New EP from Javelin on Thrill Jockey with Limited-Edition Thrift Store Sleeves

Javelin is an electronic duo from NYC that is steeped in the tradition of old school cratedigging and cut up sampling. They’ve gained a lot of notice over their first self-released cassette Jamz n Jemz which Pitchfork gave a 7.4 rating saying, “At a time when it seems like everyone’s roommate is cooking up bargain-bin symphonies, Javelin stand out like two heady chefs, turning canned food classics into tiny little pieces of inspired, inverted gourmet reimaginings.” They gained the attention of David Byrne who has signed them to Luaka Bop for their first full length to come out next year.

Thrill Jockey will be releasing two EPs from Javelin leading up to their label debut. The first self-titled EP is limited to 500 on vinyl and is part of the amazing Thrill Jockey subscription. The best part is that each of the sleeves are pulled from thrift store vinyl and are screened by Crosshair Screenprinting and Design in Chicago who were responsible for the amazing Spring 2007 Tortoise tour poster. See the streaming player below for closer “TWYCE” to see examples of the covers. I didn’t count them, but maybe all 500 are in the display? Lots of interesting cover selections both obscure and familiar– play “spot the cover” at home!

The tracks on the 5-track EP are new with the exception of “Lindsey Brohan” which was on Jamz n Jemz. The version of “Lindsey Brohan” on this EP is prepended with the Jamz n Jemz opening “skit” “Snow Aorta” where someone is interviewed about jumping expensive bikes into water.

This EP will be followed with another EP on Thrill Jockey early next year.

Click Here to visit the Javelin EP page on Thrill Jockey’s site where you can listen to streaming samples.

Click Here to visit the Javelin MySpace page.



Upcoming Show: The Pines at The Mill in Iowa City 11/20/09

Benson Ramsey and David Huckfelt are collectively known as the roots-folk group The Pines.  Based in the Twin Cities and on the Twin Cities label Red House Records, Benson and David are part of the newest generation of the Eastern Iowa sound started by Greg Brown and Bo Ramsey (who is Benson’s dad) among others. In September The Pines released their third album Tremolo— which is their second album on Red House.

I picked up Tremolo when it came out and have been listening to it pretty regularly. I feel that as much of a progression that Sparrows in the Bell was from their self-titled release on the now-defunct Iowa City label Trailer Records, Tremolo is a further refining of their sound.

The Pines will be at The Mill Restaurant in Iowa City on Friday, November 20th. The show starts at 9PM and tickets are $8.

Click Here for The Pines’ website

Click Here to listen to samples from Tremolo and read lyrics

Click Here for the Mill Restaurant Calendar

This Land is Your Music Residency at the Mill Update

As previously announced, November brings a special “songwriter in residence” at The Mill in Iowa City by Pieta Brown called “This Land is Your Music : Pieta Brown & Friends” which is a series of three shows on November 5, 12, and 19 which is described as “celebrating Music, Land & Community.” Each of the shows will center around Pieta’s music with her playing in solo, duo (with Bo Ramsey) and in a full band configuration. In addition to her set, there will be an opening act and there will be an exhibit in the “back room” at The Mill featuring the art of a local artist.

The shows start at 8PM, and are $10 with the proceeds going to support The Friends of Hickory Hill Park, public radio station KCCK, and public radio station KUNI (which is now part of Iowa Public Radio).

Here is the breakdown of the shows:

November 5th: Pieta Brown solo with opening act Alex Ramsey. Alex is one of Bo’s sons and brother of Benson Ramsey of The Pines. Alex has provided piano to the last couple of Bo Ramsey releases as well as The Pines. The exhibit will feature artwork by Zoe Brown, who is Pieta’s sister and provided the artwork for Pieta’s last EP Flight Time. The exhibit will also feature art by Dustin Busch. Dustin is an Iowa City stallwart having been playing solo and also part of Kelly Pardekooper’s Devil’s House Band.

