Check Out K-Holes Tonight at Soundlab

By Eric Kendal for Artvoice: It’s been a while since a band has come along with a name that so rightly suits their sound. Brooklyn’s K-Holes push a brand of art-infused swampy garage-rock that is just as capable of making you achieve an out-of-body hallucinatory dirge as their namesake suggests. Cramps-style drumming, guttural male/female vocals and scrappy overdriven surf-punk riffs create a cacophonous scene involving the most terrifying party music you’ll likely hear for some time. What sends them over the top is the inclusion of a saxophone which can drive a song from haunting to almost celebratory in a matter of seconds without sacrificing an ounce of depravity, you know, to keep things filthy. It’s that same kind of lights-out sexed up swagger that made bands like the Gun Club so memorable. Fellow Brooklynites Call of the Wild are along for the ride with the promise of more high-octane rock n’ roll than a trio should be allowed to handle. Soundlab’s doors open at 8pm, so don’t be late. The off-kilter dance punk antics of Utah Jazz will put a smile on your face right before the punk and roll of Fatal Figures slap it right back off. 8pm. Soundlab, 110 Pearl St. (440-5907/www.bigorbitgallery.org/soundlab). $6.

Read "Cults Following : An 'accidental band' can barely keep up with its own success"

By Eric Swedlund for Tucson Weekly:

For an accidental band, Cults found an incredibly quick path to success.

A chance meeting, a quick romance, some at-home music playing, three songs posted online and boom—the band winds up on Columbia Records with one of the most buzzed-about debut albums of the year.

"I don't think we ever thought about having a band," says Brian Oblivion, the guitarist half of the duo. "We'd just both liked making music around the house, just goofing around, and it started turning into songs. We went up to her parents' house upstate and recorded them in a weekend and put them online. We'd never played a live show, didn't plan on playing a live show. We just recorded some songs to show our friends we can.

"We've tried to put our finger on that moment when we decided to be in a band together and neither of us can remember."

Read the rest here. Cults visited Soundlab on 4/5/11.

Read "Gatekeepers #4: DJ Soma Talks About Infringement"

By Cory Perla for Artvoice: DJ Soma is a true vetran of the local DJ scene, keeping bodies moving and music pumping since the early 1990′s. This week I talked to this staple Buffalo DJ, real name Curt Kuczkowski about the music he likes to spin, the 2011 Infringement Festival and his experiences on the fringe. This year DJ Soma will perform at a variety of Infringement events including Electronic Night at Soundlab on Friday, August 5th.

Read the full interview here.

Download the Complete Infringement Festival Schedule

Here.

Read "2011 Infringement: a Sampling of Buffalo's 11-Day Festival of Art on the Edge"

From Artvoice: Infringement Festival 2011 is upon us, which means that marginalized artists of every shape, size and genre will come out of the woodwork to showcase the off-beat, unexpected, unheard-of art that has made this festival a focal point of the summer since 2005. For 11 days, Allentown and the surrounding area becomes ground-zero for musicians, poets, dance troupes, media artists, theatre groups, street performers, and anyone else that falls between the cracks of conventionality to put themselves, and their art, on display. This year’s festival lineup boasts 1,200 performances in 52 venues across Buffalo, with group events running the gamut from the College Street Block Party, Broadway Market Extravaganza, Squeaky Wheel Film Fest, and Bike-In Movie Night at the Elmwood Co-op. The mayhem starts Thursday (July 28), as unofficial BIF headquarters, Nietzsche’s, hosts the opening ceremonies in Olympic-style fashion with a jam-packed night featuring performances by MC Vendetta, Pam Swarts, Ginger James, Scantron, Harold Black and the Entire Planet, DJ Medison, the Zombettes, Reverend Soapbox and the Rabble Rousers, and many more on both the front and back stages from 7pm until deep into the night. It’s festivals like this that prove Buffalo is a hotbed for under-the-radar art, and that there’s no shortage of artists who are willing to push the envelope to experiment, be controversial, and above all, make art on their own terms. —jon wheelock.  Read the rest here. 

Attend: "Zach Boehler: There Has to be Another Way Out of This F. Scott " at Big Orbit Gallery

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 23, 8-11pm. Free and open to the public.
Big Orbit Gallery, 30D Essex Street, Buffalo, New York, 14213. 560.1968

It is Big Orbit Gallery's pleasure to announce, There Has to be Another Way Out of This F. Scott, an exhibition of paintings by artist Zack Boehler.  Zach Beohler is a native of Buffalo, NY and a graduate of Buffalo State College. He is currently pursuing a MA in Art Education at the college. While Zach has displayed his work in numerous group exhibitions around Western New York, this will be his first gallery solo exhibition. Boehler is also a respected teaching artist who works extensively with children from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Buffalo through the Essex Street Arts Center's Simon Griffis Studio for Youth.

Artist Statement:  When creating my work I often think of the Oscar Wilde quote "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." I feel my work often examines the condition the individual faces in the built environment. People constructed the urban environment to house and move large groups. The singular individual often is left to feel isolated by the constructed system and though surrounded by others at all times and continuously visually stimulated, one finds a stunning lack of meaning.

The title of this show is derived from this lack of meaning. Looking at the great literary minds of the Lost Generation and comparing their thirst for life's meaning and also their feeling of imminent collapse many lines of similarity can be drawn to the experience I have witnessed of those today. While the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of the 1920's were disillusioned by World War I, we are not so much disillusioned as we are over-illusioned. The constant stimulus of our society has left many of the digital natives to become numb to any stimulus at all, and left voided in meaningless. Coupled with the loss of meaning is a fear of anonymity. We are left to feel that notoriety in any respect is a necessity of success, of happiness, and will cure our voids. Notoriety can only force us to delve further into the culture that has left us numb.

When we are forced to confront these feelings, and the realization that we experience them together, we find a sense of exploration. By embracing the idea of self-manifested destiny one can shake free of the over stimulation to once again perceive humanly, through curiosity and discovery. My imagery depicts these moments, where we discover meaning and feel possibility. The white flags depicted in this show are not a symbol of being beaten, they are instead a call to take action and surrender ourselves from the society that has forced unfounded mediocrity onto our shoulders. We can be pioneers; we can own these nights, manifest our histories, raise our flags and find that our anonymity is our greatest virtue while we live the legends we were born to chase.

