All of this, and the smeared, spectral vocals and pounding stickwork, helped make debut Sentinels of the Heliosphere (Sleepy Records) one of 2010’s finest Baltimore stoner slabs. In an April e-mail interview, the first-name-only members of Solar Temple Suicides–Jon on lead vocals and guitars, Mike on drums and percussion, and bassist Scott–took a few moments to answer City Paper’s questions about their origins and what they’re most afraid of.

City Paper: One thing I like a lot about Sentinels of the Heliosphere is how it doesn’t go too far toward any one extreme–by which I mean that it isn’t especially languid, but it’s not exceedingly hurrying; it isn’t crazily diffuse, but at the same time it’s not out to crush the listener; it’s engrossing but it’s not going to carry one out to sea, unless perhaps one is already altered. More Dead Meadow than, say, Spacemen 3, without a wimpy folk-psych feel, as has recently been in vogue. Was this intentional, or just how things wound up playing out?

Mike: That’s a really fantastic way of describing the album.

Jon: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m glad that people think that.

Mike: I’m glad we don’t have a wimpy folk-psych feel.

Jon: Before we actually started playing music together I guess we were sort of more like, “Yeah, let’s be a shoegaze band,” but then once we actually started playing music–I mean, we’re all into a lot more music than just shoegaze. So like all the other shit that we listen to sort of filters in as well.

City Paper: How did Solar Temple Suicides come into being, and what inspired the name?

Mike: Well, I was at a party and I was really stoned and I heard somebody say something about My Bloody Valentine. And I said, “Well I like ‘em, too.” And that was pretty much how the band started.

Jon: I’ve done a lot of different projects over the years and I’ve been really into this kind of music for the past like five or 10 years and never really did anything along these lines. And I found someone else who wanted to be in a band and do this kinda stuff.

Scott: So the conversation between Jon and Mike happened first. That was when me and Jon were in this sort of neo-folk project, and he asked if I wanted to be in a shoegaze band. And I was just like: “Yes.” Jon came up with the name.

Jon: We needed a name. When I’m at my day job, I do a lot of procrastination by Wikipedia. I don’t know what exactly started me on that particular topic, but I ended up reading an article on Wikipedia about the Solar Temple cult.

Mike: We were going by Solar Temple for a while.

Jon: Until we discovered there were like 80 million other bands with that name.

Scott: And also a masked Mexican wrestling team.

Mike: So Greg suggested we throw something else in, and we went with suicides.

Jon: But I guess I like it for a couple reasons. I guess bizarre cults and bizarre instances of murder are kind of interesting to me. But then it also had the spacey connection with the whole them trying to get to Sirius, and all that. I also kind of liked the sort of sideways reference to Brian Jonestown Massacre. I mean, that wasn’t intentional.

City Paper: You guys are among many, many bands appearing on Patetico Records Rock Back for Japan comp. Do you remember where you were when you heard about the disaster there, and what you felt?

Mike: Tom Lugo, from Stellarscope and Panaphonic, and he also owns Patetico Records, he sent me an e-mail asking if we were interested in being part of it. And I told him, “Yeah, of course, no problem.” And I didn’t realize how big he was making it. I mean, I think we’re on like the seventh volume and he might even do eight. So that’s how we got involved with that. It’s really awesome to be on a compilation with all of these bands and it being a benefit thing.

Jon: I mean, obviously sadness and sympathy, but I can’t even imagine like what that must be like. It’s hard for the brain to even process something like that.

Mike: The first thing you heard about was the earthquake, and then you heard about this other stuff, and then you heard about the tsunami, and then you heard about all these other things. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Scott: Well, I was up late as I usually am on the internet and a friend of mine posted that terrible things were happening in Japan, and I looked it up online and I basically watched it live on Al Jazeera English on their YouTube channel. It was really, really strange. It was very surreal and it made me think of when I was down in New Orleans a year after Katrina. It was just when they were starting to clean up the houses and I was six blocks away from one of the main levee breaks that took out the lower Ninth Ward. I would just like walk down the street across the bridge and there were no houses, and on the way there, we were on an ever so slight incline and you go a few blocks down our street and all the houses were abandoned and people’s possessions [were everywhere]. So it made me think of all that, how it was so many times worse than Katrina.

City Paper: According to the biography on the Solar Temple Suicides site, the now-defunct SCarey Studios plays a key role in the band’s origins. Set the scene for us; what was the vibe, the energy like there? Were you able to carry it over into your next practice space?

Jon: I may have had more of an attachment to SCarey Studios than the other guys. Possibly because I sunk more money into it than anyone else. That was a very interesting and, in a way, important period in my life, trying to run that place.

Mike: I think it was pretty important with us, just in terms of the chaotic aspect of what was going on there. We never really got through a full practice there. I mean, it was really insane over there.

Scott: It was originally a small alleyway row house, the kind you have in Baltimore city. The little tiny ones; you know, the servants would live in the alleyway in a tiny little row house. And over the decades, it had additions put onto it to turn it into an industrial space. So in the end, it was this tiny, just rotted, decayed row house with the back wall cut out, with a large room behind it. And then you’d go to the right and there was a giant warehouse, almost the entire length of the block. It wasn’t giant for a warehouse, but it was giant compared to the tiny row house. This huge, empty space that had been disused for, like, 15 years. Before that it was a machine shop, and before that it was god knows what.

Jon: Well, we know it was probably a chop-shop at some point because we found all those license plates stuffed in the wall.

Mike: I mean, it was literally falling down around us.

Scott: You could see through the walls, like through the gaps between the bricks in the walls. It was amazing.

Jon: Me and my roommate and partner in Hexpseak, Walter Carpenter, we had kinda been talking about trying to do some kind of warehouse space for a while. One thing Walter and I kind of had in common was that we both had a lot of ideas and a lot of ideas that sounded like really good ideas, but they never actually happened. We’d been talking about getting a warehouse space and then we were having shows and stuff at our actual house, and the cops kept coming cause our one neighbor was a cunt, so we decided to, like, actually get off our butts and find a warehouse space. This place was pretty cheap and then I guess that sort of coincided with the founding of this band.

So I was like, “Hey, Walter and I are trying to get this space, you guys in on having it as a practice space and run shows there and stuff?” And so they were in.

Mike: One band that always sticks out to me though, of having a show there, was Mahjongg.

Jon: Yeah, Mahjongg was fucking great. We had a lot of good acts. We had a lot of noise acts, pretty much anything that any person who was involved with it, that felt like booking got booked. The people of the neighborhood really kinda added to the flavor there.

Mike: Oh, you mean the junkies.

Jon: The junkies and the car wash and the car wash employees. I mean, the junkies were your run of the mill Baltimore junkies and you can imagine everything that might go along with that.

Mike: I think we sang happy birthday to the same woman like four times in a month.

Jon: Basically, in the end though, because it was a garage in the middle of an actual neighborhood–

Scott: –where people lived, who had to get up for work in morning.

Jon: So yeah, we were getting the cops called on us. . .

Mike: Every single time.

Jon: Maybe not every single time. But pretty often.

Scott: Yeah, our budget did not allow for real sound proofing and you could hear a show three blocks away.

City Paper: What’s “Close Your Eyes” about? Every time I listen to it, I imagine a bunch of people following their opiate-influenced bliss in a mammoth Holiday Inn suite.

Jon: I kinda wish what you’re saying [that] was what it’s about. It is, as far too many songs are, about an ex-girlfriend. To give the short version, it was a long time ago and I thought she was going to be like “the one.” Had a messy breakup and didn’t talk for a while, and then, you know, after brains had calmed down and whatnot, we became pretty good friends–actually really good friends for a while there. I guess we all kinda deal with the difficulties of life in different ways. For whatever reason, she just sorta started losing touch with reality in a way. And I mean, it was kind of sad, really. She’d be all boasting about stuff and then sort of like delusions of grandeur and then but also delusions of persecution. It was kinda sad to see her go off the deep end.

Mike: Slowly degrade.

Jon: I think there is still that really great person inside her somewhere, but I don’t know whether she’s just not willing to let it out or whatever. And I guess that’s what inspired the song, but also I was following that trope of like the garage-rock song about a crazy woman.

Mike: When we first wrote this song, we wrote it as a three piece, and we wrote it really fast. It was actually a faster song.

Jon: Yeah, that’s true. We cut the tempo down a lot.

Mike: I mean, I definitely think that it has that good bite of melancholy that we happen to infuse a lot of our stuff with. And I think that song has it as well.

City Paper: What is your biggest fear?

Scott: I’m thinking maybe we should answer this one flippantly. I’m going to say: video games coming to life and killing us all. Actually, that’s not very good. Penguins are my biggest fear. But only big ones. Emperor penguins are huge.

Jon: I guess my biggest fear changes from circumstance to circumstance. Sometimes thinking I’m never going to be happy. Sometimes it’s thinking I’m always gonna be lonely or sometimes it’s, like, “Oh this job is gonna go on forever.” I guess depends on, you know, what’s going on at the time. Although, I guess like dying slowly and painfully is. . .

Mike: There was this commercial where this guy’s in a shark cage and there’s sharks all around, and then somehow the cage gets snapped off or something, and the last shot of the commercial is like him sinking into the dark of the ocean. That’s my biggest fear. But at the same time, there’s a lot of movies that have that style of imagery and really, I’m always drawn to that. Even though I’ve had nightmares like that.

Jon: I’m glad I’m not drawn to movies of 90 year olds shitting themselves.

Mike: Scott is, though.

Scott: I like Eraserhead. I don’t know if that counts.

Mike: But I guess it’s the helplessness of the situation. You’re fucked. There’s nothing you can do.

Jon: Which I guess is like essentially the same issue as my thing. We can agree: two thirds of us at least are afraid of helplessness.

Mike: But I also find some of those scenes very calming, cause there must be that zen moment. And that’s terrifying and incredibly intriguing to me.

Solar Temple Suicides play the Ottobar June 6.

[youtube_embed]

Spermwhales songs have titles like “Daydreams,” “Dwell Forever,“ and “Surf Out Of Forever” that telegraph the cerebral, blunted atmospheres that Spermwhales’ Brent Grant taps into with little more than a guitar, effects pedals, and an impeccable melodic intuition. His prismatic, hypnotic drones, tonal-pond ripples, and Wavves-esque surf-noise is nothing short of beautiful.

Occasionally, as on last year’s Time Warp EP, Grant and his muse are inexplicably able to defy time itself. Most Spermwhales releases are available free online and Grant plays out occasionally, but the project is largely–and criminally–unknown in the underground Baltimore music community.

In a late-October/early-November e-mail interview, Grant discussed the origins of the Spermwhales project, how his musical approach has changed over the years, and the fact that his new bassist is named Danny Glover.

City Paper: How did you decide on Spermwhales as a stage name?
Brent Grant: When first starting Spermwhales I had no intention to be serious with this project. It derived from the original name, “spermwhales came in the ocean and that’s why its salty.” I started to get lazy with writing all of that out and shortened it to “Spermwhales”–one word, no space.

CP: When and how did Spermwhales become a serious endeavor for you?
BG: When the sound changed from cutesy keyboards to drone. It made me feel whole musically. I will never stop now; I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life.

CP: Tell me about your earliest experiences or experiments with making music. What were they like, and how old were you?
BG: I had a keyboard at the age of 8 years old. That would have to be my first experience with music. Pre-set drum beats and me dancing to them. In 10th grade I got an electric guitar; immediately picked it up and started making up stuff equaling mass amounts of “noise” and “racket.”

Back then, I never wanted to ever know how to play a traditional or conventional style of music. I was totally immature, aggressive, and didn’t give two shits. Never played the same song twice, always improvised–which all kind of changed when I got a little bit older.

CP: Was the keyboard a Casio SK-1? That’s the one my mother got me when I was a kid; really basic and rudimentary, but still an amazing piece of equipment to my 10-year old mind.
BG: It wasn’t an SK-1, but it was a Casio. It was one my dad found at a yard sale. I can’t really remember what model it was. That keyboard ended up getting smashed in a brother vs. brother battle royal.

CP: What instruments and programs do you use for Spermwhales recordings and performances?
BG: A guitar and an 8-track recorder. Live, mostly Fender Telecaster and Boss/Roland pedals; recording, I use different Fender guitars/bass and more FX.

CP: Of all the Spermwhales recordings I’ve heard, the Time Warp EP is far and away my favorite. Tell me about the conception and making of Time Warp.
BG: Life and death. The Time Warp EP was an online album I put up for download last year, which was intended to get me more listeners. It turns out this is the most downloaded album of mine. This song was recorded on Nov. 20, 2009. It was the most difficult time period in my life. My favorite cousin just past away from diabetes. My whole world was coming apart with a bunch of other shit. Wanted to get away from everything, was taking a break from music at this time. I had a show the next day with Shy Violet and Prom Concussion, who both use prerecorded instruments on cassette 4-tracks live–which completely inspired me to do the same.

Never doing prerecorded stuff live before, my sound meditation started calling me, sending me into a blank state of mind where time doesn’t exist, where nothing matters. A dream within a dream. No physical body. Complete emptiness. the sound lifted me away. I was free from everything. I derived Time Warp from leaving this life, which only felt like a five-minute meditation but ended up being hours. I recorded two tracks for the show.

Nov. 21, the day of the show, I played along with the tracks on my old Tascam. Nov. 22 I recorded the third track and mixed it, making it the final product. I put the song online and started posting it. A month later my friend sent me the live recording; not that many people have the live version, so here it is. This is a very meaningful piece for me.

CP: Given that Time Warp represents something so deeply personal, does it feel weird or unseemly that so many listeners have gravitated toward it? What sort of responses or feedback have you received?
BG: No, not at all weird. It was my intention to be heard more. Anyone who listens to it can perceive it in any way they want to. No one would ever known those meanings if it wasn’t for the question, you know? I have seen it posted other places. From what it looks like people enjoy it: friendly write-ups. Still don’t get that much feedback. Just another sperm trying to get the egg.

CP: What differentiates the entries in your Bootleg series, conceptually, from other Spermwhales releases like Natural Echoes and Easy Visual?
BG: Less ambient, more pop–trying to switch it up. I started doing stuff people can recognize: drum, bass, guitar, and vocals. People get bored easily.

CP: Did you grow up in Adamstown?
BG: Yes; I’ve lived in the same house my whole life.

CP: Outside of recording, writing, and performing, do you ever listen to your own records? A lot of musicians don’t, in my experience; Robert Pollard is the only example who comes immediately to mind.
BG: It doesn’t happen that often. Sometimes, I wonder what it sounds like in the car. So I’ll drive around and listen to stuff I’m working on. I’ve done a lot of stuff in five years. It’s hard to remember it all, so it’s nice to refresh my memory with past recordings: different stages of my life, all documented.

CP: So it’s kind of like a sonic yearbook, then?
BG: Yes! I was 19 when it started; I’m 24 now. If I live another 20 years, this will be an enormous year book.

CP: This isn’t really a question, but the effect playing all of the videos on your MySpace page at once is fucking insane.
BG: Haha! I’ve been told that a couple times before.