November 12th: Pieta Brown with Bo Ramsey, with Bo Ramsey solo opening. This will be interesting as I’ve never seen Bo as a solo performer. I have a bootleg from a couple of years ago where he was touring with Greg Brown and he opened solo and it was really cool. The exhibit will feature art by Codi Josephson who runs Home-Ec Workshop in Iowa City. This will probably be the CD release show for Pieta’s new EP Shimmer produced by Don Was, which comes out that Tuesday, 11/10.

November 19th: Pieta Brown and Skyrocket, with Dusty B. (aka Dustin Busch) opening. Dustin Busch is a former Iowa City musician who is currently the guitarist in the Tucson group The 17th Street Band. The exhibit will be a collage of work by local photographer Sandy Dyas. Sandy’s book “Down to the River” is a collection of pictures of Eastern Iowa musicians including Bo Ramsey, Pieta Brown, Kelly Pardekooper, Greg Brown and others. The book comes with a CD of songs from these artists and is well worth seeking out.

Any way you look at this, this is a really cool event and it is wonderful that Pieta is giving back to the community that fostered her career. If you have the opportunity to see any of these shows, by all means, don’t miss it!

Click Here to visit the Mill calendar which will have information on how to purchase tickets.

Click Here to pre-order Pieta’s new album Shimmer.

Upcoming Show: Chris Smither at CSPS in Cedar Rapids 10-27-09

Next Tuesday night, October 27th, folk and blues singer-songwriter Chris Smither will be making a stop at CSPS in Cedar Rapids during his Fall tour in support of his new album on Signature Sounds Time Stands Still which came out on September 29th.

A collection of stripped-down orignals and a few choice covers by Dylan, Knopfler and Frank Hutchison, Time Stands Still was recorded in an astounding three days and captures the immediacy of his live show.

Chris’s songs have been recorded by artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, and Donna Krall. It was Raitt’s recording of “Love Me Like A Man” for her 1972 album Give It Up that marked the beginning of a long-standing working partnership. Diana Krall covered this same song in 2004 for her album The Girl in the Other Room.

The show will be at 7PM next Tuesday night (October 27th) and tickets are $18 in advance and $22 at the door. Don’t miss this opportunity to see this acclaimed songwriter and performer at the amazing CSPS!

Click Here to listen to “Surprise, Surprise” from Time Stand Still.

Click Here for Chris Smither’s Website

Click Here for the Legion Arts page on the Chris Smither show

Upcoming Show: Melissa Greener and Pezzettino at CSPS in Cedar Rapids 10/18/09

With the Legion Arts live performance schedule well underway, we are seeing the expected eclectic selection of acts– everything from Viking Folk Music to Czech bluegrass. I’m really excited for the prospects of the upcoming season!

Next weekend– 10/18– we see a couple of female singer-songwriters both making their debut in Cedar Rapids and at CSPS. While both take a distinctively different approach to their art, they both are utilizing a business model that involves direct contributions from their fan base.

Melissa Greener is described as an up-and-coming singer-songwriter with “quirky and literate songs” and compared to the energy often attributed to Ani DiFranco. Based in Manhattan, her goal is to move back to Austin, TX where she lived and worked for a time and considers home. For her sophomore release Melissa is fundraising at different levels with the goal of completely paying off the recording she has completed which will allow her to be debt-free and able to focus on the business of touring.

Opening for Melissa is Margaret Stutt who performs as Pezzettino (“Little Square”). Like Melissa, Margaret is also doing a direct-to-fan type of self promotion and sales. Someone who seemingly doesn’t need to sleep, she is a constant stream of activity and creativity. To fund her tour of houses and art spaces which has her stopping in Cedar Rapids for two nights, she has been taking donations and requests for songs– mostly cover tunes– where she deconstructs the song in question, rebuilding the song in her own distinctive way and making a video for the song. Sometimes dark and moody, sometimes quirky and funny, but distinctly Pezzettino these pieces are generally created and completed within a day! Margaret is a classically-trained pianist (at least until she was 12), but her instrument of inspiration is the accordion. She takes the squeezebox to task with her very personal and emotional songs on her release Lion and the follow up Lamb to be released in 2010 will be a more subdued affair.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see two these two up-and-coming artists. The show will be at 7PM at CSPS. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the door. Because the show is on Sunday, it starts early, it will end early for all you concerned with getting up for work the next morning!