See Oriental Rugs & More at Soundlab Tonight

WHAT: Little Red Booking Presents ORIENTAL RUGS / MMCIII / D.U.G.O.U.T.C.A.N.O.E. / DJ Jake Gittes

WHEN: Friday, July 22 - 8:00pm Doors + DJ, 9pm Show

COST: $7, all proceeds go towards touring artists and art space.

 ORIENTAL RUGS is a Chicago three piece that utilizes analog synthesizers, cassette tapes and a VHS mixer to convey a synesthetic collage. Members consist of John Shin, Mark Lee, and Ron Ewert.

http://www.facebook.com/Or ientalRugsMusic

http://soundcloud.com/orie ntal-rugs

MMCIII is fantasy electronic music hailing from Denver, Colorado. Milton Melvin Croissant does video projections of 3D animations while playing homemade (as well as pre-made) instruments with light, color, and motions sensors, and magic wands. Sounds like Terminator 2 meets Beyond the Mind Eye.

http://www.mmciii.com/

http://www.foxydigitalis.c om/foxyd/?p=11408

D.U.G.O.U.T.C.A.N.O.E. uses a deep wealth of field recordings as well as dense layers of guitar and vocals to do positive mind poems. Reminds MMCIII of Nobukazu Takemura.

http://dugoutcanoe.bandcam p.com/

Local DJ Jake Gittes (real name: Jake Mikler) will be sharing his comprehensive music library with you all, sprinkling it like gold dust in between sets, in between universes: early outer space, post-atomic punk, minimal electronik, past and current kraut, art-punk, etc. Listen and levitate!

Read ParisTransAtlantic's Review of the Nate Wooley Quintet (Put Your) Hands Together

Nate Wooley has a compound identity as a trumpeter. On one hand, he's created a body of work in free improvisation (as a soloist and in duos with Paul Lytton, Chris Forsyth and Peter Evans) preoccupied with exploring the trumpet's sonic possibilities and issues of space, duration and free interaction. Conversely, he's also a sideman in some highly creative but more traditional jazz groups, like the Daniel Levin Quartet and Harris Eisenstadt's Canada Day. Wooley's own quintet dates from 2008, and it clearly represents a coming-together of those interests, an attentiveness to both the minutiae of sound and the exploration of group relations within loose forms, the combination creating profoundly nuanced work.

Wooley has played Soundlab many times: 10/17/04 Blue Collar (Nate Wooley/Steve Swell trombone/Tatsuya Nakatani), Padhermlardbacz Horn Trio + Drums (Ravi Padmanahba/Mike Hermanson/Mike Allard/Steve Baczkowski); 04/09/05 Nate Wooley/Chris Forsythe, Open Music Foundation; 05/13/06 Cor Fuhler, Nate Wooley, Newtown Armstrong; 09/30/06 SILO: Nate Wooley, Audrey Chen.

Check Out the Communist Party Tonight at Soundlab

Friday, July 15, 11pm--COMMUNIST PARTY featuring ROBOROC & HXLY! with commie residents Flava Braun & Sir Richard Rector. $5 over 21, $10 under 21

Read "Interview with Charlie Looker of Seaven Teares"

From the roulette blog:

With roots in metal, modern composition, jazz, indie pop and Early Music, Charlie Looker’s music has always been an intuitive synthesis of diverse influences. A core member of the notorious Brooklyn “brutal chamber” group Zs, Looker formed his own band Extra Life in 2007 to explore more fully his vocal writing, folk-based forms and synthetic instrument sounds.  Other notable projects and credits include work with Dirty Projectors, John Zorn, William Parker, Tyondai Braxton, Daniel Carter, Elliott Sharp, Christian Wolff, Seductive Sprigs and Time of Orchids.

Charlie Looker played the old Soundlab with his group Lavender on 08/10/02 (also on the bill: John Long, Tassels from a Day Sale live original soundtrack to Dziga Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin). On 08/23/06 he played the new Soundlab with Seductive Sprigs, Nat Baldwin.

Watch Skeletons Big Band on Roulette TV

Skeletons and the Kings of All Cities Played Soundlab on 03/30/07

Stream New Battles MP3s

Courtesy of the Wire, listen to a rundown of Battles tracks, from both their previous studio releases and forthcoming album, Gloss Drop. Battles visited Soundlab on 04/02/07.

Read "Marilyn Nonken Talks About Feldman Festival"

From the Signal to Noise blog:

Pianist Marilyn Nonken is performing Triadic Memories on June 4 in Philadelphia as part of “American Sublime,” a festival devoted to the works of Morton Feldman. Marilyn was kind enough to tell us a bit about working on Feldman’s music, as well as some of her other upcoming projects.

Read ParisTransAtlantic Reviews of Recent Michel Doneda Releases

In the early 2000s, saxophonist Michel Doneda was putting out an astonishing number of recordings (about 25 between 1999 and 2005 by my count), but since then, he's been relatively quiet. So it's good to see this strong batch of recent work hit. Doneda's 2004 collaboration with Tatsuya Nakatani and Jack Wright on soseditions was a stunner, so it's great to see Nakatani inaugurate his new label with a duo he and Doneda recorded in New York in September 2007.

On 01/18/04, Soundlab hosted the Jack Wright/Tatsuya Nakatani/Michel Doneda trio along with the trio of Blaise Siwula/ Adam Lane/Toshi Makihara. Nakatani and Wright have visited several times since.

Listen to a "History of Electronic/ Electroacoustic Music (1937-2001)" (but Take It With a Grain of Salt)

From ubuweb:

This massive selection is from a 62 CD set called "The History of Electroacoustic Music" that was floating around as a torrent, reputedly curated by a Brazilian student. It's sketchy. The torrent vanished and the collection has long been unavailable. It's a clearly flawed selection: there's few women and almost no one working outside of the Western tradition (where are the Japanese? Chinese? etc.). However, as an effort, it's admirable and contains a ton of great stuff. Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection.