CP: The Spermwhales MySpace page lists “Danny Glover” as the other member of the band. You should hire the co-star of the Lethal Weapon series to show up at a gig and demand proceeds from record sales–unless there actually is a guy named Danny Glover who performs with you. Is there?
BG: Danny is my bass player; he just joined two months ago. He could be the actor, or it could just a coincidence [that] he has the same name–or the fact he watches Predator 2 on the regular. He will be joining me on the northern tour with Shy Violet. I finally have structured stuff I play live now, so he’s been a big help with me writing these new songs. Still doing the nice ambient improv stuff, adding the `90s surf-y constructed fun jams in the middle with more ambience at the end.

I’m trying new stuff; I’ve been doing the same thing pretty much for the last couple of years and wanna switch it up. Been having friends play with me live; this confuses the fuck out of some people, though, cause then they think they’re definite members in the band when it was a one-time thing. As of now, Danny Glover is a member of spermwhales. He won’t be at every show before or after tour. He will always be part of this continuous whale journey, in visible form or not.

Spermwhales play the Hexagon Nov. 13 as part of the MT6 Fest with Human Host, Band Liquor Pond, FUN, Narc, Needlegun, and many others.

Baltimore’s Things That Fly need a superhero movie to soundtrack like sparrows need nests–something hopeful, inspiring, and flashy, teeming with twentysomething angst and hormones and moral prerogatives and slow-motion explosions. Comic-book drama would be a perfect fit for the stirring emo-pop singer/guitarist Jeff Henley, 26, and guitarist Arthur “Paul” Hemlock, 27, whip up together. The duo’s EPs–2008’s Distractions and this year’s Missing Places, both available for free here–are raw, yearning open wounds that live and die on Henley’s over-enunciated, affectation-addled plaints and carefully chosen chords that blow those emotions up to drive-in theater-screen size; think of early-aughts mall-emo giants like Thursday, Jimmy Eat World, and Blink-182 filtered through the cathartic/regretful lens of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”

And while Distractions found Henley and Hemlock rocking with an energy-drink intensity, Places adopts an Americana torch-song vibe that’s more Bruce Springsteen than Green Day. In a late September/early October e-mail interview, Henley opened up about the origins of Things That Fly, the Baltimore music scene, and his fondness for the Ataris.

City Paper: What was the first instrument you learned to play?
Jeff Henley: I got my first guitar when I was 12. It was a white Fender Squire that I smothered in stickers.

CP: Do you remember the first song that you wrote, alone or with others? What was that experience like, when did it happen, and at what point did you realize, This is something I definitely want to keep doing?
JH: The first song that I wrote and finished was called “Turtle.” I ended up getting a turtle tattooed to the back of my arm when I was like 18. I’ve always wanted to play music; it makes sense to me.

CP: In “The Wrong Sun,” there’s this lyric: “Watch the things that fly.” How did you guys arrive at Things That Fly as a band name, and what does it mean or signify to you?
JH: “Things that fly” is a chapter from the book Life After God, by Douglas Coupland. That book really got me. The song “The Wrong Sun” was written a few months before Things That Fly was our band name, but I didn’t want to change the lyrics and get rid of “watch the things that fly.” I just liked the words; it meant something to me.

CP: Two years, give or take, separate your EPs. Missing Places (2010) strikes me as more confident in terms of songwriting than Distractions (2008) was, reaching beyond emo-punk to something less scene-rooted, a more wide-screen rock sound that’s reminiscent of Green Day’s big epic ballads. Was that a conscious choice, or just a natural evolution?
JH: Distractions was a different time. That was a four-piece rock band. Missing Places was mainly just me and an acoustic guitar. Paul would come over to my apartment once a week or so, and he’d help me with lyrics and arranging the songs. We wanted to write big, classic-sounding songs.

CP: What circumstances led to Things That Fly meeting and writing, performing, and recording together?
JH: The band was started around 2006 or 2007, but it isn’t the same lineup anymore. Now it’s just myself and Paul. I’d rather wait and just play music being the two of us until we find the absolute right people and situation for a full rock band. We’re playing the show at Ottobar with a full band though; we’re getting some friends to fill in. Kory Gable is playing drums for us; he recorded our latest EP, Missing Places, at his studio in Lancaster, Pa. His close friend Matt is playing bass for the show.

Other than that, we’ll be playing random acoustic shows, writing songs, planning out new EPs, enjoying this fine autumn weather.

CP: In the main photo on the Things That Fly MySpace page, one of you has a sort of dual-tone mane. That looks complicated to maintain; is it?
JH: That’s Paul. He’s got great hair. He can really style it, and do whatever he wants with it. He’s got it all black, at the moment.

CP: Do people ever ask you if you’re related to Don Henley?
JH: I’ve gotten the Don Henley thing a few times. Not too often. Actually, the last time I could pulled over by the cops was in like 2008. I didn’t come to a complete stop at a flashing red light. They decided to search my car. During the search, “Boys of Summer” by Don Henley came on the radio; I thought it was kind of ironic–with my name and all of the times I’ve played shows with the Ataris, who covered “Boys of Summer.” I just thought that was wild that that was the song that was actually playing at that moment.

CP: Did you and Paul grow up in the Baltimore area? What was the music scene here like when you first became a part of it?
JH: Me and Paul have known each other since we were little kids. We grew up in Frederick. I lived in the Baltimore area when I went to school, and me and Paul lived in an apartment together during that time.

The Baltimore music scene kinda seems like the same to me. I mean, the bands are different now: 90 percent of the bands that were playing when we started are no more. Some of the venues are different now. People used MySpace; now they use Facebook. But overall I still think it’s the same deal; it just kinda recycles itself every couple of years.

CP: Were/are you and Paul part of any other bands or projects? If so, what were/are they, and which genres do they straddle?
JH: Oh yeah. We’ve both been in and out of bands and projects, growing up; I think they’ve all served their purpose. They were all punk/pop punk/emo kinda bands. I’ve got a whole library of MP3s of all the recordings I’ve done over the years.

CP: Do you have an new album or EP forthcoming?
JH: We’re planning on a three-song EP next. I’ve got two new songs written that I’m pretty excited about; they’re both pretty fast and catchy. They were written with a full rock band in mind. One is called “Stay Awake” and one is called “Escalator.”

CP: What was the largest crowd that you’ve performed for to date, and what was that experience like for you?
JH: The largest was an acoustic show that I did at Towson University. It was like 2005, I think; it was in front of 400 or so people. It was in a theater auditorium-type place, so everyone was watching. It wasn’t like playing some rundown bar or anything. It went over really well, it was a good moment. I feel like I’ve played in so many bizarre situations that it was easy for me pull it off.

CP: Who do you consider your biggest influences, musical and otherwise?
JH: The Ataris mean a lot to me. I’ve played with them like six or so times. I grew up listening to them; I still listen to them. It’s always an honor. I really like Punch Line. They’re a great band. I’ve been listening to their new album non-stop. With it being colder out, I’ve been listening to Gaslight Anthem’s The ‘59 Sound a lot lately in the car.

CP: What do you guys do for day jobs?
JH: I’m a host at a TGI Fridays, and Paul works at a warehouse.

CP: You guys are presently unsigned. Have you pursued any record labels, large or small, or have you found the D.I.Y. approach preferable?
JH: We’re just doing what we’re doing. Obviously, I’d love to be signed at some point in my life, to be at that level where your album is on the end-cap at Target or something. Free trips to Disneyworld. Someone to drive me around everywhere. That’d be nice; I hate driving.

Things That Fly plays the Ottobar Oct. 18 with the Ataris, Don’t Panic, Singleton, and Run The Risk.

In an early August e-mail interview, Lindberg opened up about Warpaint’s formation, but was less inclined to spill the beans about the band’s forthcoming album, describing it as “a surprise.”

City Paper: How did Warpaint form, and what made you settle on that name? It’s so evocative–potentially it contains so many layers.

Jenny Lee Lindberg: We–Theresa, Emily, Shannyn, and myself–had all been friends and family for years. My sister called me one day while she was traveling and asked to start a band with me, and we both agreed it would be amazing to include the other ladies. (Note: Lindberg’s sister, actress Shannyn Sossamon, was originally a member of Warpaint.)

She called and asked them: pretty simple. Two weeks later, we had our first rehearsal on Saint Valentine’s Day, and nothing had ever felt more beautiful and right. We’ve been at it ever since– six years later, here we are! As for our name, Emily thought of it one day. She was working with a medley of words, and that combo came about. She liked it and shared it with the rest of us. I had an aversion to it at first, but I have to say it’s most definitely grown on me– I can’t imagine us being called anything else.

CP: What is an “exquisite corpse”?

JLL: It’s a game. Here’s one of many examples on how to play. You take a piece of paper, draw something–draw anything–then pass it along to your neighbor. They have to then draw something as well, without seeing what you have drawn. Then it’s passed along, and the next person does the same thing. Eventually, when the drawing is completed, everyone’s piece connects.

CP: Tell me a little about “Billie Holiday.” How did that song come together, and what was the inspiration for it?

JLL: We were in Canada; we had a Motown song book. Emily had written a bit of the song a few months before, the “B-I-L” bit– that came about because she was literally staring at a poster of [Billie Holiday]. Then, in Canada, Theresa started singing “My Guy” over the guitar. They decided to combine the two, and we all decided to sing in unison, and harmonize whilst enjoying a jacuzzi before a show.

CP: You’re on tour with Javelin right now. It‘s an intriguing paring. How did that happen?

JLL: We saw them play at SXSW. We asked our booking agent. We thought it would be a wonderful match, sonically, and we were excited to dance. We had our first show of the tour last night. They truly are gems, and amazing at what they do! Fun, fun, fun!

CP: Sometimes when native L.A. residents talk about L.A., they make reference to its sprawling size and a resulting sense of loneliness or solitude. Is that how you see L.A.? I ask this because Warpaint songs have a similar feel: there’s a very Spaghetti Western/out-on-the-edge energy that pulses through them. They’re richly nocturnal, too; they remind me of Michael Mann’s Collateral, the one with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

JLL: It’s quite the opposite for me. I feel a strong sense of family and community in LA. Perhaps it’s the length of time I have been there. It’s home for me. I feel extremely comfortable there. Loneliness comes from within. You feel that wherever you are.

CP: When you’re on tour, how do you usually spend the time immediately before and after your set? Do you make a point of watching the opening band every night, or are there some nights where you’re just more inclined to walk around the neighborhood of the venue where you’re playing?

JLL: We’ve only recently started headlining certain shows, so most of the time we‘re the openers. We try to be as connected as possible prior to our show, and after we celebrate, doing whatever– dance, laugh, cry, sleep!

CP: Which band member came up with the genre descriptors–“psychedelic, ghettotech, melodramatic popular song”–on the Warpaint Myspace page? The first seems legit, the third legitimately aspirational, and the second feels like a definite conversation-starter.

JLL: Theresa and Emily. Oh, aren’t they silly?

Warpaint plays the Ottobar Aug. 17.

Warpaint Q&A for NOISE Inbox X Reply | Ray Cummings to me show details Aug 12 (3 days ago) M: Let me know when you get this. I’m including it as a cut-and-paste and as a Word document. Best, R NOISE Q&A: WARPAINT’s JENNY LEE ON BILLIE HOLIDAY, EXQUISITE CORPSES, AND LOS ANGELES Michael, contact Warpaint’s publicist for an image: sonyakolowrat@beggars.com. By Raymond Cummings The guitars of Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman interlocking in sequin-sparkle shimmer or sinuous smolder; Jenny Lee Lindburg’s bass notes pacing thoughtfully at melody’s edge; Stella Mozgawa’s keyboards adding depth and texture to the whole even as her drumming propels it. This is the intoxicating sound of Warpaint (link: http://www.myspace.com/worldwartour), an L.A.-based foursome whose Exquisite Corpse EP (Manimal Vinyl, 2009) was one of the indie-rock diaspora’s more auspicious recent debuts. Corpse shuffled ably through in-the-round drift-folk ala Beach House (“Billie Holiday”), rollicking post-Gang Gang Dance gypsy fury (“Elephants”), and sublimely ethereal pop (“Burgundy”). The six songs feel equally intimate and mysterious, free-form and precise, cruising-backstreets-at-3-a.m. chilling and fresh-silken-sheets cozy. In an early August email interview, Lindberg opened up about Warpaint’s formation, but was less inclined to spill the beans about the band’s forthcoming, untitled album, describing it as “a surprise.” City Paper: How did Warpaint form, and what made you settle on that name? It’s so evocative – potentially it contains so many layers. Jenny Lee Lindberg: We – Theresa, Emily, Shannyn, and myself – had all been friends and family for years. My sister called me one day while she was traveling, and asked to start a band with me, and we both agreed it would be amazing to include the other ladies. (Note: Lindberg’s sister, actress Shannyn Sossamon, was originally a member of Warpaint.) She called and asked them: pretty simple. Two weeks later, we had our first rehearsal on Saint Valentine’s Day, and nothing had ever felt more beautiful and right. We’ve been at it ever since – six years later, here we are! As for our name, Emily thought of it one day. She was working with a medley of words, and that combo came about; she liked it and shared it with the rest of us. I had an aversion to it at first, but I have to say it’s most definitely grown on me – I can’t imagine us being called anything else. CP: What is an “exquisite corpse”? JLL: It’s a game. Here’s one of many examples on how to play. You take a piece of paper, draw something – draw anything – then pass it along to your neighbor. They have to then draw something as well, without seeing what you have drawn. Then it’s passed along, and the next person does the same thing. Eventually, when the drawing is completed, everyone’s piece connects. CP: Tell me a little about “Billie Holiday” (YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPv3eou3Ltg). How did that song come together, and what was the inspiration for it? JLL: We were in Canada; we had a Motown song book. Emily had written a bit of the song a few months before, the “B-I-L” bit – that came about because she was literally staring at a poster of [Billie Holiday]. Then, in Canada, Theresa started singing “My Guy” over the guitar. They decided to combine the two, and we all decided to sing in unison, and harmonize whilst enjoying a jacuzzi before a show. CP: You’re on tour with Javelin right now; it‘s an intriguing paring. How did that happen? JLL: We saw them play at SXSW. We asked our booking agent; we thought it would be a wonderful match, sonically, and we were excited to dance. We had our first show of the tour last night. They truly are gems, and amazing at what they do! Fun, fun, fun! CP: Sometimes when native L.A. residents talk about L.A., they make reference to its sprawling size and a resulting sense of loneliness or solitude. Is that how you see L.A.? I ask this because Warpaint songs have a similar feel: there’s a very Spaghetti Western/out-on-the-edge energy that pulses through them. They’re richly nocturnal, too; they remind me of Michael Mann’s Collateral, the one with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. JLL: It’s quite the opposite for me. I feel a strong sense of family and community in LA. Perhaps it’s the length of time I have been there; it’s home for me. I feel extremely comfortable there.. Loneliness comes from within; you feel that wherever you are. CP: When you’re on tour, how do you usually spend the time immediately before and after your set? Do you make a point of watching the opening band every night, or are there some nights where you’re just more inclined to walk around the neighborhood of the venue where you’re playing? JLL: We’ve only recently started headlining certain shows, so most of the time we‘re the openers. We try to be as connected as possible prior to our show, and after we celebrate, doing whatever: dance, laugh, cry, sleep! CP: Which band member came up with the genre descriptors – “psychedelic, ghettotech, melodramatic popular song” – on the Warpaint Myspace page? The first seems legit, the third legitimately aspirational, and the second feels likea definite conversation-starter. JLL: Theresa and Emily. Oh, aren’t they silly? Warpaint plays the Ottobar August 17 with Javelin. Warpaint Q&A NOISE Draft.doc 28K   View Download YouTube – Videos from this email Reply Forward

By day, Andrew Barranca works as a special educator, assisting children with autism. In his spare time, the Fredrick native (who now resides in Rockville) moonlights as GayBomb, whipping up sonic-slurry shakes–created in part using a card reader Barranca discovered “in the supply closet of my first classroom”–that suggest a hybrid of industrial noise pollution and the gnashing laptop fury of John Wiese’s Teenage Hallucinations. When Barranca feeds vocals into the maw of his distorted slipstream–see dithering, see-sawing “Tongue Out,” or the trash-compactor kazoo scrapes of “Crank Bang”–his artistry breaks through into new dimensions. In a late May e-mail interview, Barranca discussed influences, gear, and Charles Nelson Reilly.