Ticket Information

Click Here for Melissa Greener’s Website

Click Here for Pezzettino’s Website

Pezzettino is pressing a very limited edition (300 copies),  random color vinyl 7″ single of “You Never Know” with artwork by Milwaukee artist Dwellephant. As Margaret says, the b-side will be a surprise because, “you never know,” right? Click Here to learn more and order one!

Mojo Nixon to Burn Down The Malls By Making Entire Catalog for Free Download for Three Weeks!

According to Digital Music News, in celebration/honor/whatever of Mojo Nixon’s new album Whiskey Rebellion which comes out on October 7th, 2009 he and Amazon.com are making his entire catalog free for downloads for three weeks starting October 7th!!

You might recall Mojo Nixon from his halcyon MTV days when he seemed to host every other week and his videos for “Burn Down the Malls,” “Elvis is Everywhere,” and “(619) 239-KING” played very frequently. He also had the video for “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child” which starred Wynona Ryder as Gibson banned from the network, which precipitated his slow decent from the public eye. You might remember his song “Don Henley Must Die” as well.

Nixon has continued to record under various side bands and projects over the years after sucessfully wrenching his catalog from the Enigma/EMI/IRS deathclinch. He is apparently as onery as ever and during this economic recession is hoping that his package of free mp3’s will stimulate everyone.

Click Here for Mojo Nixon’s website

Click Here to purchase Mojo’s catalog on Amazon.com
for free for three weeks starting October 7th!

Free Download : Umphrey’s McGee Live 3-13-09 at Murat in New mp3HD Format

Umphrey’s McGee is a band that embraces technology. This is one of the things that really impresses me about the band. You can download every show within days of the performance at umlive.com in mp3 and FLAC formats with cover art, you can purchase a CD of the show at the show if you prefer. They have done subscription simulcast video over the internet, they twitter, they Facebook, they MySpace, they blog. They support taping and they have a very extensive archive of live shows on archive.org. Not to mention the bonus material afforded to the purchasers of Mantis via Push!

As a result there is a lot of content readily available from the band. Even before a potential new fan would need to purchase anything they can get a pretty good sampling.

In April Umphrey’s McGee partnered with Thomson and Fraunhofer– the owners and developers (and licensors) of the CODEC used for creating mp3 files– to provide part of their 3/13/09 performance at the Murat Egyptian Theatre in Indianapolis in the new MP3HD format.

MP3HD is an attempt to provide a compressed, yet lossless file format (think a .WAV file) while maintaining the ubiquitous compatibility with mp3-capable software and mp3 players. This is achieved by providing mp3 compressed data along with the lossless data inside the file. This makes the mp3 player think it is playing a regular mp3 file, but devices and software that is mp3HD-compatible will be able to play the higher-fidelity lossless content. Even with the stacking of the file content they are able to achieve on average 4X compression over the uncompressed .WAV version. This is primarily because the mp3 portion tends to be very compressed. The Umphrey’s show has 128Kbps mp3’s, which by most people’s standards is pretty lossy bitrate. Amazon.com provides mostly 256Kbps or in some cases 192Kbps mp3 from their store for example.

Certainly one might question the need for MP3HD. Anyone who has been dealing with lossless music files over the years have been using FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression) to do their bidding, and FLAC is free– that is no one is paying to provide that support– all software and hardware that is able to play mp3’s today should be paying licenses to Thomson.  Both Microsoft and Apple provide their own version of lossless compressed files, too– Apple’s ALAC, and Microsoft’s WMA Lossless. But, as you might imagine, neither of those formats are supported directly on the other’s media players, and neither player supports FLAC.