Check Out Communist Party Pics

Hit up the Commie Party facebook page here.

See The Vacant Lots at Soundlab Saturday, Watch The Video for "Cadillac" Now

By Cory Perla for Artvoice:

In their first year, Burlington, Vermont’s the Vacant Lots did what most indie rock bands strive to do over the span of an entire career. That is, self release three full-length albums. Tapping into the dark side of the pop spectrum, the duo of Jared Artaud and Frank Zammiello recently signed to New York City’s Mexican Summer record label to release their singles “Confusion” and “Cadillac,” two psychedelic, yet black and white garage rock burners. Its not out of the ordinary to find the Vacant Lots compared to bands like the Black Angels, Spacemen 3, the Stooges or Bo Diddley, but their sound still remains their own, combining retro-rock with grunge and indie. The Vacant Lots will bring their retro-psychedelic rock to Soundlab on Saturday (July 9). Local garage rock band the Auras and  indie-pop band the Bird Day open the show.

Read "Evolving Expert," an Interview with Erik Friedlander

By Marc Masters and Grayson Currin for Pitchfork (The Out Door #14):

If you need cello on a record, Erik Friedlander might be a decent person to call. He's the musician summoning those dark storms on the Mountain Goats' "Dilaudid", and he's one of two cellists on Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite. He's played with John Zorn, Mike Patton, Wynton Marsalis, Ricky Martin, and Alanis Morissette. What's more, he's several albums into a solo career that keeps getting better.

Read the rest here. Erik performed selections from his Maldoror record at Soundlab on 04/19/04

Read "Beyond Fahey"

By Marc Masters and Grayson Currin for Pitchfork (The Out Door #14):

A few months ago, music writer Ned Raggett followed up an interview with Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny by jokingly offering to let Chasny interview him. Chasny took him seriously. And among his many interesting questions was this thought-provoking charge:

"What do you think about every music writer comparing every acoustic guitar player to John Fahey as if he had the greatest influence on everyone? Isn't this the same sort of critical reductionism that would not be allowed in any sort of serious art journal? Wouldn't that be the equivalent of... comparing every single music writer to Lester Bangs?"

Raggett gave a typically thoughtful answer, but I later joked with him that he should've told Chasny that acoustic guitarists who want to stop being compared to Fahey should stop sounding like him. I was being facetious, but I do think there's more happening here than reductionism. It's true that no guitarist is a Fahey clone-- that would be impossible, since Fahey's own career was too wide and contradictory to be captured by one style. Chasny himself has proven that with his work as Six Organs of Admittance; while he has echoed Fahey and many other acoustic masters, those echoes often take a back seat to his own creative voice.

Read the rest here.

Attend Jooklo Duo & Bill Nace/Steve Baczkowski Live at Soundlab Record Release Tonight

Tonight, June 3, 9pm, $10 general, $8 members/students/seniors--JOOKLO DUO (Virgina Genta (tenor saxophone); David Vanzan (drums, percussion). And celebrating their record release Live in Buffalo on 8mm Records recorded live at Soundlab in Buffalo N.Y. in July 2009: BILL NACE (electric guitar); STEVE BACZKOWSKI (baritone/bass/tenor saxophones).

"Coming at free jazz from psych rock, Jooklo Duo hones in on the mystical sound of Coltrane and Ayler, and plays its own enthusiastic, lo-fi version." - East Bay Express

Hallwalls and Soundlab presents the Buffalo debut of Jooklo Duo, a saxophone and drum duo featuring Italian musicians Virginia Genta and David Vanzan. Motivated by the furious playing of free jazz pioneers like Albert Ayler, Rashied Ali, Sunny Murray and Arthur Doyle, Jooklo Duo is one of the loudest, most high-energy avant-garde jazz projects making music today.

Italian tenor saxophonist Virginia Genta and drummer David Vanzan formed Jooklo Duo in 2004, and released their first album, Free Serpents, two years later. They have since toured extensively in Europe and the US in duo, and also in various configurations under the names Neokarma Jooklo Octet, Neokarma Jooklo Trio, Golden Jooklo Age, Jooklo Fire Quartet, and Jooklo Finnish Quartet, and with musicians such as Sonny Simmons, Maurizio Abate, Makoto Kawabata, Tero Kemppainen, Andrew Barker, Chris Corsano, Peaking Lights, Bill Nace, Paul Flaherty, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, John Blum, John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin), Takehisa Kosugi (Taj Mahal Travellers), Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth, Hartmut Geerken, Famodou Don Moye, Makoto Kawabata, Muruga Booker, Raymond Strid, and Giorgio Pacorig. In 2010, they released High on Genta's Troglosound imprint and The Warrior 7" on Northern Spy. This will be their first concert in Buffalo.

Jooklo Duo partnered with guitar wizard, Bill Nace, and will descend upon the East Coast and Midwest for 20+ dates from May 19th through June 17th. Touring in support of their 7" release The Warrior on Northern-Spy Records, released last November, and Where Has the Jazz Gone on the duo's own Italian imprint Troglosound, released in March, the group will play shows in Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore, Jersey City, New York City, New Haven, Providence, Boston, Northampton, Albany, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Chicago, Lafayette, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Upon completion of their tour the band will record their first state-side full-length LP in Brooklyn for Northern-Spy which will be released in early 2012.

jooklo.altervista.org

Steve Baczkowski and Bill Nace Steve Baczkowski & Bill Nace – Live in Buffalo, 8mm Records:

"…LP that documents a furious duo exchange between US power saxophonist Steve Baczkowski (best loved for his work with Flaherty/Corsano and his duo with Ravi Padmanabha) and Northeast guitar mangler Bill Nace (Northampton Wools, Vampire Belt, Blood Stereo et al). Recorded live in Buffalo this is a wild side, with more in common with the sense-destroying attack of Borbetomagus circa Zurich than anything coming out of the post-Ayler tradition. Baczkowski balances huge sheet metal waves on the tip of his tongue while Nace takes a grinder to the table-top guitar ala Donald Miller. There are some eerie passages of high-tension silence populated by non-specific electronics, slithering drones, vocals and high lonesome feedback but they don't last long and it's the molten peaks that keep you coming back again and again. Industrial strength free jazz from a duo who know." – Volcanic Tongue

Read "A Media Blitz for Cory Arcangel"

By Colin Dabkowski for the Buffalo News: Cory Arcangel, the Western New York native and Nichols School grad who has a high-profile show opening this week at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, has been all over the arts press lately. He was the subject of a long profile in this week's issue of The New Yorker, a profile and a (rather middling) review in The New York Times, another long profile in New York Magazine. Seldom has an artist "arrived" with such fanfare. And if you read all these pieces, you'll begin to see what all the fuss is about.

