This is probably the most stunning festival video I’ve laid eyes on. Sam O’Hare has pulled together incredible clips of the festival igniting and climaxing. By speeding up the film and using aerial shots, O’Hare turns ordinary movements into something quite spectacular. The end result is astonishing. Starting with attendees assembling their temporary homes and storming the gates to audiences roaming through the grounds, lazing in the grass, and cheering for the headliners, each scene is sweetly chosen. Throughout, the gorgeous structures that cover the property look utterly surreal. And for a moment, the enormous event that is Coachella looks miniature.
The music was oddly enough produced by a music and sound design initiative called Human. The company creates inventive pieces for commercials, film, and television. From their site, “We embrace technology as a means of expanding the boundaries of genre, location and culture.” This is exactly what O’Hare’s creation coupled with Human’s music adeptly achieves…
As El Guicho explains at the beginning of his new video, we are about to journey to “explore the cosmos in a ship of our imagination… [and] the ship will take us to worlds of dreams.” This video must be the visualization of Díaz-Reixa’s dream world. He launches a golden cassette tape off a cliff and takes us on a psychotropic trip filled with innumerable bare breasts, sexual innuendos, a woman lighting a cigarette from a match poised in a bird’s beak, the murder of a stuffed panda, a beauty painted entirely in gold and many things purely unexplainable. The video is stimulating and complex, the song familiar albeit futuristic.
The piece serves as the trailer for a film that shares the name “Bombay” and evokes filmmaker Nicolás Mendez’s interpretation of El Guincho’s 2nd release, Pop Negro. It begins with El Guincho playing astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, parodying Sagan’s idiosyncratic documentary style, and ends with the expected, more beautiful bare breasts.
Spanish musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa is El Guincho. He spent his early days on the Canary Isles, alienated from the 80s pop culture. Primarily a boy of the beach and the ocean, he eventually discovered his passion for film and music, which he then nurtured in Paris and Barcelona. The resulting sound infuses styles as disparate as Animal Collective and Os Mutantes and relies heavily on interlocking samples, auto-harmonizing pop choruses, and heavily syncopated beats. Díaz-Reixa describes his music, imbued with island sounds, the bouyancy of tropicalia, and pop precision, as “space-age exotica”.
His breakthrough record, Alegranza (2008), launched the Spanish artist high into the indie music blogosphere and sent him to perform several highly anticipated shows at Austin’s SXSW. “Bombay” is off Díaz-Reixa’s recent release, Pop Negro (2010). His second album, like the first, is a mix of afro-beat percussion, world music samples, uptempo beats, and exotic production. Díaz-Reixa began producing the album shortly after the release of Alegranza and it became 18-months in the making. Three months into the recording process, at Berlin’s infamous Planet Roc studio, Díaz-Reixa returned to the Canary Islands to serve as a wind surfing instructor in order to raise the money to justly finish the project.
Díaz-Reixa has extended his reach into a variety of other projects, including adding music to Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, performing with his rock band, Coconot, and working in Spanish film and television.
El Guincho appears in the U.S. this week with two L.A. dates (Oct 7 – The Standard Hotel and Oct 8 – Spaceland) and one in San Francisco (Oct 9 – Elbo Room)!
This summer I was whisked away on the festival circuit leaving little time to share what’s been exciting my ears. That likely hurt me more than it hurt you. But I’m back to reflect on what is coming out now and to make sure that you are hearing it as well.
As I get the gears revolving, here are a few tunes which caught me this summer…
People should move to Colorado just for Red Rocks. That venue with its perfect sight lines and sound set within two majestic red rock slabs doesn’t get any better on a warm summer evening like last night. Vampire Weekend blew it off the charts. My favorite quote of the night from Ezra Koenig, “You guys look nice at an angle.”
The band came out at a 10 and the audience gave it all back. The energy swirling between the rocks was palpable and Koenig repeatedly commented on the communal feeling wafting from the audience. “We haven’t been to the Denver area since we started touring… You guys are amazing.” The band rewarded fans with the second ever played Contra and a set that both highlighted their keen musicianship and a knack for writing short gems blending danceable influences from around the globe. Every song they unleashed off their two albums differed from the studio cuts, increasing the feel that we were getting something truly special.
Best view walking to the parking lot ever. I relished in the sounds of people yelling in appreciation as I made my way to the car. Last night was the most beautiful show I’ve been to in ages. It made me cry.
Vampire Weekend is one of the best live acts touring now. Go see them.
I am entirely excited for CocoRosie’s performance tomorrow at the Gothic in Denver. I’ve yet to behold the musical explorations of the Casady sisters live, but I sense that it will be epic. Their music is sultry, experimental, impassioned, and one-of-a-kind. The resonances of Bianca and Sierra’s angelic and otherworldly vocals amid their curious, fantastical realm of effected sounds and tones is true art.