As a result, if I want to have the lossless versions of Umphrey’s McGee shows, for example, I would download the FLAC files, and either burn them to a CD if that was my medium of choice (my CD burning software support FLAC) or I would have to convert them to mp3 using a utility or extract to WAV and convert with iTunes or Windows Media Player. (Note: There are other ways to achieve this but I’m not interested in providing a primer on making mp3 files here) I can then put these on my media player of choice. This is a lot of messing around to get to the final result and most people aren’t interested in doing all of that work so they will just stick to mp3’s. The other issue here is that I end up having to manage two or more copies of the music. The lossless version in addition to the one that is the copy of the mp3’s for my media player.

I don’t mind juggling the files around as I’m pretty used to it by now, but the ability to only have one file that has both compressed and lossless is very appealing to me. I don’t like 128Kbps mp3’s, however, and I don’t have any devices that can play mp3HD so I have to convert them anyway to get a higher bitrate. I looked at the tools provided by all4mp3 and it appears that one can choose a higher bitrate for the mp3 data– of course this would be at a sacrifice of the 4X compression.

So, we’ll see if this takes off I guess. I think ultimately this is the right idea, but there is a lot of consternation surrounding the licensing. I would rather that Apple just added FLAC support to the iPod/iPhone/iTunes, really. (Another solution would be the open source project Rockbox can be installed on an iPod providing FLAC support which isn’t a solution for most iPod owners).

Getting back to the Umphrey’s show, it is a pretty good performance. The Murat is a very friendly location for the band to play– and they say so during this show. It also explains why they chose The Murat for their live album. The songs shared make up most of the second set and the encore from the 3/13 show. Looking at the setlist database at umphreys.com it looks like they edited out the “Another Brick in the Wall”/”Thriller” mashup second set closer, which is probably due to licensing the song. The Jimmy Stewart from this set is a vocal Jimmy that is pretty good, too. (A “Jimmy Stewart” in the band parlance is an improvisational performance).

Click Here to download the Umphrey’s McGee 3/13/09 Murat Show in mp3HD at all4mp3.com

Click Here for Umphrey’s McGee’s website

Free Download: Euforquestra – “Soup” from New Album, Live Show & Full Album

Iowa City-expats and current Fort Collins, CO residents Euforquestra have a new album titled Soup coming out on October 6th. The band is offering up the title track for free download.

As if that wasn’t enough– as a motivator to get people to “fan” them on Facebook, the band planned to give a free download of Soup on October 6th if they achieved 3,000 fans by October 1st. Looking at their fan page they seemed to have accomplished that at 3,427 fans at 11:30 AM today!

The band also posted a download of their 7-18-09 Camp Euforia set which had their BFF’s Public Property on stage with them. The show was taped by Ryan Sibert and it sounds amazing! The first seven songs are Euforquestra and the rest of the set excluding the encore has the band joined by Public Property on stage calling the amalgam “Public Porquestra.”

If you pre-order Soup online, you can get two unreleased bonus tracks: “Ochun (Dub Remix)” – mixed by Sir Mel F. Lewis, and “The Events of December 11” – Live in Lone Tree, IA – April 25, 2009.

Additionally, the band will be playing four dates in Iowa as a record release before returning to Colorado. Here are the dates lifted from the band’s website:

Wed. Oct 7 The Hub Cedar Falls, IA
Thu. Oct 8 DG’s Taphouse Ames, IA
Fri. Oct 9 Iowa City Yacht Club Iowa City, IA
Sat. Oct 10 Magic Bus Iowa City, IA

Click Here to become a fan of Euforquestra on Facebook and get the details for the Soup download.

Click Here to visit Euforquestra’s website and download “Soup” from Soup.

Click Here to download a .zip file of “Public Porquestra” live at Camp Euforia ’09.

Here is the setlist of that show courtesy of the band:

1. Intro by Ty Byerly
2. Ogun>
3. Called You>
4. Change Me
5. Trinidad Blue Basin
6. Free
7. Girlfriend Is Better
8. Melody Truck
9. Dread None*
10. Obatala*
11. Smoothie*
12. Work To Do>*
13. Reggae Got Soul*
14. Mutha Funk Y’all*
15. E: Samba

*= w/ all of Public Property (aka “Public Porquestra”)