Locally, Arcangel's work will be on view starting on July 1 as a major part of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's boundary-pushing exhibition "Videosphere: A New Generation," in which the gallery will showcase its small but potent collection of new media art. The show also serves as a sort of declaration by the museum of its committment to collecting new media art much more going forward.

Look for more coverage of that show -- and other interesting developments at the gallery -- as its opening approaches." 

Cory Arcangel's Beige Records performed an "art battle" with Paper Rad at Soundlab on Novemember 9, 2002.

Watch Jonathan VanDyke Do Nothing for 5 Days

From the AKAG press release: Starting on May 28, the artist Jonathan VanDyke will perform The Long Glance, a work in which he will stand and contemplate Jackson Pollock's Convergence, 1952, for forty hours over five days. VanDyke will remain in the same spot each day from 10 am to 5 pm, with only slight movements and just one twenty-minute break. Visitors are welcome to watch the artist's silent performance or view the painting alongside him. The performance will also be broadcast on the Gallery's website.

 On Friday, June 3, as part of M&T FIRST FRIDAYS @ THE GALLERY, VanDyke will reprise his performance from 1:30 to 5 pm, and give a talk about his experience at 7 pm.

Listen to Junior Boys' new nine-minute track "Banana Ripple"

By Tom Breihan for Pitchfork:

It's All True, the new album from the Canadian synthpop smoothies Junior Boys, is due June 14 around the world and June 20 in the UK, via Domino. Here, the nine-minute, album-closing soul odyssey "Banana Ripple" is streaming. Before the album drops, the group will release "Banana Ripple" as a 12" single on May 30 in the UK, with remixes by the Field and disco edit pioneer Tom Moulton.

Junior Boys hit Soundlab on 11/03/09 with Wooden Hand.

Read "Q&A With Rusko: 'I Don't Think I've Ever Made A Deep Or Serious Track In My Life.'"

By Puja Patel for the Village Voice's Sound of the City blog:

Dubstep is the first thing that comes to mind when people mention Rusko, and that's almost become a disservice to the young UK-born DJ. While Chris Mercer is certainly credited as an innovator of the wobbly, bass-thwarting, and often numbingly gloomy genre of electronic music, he left the darkness behind a long time ago. Growing up in a Leeds, the young producer was immersed in local reggae and dub scenes; eventually he adopted those sounds and pushed out his experimental electronic tracks alongside co-conspirators Caspa and Skream. The sound caught on quickly among dub fiends, drum-n-bass heads, and even jungle lovers because of the way it gave the masses a more relaxed groove to soundtrack their dimly lit warehouse raves. But slow and steady is not what Rusko is about. Not too long after the genre's inception Mercer veered away from its sticky basslines in search of uptempo beats and melodies, then took the hybridized results to audiences outside of the underground. And so far, it's been working.

We caught up with the DJ while he was rehearsing for his tour--which arrives in New York tonight--to talk about his newest dub finds, "bro-step," and his work in pop music.

Read the interview here. Rusko played Soundlab on 12/05/09 with RX & Chae Hawk, Big Basha and Steve Kream.

Read "Oneida Complete Trilogy With New Album"

By Tom Breihan for Pitchfork:

On June 7, Jagjaguwar will release Absolute II, the new album from Brooklyn experimental rock scene elders Oneida. Absolute II is the third and final album in the band's Thank Your Parents triptych, which also includes 2008's Preteen Weaponry and 2009's Rated O.

Oneida's Bandcamp page includes an overview of the entire Thank Your Parents project, which the band calls "an aesthetic object, a historical meditation, and a narrative experience." A buzzing excerpt of the track "Horizon" is up above, for your listening pleasure.

Even though Oneida has an absolute beast of a drummer in Kid Millions, a press release promises that the four-track Absolute II includes no audible drums. It also lacks any "identifiable 'rock' music." That's the album's cover art above Listen to an excerpt here.

Oneida performed at Soundlab on 08/03/06 with From Monuments to Masses and Sleeping Kings of Iona

Attend the Opening of "Sex * Time * Decay * Shasti" at Big Orbit Tonight

Saturday, April 30, 7:30pm, Big Orbit Gallery, 30d Essex St--Shasti O'Leary Soudant MFA Thesis Exhibition. Sculpture, photographs, performance. Opening reception 7:30, one-time performance at 9pm.

• some material may be disturbing to sensitive viewers • PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE INSCRIPTIVE NATURE OF THE ARTWORKS ON DISPLAY DURING THE RECEPTION.

THE ARTIST AND BIG ORBIT GALLERY ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE INCURRED TO THE CLOTHING OR INDELIBLE MARKS MADE ON THE SKIN OF ATTENDEES.

Thank you,
The Management

Read "Yip Yip Stripped: Orlando Costumed Duo Gets Real"

By Justin Strout for Orlando Weekly:

It's Tuesday evening in the Florida Hospital Orlando cafeteria. It's not the peaceful lakeside café strategically positioned to greet visitors coming in from the Kubrickian tunnel that connects the hospital to its parking garage, the one with baguettes and a spiral staircase and the promise of hope.