City Paper: When did you realize that you wanted to be a musician?
Andrew Barranca: My first record was a 7” of horror sounds. I think this is when I felt the impact of sound recordings, and became interested in all the potential.

CP: The “gay bomb” is the name of a supposed military weapon. How did you decide on it as a sobriquet?
AB: There are so many meanings that can be inferred and so much subtext that I felt it would be enough to make people curious.

CP: When you play a show, what preparations are necessary? Do you go onstage with a predefined idea of what you want to accomplish or get across, or does the situation sort of dictate things?
AB: Before I play a show, I select the cards I want to play. Using the drawings on them, I sort them all out into groups of similar drawings. After they are all sorted, they are all laid out in the performance area so they can be grabbed quickly. I used to write descriptions of the sounds on them, but the pictures make the process of identifying a card easier. When the set starts the samples are set, but how they will be mixed is improvisation. Most my sets have similar samples with beats and noises being recycled, sometimes they have a narrative, but over the course of a year sets vary greatly.

CP: What sort of equipment set-up do you use to generate sounds?
AB: My samples are recorded from myself, machines, CDs, and records. Once everything is recorded onto cards, I use two Califone Card Masters plugged into one Berringer Keyboard amp to mix it.

CP: Some of your tracks are unabashedly abrasive, but at times there’s a hint of melody lurking under avalanches of noise, born by corkscrewed vocals or the scree itself. “Crank Bang” is an example of this; it’s almost like Lightning Bolt distilled to its id. Can noise as a genre, in your opinion, transcend its inherent ugliness? Can noise beguile in the way that, say, an Antonio Vivaldi piece can?
AB: People have become acclimated to abrasive sounds. Some people might think that the sounds in “Crank Bang” are ugly, but I know that–ugly or beautiful–they are stimulating. When I play a set, my brain is sparking with excitement, and I can feel my mood and emotions heightening. I imagine that same elation is felt by people who really love listening to Vivaldi. I don’t know what noise will do or how it will be perceived, but my intention is to engage myself–and hopefully the audience–in the sensory experience of the music.

CP: If you could curate a dream festival that you yourself would perform in, who else would appear on the bill with you? Who would you collaborate with, live, in this setting?
AB: In my dreams, Charles Nelson Reilly would MC. Antonin Artaud would read nursery rhymes, Jimmy Hendrix would play a guitar solo, Andy Kaufman would do whatever. Playing music would be the Laundryroom Squelchers, Narwalz of Sound, Ex-Pets, The Jauntees, What’s Yr Damage?, Small Pox, Occasional Detroit, White Suns, Sebadoh, and This is My Condition. Shams and DJ Dog Dick would take the festival into the morning. I’d like to play with Charles Nelson Riley, Occasional Detroit, Jason Willett.

CP: Do you have a current musical obsession–an artist, song, or album–that you can’t quite get enough of?
AB: Lately I’ve been enjoying Narwalz of Sound, the Dramatics, Sentridoh, Lemon Kittens, and Phil Hendri.

CP: Who or what do you consider your most important influence?
AB: Antonin Artaud made me question the purpose of performance arts. His writings changed my ideas on art and legitimized my creative impulses. I felt inspired after reading his book, The Theatre and Its Double, and his radio play “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.”

CP: Do you have any special surprises in store for the June 10 show? Any new or forthcoming releases?
AB: I’m playing some new samples from drums and electronic devices. I just bought a drum set, so I’ve been playing it and making new cards with the beats. The Hexagon has a no covers policy, so it will all be original music. I just released a CD-R collaboration of Sensible Nectar and Gaybomb on Rainbow Bridge Records; at the Hexagon, we’ll be releasing a split cassette of Gaybomb and Newagehillbilly on SpleenCoffin. I also record new material for self-release of an edition of 10 tapes. Every month or so, I record an improvised live set, and put it out. They are called GDJ tapes. Currently I am in the 10th set of GDJ tapes. They are available at shows and on my web site.

CP: Which do you find more satisfying as an artist: the process of recording or performing before an audience?
AB: Both of them are extremely satisfying. One great thing about playing for people is that I don’t have to stop in the middle of my set to flip the tape.

Gaybomb plays the Hexagon June 10 with Newagehillbilly and Decapitated Hed.

A week-long, multi-venue festival, a packed-to-the-gills one-night stand, an ambitiously incestuous remix project-qua-baccanal, a 7-inch series, abject silence: there’s no right or wrong way for a record label to celebrate an anniversary. While the compilation is among the most common commemorative expressions, there’s an unfortunate knee-jerk tendency to underthink the sequencing, clotting odds, ends, and alternate takes and hoping the collective mess equates to a declarative state-of-the-roster snapshot. But the best label comps–think Zeromoon Sampler III: An Explanation of Difficult Music and Chronologi 12k: Year 1-Year 4–deftly summarize a collocated aesthetic, attract listeners to related wares, and register as stand-alone triumphs.

Baltimore’s Public Guilt imprint makes its sixth year of existence with free-download comp You’re Not As Weird As You Think You Are: Six Years of Public Guilt. If the two-disc extravaganza isn’t as seamless as the pair referred to above, that’s only because the international stable founder J.R. Fritsch oversees is richly varied, demanding that instrumental thrash metal, magma-hot electronic dysentery, and sinister acoustic folk coexist in a streamlined way is akin to praying for a miracle.

So Weird gamely humors contextual-ambiance upsetters: see Vopat’s majestic, cinematic torpor (think Mogwai armed with pianos), Psychic Paramount’s hyperventilating shred suite, the brass-injected hardcore of Cream Abdul Babar (think Noxagt molesting Pissed Jeans, or vice-versa), Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat’s distraught screamo-folk (think Calla unplugged). And what of Microkingdom’s “Meat Ghost”? It segues from out-of-tune string-section ephemera crossed with burbling digi-tones to full-bore jazz-improv clusterfuck in a flash.

By contrast–by not calling much attention to themselves–Ala Muerte’s maudlin operatic tics and Blister Freak Circus’ tambourine-inflected beardo-strum compliment Weird‘s core ambiance. And about that ambiance: it’s a fizzily wordless mood-quilt of disparate styles that tickles the subconscious ear, hallucinating a state of being that eclipses whatever flow-interrupting effects these outliers cause by sucking the listener firmly back into its matrix. It’s present in Aun’s blotched-tone static-mining, in the constricted, wound-up blare of Perfekt Teeth’s remix of Darsombra’s “Nymphaea,” in Aluk Todolo’s grim amplifier snarl, in the WALL-E bleep, clank, and whir of Magicicada’s “Slow Walk Backwards,” in how Korperschwache’s murderously bleak power-chords hang overhead like waiting guillotines. The ear reels, rights itself, is left hungry for more Guilt.

Fred Schneider sounds exhausted. It’s an evening in mid-March, and the party-pop icon is at home in New York City—holding forth about his recent musical exploits and the impetus for tonight’s performance at the American Visionary Arts Museum—and he just seems wiped out, like most mere mortals are at 10 p.m. on an average weeknight. Given the freewheeling, flamboyant persona Schneider has spent the past 30-odd years cultivating as the B-52s’ perpetually randy dandy, being exposed to this side of him is kind of like discovering that your pious, soft-spoken pastor is an enthusiastic strip-club patron.

If all you’ve got to go on are Schneider’s new wave-y yesterdays—i.e. his boisterous solo records and tinsel-tape-parade B-52s bangers like “Mesopotamia,” “Love Shack,” and “Good Stuff,” and 2008′s upgrade-for-modern-times comeback album Funplex—it’s easy to infer that this erstwhile “rock lobster” is finally Art Deco-party-pooped. But Totally Nude Island (Happy Happy Birthday Records), the EP he released with new project the Superions in February, suggests that our fiftysomething Fred is simply downshifting his whacked-out, arch-camp quirk into a milder gear.

As front man for the Superions, Schneider adopts a droll, almost spoken-word approach that complements the Jetsons-meet-Men at Work synth-pop stylings of his bandmates. He’s more bemused narrator or winking tour guide than gate-crashing hellion, extolling the wonders of a licentious, make-believe paradise on the title track, flirting with curvy she-aliens on “Those Sexy Saucer Gals,” or desperately trying not to get caught shoplifting at the local Piggly Wiggly (“Who Threw That Ham at Me”).

City Paper: Is this a stand-alone show, or part of a larger tour?
Fred Schneider: It’s a one-off, just a special benefit show for the [American] Visionary Art Museum to thank them for letting us do the Superions video there, for our new song “Who Threw That Ham at Me.”

CP: Will you have a backing band for this show? What material will you be playing?
FS: Yeah—they’re called the Mastergators. My friend Al Shepherd from My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult contacted the museum and got everything going; he’s in the band, plus [former Scissor Sisters drummer] Paddy Boon. We’re doing stuff from the solo albums [1984's Fred Schneider and the Shake Society and 1996's Just Fred].

CP: How and why did the Superions come to be? I know that you just released an EP; are there any plans for a full-length?
FS: My friends Dan (Marshall, music programmer) and Noah (Brodie, keyboard player) live in Orlando, and I stay with them when I’m down there. I turned them on to lounge and tiki music. They wrote some songs, and asked me to put words to them; it turned out really fun. We’re actually in the process of writing a Halloween album, a Christmas album, and a regular album.

CP: Wow! That’s ambitious.
FS: Yep! We have it in us. It’s just a matter of finding the time, because they both have full-time jobs.

CP: What’s going on with the B-52s these days?
FS: We recorded live shows in Australia; hopefully they’ll be mixed and out this year. Right now, I’m really focused on the Superions, on getting that going really strong.

CP: Does Baltimore hold any special appeal for you?
FS: Well, of course, John Waters. I have fun there; I always have a great time. Good shopping, good junking—all the things I like.

CP: What’s the most unusual thing a fan has sent you?
FS: Well, people used to make Quiche Lorraines all the time—models of the pooch in the song. I have a bunch of those. Nothing all that weird, to be honest, thank God.

CP: I think there’s a perception in some quarters that you live a crazy life, full of wacky parties and loud clothes and such. True?
FS: In the beginning, but not really anymore. Though I do dance on a table from time to time.

CP: Are you often recognized on the street? When this occurs, what usually happens next?
FS: Oh yeah, a lot of times. Everyone is pretty gracious and excited. They usually start screaming, which makes me laugh. My fans are great people, really respectful, which I love. Most of them were nuts for a B-52s song when they were in the fifth grade, which makes me feel old!

Fred Schneider performs tonight, April 9, at the AVAM.

The first thing you notice about Unsung Stories from Lilly’s Days as a Solar Astronaut is its distinctive packaging, a cryptic collage overlaying a backdrop the color of faded parchment paper: ragged, Ralph Steadman-esque lettering interspersed with distressed typefaces, washed-out snapshots of an ’80s-era sedan and an unidentifiable action figure, aimless doodles, a gray cluster of evocative text clippings, and an image of a pair of open scissors. If your guess is that Unsung wouldn’t be all sweetness and light—that its aching, emotional longing runs deep—award yourself a gold star.

This melancholic, mosaic record—the second from Baltimore-based aural alchemist Jonathan Badger—looks like a tragic scrapbook, and it sounds like one, too, even as its song titles split the difference between blunt utilitarianism (“Aria 7″) and desperate, depressive delusion (“They Searched for Each Other in the Shelter of Mercury”). Unsung shuffles nimbly between extremes of darkness and light the way an Olympic figure skater transitions from twirls and spins to Lutzes and axles, a suite of fluid, involving instrumentals that draws from disparate genres to arrive at a sort of post-ambient survey course.

Badger’s sonic palette can definitely inspire tinnitus: “Lucius” forces effects-driven, contact-mic’d-wasps-in-a-jar chicanery to play nice with Mogwai-lite gloaming, while “The Vessel Megalo” is all orchestral, noise-metal swing. “Aria 7″ gently stipples downcast classical harmonies with static and micromorphed bongo-beat samples then drops all of that in favor of starched electric ax sandblasts. A few tracks—namely the aforementioned “Mercury,” which cries out to be set to an interpretive dance piece, and the hiccupping hospital monitor, conservatory drear of “Beat 1″—generate the kind of dissonant cross-currents that fool you into thinking that your cell phone is ringing near by.

Unsung is at its best when Badger really gets his Siberian-winter-of-our-discontent on. “His Face Like Glass to the Touch”—a modernist tone poem for piano, Mellotron, and guitar that peers deeply into its own cracked mirror image—paints a spellbinding portrait of baroque/prog unease, and “vocals” that have been drained of all humanity lend the piece an operatic cast. “The First Time I Dreamt of the Surface There Was No-One to Hold” shoves burbling, opaque electronics and sewing-machine stitched riffs through pregnant silences and gusts of string-section anguish that are abruptly cut short.

Given the sulfuric dissonance, clamor, and strife present in White Suns’ noise-punk tumult, it’s hardly shocking that the Brooklyn trio count Sightings among their favorite bands. Performing and recording together, Kevin Barry, Rick Visser, and Dana Matthiessen blaze with a gunfire-stipled, sunspot intensity that befits their handle and recalls, at times, that acerbic outfit. (To sample the face-melt of “Don Mattingly,” “Exposible Income,” and other tracks, visit the White Suns’ last.fm page.) And while the band have yet to record a full-length record–self-released 2008 debut The First EP and last summer’s split with Shearing Pinx (on Isolated Now Waves) is all they have available so far–they maintain a strong touring schedule and appear on the bill at Saturday’s MT6 Fest. In a later October e-mail interview, Barry, Visser, and Matthiessen discussed Brooklyn’s experimental bent, the meanings of their song titles, baseball, side projects, and the defection of an early member who aspired to become Smokey the Bear.

City Paper: How and when did White Suns form?
Kevin Barry: A vestigial “White Suns” formed in 2004, in the rural Connecticut town we grew up in, when it became brutally clear that for us to be have any kind of emotional stability, we had to be making this type of music. Dana and I began with another human named Derek on electronics, but after a handful of disappointing shows, he fled to Yakima, Washington, and was replaced by Rick.

