny’s Death Scene
05 [banter – Dangerbird]
06 Teenage Wasteland
07 [banter – Ed Ames]
08 In The Tall Weeds
09 Pulverized
10 Pizza King
11 Better Days
12 [banter – thanks]
13 Hello, I’m a Ghost
14 Sidewalk Sale
15 To The Lightning
16 [banter – Job’s Daughter’s Club]
17 Dropping Houses
18 Aliens In Our Midst [The Twinkeyz]
19 I Give You All
20 Beautiful
21 [encore break]
22 Majestic-12
23 [banter]
24 Ceremony [New Order]
25 Airborne
26 [second encore break]
27 Gene, I Dream
28 Rigor Mortis

SUPPORT Wussy: Website | Buy Forever Sounds | Bandcamp

Nick Millevoi’s Desertion Quartet: March 6, 2016 Palisades

March 31, 2016
By

Nick Millevoi's Desertion Quartet

You may be most familiar with Nick Millevoi as one-half of the two-pronged guitar offensive of the Solar Motel Band. But you may not know that Millevoi leads his own band of psych-jazz merchants, the Desertion Quartet, featuring Jamie Saft (frequent John Zorn collaborator), Ches Smith (whose extensive credits include Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog), and Johnny DeBlase (who also plays with Millevoi in Many Arms). Named for Millevoi’s upcoming album, Desertion, the group’s longform instrumentals oscillate between heavy riffage and and free-jazz freakouts. The Quartet opened up for the like-minded Sunwatchers earlier this month and treated the crowd to a preview of that album, which is due out May 20 on Shhpuma. “Desertion and the Arsonist’s Match” was recently written up by NPR and encompasses the breadth of the band’s range; but for my money it’s the eight-minute noise breadown “The Fire That Partially Destroyed City Hall” that’s most compelling. Either way, the players have the credentials and the songs to make Desertion one of this year’s most anticipated releases.

I recorded this set from the stage lip, combined with a board feed from Palisades FOH Ariel. The sound is outstanding. Enjoy!

Download the complete show: [MP3/FLAC]

Stream the complete show:

Nick Millevoi’s Desertion Quartet
2016-03-06
Palisades
Brooklyn, NY

Exclusive download hosted at nyctaper.com
Recorded and produced by Eric PH

Soundboard (engineer: Ariel) + AKG C480B/CK61 (stage lip) > Roland R-26 > 2xWAV (24/48) > Adobe Audition CC (align, mixdown, balance, compression, normalize, fades) > Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, exciter) > Audacity 2.0.5 (downsample, dither, tracking, tagging) > FLAC (16/44.1, level 8)

Tracks [31:19]
01. Where They Do Their Capers >
02. Desertion and the Arsonist’s Match
03. Just for a Moment, I Stood There in Silence
04. [banter]
05. The Fire That Partially Damaged City Hall

Support Nick Millevoi’s Desertion Quartet: Website | Preorder Desertion via Bandcamp

Heroes of Toolik: January 30, 2016 Union Hall

March 30, 2016
By

Heroes of Toolik
[photo by John Baumgartner]

Neil D. reports:

Placing Heroes of Toolik in the music pantheon is such a difficult task that it might be best just to list their collective past affiliations, as provided by the band’s website:

(Glenn Branca/Rhys Chatham’s Merry Band/Ben Neill’s Mainspring/John Myers’ Blastula/SEM Ensemble/New Music Consort/Virgil Moorefield Ensemble/Lounge Lizards/Arthur Russell/Television/Nona Hendryx/Gary Lucas/Washington Squares/New York Blues Project/The Waitresses/The Neon Boys/Uncle Bob NYC/ The Modern Lovers/David Johansen/Elliott Murphy/Arthur Russell (again)/Gary Lucas/Rhys Chatham (again)/Jenny Get Around/The Hillfillies)

If this brings to mind an unclassifiable collision of several flavors of avant-indie weirdness, that’s not a bad start. You can clearly hear a fair bit of Television influence — Billy Ficca’s distinctive drumming will have that effect on any band, though Arad Evans’ and Robert Poss’s guitar playing is in places sufficiently Verlaine/Lloydesque as well — but then there’s also Jennifer Coates’ only slightly country-inflected fiddle and vocals, and longtime Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks, and trombone of all horns, here courtesy of John Speck. It’s actually kind of remarkable how straightforwardly tuneful it all sounds, at least compared to a baseline of, say, The Scene Is Now. Writing up their previous appearance on NYCtaper, Acidjack described the result as “a brand of well-informed rock n’ roll that draws on these influences without over-complicating itself,” and I have nothing to argue with there. (Except possibly the lack of a preceding apostrophe on “n’,” about which AJ and I are going to have to have a talk.)

This was the headlining set at Union Hall from the show where I also recorded Antietam, and was captured with the same recording setup. Big thanks to Evans for permission to record, and for his patience (and yours) for the delay in getting this posted. You can buy Heroes of Toolik’s recordings here, and also find out about upcoming gigs — none listed at the moment, but they have a new CD in the works, so stay tuned.