This cafe-teria is further down a ways and offers booths, fluorescents and ice cream by the pound. And silence, occasionally interrupted by the excited chatter of two unspeakably geeky suburban kids from Longwood lacking friends enough to start a proper band with actual instruments. There's Brian Esser, an artsy type with a jagged deadpan wit, jacked up on behavioral meds and prone to playing high-wire on the parking garage roof or hosting banana-eating contests that end, progressively and alarmingly sooner and sooner, with him vomiting blood. With him is his high-school lifeline, Jason Temple, angular, confidently withdrawn and still buzzing from hours spent with Esser at Rocky's Replay arcade, which they drove many miles out of their way to get to. This is their home base, complete with cheap burritos and empty late-night hours. It's where they wrote their first album within a month.

Only that was 10 years ago, almost exactly. Today, the cafeteria has smoothie machines, and you get there via the Walt Disney Hall of Inspiration. The table that Esser and Temple made music on is lorded over by an imposing antique clock and surrounded by TVs, all blaring Gwyneth Paltrow singing Adele. Esser, at least, doesn't mind.

"This is kind of weird," he says, interrupting a thought to take a long look around his old haunt's new trappings. "I like the TVs. It was so quiet in here before, I'd be really terrified to talk. But now there's TVs in people's faces. It was creepy quiet. It's like I've forgotten that we used to do this. Now it feels so far away."

Read the rest here. Yip Yip played Soundlab on 11/12/06 with Mon Petite Chou Chou and Power Pill Fist. On 10/04/07, they returned with Yip Yip, Z Mann Zilla and the World's Largest Trio & DJ MJB Corp.

Experience Digital Buddha: Jin Hi Kim at Hallwalls Tonight

Friday, April 29, 8pm, $15-20--DIGITAL BUDDHA: JIN HI KIM, Asbury Hall, 341 Delaware Ave.

Hallwalls is pleased to present master musician and composer Jin Hi Kim in a rare Buffalo appearance performing her extraordinary solo multimedia work Digital Buddha and more live in Asbury Hall. Jin Hi Kim is an internationally acclaimed innovative komungo virtuoso and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in Composition. Kim is currently the Music Alive Composer-in-Residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (2009-2011).

Read more here.

Check Out the Communist Party Tonight at Soundlab

Tonight, April 29, 11pm, $5--the COMMUNIST PARTY! feat. DJ DSTAR, Mario Bee w/Mareo Speedwagon, Flava Braun & Sir Richard Rector.

Check Out the "Ineffably Urban" Symposium On/In Buffalo Saturday at Hallwalls

Saturday, April 30, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., FREE--

UB Arts Management Program, UB Humanities Institute, & Hallwalls present INEFFABLY URBAN SYMPOSIUM. Ineffably Urban is a one-day event on Buffalo, its conflicting identities and diverse creative representations, as cases of the urban image today. What is the status of the urban, of the image, of its expressions and discourses in diverse disciplines?

ineffable |inˈefəbəl| adjective
too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words • not to be uttered

This city often defines itself in terms of past glory or else its current struggles; its dysfunctional political culture, troubling social segregation, or its strong and persistent grass-roots base in the fields of culture, education and social justice. These disjoined identities find expression in common narratives of Buffalo, from Mark Goldman’s City on the Edge to Lauren Belfer’s City of Light. Likewise, strategies of fragmentation and of reconstruction – literal and mental – crop up, as they do in other post-industrial cities, in fields ranging from architecture to art and the humanities and social sciences. Between capitulation, nostalgia, demise and reconstruction, the urban image is left decidedly unutterable, undecided, ineffable: both sublime and unspeakable.

This symposium finds inspiration in this situation for a vigorous discussion of the urban image itself between critical discourses today. Beyond a local or regional discourse, Ineffably Urban aims at addressing questions one step removed from the actual city: how can we talk about the city’s “unspokens”? How can we render a picture of Buffalo without destroying that image immediately as we articulate observations and strategies explicitly? What is the “imaginaire” between the faded glory of Buffalo and its contemporary reality?

More specifically, the event aims at contextualizing findings within the broader context of other “formerly urban” cities in the rust belt and elsewhere, by investigating the theoretical narratives, the semiotics of texts and images (writing, photographs, films, video) and the driving social, political, and cultural forces around Buffalo and its urban image.

Much more information on the event, including program and participants, is available at its website.

Read "Alan Licht On The Emergence Of Experimental DJ Culture" (2009)

Previously unpublished essay by Alan Licht for The Wire Issue #300 (Feb 09):

Ah, 1982: the year that Christian Marclay, who would soon be known for bringing turntables to the world of free improvisation, using fast cuts, layering and loops for a live translation of tape music, first performed with his decks at the Kitchen; the year that Brian Eno released On Land, his second ambient album - largely ignored back then, its deep bass sound and glacial movement would become a major influence on the Ambient club movement a decade later; and lastly, as Steve Barrow says in Simon Reynolds’s Generation Ecstasy, “By 1982, dub had run its course in Jamaica, it had become a formula.” Reynolds himself then notes, “But this was just the moment at which dub techniques were being used by New York electro-funk and disco producers in remixes, and vocal-free B-side instrumental versions.”

These unrelated occurrences in The Wire’s year zero all helped set in motion the idea of DJ culture, which reached its pinnacle in the mid- to late 90s. The DJ, not the guitarist, was the instrumental pop hero of the decade. In the disco era, DJs like Larry Levan and Nicky Siano attracted a cult following for their weekly all-night flights, crafting an endless groove from different extended-mix 12” singles, but never took center stage. Only the late Arthur Russell seems to have made the connection at the time between these marathon disco DJ sets and the rhythmic trance element of the minimalist Riley/Reich/Glass axis. Russell was a cellist, not a DJ, but a consideration of his output of disco singles, classical compositions, and pop songs and instrumentals invites comparison to the connect-the-dots aesthetic of a good DJ, and his activities are in some ways a harbinger of the rapport between the avant and electronica worlds to come not long after his death in 1992.

Read the rest here. DJ Olive played the old Soundlab as part of a DJ trio organized by Christian Marclay (who could not make it), that also included Marina Rosenfeld and Toshio Kajiwara. DJ Spooky played Soundlab twice, on 04/05/02 with DJ Marcos/DJ Del Mar and Christ Sinister/God Morgen; and on 04/20/05 as part of a benefit for the Critical Art Ensemble which also included Polmo Popo (DJ set), Mark Kloud and Cort Lippe/Jonathan Golove. On 04/14/05, Animal Collective visited Soundlab with Ariel Pink.