The duo’s name comes from nicknames their mother gave them when they were young, Bianca “Coco” and Sierra “Rosie”. The girls reunited in Paris in 2003 to collaborate and create. The story is quite romantic. Bianca, who was then 2, living in Brooklyn and hadn’t seen much of her older sister for the past 10 years, had grown restless and decided to invite a change. She chose to travel the world and showed up in Paris where 24-year-old Sierra was studying voice. The two sisters sequestered themselves in Sierra’s bathroom, the most acoustic and isolated room in the apartment, for the better part of 2 months and soon completed their debut album, La Maison de Mon Rêve (2004).
Since then, the girls have toured the world, sharing their gorgeous and unrecognizable fusion of hip-hop, opera, electronica and pop. Sometimes it sounds as though you are listening to a field recording equipped with foreign noises, scratches, and faded vocals floating in the background. Other time it’s as though Billie Holiday has come back as a tiny girl obsessed with rhyme. Their third work, The Adventures of Stillborn and Ghosthorse (2007), was aptly produced by legendary Icelandic sound engineer, Valgeir Sigurdsson, who has excelled at capturing the anomalies and eccentricities of the Bjork. The duo recently signed with Sub Pop records to release their fourth full-length album, Grey Oceans (May 2010).
CocoRosie’s music is a reflection of Bianca and Sierra’s relationship with each other and this is what inspires its magic. It’s a means of expression for the intense and complex energy that runs between the two sisters. Originally, the girls performed as a duo with Sierra singing, playing the guitar, piano and harp, and Bianca singing and manipulating children’s toys, electronic and percussion instruments, and other unusual noisemakers. They more often now perform with a variety of backing musicians who take the roles of bassist, synth player and beatboxer.
Costuming is a constant within the world of CocoRosie, another part of the performance that I can’t wait to lay my eyes on. Bianca has been making her own clothes since she was 15. In Paris, the sisters are revered as fashion icons and regularly make the covers of style magazines. But unlike many of the women who surround them, the two are more likely to take and make their attire from 2nd hand stores than from the shops on the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré.
So off to the Gothic to experience a world of unicorns, rainbows, fairies and angels and everything else that is CocoRosie. Don’t miss them as they voyage throughout the U.S. and then Europe.
Jun 21 – Gothic Theater, Denver, CO
Jun 22 – Urban Lounge, Salt Lake City, UT
Jun 24 – Vogue Theater, Vancouver, CA
Jun 25 – Showbox, Seattle, WA
Jun 26 – Wonder Ballroom, Portland, OR
Jun 29 – Regency, San Francisco, CA
Jun 30 – Rio Theater, Santa Cruz, CA
Jul 1 – Belly Up, San Diego, CA
Jul 2 – Orpheum Theater, Los Angeles, CA
Jul 17 – Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux, CH
Jul 18 – Villa Ada, Roma, ITALY
Jul 19 – Spazio 211, Torino, ITALY
Jul 20 – Wagenhallen, Stuttgart, GERMANY
Jul 21 – KulturZelt, Kassel, GERMANY
Jul 23 – KulturArena, Jena, GERMANY
Jul 24 – Archa Theatre, Prag, CZECH REPUBLIC
Jul 26 – Gödör Klub, Budapest, HUNGARY
Jul 27 – Arena Open Air, Vienna, AUSTRIA
The Westword Music Showcase is Denver’s very own version of SXSW, albeit a smaller one. The yearly event, hosted by the free alternative weekly across 8 blocks of the Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood lasts just one day. But don’t let this take away from the fact that it is one of the best events in the area to take in the burgeoning Denver music scene and catch some amazing national acts as well. And it’s cheap. Just $15 in advance and $30 day of.
This year’s event has one of the best lineups to date for indie fans with headliners including Ghostland Observatory (Austin), Dirty Projectors, and Neon Indian. Other stand-out local acts include The Still City, Eleanor, Hello Kavita, Taun Taun, and Kill Paradise. See below for Lux’s picks for this year’s Westword Music Showcase.
Phish will give its first television performance since 2004 tonight on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” The appearance is part of a Rolling Stones’ tribute week to their 1972 album Exile On Main Street. Each night on Fallon a different band will cover a song from the classic album. The show starts tonight at 12:35 / 11:35 CST on NBC.
The tribute week concides with the May 18, 2010 deluxe release of a remastered version of the album featuring 10 previously unheard tracks including “Plundered My Soul”, “Dancing in the Light”, “Following the River” and “Pass the Wine” as well as alternate versions of “Soul Survivor” and “Loving Cup”.
Throughout the week artists will sit in with hip-hop artists The Roots, Fallon’s house band since March 2009. Other musical guests this week included Green Day, Keith Urban, Sheryl Crow, Taj Mahal, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready, and Rolling Stones’ keyboardist Chuck Leavell. LL Cool J is appearing tonight along with Phish.
The million dollar question: What will Phish play? So far nothing has been announced. The rock legends played Exile in its entirety at Festival 8 over Halloween this past fall, so anything is possible.
Check out this clip of “Rocks Off” from Festival 8.
Looking forward to the unveiling of Phish this evening!
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