Dana Matthiessen: Derek’s private dream of impersonating Smokey the Bear trumped being in a rock band. I also want to add that Kevin and I started playing music while I was in high school. The catalyst was my booking a set, without a band, at a benefit concert for a local church. I had wanted to come up with something that would suitably scathe the Christian ears in the audience, and I knew Kevin was in some way a fellow fan of noisy music. In retrospect, it was a dumb premise. I had a piece of a guard rail that I was using for percussion; I miss it sometimes. Anyway, Kevin and I continued collaborating whenever he was in town. As for Rick, he and I had been fucking around in our garages with one failed project or another for a long while before he entered the band. With Derek gone, asking him to join was a no-brainer.

Rick Visser: We all grew up going to the same schools and ultimately hanging around with the same kids. There are not many people in our hometown to begin with, and the kids that are into music–more specifically, experimental music–were and are pretty thin in number. Consequently, the little scene is pretty incestuous and everyone plays in everyone else’s bands and, like Dana mentioned, we had all been in one failed project or another and had kind of cut our milk teeth together in friends’ garages and basements. It’s kind of funny that years later after all of us moving around and living in different places White Suns would prevail as a band comprised of people from the same small town.

CP: What’s the White Suns breakdown, as far as who plays what instruments?
DM: I have a bad habit of not breaking down. I pay for everything I break.

KB: I play a guitar through a single distortion pedal and therefore have the fastest set-up/breakdown time in the band. I write the words that are spoken in our songs and I also do the majority of the speaking.

RV: I play fragments of what everyone else plays: a little drums, a little guitar, a little electronics, and a lot of love.

CP: Does the name “White Suns” bear any particular significance? It always makes me think of a future where ozone alerts are a thing of the past because we’re perpetually under alert, and people are afraid to go outside without sunscreen on.
DM: Honestly, the name doesn’t mean much to me. We kind of randomly settled on it and are now in some limited sense beholden to it. I think of it like my own name: not something that bears any specific sense in itself, just a marker, a way for people to identify me. I like that White Suns is relatively vague.

CP: How did you come to be part of this year’s MT6 Fest lineup?

DM: Jason Donnells–of the New Flesh and Pfisters–has been a Baltimore comrade for several years, and he helped us get on the bill. Our first show in Baltimore was with the New Flesh at skate-punk joint the Nerve Center, where I ended up replacing him on bass at some point during their set. Sincere apologies to whoever sat through my finger-slop. After that, he took us to New York Fried Chicken.

CP: What is “exposable income”?
KB: “Exposable income” is a steady stream of financial wealth that is kept hidden, but can be perceived by a discerning eye.

DM: Economic disenchantment.

CP: What’s your songwriting process like?
DM: Sometimes one of us has an idea for a part. Sometimes we try to approach it holistically, but the real work comes from building connections between dispersed, barely related “shit that sounds cool.” Jamming never really works out.

RV: Yeah, we don’t jam–we improvise.

KB: Music is first, and comes about through a process that I imagine is analogous to metal sculpting. Words are second. They are dredged from notebooks and applied if they fit the nature of the song.

CP: Do any of you play in other bands or projects?
DM: I have a solo thing called Cancer Dance and another project, Jock Jams, that seems to be getting off the ground after a bit of a hiatus. The former has a release on Oddsmaker Records, the latter on Goaty Tapes. Both are generally noise/drone-oriented, but I’ve written some rock songs, too. Rick and I occasionally do a dual-drumming thing, Prayer Buddies. Kevin had a brief stint in punk outfit Cutter and Rick has a solo project-cum-band called Open Star Clusters that he can tell you more about.

RV: Open Star Clusters is my other main thing. It’s kind of a rotating door of a project that has been through many incarnations. I also have a solo thing that is as of yet un-named, which is drums and pedals, or more recently, a hodgepodge of tapes, electro-acoustic stuff, and electronics. I also play guitar in a band called Bahh Black Box, but all the songs are written by someone else for that band. And of course there’s Prayer Buddies, the old Dana and Rick stand-by.

CP: Do you have any plans for an album? If so, are you aiming to put it out on a label, or will you release it yourselves?
KB: No plans for a proper album; not many people are interested in blowing a lot of money by releasing our music. Twenty-minute cassette coming out this winter on Heavy Psych, though.

CP: “Don Mattingly”–one of the songs on your new split EP that’s also been up as a free download on your last.fm page for a while–gnashes and thrashes with an almost possessed intensity. What’s the story behind that song? Are you Mattingly fans? Is he an inspiration to you?
KB: The title is tangentially related to the lyrical content, which pertains to the loss of youth. It was one of our first songs. We found out later that it sounded a lot like a particular Arab on Radar song.

DM: I think Kevin played baseball when he was a youngster. I quit after they stopped letting you use a stand for the ball. I remember having a bat-throwing problem.

RV: Baseball umpire was my first job, and I played until high school. I still have anxiety about those days. Although I played stickball a lot over the past summer.

CP: What’s it like being a noise-rock band in Brooklyn? Sometimes it seems, to outsiders, as though the borough of Brooklyn is comprised entirely of noise, freak-folk, and underground bands of various stripes. Is it a competitive environment, or does everybody pretty much get along?
KB: There is a lot of music in Brooklyn, but most of it is not as “weird” as the people making it think it is. Many people describe their work as “noisy” or “noise,” but it isn’t. The niche we inhabit is small and our cohabitants are supportive. Good Brooklyn bands include: Sightings, Zs, Drunkdriver, Twin Stumps, Vaz, Pygmy Shrews.

DM: There are contingents of people doing stuff that is more explicitly noise, but much of it lacks the kind of organization that would make it a full-blown community, per se. Like the stuff in Kevin’s list, we generally end up teaming with bands that have more of a loud, distorted rock thing going for them. It’s not so much an effect of necessity as it is the people we’ve ended up getting to know.

RV: It’s competitive until you meet bands that you get along with and share some ethos or sound with. Like Dana and Kevin said, we fit in with the heavy crowd because of who we’ve come to make friends with. There are so many other little scenes and groups of bands that get along stylistically. It’s a big, eclectic city, and I just moved here.

CP: Before you became musicians, was there a special show–or shows–that you caught that made you say to yourself, This is exactly what I should be doing?’
KB: For me it wasn’t a show, but an album. A friend lent me Sonic Youth’s Goo in 8th grade. I began taking the only available guitar lessons from an aging bluegrass enthusiast shortly thereafter.

DM: Not that I can remember. My weed friends in high school got me into music, and I eventually decided to get a drum kit with my bag-boy money since I’d never enjoyed playing the guitar.

RV: It’s a long and winding trail that led to this point. From classic rock stars, to the local legends around coffee houses, to figuring out what “avant-garde” means, to learning about DIY. You get kind of swept away in it all. “You don’t choose noise rock, noise rock chooses you!”

White Suns play MT6 Fest V Nov. 14 at the Hexagon. For more information visit hexagonspace.com

City Paper: In an earlier e-mail, you said that Music for Higher Dimensional Consciousness represents a new direction for you. When you say that, what do you mean? Are you speaking in terms of composition?

Twig Harper: It’s not that it’s entirely a new direction, it’s that I feel as if I am finally breathing new air, standing on a hill built from years of struggle and experimentation. My solo music and the work with Nautical Almanac have more or less been about working with consciousness as an instrument. This is approached like how most bands use guitars; it is a navigable realm with specific shapes, sounds, ideas, and cycles. And since it requires an outside observer to interact with, it had to wait until everyone and all the cultural, social, and personal elements lined up. Now it’s that everything finally clicked and I’m past a threshold, and these ideas are blazing into the next cycle. It’s been an amazing ride and this is only the beginning of a new phase. Music for Higher Dimensional Consciousness is designed to be listened to with headphones; I am very happy with how it turned out. It works on me-I get shot straight up, to higher realms.

CP: 2009 seems like it’s been a prolific year for you: You’ve put out five releases so far. What’s on the horizon for you next? You’re on something of a tear.

TH: Last winter to this spring, I had just finished working and recording with a bunch of people-Sejayno, Needlegun, Lizz King, Salamander Wool, and others-and I just rode that bolt of fluid, creative energy into producing a bunch of solo releases, something which I hadn’t done in years. I felt a million suns exploding within a reflection of a dragon’s eye, and asked the white-hole-cornucopia speaker coils for blessings. This year at some point, too, I did a solo European train tour, dragging over 100 lbs of gear, merch, and stinky clothes on my back for two and a half weeks. Peeping into the future, there is a finished CD that Hanson Records is going to release soon, and I will be starting new and intense recording projects and finishing the ones floating over my head that I should have [finished] years ago.

CP: What inspired Inner Alchemy/Electric Water, and how did you go about making it? I’m finding that when I listen to this one at work I constantly have to keep getting up and going to use the urinal. Stretches of Possible Last Unknowns also strike me as especially “watery.”

TH: For Inner Alchemy, I took my portable DAT recorder over to the Gwynns Falls and set up a stereo and microphone lines that were further apart than any normal person’s head would be. I monitored with the headphone volume turned up loud and found all the sweet spots and hidden voices. Now, since I am hearing 10 times louder than normal, and with two ears placed a few feet apart, one become a new type of animal, senses set to a strange, watery new world. Since I am not a field recording purist in any sense, I took these tapes back to the studio and worked them over a few times, adding electronics and processing them into a sonic soup. Water is one of the greatest teachers; I’ve been getting absorbed and washing it out.

CP: At this point, what are the tools of your sonic trade? And have they changed, recently?

TH: I use whatever is in my reach: cassette-tape loops, lathe-cut records, analog tape manipulation, bowed strings, circuit-bent delay pedals, and ancient synthesizers. But that is really not that important to me. This is all very tricky. My approach has evolved to balance the device-as-entity and device-as-tool. In the past, I focused more cannibalized electronics with feedback systems, which created very specific voices. It was conversations between human and machine. So the device-as-entity was more forefrontal. But that’s just the beginning, because we too can become tools for higher orders.

CP: Generally, when you create a piece of music, do you do so with a specific goal in mind? Or do you follow your muse wherever it happens to lead?

TH: It is about using known methods that shift between states of be-ing and is-ness to achieve a desired goal. These ordered modes lead us to the edge. A musical instrument is the grounding point into matter: the human is instrument, and I tune into the music being birthed out from the sea of awareness. I honor this relationship by amplifying these mysteries that are encountered and integrated. I am a conductor and time traveler. You must embrace the dissonance.

How I do this is by using sounds that exist in the past but can changed in the present to affect the future-even if the future is that all possibilities become reality. Until this death, we dream. By cutting my own records in non-linear groove path ways, by using live prerecorded tapes of tapes, loops, fractal cut-ups, radio interceptions, recorded again and reprocessed hundreds of times into a field stoned soup. I use recordings that I had made 15 years ago and put them into the current mix. Nothing is profane: by accepting our limits, we gain more freedom.

CP: What’s happening with Nautical Almanac? Is the band gesticulating quietly out of view? I keep hoping to hear news of a new release and/or big national tour-I know you guys play often at Tarantula Hill in Baltimore-and I’m sure a lot of fans feel likewise, though I know that you, Max, and Carly are all busy with various projects.

TH: It’s slowly building back up, after a long slow down to a stopping in our tracks. Nautical is just Carly and I right now, and it’s been a “band” since 1994, and we hit a wall. So we changed our lives. It was the main focus for us, and we just ran it to the end. Carly realized that audiences were only able to go “so far” with us at that time. So she decided to focus on hypnotherapy and help people more directly. So much of what we do in our lives is about fusing Art, Science, and Spirituality together, so sometimes it’s good to rotate the manifestation of that triangle. Nautical Almanac is quietly building up to our vision for the next level. It requires a lot more work and more people and may not even be Nautical Almanac when we hit the goal. We know it will happen when it’s right, and it’s starting to feel that way. Carly has been working on the stage setting that is a moving amorphous sheet with levels of projections, movement, shadows, audible light triggers, and I have dreams of four-channel metabolic soundsystems.

CP: When and why did Max Eisenberg leave Nautical Almanac? What does he do now? I didn’t even realize he wasn’t in the band any longer.

TH: Most people think Max still is in the band since our visibility has been hazy when we do play out. He left because he was doing DJ Dog Dick and we all felt that it was better [for] him to have that to focus his ambitions on than the Nautical infinite tape loop of nowheresville. My memory is slipping about when he left, but [it] must of been in 2006? While I think the music we did with him was some of the most challenging for everyone involved, it was lost on most people and sort of slipped away.

CP: What projects is Carly working on right now?

TH: Carly is practicing hypnotherapy, planning a tour for next year, making urban wildcrafted flower essences, canning food, creating amazing light art, and just about a million other killer things.

CP: What are the most interesting two books you’ve read recently, and why?

TH: This is hard, I have been absorbing so many books as of late. My interest in human potential, psychedelics, and transpersonal consciousness has been dominating my reading time.

CP: It kind of threw me off kilter when, at the end of the first track on Music for Higher Dimensional Consciousness, you threw in a slowed-down, sinister bit of “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” What prompted you to do that?

TH: It’s a deeply ingrained tune. I think most people know the jingle and have some sort of relationship to it. After listening to 18 or so minutes of sweeping sound, it hits at a very base level. I did not premeditate that action; it appeared during the recording process, so I went with it, adding to it.

CP: How are you finding the economy-or the market, I guess-for underground music these days? Does it seem to you that sales and interest are holding steady for Heresee releases, or are things tough, financially and otherwise?

TH: Our purpose of the label was to get things out there; we have never been motivated by making a buck, and felt blessed to release so many things and make money back for more projects. Heresee never sold any more than 600 copies of any release, and we made mostly small runs of a few hundred. We put out our own music and things we were excited about that we thought needed to be heard by people we knew. Things are in flux right now and CDs are becoming almost worthless to a lot of people who enjoy deep music. So that means we actually produce less physical material for less money, and I am very happy with that.

CP: Who-or what-do you draw inspiration from?

TH: Baltimore. This city constantly blows my mind away. Do or Die Baltimore. We live it. This city’s blessing/curse is to live close to a heart pump of the dream/world portals-it flows very strong here. Birth can look a lot like death. Say goodbye to the rotting away. Peace shines out as we grow stronger.

Twig Harper plays the Bank Oct 31. For more information visit heresee.com.

In the mid-1990s, Nuclear Power Pants would have been lucky to snag a third-string indie stage gig on selected Lollapalooza dates. In the late-’90s, they might’ve found themselves opening for the Make-Up, Olivia Tremor Control, or Love As Laughter. Today, at the twilight of the penny-pinching ’00s, this daffy, nomadic octet—formed in New York in 2003, only to dissolve and reconstitute itself in noise-fuck haven Providence, RI, two years later, then emigrate in dribs and drabs to Baltimore—is sensibly issuing its debut in a vinyl edition of 500 on a young, local label with Pitchfork-approved cachet to spare.