Catch the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film & Video Festival Presented by Siew-wai Kok This Saturday at Squeaky Wheel

Saturday, April 30, 7pm, $5-$7, Squeaky Wheel, 712 Main St:

Siew-wai Kok, co-director of the 1st Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film & Video Festival  (KLEX), returns to Buffalo to present selections from KLEX alongside some of her newest explorations merging cinema and sound. KLEX new international film festival developed as an innovative platform to introduce both historical and contemporary experimental cinema to the Malaysian audience, nurture the experimental film and video makers in the region, and develop experimental cinema communities in Malaysia. KLEX currently serves as a venue for discourse on critical issues related to the edge of cinema art and will encourage the interaction and exchange between experimental filmmakers and video artists in Asia, especially in South East Asia. For the 2010 program, KLEX invited guest curators from Indonesia, Taiwan and the Philippines to curate a screening program of works from their countries. The festival received over 180 works from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, China, Canada, USA and Europe. This will be the first time the program will be screened in the United States. Siew-wai will also present a series of her own works after the KLEX screening and an artist/curator talk regarding of her involvement with organizing artists in Malaysia at various capacities.

Seiw-wai has participated in several Big Orbit Gallery/Soundlab events, including: on 06/28/01 she was featured as part of the Parenthesis series at Rust Belt Books along with Knox Harrington; on 03/22/03 she performed at the Out of Nowhere CD (which featured her soundwork) Release Party, featuring live performances by Cort Lippe/Jonathan Golove, Andrew Deutsch/Peer Bode, JT Rinker/Leah Muir, Pamela Susan Hawkins/Dean Thornton/Sei-Wai Kok; and on 05/14/05 Soundlab hosted Siew-wai Kok: Breathe, which featured guest artists and performers: Vincenzo Mistretta, Jax Deluca, Patrick Cain, Paul Kozlowski and Koji Tambata

Read "Charles Gayle: Freedom Cry" (1994)

By Howard Mandel for The Wire Issue #121 (Mar 94):

On the streets and in the subways of New York, the spirit of black free jazz lives on in the music of a few true believers – musicians like Charles Gayle; homeless, neglected but still burning with the passion to be free. By Howard Mandel.

“Let’s do the interview at your place,” suggests Charles Gayle, reigning king of New York City’s black free jazz players. “Because the heat at my place is not really happening.” The January weather has been severe in NYC and Gayle, aged 54 but still tall, lean and muscular, lives as he has for four years in an unrenovated East Village squat.

It seems that free jazz in New York is nearly homeless, certainly at the culture’s farthest fringe. Though physically vigorous, the nominally non-commercial, sometimes politically engaged, sometimes rhetorically self-righteous, sometimes fatally self-absorbed music that erupted from Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and their many associates three decades ago has just a few devotees who earn about as much money and respect as street people. Nonetheless, tenor saxophonists such as Gayle, David S Ware and Zane Massey, pianist Matt Shipp, bassist William Parker, drummer William Hooker, and a score or two of others persevere.

Free jazz is shunned and/or scorned by music mags, record labels, the latest wave of so-called mainstream players, influential critics, academics and presenting institutions. It is characteristically loud, dissonant, anarchic and confrontational, though free jazz players claim, as they always have, spiritual catharsis if not transcendence as their aim. The style’s superficial chaos, its apparent lack of differentiation, resembles, more than anything, the helter-skelter interactions of urban life. Well, what grows in the City takes on protective colouration. Most New Yorkers probably see and hear no more in free jazz than they do in weeds.

Read the rest about the great Buffalo-bred saxophonist here.

Attend Sugar City's 2-Part 2-Year Anniversary Celebration

Tonight, Friday April 22, 7pm & 10:30pm--SUGAR CITY'S 2 YEAR 2 PIECE FEST. Part 1, 7-10:30pm, 523 Main St Buffalo, NY UVB-76 | MARTIN & LAWRENCE | PACING |A HOTEL NOURISHING | EROTIC ECONOMIES | Part 2: CHRONOLOGICAL DANCE PARTY 10:00-2am, Soundlab. $8 donation pre-sale, $10 donation at the door for both parts OR $5 donation for just Part 2. Two-Toned attire encouraged.

Last year’s party was really something special wasn’t it? We wanted this year to do justice but also be a little unexpected. In the Sugar City spirit of doing it together and celebrating our grassroots community we have planned a really amazing night combining several local avant-garde artists, phenomenal out of town guests and entrance into a brand new space on the “forgotten block” of Main St! Conveniently located near Mohawk Place for our buds going to the Crappy Dracula show! 

▶ ▷ ◀ ◁PART 1 ▶ ▷ ◀ ◁ 

Two-Piece Fest (all duos!)

523 Main St downtown near Mohawk St by WNY Book Arts Center. Doors at 7 start at 7:30 End at 10:30.

Performances include: |▲ Martin & Lawrence ▲| Ric Royer and Lexie Mountain are flying in on a golden aeroplane straight from the glittering East Coast. We are psyched to bring these two comedic characters together as our MC's for the night. 

|▼ UVB-76 ▼| Mario Fanone and Sherri Miller melt your mind with experimental electronic music and added performance. What tricks will they have up their sleeves this time? 

|▲ A Hotel Nourishing ▲|Sonny Baker and Cameron Rogers play their first show in awhile. We are so pumped for these two to lay down some tough beats and harsh licks! 

|▼ PACING ▼| Matt and Moezes bring the drudge, bring the harsh noise, and may bring down the walls with their sonic vibrations. 

|▲ Erotic Economies ▲| Liz Flyntz and Anna Scime produced a beautiful free art journal that catalogs an assortment of international artists and writers. On this night they will feature experimental films curated for the journal and get you excited about volume 2 being released soon!

WHAT TO EXPECT: |:|RAFFLES|:|ART|:|PHOTOS|:|TACOS|:|LIGHTS|:|MAGIC|:|FUN|:|FAMILY|:|

THEN at 10:30 the 12/8 Path band will suit-up and everyone will gather to dance, blast, and march to the above ground subway and ride with the band to Soundlab for PART 2 of the party!

