|
MAUM PRESENTS: WHY? (w/ Andy Broder + Matt Erickson of FOG) // AU //SERENGETTI & POLYPHONIC
Wednesday Oct 28, 2009 8:00 PM
ANTICON Records WHY? continue their calculated lo-fi blitzkrieg on that self-made jangle-rap, indie pop ’n’ roll genre. This tour they're inducting a pair of venerable big guns into the band: Fog mastermind Andrew Broder and bassist Mark “Bear” Erickson. Throwing their samplers to the wind (mostly), WHY? recorded live as a five-piece and are touring as the same.
AU (pronounced "Ay-you") is the work of multi-instrumentalist Luke Wyland. Begun while finishing up his degree from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, then moved across the US to Portland, OR. Currently a full time duo with Dana Valatka on drums (Jackie-O-Motherfucker, Mustaphamond), it is a loosely defined amalgam of players that can swell to double digit numbers with full choir in tow and sees some of Portland's finest lending a helping hand.
This show is for ages 18+. Tickets for this show are $12. Doors at 8pm.
WHY? (w/ Andy Broder + Matt Erickson of FOG) | 8:00 PM
 Yoni Wolf had been wearing the same Walnut Hills High off-white/yellow/brownish gym shirt all year with nary a wash. He'd discovered an abandoned 4-track in the basement of his father's synagogue the summer before,now his chubby freshman cheeks belied a secret love for home recording and bad poetry (a love not extended to jumping jacks and the infamous mile). Mom was an art book editor, Dad was a rabbi, Cincinnati was home.
That lanky grunge kid doing push-ups at the end of the line...that was Doug.
Doug McDiarmid was born in 1977, two years before Yoni, at Cincinnati's Christ Hospital. Since then he's been good at anything he does. His parents were both French teachers, and archetypical of the fair-weather Protestant/liberal-arts-supporting/rationalist movement in child rearing. Thus, Doug attended church occasionally, learned piano in kindergarten, and happily took to "alternative music" when he realized his lack of virtuosic masturbatory shredding ability on the guitar. He doesn't remember being in P.E. with Yoni, but Yoni remembers his wicked skater cut.
Josiah Wolf graduated the same year as Doug, but while Doug was growing out his hair in Steve Miller cover bands, Josiah was beating the skins in Concert Band (he is, to this day a band dork,those scars don't ever heal). He'd been playing drums since the 4th grade, since his father sat him down on the synagogue stool and passed down the sacred sticks. Josiah played at worship service as a child, invented something called "chill metal" in his teens, and fell in love with Thelonious Monk on his way to the University of Cincinnati music conservatory. Matt Meldon lived on Ohio Street near the University, in a little apartment adorned with batik wall tapestries. He too was born and raised in Queen City, and was now studying jazz alongside the elder Wolf brother.
For obvious reasons, he had a ponytail.
Childhood was relatively simple: Pops worked and Ma watched Sis, while Matt listened to Jimi. He smashed his first guitar because it was too hard to play; today he shreds with masturbatory virtuosity. Matt was the last of the four to make the move out to California.
Such are the humble and endearingly geeky beginnings of what we now know as WHY?,a folk-pop, indie-hop, sometimes-mustachioed, psych-rock quartet that operates out of the Oakland Bay Area under the bold banner of the anticon collective.
At the band's helm is Yoni (all growed up), who,with his candytime-dissonant, singsong-suicide style,has recorded under the name "why?" for the best part of six years. After meeting fellow anticon tribesman Adam "doseone" Drucker in art school and subsequently dropping out, Yoni developed his signature sound over several projects: the lo-fi thought-rap of Greenthink (with doseone), the critically lauded dreamscape crunch of cLOUDDEAD (with dose and anticon DJ/producer odd nosdam), and the hushed bedroom aesthetic of Reaching Quiet (with nosdam).
Yoni left the Midwest in 2001, went solo for two why? EPs and one brilliant full-length (2003's oaklandazulasylum), and now he's found a permanent home in his Berkeley bandmates.
Yoni writes and sings mainly, but he's also known to dance, play any instrument he can get his hands on (piano, keyboard, guitar, bass, drums, harmonica), sample, and occasionally beat his chest like a gorilla.
Doug (or "Death Metal Dug," as the others prefer) is the utility man, maneuvering such heavy machinery as pianos, guitars, samplers and turntables. Josiah plays drums, teaches drums to little kids, eats drums for breakfast, and sleeps drums at night. Driven by brotherly competition, he also plays anything that Yoni plays.
Matt sticks to his guitars. Despite Yoni's proclivity for rampant collaboration (he's worked with Hood, Fog, DJ Krush, Boom Bip, Sole, Dept. of Eagles, and 13+God), WHY? is, and will continue to be, his first love.
more >>> |
AU | 8:00 PM
It's flanked at one of its ends by the blissful bombast of a 20-plus person vocal chorus, and concludes some forty minutes later in the hushed strains of a wistful lullaby. Between these disparate bookends lies the staggering aesthetic expanse ofVerbs-the sophomore record from acclaimed Portland, OR. experimental pop collective AU-which, in its swirling depths and subtleties, promises to be one of this year's most satisfying surprises.