Wicked Eats The Warrior (Wham City) is a no-gray-area proposition—you’ll gulp the LSD-spiked NPP Kool-Aid or you’ll run away screaming—something the band can’t help but be aware of. Each of these eight party jams is a warping, Salvador Dali-surreal glob of sneering synth fuckery and dinky, Dark Meat-esque noisemaking, with gang choruses led by vocalists R.M. O’Brien and the aptly named Benjamin Beast, who seems to be perpetually stuck in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

Each song aims to outdo every other song in terms of intentionally awkward lyricism and overall obnoxiousness: check the gospel yeh-yeh-on-Quaaludes dreck of “Got Soul, Need Body,” which comes across as a disavowed Black Mountain D-side, or the desire expressed in stilted irritant “Uh Oh” to “live in the eagle’s throat, so wet, so dark, and so warm.” Or Scooby-Doo drunk “Graveyard,” with its insidiously strong mash-note bass line ruined by tornado bloops and bleeps. “I’m not a nuclear fluke/ I’ve got a bad reputation as a really cool dude,” Beast mock-incants on “Partytime U.S.A.” as if auditioning for the soundtrack of a straight-to-internet Attack of the Killer Tomatoes remake. “Screwdriver” girds psych-ward Mad-Libs and broiling, insufferable sound effects to a bullheaded “Pete Gunn” bass hook.

There’s probably a wealth of laughter in and around Nuclear Power Pants HQ, but whether Wicked inspires more knowing, in-on-the-joke guffaws than derisive, dismissive snorts remains to be seen.

Nuclear Power Pants play Floristree Sept. 26. For more information visit myspace.com/floristree.

Listening to Gang Gang Dance often feels like drowning in a flood of mysticism: exotic instrumentation trickling down on synth flutterings and dense, bent percussion of both the electronic and organic persuasions, while frontwoman Lizzie Bougatsos lends the surrounding melee an idiosyncratic voice. At times, she’s fiercely ornamental, doling out dizzying ululations; at others, she can be unflinchingly literal. (“Afoot,” from last year’s Saint Dymphna, considered the irony of Westernized fast-food franchises opening in countries where “cows are sacred, and most people walk.”) There’s a bit of everything in the stew Bougatsos, Brian Degraw, Josh Diamond, Tim Dewit, and Jesse Lee stir: world music, freak-folk, ’80s radio pop, M.I.A. (see the Rawwar EP from 2007, specifically), fractal-driven avant, damaged art-rock, and much more.

In a July 7 e-mail interview-the day of Michael Jackson’s Los Angeles memorial service-Bougatsos answered a few questions put to her about Baltimore, Saint Dymphna, and the late, lamented King of Pop.

City Paper: Do you have any favorite Baltimore haunts, eats, or people in particular?

Lizzie Bougatsos: Well, I love that John Waters! Cookie Mueller! And I like to eat at the Golden West.

CP: You guys just got back from playing the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. How’d that go?

LB: It was pretty rad. We got the same ratings as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Grace Jones; that was quite an honor.

CP: Retina Riddim made for an arresting audio/visual marriage, linking Gang Gang Dance’s omnivorous/world-music sound with images of the world within and outside of the United States. Do you have any plans for another CD/DVD project along those lines?

LB: Yes, Brian Degraw is working on our next DVD. And we’re writing our new music as we speak. You’ll probably hear some of it live, at the show.

CP: Saint Dymphna has a more honeyed, synth-y sound than earlier Gang Gang Dance records-a gloss; the production reminds me a bit of late ’80s/early ’90s pop singles and M.I.A. What was inspiring you in the writing and recording process? Was there an overarching concept?

LB: For me, personally, I had the image of the arctic in my mind. Glaciers. And pop music. We were YouTubing Yes a capella tracks, and smooth sailers like Don Cherry.

CP: When I heard that [U.K. grime artist] Tinchy Stryder would be appearing on Saint Dymphna, I wasn’t sure what to think. But his guest rap on “Princes” fit like a glove. How did you come to work with him?

LB: Brian Degraw, Josh Diamond, and Tim Dewit had been fans for a while. He visited our studio in London when we were recording for a “Latitudes” project at Southern Studios. He also opened for us at a show in London a few years ago. He must have been 19 then? What a little prince he is!

CP: What’ve been some of the more memorable or significant experiences and revelations you’ve had while touring overseas?

LB: Well, we had an amazing show in Barcelona at Primavera. The last time at Primavera was magical, too . . . opening for the Boredoms. We led the Boadrum on Aug 8, 2008. And in a few weeks we will be playing on a boat for the solar eclipse. I don’t think anything can be greater, experience-wise, than that.

CP: I know you play as part of I.U.D., but what projects are you all involved in outside of Gang Gang Dance?

LB: Well, Brian and I make art. I currently have a show up at the Breeder Gallery in Athens, Greece.

CP: What’s the Gang Gang Dance writing process like? Do songs emerge out of extensive jam sessions?

LB: Pretty much. We play the songs over and over the parts until it becomes a song.

CP: Are/were you Michael Jackson fans? Where were you when you heard the news of his death, and what were you doing?

LB: I’ve been watching the memorial service all day. “I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” by Stevie Wonder nearly broke my heart. [Jackson's] message was very positive for all peoples. He changed lives. I am sad to see him go, but he is forever in our hearts, isn’t he? I was running errands in the East Village when I found out. I called my boyfriend to see if he was OK. We were very touched by him and worried about Bubbles the chimp. He looks very sad in jail. Somebody, please help Bubbles!

CP: Have you ever considered covering a Michael Jackson song?

LB: No. Usher does a pretty good job, though. So does Justin Timberlake.

Gang Gang Dance plays August 5 at the Ottobar.

Baltimore’s Creepy Murdle—bassist Anne Feinstein; her husband, guitarist/snarler Rich Feinstein; and drummer Clay Holland—might be MT6 Records’ most accessible signees yet. Sure, their macro-aggro crunch on debut The Little Things That Kill You comes cloaked a scrim of psychedelic bubblewrap; sure, Feinstein’s clipped, anarchistic dispatches seem to have been recorded via a busted CB radio. Yet there’s no denying the trio’s ear for a killer hard-rock hook or a dynamite punk-rock riff-worm; the chances of Creepy Murdle’s herky-jerky hurtle catching on beyond its home base seem far stronger than, say, Rosemary Krust, the Agrarians, or Needlegun.

“Ontro” slings bing-bong, effects pedal dissonance that devolves into melting tape machine sludge before “Of Mad Kings” emerges to knock doors from hinges: thorny, concussive guitars and no nonsense drums on a surging tear with something to prove and Rich Feinstein trying on a credible Billy-Corgan-in-1995 impression. Skim a few dollops of that starchy distortion off of snotty, three-chord “Sunshine”—Blur-in-Orange County wooooo-hoos and all—and you’ve got yourself a lost Fat Wreck Chords compilation track. “Email Bomb” pogos so frenetically through a vitriolic “eff spam” screed that you might get whiplash; while harried “Fifteen”—with it’s no-hope “Fifteen minutes and I’m already dead/ Fifteen minutes and it’s all in my head” refrain, infectious “nah-nah-nahs,” and keyboard jags—comes across, even with pauses for breath, as even more urgent.

But Little Things gets still more hectic, as the vocals for breakneck garage-y vamp “I Hate the Way The World Goes Round” seem to disintegrate halfway through, as they were sucked through an oscillator. Perhaps what’s most impressive about Creepy Murdle is how its moxie and adrenaline never flag over the course of this album’s 35 minutes; dollars to doughnuts there’s a lot more to come.

Creepy Murdle plays July 18 at the Hexagon. For more information visit hexagonspace.com.

Almost as a rule, we don’t expect weavers of mercilessly dark, navel-gazing music to be forthcoming about either their craft or themselves. So we were shocked, during an e-mail exchange with Jasper TX’s Dag Rosenqvist, to find him so voluble an interview subject. Below is the full interview transcript, much of which wouldn’t fit into the article in the July 8 edition of City Paper; here, Rosenqvist holds forth on his relationship with his fans, audience etiquette, the role of dynamics in musical composition, and Chuck Palahniuk.

City Paper: What was your earliest music-making experience? Can you remember what it sounded like?
Dag Rosenqvist: I started playing the double bass when I was nine, and it probably sounded awful. When I started recording what was eventually to become Jasper TX, I had no real equipment, just a 4-track portable cassette recorder that I lined a cheap electric guitar into. It sounded like shit, to be honest. But the ideas were there, and I got better along the way, thankfully. I actually have some of those early recordings left, but they will never leave the safety of my bedroom drawer.

CP: Who would you count as your biggest musical influences (in terms of other artists or anything/anyone else), and what music do you find yourself captivated by right now?
DR: That’s a hard one. I grew up in a home full of music. None of my parents played any instruments but they listened to a lot of music. My father’s a big jazz fanatic, so he introduced me to the likes of Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Lars Gullin, Eric Dolphy, and Charlie Parker. My mother, on the other hand, listened to the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. So I learned to appreciate both regular pop/rock music as well as the more free-form stuff. I think this has had a huge influence on my music, maybe not directly in the music itself but rather in the idea that, when creating music, you’re free to do anything you want. And no one can tell you you’re wrong.

At the moment I’m really into Zelienople. Everything they’ve done is basically phenomenal. Lately I’ve also been listening a lot to the latest Mastodon album, Crack the Skye, as well as older stuff from Neurosis, the
latest Balmorhea album, everything by Peter Broderick, Ronnie Sundin’s latest album Seven Year Silence from the Swedish Label Fang Bomb (who also released my Singing Stones album) Pillowdiver, Lichens, Early Day Miners. I could go on for a while, so I think I’ll stop there.

CP: What inspired you to adopt the rather evocative stage name “Jasper TX”? Did it have anything to do with what happened there in 1998-three white men chaining a black man to their truck and dragging him to death?
DR: Yes, it did. Naming my project Jasper TX was my way of saying that we should never, ever forget what we human beings are capable of. The incident in Jasper became a symbol of both despair and hatred, but also of hope as the world condemned the actions of the three men who murdered James Byrd, Jr. This incident, as well as my music and life in general, contains both light and darkness. The one cannot exist without the other. Sadly, the events that took place in Jasper, Texas are still a relevant reminder even today.

CP: There’s a very dark, brooding-yet-beautiful feel to your music that exudes intimacy. I wonder: do you ever worry that this intimacy-which I imagine is intense in a studio and definitely is mind-blowing when heard through headphones-loses something in concert venues, where there’s chattering, ringing cell phones, and so forth? Are audiences generally respectful?
DR: Generally, I would say that audiences are respectful. There have been occasions where I’d gladly strangle people from the audience and there’s almost always that cell phone that goes off, but most of the times people are actually there to listen to the music. Records and live shows are two different things to me. That is just something that you have to come to terms with as an artist. I can never recreate the same atmosphere live as I do on the albums. The albums are meticulously crafted and nothing on them is left to chance. A live performance is basically a state of chaos that you try to control the best you can. Sometimes it’s magic; sometimes it falls flat to the ground. I don’t think that the intimacy of the music gets lost; I just think that it’s a completely different thing altogether.

CP: Tell me a bit about The Bending of Light, your recent collaboration album with Anduin. How did that come about? You’re touring together now; will you be performing together onstage?
DR: Initially, Jonathan [Lee of Anduin] contacted me regarding a remix for his Forever Waiting album. After that was done, we started talking about doing some kind of collaboration and basically we just started swapping files over the Internet. We also started outlining ideas and concepts for the music so both of us could have sort of a framework to create the music within. It was a very organic process where the tracks bounced back and forth a lot before we were finally done with the album. I really wanted to do stuff that I hadn’t previously done so I used a lot more synthesizers on these recordings. I’m very pleased with how it turned out in the end and we’re already planning on recording a follow up to it during the upcoming tour.

For the tour we will each be playing a separate set and then the idea is that we close every night with a collaborative set. It will probably be pretty much improvised and hopefully very good!

CP: What are the best and worst aspects of touring for you? And, weighing touring and recording, which do you prefer, and why?
DR: The best parts of touring is definitely meeting people and seeing new places. It’s always a blast when you actually get to meet people with whom you’ve been emailing for a long time. To actually sit down and have a conversation over a beer or a cup of coffee. I love being shown around to the best bars and places in a city, the kind of places that you only know of if you’ve lived there for a while.

The worst part of touring is the waiting. You wait for check-in at the airport. You wait for a flight. You wait for a bus. You wait for sound-check. You wait for the show. You wait for the promoter to give you your money. On an average day I’d say that waiting takes up two-third[s] of the day when you’re on tour. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but sometimes it certainly feels that way. There’s also the hauling of equipment, the sleep deprivation, the constant traveling, the feeling that you don’t belong anywhere. And of course, I always miss my wife when I’m on tour.

I think I prefer recording. It’s not that I don’t enjoy playing live but I’m a bit of a control freak. I hate it when I’m not in control of things that happen around me and playing live is all about trying to do something meaningful in a state of chaos. When you succeed and do a great set it’s rewarding beyond belief. When you fail, you just want to go hang yourself. And that’s another hard aspect of touring. You pour so much from yourself throughout a day and if you then fail on stage then it feels like it was all wasted. But then again, I’ve done catastrophic shows that people absolutely loved, so what do I know?

CP: Your music is of the sort that inspires a deep emotional response. Have any fans ever contacted you to share personal meanings/experiences associated with your compositions?
DR: Yes, it happens quite frequently actually. One time there was a Japanese guy who e-mailed me saying that my music comforted and helped him when his wife and son got killed in a car accident. How do you respond to a thing like that? I love it when people mail me regarding the music I do, it’s sort of a receipt that the music means something to someone beside myself. On the other hand it can be very hard to deal with people’s stories about loss and alienation. I think the trick is to not let it affect you too much. I think that you need to distance yourself from it, both the positive and the negative, so that it’s not starting to weigh you down and have too big of an impact on your personal life. But it ain’t easy.

CP: Are you doing any reading right now? If so, what’s on your night stand at the moment?
DR: Right now I’m reading Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk and The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Palahniuk is one of my favourite authors. I love his twisted humour and how every book hold ideas that a lesser author would turn into at least ten pretty watered down books. Other all-time favourites are Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, and Swedish author Carl-Johan Wallgren. If you find anything by Wallgren in English, buy it!

CP: You seem to write and release music at a rapid clip; I get the sense that you’re never low on ideas and energy. Is music, in essence, your sole vocation? Or do you have a day job?
DR: Music is not my sole vocation as I’m currently studying to become a project manager. I just finished my first year out of two so over the summer I’m actually unemployed and pretty broke. But so far I haven’t had a single day off since the semester ended. So yes, I’m pretty much never short on energy or ideas. The thing is there’s just so much music to be made, so many interesting projects to be a part of. When I had all of my recording equipment at home I used to be really manic about recording stuff. I could sit for twelve hours straight without eating or sleeping or even knowing that the world existed around me. Now I have a recording space a good twenty minutes from home and I’m trying to work as focused and efficiently as possible when I’m there. The older I get, the more focus, structure, and control I need, it seems. I’ll probably end up turning into a psychotic bureaucrat making minimal harsh noise.

CP: If your music had a color, what would it be?
DR: A mix between moss-green, dirty faded pink, and sort of brownish black. I think those colours sums up the various aspects of my music pretty well. Shimmering and comforting, a bit faded and old and somewhere underneath there’s a darkness that we can never get rid of.