LIKE THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6s3k9fxga8 or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0m8E7DJWT0&feature=related

▶ ▷ ◀ ◁PART II ▶ ▷ ◀ ◁ 

Soundlab 110 Pearl St Buffalo, NY

Chronological Dance Party. Doors at 10PM

Sequentially travel through music history as our pals play you some tunes from the 50’s thru the 90’s. See you on the dance floor. THERE WILL BE A MIXTAPE EXCHANGE IN EFFECT. Bring a mixtape or cd and swap it for someone else’s mixtape or cd. Free with your stamp from part 1 or just $5 if you wanna swing on by late.

Featuring: Frankie Rainbows (1950’s), Jill Apex Hunter (1960’s), Handsome Dan (1970’s), Blake Ellman (1980’s), Dan-O (1990’s)

PRESALE TICKETS @ sugar city, from sugar citizens, and both record theaters, spiral scratch, and at http://sugarcity.bigcartel.com/

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

The funds raised will go towards compensating our great out of town guests and supporting Sugar City’s future!

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

www.buffalosugarcity.org 

Listen to New Handsome Furs - "What About Us"

By Brandon for Stereogum:

“What About Us” is the first public sample of Handsome Furs’ forthcoming Sound Kapital. As you likely noticed, Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry are still using their promo photos to remind us they’re happily married (though here, oddly, they aren’t touching). Before you dive in, it’s also worth noting Sound is the first Handsome Furs album written entirely on keyboards.

Handsome Furs played Soundlab on 07/18/09 with The Cinnamon Band.

Watch Girl Talk Teach English

By Tom Breihan for Pitchfork: E

nglish, baby! is a website devoted to teaching the English language, sometimes via celebrity video interviews. The site's latest video interview features Gregg Gillis, otherwise known as Girl Talk, who helps explain the terms "out of the blue" and "sample." The videos are part lesson and part regular interview, and they're refreshingly devoid of "Yo, Teach!"-worthy self-conscious coolness. (Well, except for the high-fives at the end.) Watch two clips here, via English, baby!

Girl Talk first performed at the old Soundlab on 07/06/02 as part of Circuits of Steel tour featuring 7 artists from Pittsburgh's emerging electronic/experimental scene: Clockworm, Girl Talk, Manherringbone, Colongib, My Boyfriend the Pilot, Powder French, Xanoptiocon. He visited the new Soundlab on 4/13/07.

Read the FLUX String Quartet Discuss Performing Six Hour Feldman Piece

By Jim Ducibella for William & Mary college blog:

The FLUX String Quartet, William & Mary’s Artist-in-Residence for 2010-11, will close out its academic-year concerts by performing Morton Feldman’s six-hour-long test of endurance and style, the String Quartet #2.

The concert, free and open to the public, will take place on Thursday, April 21, at 5 p.m. at the Sadler Center Chesapeake Room A. The FLUX String Quartet will take no breaks during the concert; audience members, on the other hand, are encouraged to walk in and out of the theatre. While it is the seventh time the group has performed Number 2, it will be the first time in four years that the group will undertake the composition.

Read more here.

Download: Mountains' Bubbly "Thousand Square"

By Christopher Weingarten for the Village Voice's Sound of the City:

Meditative blisscrafters Mountains are Brooklyn's finest young purveyors of pillowy drifts, true masters of the airy drone. Over six fantastically fluffy years, Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp have explored different combinations of otherworldy hum and fluttery post-Fahey acoustic pluckage, but Air Museum (out May 10 via Thrill Jockey) launches the pair straight into the space-rock cosmos. Though the two claim Air Museum is simply bursting with acoustic instruments, their surely enviable pedal boards make everything ooze in liquid ecstasy like the gushiest, synthiest, most future-shocked, run-from-Big-Brother, robo-fucked Tangerine Dream records. One track even sounds like Vangelis' "Chariots Of Fire" score if it were remixed into a Growing-style charred blast.

"Thousand Square," in which the duo explores rhythm more than on past releases, has the sunny synthetic bubbles of krautrock cosmonauts like Harmonia, panning speakers, and getting into polyrhythmic chit-chat--all tethered to this planet by a field recording of people walking around inside a church in Jerusalem.

Q&A: Mountains' Koen Holtkamp on "Thousand Square"

What is "Thousand Square" about? What does the title mean?
It's meant to be fairly open-ended to let the listener come up with their own interpretations. A specific description of nothing in particular.

How was it created?
It's very much a studio production versus a live track. We set up a few shifting analog synth sequences that were slightly out of sync with one another and then both played guitar and electronics over that. Most of our recordings in the past have been pretty much live so this was a different approach for us. The whole piece was composed, recorded and edited in a day.

What equipment did you you use to make it?
I put together a small modular synth setup in the last year, which involves a lot of patching together different modules that communicate via control voltages. Given the hands-on approach of patching things together the line between hiccups and intention gets kinda blurred, which is part of what makes the process so enjoyable.

Do you have to be in a particular mindstate when you record? Does the studio have to look and feel a certain way?
Well there's always the ideal situation of being in the middle of nowhere but I think living in a place as hectic as NYC just being able to have a space where you can get away step back and focus on listening versus whatever else is going on in your life helps quite a bit. Low lighting, very little distraction and wine seem to work for us a well.

What's the most memorable show you've played in New York?
I sorta miss the Tonic days. There was a real sense of community around that place.

What's your favorite place to eat in New York?
I really enjoy cooking, so I'd say "home." But aside from that... New Malaysia Restaurant in Chinatown or the Indian diner under the 59th Street bridge in Queens.

Mountains played Soundlab with Skull Defekts on 1/27/10 and again on 4/2/11.

Get Tickets to See Prof. Noam Chomsky Speak in Buffalo

Thursday, May 12 · 7:00pm - 10:00pm, Montante Center, Canisius College, Buffalo NY. Get your tickets here.

Get Your Post-Runway Dance On with Shock & Awe Tonight!