Download the complete show: [MP3/FLAC]

Stream the complete show:

 

Video:

 

Heroes of Toolik
2016-01-30
Union Hall
Brooklyn, NY

Soundboard > Sony PCM-M10 > WAV (24/48) + Core Sound Low-Cost Binaural mics > Church Audio ugly battery box > Sony PCM-M10 > WAV (24/48) > Sound Studio (light EQ and mixing) > FLAC (16/44.1) > Tag > FLAC

Recorded and mastered by neil d

01 Bede
02 Something Like Night
03 Young Venus
04 Again
05 8 Mile
06 Aquarium School
07 Crazy Doll
08 Perfect

Support Heroes of Toolik by buying music from their website.

Chuck Johnson Band: March 26, 2016 Three Lobed Sweet Sixteen Spectacular, King’s (Raleigh, NC)

March 29, 2016
By

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Chuck Johnson has been on this site numerous times, most recently for his work supporting Blood Moon Boulder last year at Union Pool. With his newest album, Velvet Arc, Johnson decided to go with a full band, which is a departure from his recent solo guitar work, but not an overall catalog that stretches back to various NC-based bands (Shark Quest, Idyll Swords, etc.). What emerges on the record is a bottom-heavy, bluesier strain of tunes that makes you long to see them live.

This very special performance at King’s in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of ten separate sets in honor of the sixteenth anniversary of Three Lobed Recordings, was a rare, one-off appearance of Johnson performing these songs (plus “Florets,” from Johnson’s soundtrack work) with a full band. Rather than the West Coast-based band that recorded Velvet Arc, Johnson collaborated with longtime NC compatriots, including Mike Gangloff and Nathan Bowles (of Pelt and numerous other projects), Bob Wall, and Nathan Golub. Johnson describes the set as “loose” in his intro, but that may be a bit of modesty, as these longtime players gelled from the get-go on “Florets” before delving into Velvet Arc‘s leadoff track, “As I Stand Counting.” You may have heard Chuck Johnson before, but you’ve never heard him quite like this. With the full complement of musicians on fiddle and additional guitars, we were able to hear Velvet Arc’s various turns at American experimentalism as they were meant to be played.

Johnson noted, toward the end of the set, that Raleigh was where he was born, and the day and night’s entire slate of performances, culled from artists who have been all over the Three Lobed roster during the past 16 years, felt like a homecoming, with the out-of-towners joining and re-joining locals who have touched their lives over the decades. Three Lobed is responsible for some of Johnson’s finest releases, including Crows In the Basilica, plus earlier CDs of Idyll Swords, and this set (like many during the event) acted as both a bit of a thank-you as well as a taste of what’s yet to come on this small label whose influence has always outstripped its low-key style.

I recorded this set with the benefit of a full 8 tracks, including audience microphones, onstage microphones, and several feeds of onstage instruments, courtesy of King’s engineer Brad. The sound quality is outstanding. Enjoy!

Chuck plays a very special solo set tonight in New York along with Lee Ranaldo (solo acoustic) and Ancient Oceans at Trans-Pecos. Get tickets here.

Download the complete show: [MP3/FLAC/Apple Lossless]

Stream and download the complete show on our bandcamp page:

Chuck Johnson Band
2016-03-26
Three Lobed Sweet Sixteen Spectacular
King’s
Raleigh, NC USA

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

4x Soundboard channels (engineer: Brad Womack) + MBHO 603a/KA200N (FOB, DFC, PAS) + Schoeps MK22 (onstage, ORTF, DFC)>KC5>CMC6>Aeta PSP3 >> Zoom F8>8x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (align, mix down, compression)>Izotope Ozone 5 (EQ, effects)>Audacity 2.0.3 (track, amplify, balance, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 [intro]
02 Florets
03 [tuning]
04 As I Stand Counting
05 Roadside Auspice
06 Middle Water
07 [banter]
08 Anamet
09 [banter2]
10 Velvet Arc

Band:
Chuck Johnson
Mike Gangloff
Nathan Bowles
Bob Wall
Nathan Golub

Support Chuck Johnson: Visit his website | Buy Velvet Arc | Buy his Three Lobed releases.

Earthless: March 18, 2016 Mercury Lounge

March 28, 2016
By

Screen Shot 2016-03-19 at 1.37.08 PM
[photos of the Boston show by Elizabeth Gohr, from Earthless’ Instagram page]

It seems more than apropos that the Twitter handle of the San Diego band Earthless is “@earthlessrips”. ‘Cause that is, indeed, what they’re gonna do when you see them onstage during one of their relatively infrequent East Coast trips. During this run, they hit both Rough Trade NYC and the Mercury Lounge the following night. We caught the latter show, on a late Friday, and it was a doozy. For over an hour the band shredded through just three songs, two of which hailed from their 2013 LP From the Ages. While their records are cult favorites in their own right, the live show is the right place to experience these guys, as Mario Rubalcaba (drums), Isaiah Mitchell (guitar) and Mike Eginton (bass) tearing it up onstage is about as ideal of a fist-pumping, beer-swigging, rock n’ roll moment as you can have with a band that you aren’t embarrassed to like. This is rock music at is elemental, instrumental best, loud, pure and stacked with riffs. Somebody is bound to throw around the term “stoner rock” at some point or another, and who can blame ’em, but this is music that can go with almost any drug (or none at all, of course). After a short break, the band closed this show with a cover (with vocals, no less!) — a true-to-the-original rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.” It wasn’t the twenty-minute thrashers that came before it, for sure, but the cover was perfect — one last time to let Earthless remind us why they’re a must-see when they’re out this way.