In the year's time since last leaving off with his self-titled, beautifully accomplished debut, AU (pronounced 'ay you') architect Luke Wyland has made tremendous strides beyond the warmly retiring sensibilities that marked so much of AU-stepping (wisely) outward, and into the less insular confines of community. In practical terms, this mostly meant acquiring a proper band-the core of which consisting of mutual multi-instrumentalists Johnathan Sielaff and Mark Kaylor-but in a vaguer sense, it meant opening up to Portland's considerable creative resources. Consequently, Verbs is padded out with contributions from nearly thirty collaborators, a list which includes featured vocalists Sarah Winchester (track 6; of Team Love recording artists A Weather) and Becky Dawson (tracks 2 and 4; of Ah Holly Fam'ly, Saw Whet), as well as members of Yellow Swans, Parenthetical Girls, and Evolutionary Jass Band, among many others-inadvertently resulting in a strange and singular snapshot of a very particular corner of the city's famously sprawling musical community.
The resulting record-recorded over three days at Portland's Type Foundry Studios and finished over a subsequent two-month period in Wyland's own attic studio-seamlessly segues through new and unlikely ecstatic extremes with an arresting economy. Breakout Pop jams like "RR vs. D" rub shoulders comfortably with retreating meditations ("Two Seasons", "Summer Heat")-the record's several distinct movements working at once with more autonomy and cohesion-with arrangements that stretch in longhand across the album's length.
Verbs is the elated realization of those many asymmetrical pop diamonds that shone so brightly throughout AU's artful debut (whose warm, Appalachia-informed gems found many favorable comparisons to the far-reaching likes of Arnold Dreyblatt, Animal Collective, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Grizzly Bear)-its many swift and unexpected evolutions shepherded confidently by Wyland's competent, classically-trained hand. As surprising as it is immediate, Verbs is infused with all of the earnest and palpable joy of its creation-the delightfully enveloping whole of which demands to be heard.
-Zac Pennington
more >>> |
SERENGETI & POLYPHINIC | 8:00 PM
 Rapper Serengeti and producer Polyphonic are Illinois natives with three very distinct upbringings. While Polyphonic, born Will Freyman, was raised amongst corn fields and college kids in bucolic Champaign, David Cohn (Serengeti) experienced two separate childhoods within the city of Chicago: with his mother—a secretary, atheist, and devout communist—on the then all-black South Side; and with his father—a stressed, middle-class business-owner—in the then all-white suburbs of Olympia Fields. Though David is the great nephew of Sonny Cohn (Count Basie’s trumpeter of thirty years), music wasn’t passed down freely in the family. Instead, while Will (Polyphonic) was taking classical piano lessons at his dad’s behest, David was passing out copies of Socialist Worker at May Day rallies. Young Serengeti kept his musical obsessions in his head, and by the time he was ready to loose them, his skull had accumulated several album’s worth of left-field hip-hop detritus.
Ironically, it was Will who played jazz trombone throughout middle and high school. He’d nurtured a healthy love for Bach, Beethoven and Mahler as a child, composed his first electronic beat at 15 (reflecting a burgeoning taste for Warp Records and contemporary rap), and gone on to start his own 12-piece hip-hop big band. After attending college in his hometown—studying English, computer science and mathematics—he moved from San Francisco to New York City and back to S.F. before settling in Wicker Park, only a handful of blocks away from Serengeti, who he hadn’t yet met. ’Geti himself had ventured into break-dancing at a young age, and penned a few raps at 16 inspired by De La Soul and KMD, but it wasn’t until he studied abroad in Japan that he returned to Chicago ready to record. He’d also decided that college, where he’d majored in history, was only slowing him down.
Serengeti has since released ten albums in seven years. He made his first two nearly by accident, on the way to completing his “debut,” Gasoline Rainbows. That triptych created a hefty rumble in the underground, showcasing stylish, heady raps intertwined with thick threads of soul, pop, rock and psychedelia. With 2006’s Dennehy—a character-hopping concept album loaded with Chicago signposts and sports references—Geti established himself as some sort of missing link between Kool Keith and Common Sense, minus their respective batshit irreverence and self-seriousness. Since, he’s been following a stream of consciousness through the darker corners of society and his psyche over an increasingly adventurous musical trajectory. Last year, Serengeti debuted two new projects: Yoome, an intimate electronic collaboration with a New Zealand chanteuse, and Friday Night, an exercise in deconstructed party rap with emcee Hi-Fidel.
Meanwhile, after producing for a handful of others, Polyphonic made his solo debut in 2006 with Abstract Data Ark, an exceptional mélange of experimental electronics and tight rhythms procured from unknown sources. A year later, he founded the Juba Dance blues-rap experiment, and by the time he was introduced to Geti at a party, their mutual reputations in genre-crushing preceded them. A fortuitous collaboration ensued, and in 2007, Serengeti and Polyphonic released Don’t Give Up. The lush music—equal turns intricate and glitchy, expansive and dub-wise—was the near-perfect complement to the bleak verbiage, delivered in both rhyme and free-floating sing-song. In 2009, after being signed to anticon. by Adam “doseone” Drucker (Subtle, themselves, 13& God) the duo returns with Terradactyl, an album which finds two high-flying beasts delivering an assured and artful undie-rap classic.
more >>> |
|
|
Find MAUM PRESENTS: WHY? (w/ Andy Broder + Matt Erickson of FOG) // AU //SERENGETTI & POLYPHONIC on...
|
 
|
|
|
|
|