CP: Singing Stones is almost startlingly and suddenly quiet in spots; at moments it sounds like the calm before a massive storm and it’s as though we’re hearing rumblings of thunder miles away. Are you ever startled-in your work, the work of others, or the world in general-by the relative power of silence?
DR: Overall I think that dynamics are very important and I think that a gently strummed, soft acoustic guitar can be just as intense as the harshest of Japanese noise. Just listen to Steve von Till’s solo albums and you’ll
know what I mean. Sometimes the smallest of gestures are the ones that hit you hardest and I believe that, just like light needs darkness, sounds need silence.

A couple of years ago it became pretty popular to make “quiet music,” right on the edge of what our ears could perceive. But I never really got into that kind of thing, I think it’s too similar to noise in the way that it’s just too static, it relies too heavily on just the form and not the matter of the songs. To me it has always been the dynamics of sound and music that is the most interesting, the way you build and deconstruct sounds to tell the story you want to tell.

For Singing Stones, I tried to create a story where all the tracks were different scenes in a loose narrative. And to tell the story properly I needed all those sounds and all of the silent parts to be on the record.

It is fully realised in the sense that there’s nothing on it that doesn’t need to be there. Every sound has a place and a purpose. It’s like in a movie; sometimes you need score music, sometimes you need dialogue and sometimes you just need an empty frame.

Jasper TX plays July 11 at the Hexagon.

NYC trio Black Dice doesn’t so much make music as it dumpster-dives for sonic refuse, smashes together its findings, and shapes the shards and fragments into disarmingly odd, wobbly sculptures.

Listening to albums like Creature Comforts, Beaches and Canyons, or recent dispatch Repo (Paw Tracks) isn’t rock-out-with-your-cock-out gratifying or cathartic; it’s intriguingly puzzling, mysteriously mesmerizing, perhaps kind of frightening. Impossible questions materialize. Was that an altered human voice I just heard, ground to chum in a slouching mist of dragging, rough textures? And what were those textures, anyway? Found sounds processed beyond recognition? Electronically simulated gears a-grindin’? Surf guitars? Only Black Dice—Eric Copeland, Bjorn Copeland, and Aaron Warren—know for certain, and they’re not saying. Unlike Atlas Sound’s Bradford Cox, who includes track-by-track recipes in his liner notes, these boys hold their cards close to the vest.

In a mid-May e-mail interview, Eric Copeland was predictably vague on compositional specifics, but shared a bit of insight into the Black Dice cover-art division of labor, his personal work ethic, and the genesis of Repo.

City Paper: Listening through your catalog, I constantly find myself wondering: just how are Black Dice tracks created? Goings-on are so chopped, warped, and stickily woven that origins are difficult to discern, for laymen.

Eric Copeland: Nowadays, we make jams any way that we want. Usually, the material suggests or demands a working method. The main thing is to get every piece of the song, all the sounds, to a place where we all like it. Sometimes that means that one element will be addressed for a long time, but often, lately, we’ve been working faster. I guess we try to figure out just where the song needs to be and leave our “musicianship” out of the picture—work on it more as a bunch of ideas rather than someone playing and writing music.

CP: From where do you draw sound sources, instruments aside? On Repo some samples leap out as clearly appropriated and transmorgified, but generally, I get the sense that zillions of other samples are distressed then sewn into the ebb and flow that listeners couldn’t even begin to identify.

EC: Yeah; with Repo, anything went. We could work with anything and warp it into something else. Definitely some appropriated sounds, but quite a lot of the record is the result of our own sound designing.

CP: Black Dice has been at it for about 12 years now, with seismic stylistic shifts. How has the recording/release/touring cycle changed for you with the passage of time?

EC: Personally, Black Dice has become a full-time thing—more a way for me to approach making anything creatively. So in that way, it’s become much more serious and complete for me. But we still make our own schedules and do what we want. Nobody’s ever given us permission to be this band.

CP: What bands or artists do you find yourselves listening to for pleasure lately, contemporary or otherwise?

EC: It doesn’t matter to me. I enjoy listening to the radio, an iPod Shuffle, silence, any new music people throw our way. For pleasure, though, I find popular music—especially music television programs—to be the easiest on the ears; that’s what it was designed for, I guess.

CP: To my mind, cover and sleeve art is one of Black Dice’s most distinctive trademarks—I know you put out an art book sometime back (Gore, with photographer Jason Frank Rothenburg). There’s a sort of graffiti-meets-cut’n'paste-meets-pop art feel to it that complements the accompanying sounds perfectly. Do you develop your cover concepts together? Do any of you come from a visual art background, and is that something you pursue outside of the band?

EC: Bjorn has made all of our record covers. He started it, and it feels like an ongoing project for him. We all love his work, and maintain the final “veto” if needed, but usually he brings in his ideas and they seem to resonate well. Lately, we’ve all been doing more visual work for the band and elsewhere, but only Bjorn has a formal visual arts background, though Aaron studied and works with video, too.

CP: I know that you and Bjorn are brothers, but do all three of you spend much time together when not recording or touring or strategizing?

EC: Yes and no. We have a little family between all of us, so I can go to Aaron’s place for Thanksgiving, for instance. But when not working on stuff, we tend to live quite separately. I think we all need some space to be able to work the way we do.

CP: With Repo, what did you aim to achieve? This record feels slightly more conducive to live performances in the traditional “band” sense—maybe a but less wedded to racks of gear and triggered loops.

EC: We were just going for a good attitude, high bar of quality, a lot of ideas, songs played by a band again—lots of direction on this one.

CP: I know you have a new solo album coming out in late summer. Can you tell me a bit about what we can expect from that record? Last year’s Alien in a Garbage Dump EP stuck me as slightly more accessible than’ 07s Hermaphodite LP.

EC: The Alien in a Garbage Dump EP was just one half of an album by the same name, so I finished the second half (the Al Anon EP) and Catsup Plate will do the vinyl. Not sure when, but soonish, I guess—and Paw Tracks will put it all together for a proper album (also titled Alien in a Garbage Dump and due out August 18). Maybe it’s more accessible? I have no idea. There always seems to be an attraction/repulsion scene at play.

CP: Eric, how do you decide which ideas or compositions to use for solo recordings, and which to develop with Black Dice?

EC: I just work and work. When nobody else is around, then I tend to finish ideas by myself. But when Dice are active and writing, then I give it all to the band. I can’t get too precious with these ideas; I can’t feel like some “riff” is “the one” and treat it all crazy. It’s good for me to work a lot, but also to finish a lot—not to get backed up.

CP: After this tour, what’s next for you guys, collectively and separately?

EC: Home for a week, tour for a month, home for a bit, out again, more jams, bigger ideas—just keepin’ at it, I guess!

CP: Do you see the “noise” tag some label you with as a boon, a crutch, or something else entirely? How would you define the music Black Dice makes, or do you consider such classifications arbitrary and meaningless?

EC: We’ve never really identified with the term noise. The only time I think about it is when someone else asks about it. I’d rather just make jams than think about what type of music I’m making.

Black Dice play June 13 at Sonar. For more information visit sonarbaltimore.com

If a pop-techno album ever warranted its own Surgeon General’s warning, Super Animal Brothers III is it. Something along the lines of: “This disc contains high does of sacharrine and obnoxious cuteness, which may trigger diabetic comas in some listeners. Do not ingest more than once in a single 72-hour period.”

What Ear Pwr‘s Sarah Reynolds and Devin Booze-formerly based out of North Carolina, now nesting in Baltimore-proffer is gut-pummeling, madcap, dance-til-you-drop twee that is all puerile, cartoon surface. And it flashes by in a neon blur as dumb-happy as it is pleasure-point stabbing: tension-ratcheting “You Are the Bomb” taking that bit of vernacular seriously in 30 fleeting seconds of silliness, “Boys II Volcanoes” squishing chopped chimes and virtuoso melisma into relentless nonsense about skulls in the sea, aerobic “Beam of Light” pureeing synth sounds-at which point the song begins to careen from that churn into I Am The World Trade Center ripoff fodder, then back to the tonal melee. (See also: “Future Eyes.”)

Both Ear Pwr and IATWTC use bright, halogen synths and shameless pop hooks, but IATWTC’s music had the benefit of being about actual adult emotions based in fact; Ear Pwr aim for conjectural giggles. The title track spikes glow-stick hyperactivity with hip-hop woot-woots and animal-buddy babble; “Sparkley Sweater” is a chiptune earworm about a sparkly sweater, while cheesy skitter-fest “Cats is People, Too” has something to do with kittens in pyramids and randomly quotes Rammstein’s 1997 hit “Du Hast.”

Yet there’s something to be said for music this single-mindedly uninhibited, this merrily shallow, this steamrollering. Ear Pwr harnesses and simulates the heedless energy that spring is supposed to trigger within us all. Who can blame the band for channeling it into charmingly vapid songs such as “Diamonds Liquor Leather,” with its helium-balloon synth-squiggles and “I’ll do the dealing if you’ll do the wheeling/ We’ll make lots of money and it will be funny” refrains? And, honestly, who among us doesn’t just need this kind of cut-loose malarkey now and again?

Ear Pwr plays the Zodiac May 17. For more information visit whamcity.com

Release dates are uncertain, but Canadian label Snapped In Half will release With This Dream, Death Will Come, where be-bopin’ acid jazzisms share real estate with processed-to-another-dimensions freak-outs. Negative Force will issue Live In Nashville, stormy, punk-informed scrawl-fest The Devil is Wise Because He is Old; and We Ain’t No Goddamned Jazz Band, chock full of tantrum-throwing skronk-outs and rough, scrabbling jams. But the mother of them all arrives in cassette format. Hardline American Overdrive (Sounds of the Pocket) finds Lohman, Paternostro, and Simler at their strongest yet: EKG-squiggle blat-spatters splaying into alternately shrieking and cartilage-gnawing runs, soulful sax almost-solos, drum pounds of every description puttering away underneath-only to be whipped and upended into near-psychedelic forms by Simler’s machinations.

To top it all off, Sonic Suicide Squad spent a month on the road opening for stoner touchstone Acid Mothers Temple. In e-mail interviews conducted in March and April, before the tour began, City Paper was able to take the trio’s measure.

City Paper: I know that your Electric Possible group performance in 2006 with Ed Wilcox was sort of a precursor to Sonic Suicide Squad becoming an entity. Was there just such a chemistry in the collaboration that you sort of knew, right after the show, that this was meant to be? Or did things take longer to coalesce?
Vinnie Paternostro: Sam and I were talking about doing some sort of noisy free-jazz duo for a while. I was playing with Temple of Bon Matin at the time and Sam and Jon invited Ed and I to play with Cash Slave Clique at Jeff Bagato’s Electric Possible, an experimental music series he hosts. The SSS came out of the Blue Prostitutes, which was myself and Sam with Steve Mackay of the Stooges, Aaron Moore of Volcano the Bear, J Reeve of Temple of Bon Matin, and Jason LaFarge of Seizure’s Palace Recording Studio. Sam and I wanted to play more often and given the schedules of the Blue Prostitutes, we started another group with Jon.

Jon Simler: The only reason that the first show ever happened was because Sam and I had a show that was in jeopardy due to my possible incarceration, Vinnie and Ed were coming so Sam had someone to play with. As it turned out, the Man couldn’t keep me down-or maybe it was just meant to be, and God stepped in and offered a little divine intervention.

CP: How did the name “Sonic Suicide Squad” originate? The first reference that immediately springs to mind, for me, is D.C. Comics’ Suicide Squad series, in which various rogues’ gallery villains are pressed into U.S. government service as mercenaries.
JS: The name is actually a rip-off of a group on the television show Upright Citizens Brigade called the Hong Kong Danger Duo. It’s a name I was trying to use when Sam and I did our solo projects versus one another. So when we played our second show together and they wanted a name, I just told them that was our name.

CP: How did the tour with Acid Mothers Temple come about? Were you fans of theirs beforehand?
VP: This one’s for Sam and Jon, ’cause they did all the work.

JS: I met Acid Mothers through an old roommate who eventually married Cotton Casino. Then I drove them on their 2004 tour, and [we] became friends. Sam knew Tsuyama because they played together while he lived in Japan. In 2006, Sam played drums for Acid Mothers when they were doing a double-drummer tour. Their drummer couldn’t get a visa and they asked Sam to come out to L.A. and play the tour, but it was still up in the air as to whether or not the other drummer was coming, so Sam couldn’t leave work without a guarantee that he would do the whole tour. So he played some shows on the East Coast. Our friend Justin took over driving for me after the ’04 tour, and he kept telling us to ask them if the Clique could open for them. We didn’t think it would work so well, but when this band got together we thought it was worth a shot, so we asked.

CP: When you play live, is what you come up with totally improvised, usually? Or do you go onstage with a definite sense of what you want to accomplish?
VP: Everything we’ve done so far has been based on improvising. We already know what we want to accomplish: loud, fast improvs that are noisy as hell. We use this as a pure philosophy. Some of the ideas for the improvs are premeditated. Sometimes Sam will tell me he’s going to throw in an odd time signature or something extended like a 10-beat measure. Other times, I’ll have an idea in my head that comes from something I’ve been breaking down at home, like basing an improv off of a Giuseppi Logan tune or “Blues Five Spot” by Thelonious Monk.

JS: I’m at their mercy.

CP: Have you ever had a dream in which you came up with a killer melody or rhythm-only to wake up the next morning unable to remember anything about how it went?
VP: It was quite the opposite. Sometimes I’ll wake up with a line or even a whole song. It’s not a very frequent occurrence.

CP: What other bands and projects are you guys in? I know Sam and Jon play together as Cash Slave Clique, Jon does his solo thing as Rape Ape, and Total System Failure is Vinnie’s sort of primary gig, but are there any other outfits?
JS: Acheronian, a doom metal band from D.C. that sometimes wants a little noise.

VP: Total System Failure is my guilty pleasure. It’s my collaborative/studio work. I’ve only toured with the project once-fall of 2008 in Europe. I’ve got about five albums out with it now, available for free download on last.fm. Sam and I play with Steve Mackay in the Radon Ensemble.

CP: Last.fm has become a pretty important internet tool for bands and artists lately-more accessible and malleable in a lot of ways than, say, MySpace-and I notice that you guys are among those who have really embraced it. How’s that working out for you?
VP: I like the fact that you have unlimited space to upload your music, and you can elect to make it available for free. It’s a great tool. We just really got on the site, so I’m not yet sure how it’ll work out.

CP: What were some of your early, formative musical experiences, in terms of what led you to start playing in bands?
Sam Lohman: When I was 6 or 7–this shit happened in like 1968 or something–I got a record player and a (fuck) Disney record for Christmas. God had recently broken my sisters stereo and she asked if I wanted to go in her room, the forbidden zone, and listen to some Beatles. She’s ten years older than me so she was a happening love child. Of course, I went. She also sang in a band that practiced in my basement a few times. It`s all her fault.

VP: I started playing music in the grammar school band, so it was something I did since I was a kid. Once I discovered hardcore, punk, metal, and noise; I just gravitated towards guys who wanted to do something unique with sounds. Playing in Temple of Bon Matin taught me a lot; Ed Wilcox always encouraged me to be as creative as I wanted.