I recorded this set with Schoeps MK41V microphones and a direct feed of Mercury engineer Alex Beaulieu’s live mix. The sound quality is outstanding. Enjoy!

Download the complete set: [MP3/FLAC]

Stream and download the complete set on our bandcamp page:

Earthless
2016-03-18
Mercury Lounge
New York, NY USA

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

Schoeps MK41V (ROC, PAS) + Soundboard (engineer: Alex Beaulieu)>>Zoom F8>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (align, mix down, adjust balance
of SBD, adjust levels)>Izotope Ozone 5 (effects, EQ)>Audacity 2.0.5 (track, amplify, balance, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 Uluru Rock
02 Violence of the Red Sea
03 Sonic Prayer
04 [encore break]
05 Foxy Lady [Jimi Hendrix]

Support Earthless: Facebook | Buy their records from Tee Pee Records

Chris Forsyth & the Solar Motel Band: March 19, 2016 Trans-Pecos

March 24, 2016
By

DSC_0098
[photos by Joe Lops]

Chris Forsyth extended a recent run of excellent work with The Rarity of Experience, a double LP that earned plaudits from Pitchfork to The New York Times. Much has been made of the record’s unequivocal commitment to out-and-out riffage, but that has always been Forsyth’s MO with the Solar Motel Band. The side of him that produced The Island, the delicate, mellowed out collaboration with Koen Holtkamp, is still out there, but when he takes the stage with this band, expect an out and out rock show.

That’s what we got at this NYCTaper-sponsored show at Trans-Pecos, which represented the formal NY album release party for the record.  Things kicked into high gear immediately with “High Castle Rock” from the new record, followed by its appropriately-named Anthems I and II, and then its title track. Our only detour to Forsyth’s earlier work came in the form of “The Ballad of Freer Hollow” from 2014’s Intensity Ghost, which nestled in well with the extended two-part jams “Anthem” and “The Rarity of Experience” (notable also for adding vocals to the mix). In a nod to the band who inspired so much of improvisational guitar music (not to mention the practice of fan-based live concert recording), Forsyth and crew gave us their take on the Dead’s “Cold Rain and Snow.” It was a worthwhile reminder that while Forsyth’s name is front and center in the proceedings, part of what makes these performances special is the interplay among a very, very talented group of band members. Forsyth’s delivery wouldn’t be what it is without bassist Peter Kerlin and drummer Ray Kubian doing more than just making a backbeat, nor fellow guitarist Nick Millevoi providing the other half of the guitar attack. You don’t get a sound this all-encompassing with a “solo” artist and some guys; this is truly a band. And, for those of you who missed them this time around, head to Union Pool on May 28, where you can catch the band opening for Heron Oblivion.

I recorded this set with a pair of Schoeps MK22 microphones at the stage lip, another pair of Schoeps MK4V back by the soundboard, and a direct soundboard feed of house engineer Ned’s mix. The sound quality is outstanding, and a perfect representation of the enormity of the Solar Motel Band’s sound. Enjoy!

Download the complete set from its page on the Live Music Archive: [FLAC] | [MP3]

Stream the complete set: 

Chris Forsyth & the Solar Motel Band
2016-03-19
Trans-Pecos
Queens, NY USA

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

Schoeps MK22 (stage lip, DFC, ORTF)>Nbob Cables>PFA>Aeta PSP3 + Soundboard (engineer: Ned) + Schoeps MK4V (at SBD, ROC, PAS)>>Zoom
F8>2x24bit/48kHz WAV>Adobe Audition CS 5.5 (align, mix down, adjust balance of SBD, compress SBD, adjust levels)>Izotope Ozone 5 (effects, EQ)
>Audacity 2.0.3 (track, amplify, balance, downsample, dither)>FLAC ( level 8 )

Tracks
01 High Castle Rock
02 Anthem I
03 Anthem II
04 The Rarity of Experience pt. 1
05 The Rarity of Experience pt. 2
06 The Ballad of Freer Hollow
07 [banter]
08 The First Ten Minutes of Cocksucker Blues
09 Cold Rain and Snow [Grateful Dead]
10 [banter2]
11 Boston Street Lullaby

If you enjoyed this recording, please visit his website and buy The Rarity of Experience from No Quarter Records.

DSC_0099

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