Saturday, April 16, 11pm--SHOCK & AWE feat. the fabulous Kisabella & J. Zenger. Arrive before midnight and enjoy a COMPLIMENTARY GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE ... S&A wants to glitter you all over!

Catch Floor with Doomriders Saturday at Soundlab (Early Show)

SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 7pm (show starts at 8pm sharp), $12/$14--FLOOR, DOOMRIDERS.

Read "Elephant 6 Rocked Buffalo"

By Elizabeth Raphaelson for SUNY Potsdam's The Racquette:

The Elephant Six has been a name rattling around since early 2008 when it was announced that a collective of members from the bands Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal, Elf Power, The Olivia Tremor Control, The Music Tapes and several other bands would be going on an expansive tour across the nation. This collection of stray band members comprised of 14 musicians who worked together to put on the incredible three-hour show at the small venue "The Sound Lab" last Saturday, March 19, in Buffalo.  The show, filled with audience-participation games, fictional stories, and original songs (or the most original interpretation of songs) made the three hours seem more like a circus than a rock show.

The show consisted of the band members helping one another bring songs they had written in their formal bands to life with new twists. Filled with constant surprises (fitting, considering the name is in fact "The Holiday Surprise Tour") the members of the band displayed their musicianship by constantly trading their instruments, very rarely sticking to a single sound. Julian Koster, the musical saw player of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Music Tapes, was the only exception who, in addition to his talent displayed on drums, guitar, bass and banjo, had the monopoly over playing the musical saw. The band was able to mold themselves to whatever feel they wanted by simply switching singers or exchanging instruments.

Halfway through the show Julian Koster inched his way sheepishly to the microphone. He told a story about how in order for spring to come to Buffalo, five people would have to try to "puncture the moon" (a giant tissue paper ring a band member was holding in the audience) with the arm of the giant paper snowman that had appeared during the band's intermission. The fourth volunteer was able to "puncture the moon" and was awarded with the privilege to pick any song (outside their family of bands) for them to learn in the next five minutes. The band worked wonders in the five minutes by learning a Defiance, Ohio song and sounding as if they had practiced it for years.

The line-up of Elephant Six is truly something special. Sporting four electric guitars (one of them a twelve string), a bass, banjo, drums, keyboard, horns, musical saw, violin, tuba and clarinet, the band creates a wall of sound that perfectly blends to fuel the listener with adrenaline while sinking them into a hypnotic trance of contentment.  Elephant Six is a concert and an experience that puts the listener into the world of the band members vibrant imaginations and after three hours keeps everyone asking for more. You can check out Elephant 6 and their Holiday Surprise Tour on Pitchfork.com.

See Future Rock & The Polish Ambassador at Soundlab Thursday

Thursday, April 14, 10pm, $12--FUTURE ROCK, THE POLISH AMBASSADOR w/ special guest DJ Bacon! Advance Tickets Here

FUTURE ROCK

Chicago’s own Future Rock have carved out a category largely their own, adding drifting elements of Krautrock and space rock to rhythmic textures that reference Motorik, funk and four-on-the-floor disco. Outside of hometown Chicago, they may be best known for high profile and excellent remixes of Daft Punk, Neon Indian, Black Moth Super Rainbow and DFA 1979. Back home they are justly celebrated for legendary performances such as their set at last summer’s Wicker Park Fest that turned the entire neighborhood into a vast and energized dance floor, forcing even the palest and most resolutely hard-to-impress hipsters to call up their inner dance masters. Live performances combine loops, samples and Mickey Kellerman’s keyboards with Darren Heitz’s drums plus Felix Moreno’s Larry Graham-style bass slapping to create an enormously powerful groove. Their light show is as good as their music, and their set have been known to inspire dance frenzies.

THE POLISH AMBASSADOR (1320 Records) 

The Polish Ambassador is a beat machine from the future. Hailing simultaneously from the far reaches of other dimensional Universes and... Oakland, California, this dude drops his own unique blend of electro-funked, glitch-tweaked, wobble-freaked breakbeats that will have you dropping that bottom like it was 92.....3092, that is.

The Ambassador builds all of his live sets from a monstrous stash of original drums, bass, synth, and vox lines. "No Genre Left Behind," Sugalski jokes as he blends elements of funk, glitch, idm, hip hop, 80s music, jungle, and dub into a beat soup that will instigate healthy doses of booty shake and fist pump.

Claiming to be Poland's ambassador to the Universe, Sugalski has released 5 studio albums, all independently. Diplomatic Immunity in 2007, The Phantasmal Farm in 2008, I Found Him. Now I Must Kill Him in 2009, Mating Season (released under the Ample Mammal alias) and First Words in 2010. All 5 albums have obtained favorable press and achieved regular rotation on college, independent, and internet radio.

Synthesizers and a pure spirit are his primary weapons. Join his army and help Polish annihilate bad beats marring the earth with shame and disgrace.

Check Out Teenage Mutant GNAR Shred Bringing More Romp and Spazz than a Melmackian Mating Call Tonight at Soundlab

Tuesday, April 12, 9pm--WHITE FANG, GULL, MALLWALKERS:

On Tuesday April 12th Little Red Booking is excited to present:
*** WHITE FANG *** (Marriage Records) teenage mutant GNAR shred from Portland Oregon, bringing more romp and spazz than a Melmackian mating call. Official Website: http://www.whtfng.com/. Look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH2_eyVe6_o

*** GULL *** If you missed him the first time, this is your second chance. A member of bands Ultra Dolphins and Snack Truck, Nathaniel Rappole also performs as a one-man band known as Gull. He sings, he plays guitar, he plays drums: A multi-tasking monster to the max. Look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVZi3Xwjug&feature=r

Relatedand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOJ_146xOWo&NR=1

*** MALLWALKERS *** (Buffalo's own!) Short songs reminding you of what you hate about post-, surf-, garage- and hardcore-punk. Previously described as 'Minutemen with horns'.

Show posters (designed by Anne Muntges of SUPER GIANT) will be avail for sale!

Doors at 8, First act on at 8:30. 7 bux and all the pocket lint you've got!