JS: Being introduced to go-go music in high school. Teenbeat shows. All the Shannon Wright, Make-Up, and Blonde Redhead shows I ever saw. Seeing Black Dice open for Godspeed You Black Emporer in Philly and having my mind blown. About a month later, Sam moved into my house, and the Clique was born. I had never played music or been in a band before I met Sam.

CP: Is there a significant psychic shift that goes into getting a project like this into gear, given that two of you (Jon and Sam) have done time in a project together already, and in working with Vinnie, you’re essentially altering the chemistry? I ask this as somebody who played music as a kid but isn’t familiar with the dynamics of serious musicianship and collaboration.
VP: This band came together really naturally, with almost no effort at all. It was only supposed to be a side project of the Blue Prostitutes. Sam and I had been playing together for a couple years now and I know Jon really well, so it all just feel into place. It just clicked.

JS: With our other band, Sam and I have always collaborated with different people, and Sam has played with Vinnie many times, so it was a pretty natural thing. Plus, I think we all have the same goal: to play music and melt faces.

CP: Where do you all reside? Are you relatively close to one another, geographically?
VP: Sam and Jon are from D.C., and I live in north-western New Jersey. It makes practice a bit hard, but we manage.

CP: Any chance you’ll jam with Acid Mothers Temple on this tour? I can’t even begin to imagine what that would sound like. One of the things you have in common with them is how prolix you are as a unit. Beyond the four or five releases you’ve got slated for 2009 so far, is anything else on the horizon?
JS: It would be awesome if it happened, but nothing has been discussed. If they enjoy our show, maybe they’ll ask. Vinnie’s the boss-he’ll fill you in on the rest.

VP: While there’s been nothing [discussed] about a huge jam, we wouldn’t object. I think it would be an interesting experiment. We are already working on some new material with Jeff Kohlmeyer. He recorded Temple of Bon Matin for a number of releases, and we’ve got about two hours of material tracked now. We plan on getting back into the studio sometime in the summer.

CP: When playing live, do you ever lose all sense of time and place?
JS: If we’re doing it right.

SL: Place sometimes; time never. When I played in Nimrod, we had our songs down cold. The drum parts were played the same each time. I had a couple of experiences when I re-lived dreams I had as a child. I don’t really zone out like that when I play with Sonic Suicide Squad.

VP: That’s the whole point, entrainment. It’s what the old jazz guys used to call “crossing the bridge.” It’s getting lost in the sound. The purpose is to cause a mass psychedelic experience. It’s almost like a primitive religion.

Sonic Suicide Squad plays the Ottobar April 20. For more information visit theottobar.com.

Nathan Williams’ passport is getting a serious workout these days. February and March found the 22-year old San Diego resident and Wavves nucleus blazing a whirlwind noise-pop path through Europe, hitting Prague, Hamburg, Paris, and Leeds, among other cities.

Over the past couple weeks, he’s rocked South By Southwest and issued sophomore disc Wavvves via Fat Possum-a big step up from the tiny labels that handled his earlier releases. Arbiter-of-all-things-hip Pitchfork gave the album a vaunted 8.1 ranking; that’s not a Radiohead-level rave, but it places Williams in the internet-hallowed company of similar racketmakers such as Deerhunter, Times New Viking, and No Age.

Wavves’ metier is gnarly, distorted punk-pop scraps about being dissatisfied, broke, and at the end of your rope.

In mid-February, Williams took time out from his busy schedule to answer e-mail interview questions about gear, keeping body and soul together, and his tendency to overuse the word “goth.”

City Paper: How’d your first NYC and European shows go? Do you think you were received well?
Nathan Williams: Really well! Everything has been super fun. Very positive vibe.

CP: Tell me a bit about how Wavves started, and how you arrived at the name.
NW: Me and my friend Andrew kind of came up with the name together, kind of a joke on how I was pretty afraid of the ocean. Wavves started in my room-just fucking around.

CP: Were you in other bands prior to this one?
NW: Yeah, I fucked around in other bands a lot before this.

CP: Is Wavves just you live? If not, who’s playing with you? If so, how are you able to make the performance work, on your lonesome?
NW: On my lonesome, I record the drums and the guitar bass and do all the vocals. For live shows, I have a drummer play with me.

CP: Will you add an extra “v” to “Wavves” for each successive album title?
NW: No. These first two albums were recorded within the same 3 or 4 weeks, so in my head it’s kind of like a double LP. They were all about similar experiences in my life, so you’ll notice similar song names, and similar vibes from each record.

CP: Who are some of your biggest musical influences?
NW: Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Bad Brains, the Ramones. Lots of American hardcore stuff, lots of Motown and northern soul. Basically, anything with melody is big for me.

CP: What do you do for a day job?
NW: I make enough money doing music that I don’t need a day job. Prior to Wavves, I was managing a record store in San Diego called Music Trader.

CP: What’s your favorite piece of recording equipment/gear-and which piece would you say you get the most use from?
NW: I just use a Mac computer and the trial version of Garageband that came with it. I ran a Tascam 4 track into the computer in the beginning, but I don’t really have any recording equipment.

CP: Your albums always seem split, fairly evenly, between noisy pop-punk and straight noise experiences. What’s your composition/writing process like for each extreme, and does one stylistic vein seem to come easier than the other?
NW: I liked the way the songs complimented each other. Neither comes easier, just different days I felt like recording different types of songs.

CP: Do you feel like your music reflects the specifics of your experiences and surroundings, or that, perhaps, it exists apart from them?
NW: Yeah; all the music is about my surroundings and experiences.

CP: A few questions about goths. They crop up in your song titles a lot, and so I have to ask: do you consider yourself a goth, know many goths, or have anything against goths? Is California a sort of goth utopia?
NW: I don’t know.

Wavves performs at the Zodiac Thursday, March 26. 10 p.m.

No, this isn’t a Minor Threat demo or an outtake from Sonic Youth’s Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star. This is the instrumental version of “Idiocracies,” a poli-punk bromide courtesy of local anti-pop architect Newagehillbilly. The original, released as a split 7-inch single with Human Host, brims with tear-down-the-system invective: “Administrations/ Idiocracies/ Control our fate/ With their monopolies.”

“The music was written and recorded sometime in 2000 on 4-track cassette at the trailer I used to live in up in Harford County,” MT6 Records head/Newagehillbilly principle Alex Strama explains via e-mail. “I actually ‘lost’ the recording until about 2006, and then added the vocals then. It wasn’t meant to be political, but it came out that way in the end. I would imagine it has to do with life during the Bush Administration, and all the frustration and fear that I was feeling.”

Now that we’re living in less heavy-handed but no less uncertain times, Strama is inviting listeners and musicians to reinvent or re-imagine the track. “I’d like to take the vocals back out and see if anyone would like to be part of an experiment to see what would happen if other people recorded new music, vocals, whatever over the instrumental,” he wrote in a Jan. 30 mass e-mail message. “Let’s create something.” Thus far, Strama has received several expressions of interest, though no expounded-upon versions of “Idiocracies” found their way to his inbox.

The stark, wide-open structure of “Idiocracies” nearly begs for sonic ornamentation or affected vocals. Listen close, and you can almost hear DayGlo daubs of synth paint, all manner of distressed grumblings, a totally inappropriate accordion jam, violin strokes ringing in opposition to the massed compressions of fret and kit. It’s like a fat, juicy target. Submissions will be accepted until May 15. A collection of remakes will be released in a yet-to-be determined format.

To hear a stream of “Idiocracies,” visit www.myspace.com/newagehillbilly. To participate, contact Strama at newagehillbilly@hotmail.com.

The annals of rock history don’t want for passionately perturbed malcontents who punt from and perch precariously upon piano stools–Tori Amos, Elton John, Alicia Keys, and that dude from OneRepublic immediately leap to mind. Ben Folds is, nonetheless, a special case. As frontman for the egregiously named Ben Folds Five and later as a soloist, the North Carolina native has made misery his great subject; consider that one of his biggest singles, the devastatingly autobiographical “Brick,” was about accompanying a girlfriend to an abortion clinic and the ensuing, damning silences that followed.

Since breaking through alt-rock’s guitar-dominated ceiling in the ’90s as a ivory-tickling wiseacre willing and able to enable William Shatner’s perpetual career resuscitation, Folds has established himself as an poignant-if-flippant chronicler of Generation X adult angst. A worthy heir to Billy Joel’s kingdom–even if he isn’t quite banking that Billy Joel bacon, yet–this thrice-divorced husband and father of two knows the growing pains of which he emotes: the splits, the tattoos, the aspirations, the adolescent freak-outs, the pals finding God through drug experiences, the old fake IDs where ex-girlfriends are, regrettably, “dressed up like the Cure.”

“Late,” from 2005′s Songs for Silverman, puts the lie to the romantic myths of the tour-as-career even as it offers a poignant, intimate eulogy for the late Elliott Smith. “Elliott, man, you played a fine guitar/ And some dirty basketball,” Folds admits, piano notes rippling underneath him–a steady, constant tide that belies the likelihood that Folds’ own emotional turmoil could have easily set him upon a similarly final-exit course.

Last year’s Way To Normal finds Folds as irritable and vengeful as ever–if not more so. There are excursions to linguistic regions few middle-class, middle-aged Hair Club for Men candidates dare to tread; see the rowdy breakup plaint “Bitch Went Nuts,” with its slap-happy ivories and unashamed invocation of the c-word. A misbehaving pooch has a boogie-blues number dedicated to him (“Errant Dog”); a tour stop in a German city becomes the setting for a crippling bout of loneliness (the ravishingly melancholic “Cologne”). In a surprise move, Folds goes in for a duet with fellow pop-piano pugilist Regina Spektor, who’s young enough to be his baby sister–and more than holds his own (“You Don’t Know Me”). Indeed: Folds’ downer parade keeps on truckin’, even as the world at large pretends it stalled and died eons ago.

Ben Folds plays tonight at Rams Head Live. For more information visit ramsheadlive.com.

Record production work has ping ponged Ben Allen all over the world–from his native New Mexico to New York to the Bahamas to Georgia, where he now resides and runs a label, Make Records Not Bombs. Along the way, he has had a behind-the-decks hand in recordings by everyone from Christina Augilera to Cee-Lo to Kelis. Recently he added Animal Collective to his resume, helming the group’s hotly anticipated new album, Merriweather Post Pavilion. In a telephone interview a few days prior to the album’s release, Allen talked with City Paper about its creation.

City Paper: Where are you right now?
Ben H. Allen: Right now, I’m in the city of Atlanta.

CP: I read somewhere that you’re a longtime friends of the members of Animal Collective. How long have you known them, and how did you meet?
BHA: That’s actually not the truth–I’ve read that a few places, too. I don’t know where that came from. We had a few conversations, but we literally met the day we got to the studio to record the album.

CP: How did you come to work on Merriweather Post Pavilion?
BHA: Well, I guess the guys were having some meetings with their management and they were throwing out names for producers, and mine came up. They were interested in me because of my work with Gnarls Barkley, and wanted my low-end expertise. I did an on-the-spot conference call with the band in January 2008, and they wanted to start working on February 1st. So it all happened pretty quickly.

CP: The two names that pop up most often in terms of your previous productions are P.Diddy and Gnarls Barkley. Of the lesser known acts, which ones do you have the fondest memories of?
BHA: That’s a good question. That’s a great question. I produced an album from a psychedelic rock band from Atlanta called All The Saints in 2007. I really loved that album–that was a real pleasure to work on. More recently, I also produced a record by a band called Gringo Star–really amazing. We recorded it live. Those two are the big highlights, outside of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Over the last two years I’ve been working on a big pet project called the Constellations with local artists–it’s on my label, Make Records Not Bombs. It’s really cool.

CP: Was there anything in particular that Animal Collective wanted you to bring to its sound?
BHA: I think the low-end was the big thing. They wanted an album that would sound heavy but also an album that would sound as live as possible. They use samples and synchronizers–they play their samples the way a guitarist plays his guitar. They wanted it to be very mechanical the way dance music is, but they also wanted it to be human with room for mistakes. I don’t know that we knew that we were going to go in the exact direction that we went, going in.

CP: Do you think you were able to accomplish your objectives for the record?
BHA: For me personally, it’s a really great integration of music I love and my skills. I think ultimately we did succeed in what we set out to do. It was a really pleasant working experience–no one was really in charge, and that helped. I think the push and the pull of our two aesthetics really made it great.

CP: Where and when was Merriweather Post Pavilion recorded?
BHA: It was recorded in a studio in Oxford, Mississippi, called Sweet Tea, pretty much the entirety of February 2008, and we mixed the record at [Athens, Georgia studio] Chase Park Transduction, and that was in July. That took about two weeks.

CP: How does the finished album differ from the demos?
BHA: There really weren’t traditional demos. Animal Collective is a bit unusual; they get together once a year–though they do talk and e-mail–then they go on tour. They write the songs on tour, then make an album, then write more songs. (Laughs) The basic structures were there when we started recording.

CP: What was the vibe in the studio like? Are Animal Collective the kind of band who like to bring stuff–you know, candles, wall hangings, stuff like that–along to adorn recording spaces?
BHA: I think Sweet Tea has an exceptional vibe–probably the most creative vibe of any building I’ve ever been in to make music. But Animal Collective’s big thing is privacy. During the whole month we worked on the album, the only people there were me, my assistant, and the band. No phones or computers. For a month. It’s a small town, we were in the South, no one knew who they were. It was nonstop [work]. Privacy–and a lack of distractions–made a big difference for all of us.

CP: Were you and the band listening to any particular albums during the recording process?
BHA: No, we never listened to other music in the studio that entire month, ever. When we went out to eat, we would. I got a lot of different music from Geologist–he’d burn me CDs of weird stuff–and I came away from this with 10 or 12 new favorite artists. These weren’t references for Merriweather Post Pavilion, though.

CP: What sort of recording set-up was there in the studio? Was everybody playing their parts in the same room, or in separate booths, or was there another kind of configuration?
BHA: Actually, because everything was coming out of a machine–there were some acoustic instruments, but not many–we were all in the control room together. If you can imagine me sitting behind the console, the band were set up nearby behind two PAs so they could hear what they were doing.

CP: What do you make of the massive online anticipation for this album?
BHA: I think it says more about the band and their position in the world than anything else; they’re a great band who wrote great songs. The label did a really good job protecting the album, and that’s really important. I got the sense that for critics, Animal Collective working with someone like me–someone on the mainstream side–made a good story.

Electric Possible is an ongoing performance series curated by Tone Ghosting’s Jeff Bagato, a Washington D.C.-based musician who also operates out/noise/experimental label Panic Research Audio. Most of the musicians who appear on Live at Electric Possible issue CD-Rs via Panic. Jon Simler and Sam Lohman record together as go-go noiseniks Cash $lave Clique, while Simler dons his Rape Ape hat for wider ranging electro-insanity. Lately, though, Simler and Lohman have been gigging out and recording with Vinnie Paternostro as Sonic Suicide Squad–a promising partnership for which Possible represents an intriguing launching point.

At the outset of Possible, Paternostro’s saxophone is this ensemble’s eneverating nub: Lohman’s “space drums,” Ed Wilcox’s trash-compactor time-keeping, Simler’s disorienting live loops, and the unspecified, crab-nebula effects they’re all unleashing come across as mere garnish, glorified window dressing. That blazing, blasting sax certainly commands attention: It winnows, roars, and shrieks splintered glass shards, breathing flames down one side of the auditory field, then back up the other like a hacking cough-stricken dragon. Yet, as the 33 minutes and three interconnected movements of Possible –recorded live in the winter of ’06 at George Washington University–unfold, the turgid, turbining sweep of Pasternostro’s fellow performers creeps to the fore. All are equal instigators of this emerging jazz-noise improv weather front, all of a blessed sudden. Sax honks dissolve into skronky whimpers when they’re not fending off the loosey-goosey thumping of sticks on skins or repeating like a stuck needle tracing an exotic bird calls LP; telling loops apart from original sounds becomes all but impossible. There’s no real sense of certainty, of terra firma, of knowing what’s real and what’s a synthetic byproduct of the original reality. Anything, it seems, is possible.

The next Electric Possible event takes place Wednesday, Jan. 14 at the DC Arts Center with Croniamantal and Mind Of Matter Music Over Mind. 7 p.m. $5.

Forget Guns ‘N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy, Portishead’s Third, Dr. Dre’s Detox, Eminem’s Relapse. The first two have come and gone–finally–and who knows when the second two will actually see the light of day. Forget them all, because right now the bloggerati, critically inclined, and plebe-class masses are all atwitter over the impending Jan. 20 release of Merriweather Post Pavilion–the eighth studio album from top-tier, Baltimore-bred freak-folk act Animal Collective. It’s not that the songs–which are purported to feature massive hip-hop-esque low-end courtesy of producer Ben Allen (P. Diddy, Gnarls Barkley)–aren’t available in any form. Live recordings of the expansive tunes abound, and dozens are probably being downloaded right now. But with the exception of two or three tracks, the real McCoy remains frustratingly out of reach with less than 45 days left to go until release (on inauguration day, coincidentally enough). From the Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks message board to Sound Opinions to almost any indie blog you’d care to name, fans conjecture wildly, rate what came before, and wait with baited breath for the record just to fucking leak, already.

The anticipatory chatter was hot and heavy on ILX. “If this isn’t effectively their Collectidelica it will be a massive missed opportunity,” one poster insisted. “Sorry to be too ‘dudeish,’ but I think,potentially, that this album might RULE,” another gushed.

After attending a Domino-sponsored listening party, one poster had this to say: “it’s a great record: i can’t wait to get to know it, hear it on headphones etc. it’s got the continuity and otherness of records like Loveless, and such a different, full, bold sound–really new-amerykah-beat-driven, and really electrically synthesised and busy.” [Sic]

Given Web Sheriff’s ultra-vigilant policing of Merriweather Post Pavilion track leaks and pent-up, vaguely sexualized anticipation on the part of scruffy Person Pitch devotees, a variation on the Rickroll was, perhaps, inevitable. It finally arrived Friday, Dec. 5, in the form of a post on ilxor.com, where a poster shared a sendspace link and the following message:

“this will probably get my fiend at Domino fired…. but Merry Xmas ILM!!!!”

Duly migrated to the poster’s blog–roxymuzak.blogspot.com–and, from there, to numerous other blogs and hotbeds of aural discussion, the too-good-to-be-true link drew in suckers by the scores who, presumably, should’ve known much better. Savvy commenters got in on the action, successfully creating the illusion that the leak was legit.

“I GOT IT DOWNLOAD RIGHT NOW!,” a Malkmus board gadfly thundered. “This can’t be true though.” Other cross-web reactions ranged from “I love it!!What do you think guys???” to “FAKE” to “it is real, and it is fabulous” to “it’s been deleted already! someone re-up please pretty please” to photographs of Sarah Palin winking to “Leaks like this are deracinating the integrity of the music industry,” which should’ve given the game away to anyone who hadn’t yet figured out what, exactly, was afoot. Someone who claimed to be the Web Sheriff–but in all likelihood probably wasn’t–weighed in, too: “This is awesome.”

The link remains active. As of 11:16 a.m. Dec. 11, some 732 people had downloaded the latest re-up of the file. So: if you just have to have 11 egregiously mislabelled mp3s of Rick Astley’s deathlessly corny “Never Gonna Give You Up” floating around in your iPod’s digital ether, check it out. Below are the lyrics, which are so easily transferrable to the unspoken-yet-totally-ungrounded contract between downloader and file hoster that a compare/contrast breakdown is unnecessary:

We’re no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of
You wouldn’t get this from any other guy

I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling
Gotta make you understand

Never gonna give you up/
Never gonna let you down/
Never gonna run around and desert you/
Never gonna make you cry/
Never gonna say goodbye/
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

We’ve know each other for so long/
Your heart’s been aching/
But you’re too shy to say it/
Inside we both know what’s been going on/
We know the game and we’re gonna play it

Animal Collective’s management? Bemused, we presume. Rick Astley’s lawyers? Maybe not so much.

First non-contact encounters with bats brand themselves in memory: they’re jarring, shudder-full, unshakable. You’re going about your business–attending a Japanese Club meeting in the basement of the campus International dorm or studying in the antiquated home you’re subletting from a professor who’s away on travel–when suddenly it become clear that something furry, fanged, and airborne is sharing the space you’re relaxing in. For an instant or two, the worst bits of all the vampire movies you’ve seen flash before your eyes–then, one way or the other, the crisis passes. But the panicked aftertaste lingers.

A close-up photograph of a bat baring sharp teeth–in mid-swoop or being held upside down, it’s hard to tell–graces the cover of Animal Twat’s epymonous debut CD-R, and it’s easy to understand why once the disc starts. Another eyebrow-raising entity in the ever-expanding MT6 universe, Animal Twat–label head Alex “Newagehillbilly” Strama, with buddies Chief Pokawa, Chin Forces, and Mother Orchid–are a thrash-punk act, and an unabashedly non-family friendly one at that. Its two tracks–”Fuck Your Cocaine” and “Mummyfuck”–clock in at a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it four minutes and 19 seconds, which allows listeners to run through its anti-social antagonisms a few times on the morning walk to and from the corner coffee shop. (With the iPod volume cracked to the max, ideally.) This isn’t to say that other MT6 acts aren’t likely room-clearers, just that this one’s got its scruffed, unlaced Chucks firmly on the ground. (Read: Animal Twat could totally pass, sound-wise, for one of those newbie units who post grainy ads in Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll.)

The corroded guitar flogs, plegmn-soaked-Nerf-football howls, and avalanche-like drum bashings of “Fuck Your Cocaine” have no care for coherence. Rejection is the point, but the mystery of whether the protagonist is decrying your coke specifically or all coke generally isn’t solved, and it doesn’t need to be. “I work with my hands/ Fuck your cocaine,” they insist again and again, their loud declarations unraveling into a long, collective scream and torrent of intensive instrumental abuse. Heard blind, it’d be easy to peg this as some long forgotten mid-1990s Chicago act’s biggest single–or something the Ex shat out while high on, um, coke. “Mummyfuck” is even shorter and rawer, a black, aggro mist that sounds like a Shellac piss-take demo: blunt drums, stretched-to-the-point-of-tunelessness guitar strings, and nutso cymbals team up to beat a straight clear path for constipated, inflammatory nonsense that’s merrily unhinged but which you’d never want loved ones to overhear–lest they stop returning your phone calls.

Then, like a bat you never saw coming, it’s just over–which is one of Animal Twat’s strengths. This has the feel of a probable one-off project, and it’s all the better for that, because a full album of this sort of anarchism would be overkill. One quibble: a quickie pair of tunes merits a 7-inch release, not a CD-R EP one. Back when cassettes were the underground’s hip lingua franca, you could’ve put something like this out with plenty of room for listeners to easily tape whatever else they liked in the blank void. (See DGC’s re-issue of Bad Moon Rising.) Because CD-R technology doesn’t allow this, Animal Twat as released feels a bit wasteful.

Bad Liquor Pond songs aren’t constructed for competitive speed or conceived as incredible displays of technical skill; rather, they’re built for sheer listener comfort. The Baltimore-based quartet’s songwriting template is strictly midtempo, like a casual cross-country trip astride a baked, easygoing dragon from some metalhead’s spray-painted Econovan-mural fantasies. Frontman/multi-instrumentalist Dave Gibson, guitarist Melvis Fargas, drummer Paul Fuller, and bassist Poridge Blackwell mine the same feathered chords again and again, sometimes adding new textures, blowing some guitar-solo smoke, or mashing an effects pedal until a given tune’s over and it’s time to move onto the next one. Rinse, lather, repeat, in a good way, mind you–check out the groovy-if-slightly-faint live tracks on Archive.org to get a sense of what we mean. What sets Radiant Transmission apart from debut Year of the Clam, though, is the gradual introduction of sonic darkness into the overall air of mildly psychedelic good will.

Early on, the going’s fairly smooth. “Pain Killer” staggers along in Kurt Cobain-buried-in-Quaaludes sloth autopilot, an expanse of dazed guitars shrugging, Gibson’s discombobulated vocal seeming to echo back from the planet Neptune. “She Came in Heavy” hoedowns with banjo plunks, light handclaps, and harmonica honks that sound on the vocal-less choruses; the relatively sprightly “Sun Fingers” brings to mind Here Comes the Monolith’s “Dandelion Storm,” its crisp pacing injecting an unexpected liveliness into the proceedings. But before you’re quite ready for it, Bad Liquor Pond drifts a few fateful tokes over the line, and its muse wakes up baffled in a Spaceman 3/Dead Meadow catacomb. “Rolling Hills” lays the bummer-trip vibe thick by dealing in Laura Henry’s haunting backing vocals and thinning the elements down to indigo organs, funereal guitars, and the barest hint of percussion. Both “Skylab” and “Saccharine” foist scuzzball-pedal menace and distorted blues fuzz, primary melody riffage grinding yellow teeth while tangents blaze under the surfaces. Near silence accelerating into active-volcano molten lava splash, “Village of Kings” throws a bit more oomph and weight into its sludge-y growl. Midalbum downer slide or no–different strokes for different folks, of course–in Bad Liquor Pond’s realm. Transmission represents progress, and it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here. Given that Clam came out in January, we shouldn’t have too long to wait.

Bad Liquor Pond plays the Ottobar Thursday Oct. 2 with Thrushes and Glasvegas. 9 p.m. $10.

Last spring, Baltimore/Washington metro area all-femme outfit Odd Girl Out released its first record after a torrent of fits, starts, catastrophes, and road bloacks. Drawing heavily on pop-punk, Joan Jett, and alt-rock in general, Hurry Up and Wait was a tuneful jolt of local rock fun, and revisiting it recently got us wanting more and wondering what these ladies have been up to. We decided to check in with primary songwriter/drummer/founder/publicist Bethany Petr to see what’s new in OGO-land.

City Paper: When we last spoke, a year or so ago, you’d just released your debut album–Hurry Up and Wait–independently. How has it been received? Have you seen your fan base–in both show attendance and online terms–expand?

Bethany Petr: Yeah. It used to be that we’d call in all our friends to stock our shows with fans. Lately, though, we’ve been having a lot of people attend who we didn’t necessarily know before. I mean, actual fans that are not necessarily just our friends . . . of course, once they attend enough shows and do the whole waiting game with us, they usually turn into friends, anyway. We’ve also had pretty steady growth of an online fan base; this was made much easier with the songs from the album because it gives them something to actually listen to, of course. We sell CDs online through CD Baby and they send you a notice whenever anyone buys an album; it blows my mind every time someone who is not local randomly discovers us and buys an album in California, even London. Weird.

CP: Guitarist Kristen Brzowsky left pretty recently, according to your site, and Selena Benally took over that role. What happened there?

BP: Kristen stayed with us for about a year–which is like a lifetime in that rotating guitarist position. Anyways, she was going to chef school and doing a lot of DJing, and decided she wanted to focus more on those two aspects of her life. So she left us around December of this year. . . and after that decided to move to California, so we would have lost her anyway. We kind of freaked out, though, and had a little moment of should we continue this and rebuild yet again or just sack the whole thing? Especially Tawni and I, because we’d just rebuilt the band so many damn times. Eva and Selena sort of got us to recommit and stick it out. We tried to audition a couple people. We were considering switching anyone around that would work. I mean, we ran ads for guitarist, bassist, or even drummer with the idea that if we found anyone competent, we’d work to get them incorporated into the band. After a lot of auditions, we decided that just wasn’t going to work, though, and got used to the idea of being a four-piece.

CP: How’s the change working out?

BP: Great–Selena’s amazing. I don’t know how we didn’t figure it out before this change necessitated it. I mean, when we play now, we kind of stand back in awe and smile, particularly when she solos. I’m just really proud to be onstage with such talented musicians.

CP: Given the less-than-amicable departures Odd Girl Out endured early on, this one seems to have gone a lot smoother.

BP:Yeah: no yelling, no hurling of dumpsters off sidewalks, no bad-mouthing us all over town for random psychotic reasons that don’t really exist, no passive-aggressive drawn-out painful death. And I think this one really worked out for the best. I mean, I feel like the band is really stable in this configuration (knock on wood).

CP: Any word on a new album? When Wait came out, there were a couple existing songs that didn’t make the cut, I recall.

BP: We’ve got a lot of songs that aren’t on Wait; in fact, the majority of what we’re playing live isn’t on that record. Not quite enough for an album yet–at least not that we’ve developed as a whole band because I have a million waiting to be developed. We also are gladly accepting donations to fund a new album. I’m trying to tide the fans over by taking crappy videos of our shows and posting them on our web site to at least give a taste of what these new songs sound like. Hopefully we’ll get them recorded.

CP: What have you been listening to lately? Is anything in particular inspiring your present songwriting?

BP: It covers sort of a weirdly wide range, as always. I’m really liking the extremely sort of dirty open guitar sounds on the latest Raconteurs album. I know I’m late to the party on this one, but I’m really into Buckcherry right now–I love a band that can, in my mind, pull off extremely dirty lyrics and make it awesome rather than gross; another of my favorite bands of all time who does this is Aerosmith. I’ve also been listening to the One Republic album a lot which is quite a different, very polished pop album than those other two.

CP: When bands have existed long enough, they almost inevitably begin writing tons of songs about being in a band. Have you succumbed to that impulse yet?

BP: I’ve got at least one, but I wrote it like two years ago now during a particularly low moment in the band’s history. I’m not sure we’ll ever develop it.

CP: You played the Capital Pride festival recently. How’d that go?

BP: We (once again) played at the butt crack of dawn, like first thing in the morning. Since most people come out in the early afternoon it was about what you’d expect. We did get to play this big show at the 9:30 Club the Friday before the kickoff of Pride Women’s Party with Melissa Ferrick, Bitch, and Betty that was a good experience for us, and was pretty cool–except for their strange decision to place all the bands’, not just ours but famous people’s too, equipment in the alley after the show so they could prepare for the dance party that followed. They had a security guard “watching” it, but he wasn’t really protecting it from the swarm of feral cats and eight inch roaches. So that was great. The good thing about Pride in general, though, and this covers Baltimore, too, is that every year a new crop of kids attend for the first time. So it’s a great opportunity for us to reach fans we would not find otherwise.