I don’t know what I can write about George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic that hasn’t already been written. The man is the godfather of funk and pretty much spearheaded a musical revolution in the 1970’s. His bassist, Bootsy Collins, is one of the greatest of all time. They’re responsible for more psychotronic freak-outs than you can imagine, not to mention a thousand beats and bass lines you’ve heard in ten thousand hip hop songs. Their set on July 15th at the Pitchfork Music Festivalis a can’t-miss show.
DJ, producer, and rapper Madlibwill be playing Saturday afternoon, July 15th, at the 2017 Pitchfork Music Festival. Madlib has collaborated with some of the best rappers and musicians in the world, including MF Doom, J Rocc, Talib Kweli, De La Soul, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, and Kanye West.
His Madvillain album with MF Doom is a masterwork, and many cite his 2003 album Shades of Blue as another must-have record. I’m sure his set will be jaw-dropping.
Electronic rock act S U R V I V E(who, for some unknown reason, tend to spell their name with a space between each letter) are best known for having some of the composers of the Stranger Things soundtrack as members. They create atmospheric and sometimes creepy instrumentals that instantly remind you of John Carpenter movie scores. I’m interested to see how a live performance sounds from them. They play Saturday afternoon at the Pitchfork Music Festival.
Keep your mind open.
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LCD Soundsystemshocked the world a bit when they announced they were done creating music a few years ago. They shocked the world again by announcing not only new shows, but also a new upcoming album this year. Among the new shows is a Friday night performance at the Pitchfork Music Festival.
I’ve wanted to see LCD Soundsystem for several years now. Their blend of electro, new wave, straight-up rock grooves, and biting, satirical lyrics are a great combination. I’ve been told by friends that they put on a great show, and even clips of them performing on late night talk shows are sharp. It should be a packed house (or rather, park) for them on July 14th.
Keep your mind open.
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Detroit’s Danny Brownis a rapper, storyteller, and outsider artist. His unique delivery immediately gets your attention. It’s easy to dismiss him as a guy who mostly raps about drugs and drink, but you’ll find out he’s layered like an onion if you pay attention. Many of his songs deal with his admitted drug addictions, the agony they put on him and his family, and the trappings of celebrity. He is brutal in his honesty, which puts him far ahead of the pack. Clips of his live sets look like crazy shows, and I’m sure his July 14th set at the Pitchfork Music Festivalwon’t disappoint. I’d like to meet and thank him for his pure expression. We don’t get enough of that in music nowadays.
Thurston Moore doesn’t need much introduction. The former lead singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth has influenced more bands and musicians than we can probably count and is a guitar hero to many (much to his chagrin, I’ve heard). His new band puts out great “wall of sound” fuzz rock, and I’d hoped to catch them at Levitation Austin in 2016, but that was cancelled due to bad weather. He’ll be performing at the Pitchfork Music Festival on July 14th, so it will be good to catch up with him.
Madame Gandhi is an electronic artist and feminist activist from Los Angeles. She’s played drums for M.I.A.and is an accomplished musician in her own right. She has a neat style that mixes electro with trip-hop that I really dig; and, go figure, her beats are sick. She opens the Pitchfork Music Festivalon July 14th with a 1:30pm set.
Washington D.C. punks Priests have unleashed a lot of post-punk / no wave protest music in the last year, and the world is better for it. They’re smack dab in the middle of the current political climate’s hotbed, and they’re not just speaking out, they’re shouting out. A lot of their songs build to high tension, which is an apt reflection for much of the country right now.
Priests open the Green Stage at the Pitchfork Music Festival on July 14th. It’s sure to be a raucous way to start the day.
Keep your mind open.
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I had never attended an electronic-themed music festival before my wife and I went to Chicago’s Mamby on the Beach at Oakwood Beach this year. They’ve been running this festival for a few years now, and I’ve been meaning to get to it since it’s practically in my back yard. This was also the first time I’d been to a beach in a long while.
The weather was good, although the wind did whip across the beach and adjoining park now and then. This was especially cold on Sunday night, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
One of the first things we discovered upon entering the festival is that large bottles of sunscreen aren’t allowed inside it. “You can put some on before you come in,” said the man checking our bags. He let me keep a small keychain bottle of it, but they were apparently worried I might be smuggling drugs or booze in my new bottle of SPF 30 lotion. Heaven forbid I try to take sunscreen to a music festival on a beach.
We cheered up when we saw the “Silent Disco.” It’s a clever idea. Everyone gets a pair of wireless headphones and the DJ’s set is live streamed to them.
It looks weird at first, because it appears to be a bunch of people dancing to nothing.
It looks like a bunch of people suffering from dementia, but it’s actually a fun dance party.
I like the idea, as did a lot of others. I thought I might have to try this when I get my DJ skills up enough to do such a thing.
We arrived early enough on Saturday to catch most of Ravyn Lenae‘s set at the Beach Stage. It was an adjustment to go from our usual “dancing in clubs” to “dancing on sand,” but we managed well. Ms. Lenae had a fun time performing in front of a hometown crowd and put down a nice R&B set. Her cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” was delightful.
Rayvn Lenae
We headed to the MixMag Tent to see British DJ Will Clarkeafter that. He had a great set and seemed to be having a good time. It was inspiring for me, as my digital turntables have gone ignored for months while I’m finishing a book on disaster movies. I later Tweeted that his set inspired me to dust them off. He replied, “Do it.”
After a nice snack of Leghorn chicken sandwiches and free Vitamin Water, we went to see electro trio Marian Hillplay at the Beach Stage. They turned out to be the best band we saw all day on Saturday. They were funky, sexy, and even a bit trippy at times.
Marian Hill
Crowd favorites Miike Snowwere on after them, and they had a lot of us singing and jumping as the night got cooler and more people got higher. For the record, other people must have been allowed to bring in more than sunscreen because there was a lot of weed being blown at this festival, more than some of the Levitation festivals I’ve attended and those are psychedelic rock shows. We had to move to different places in the crowd multiple times to escape so much MJ smoke.
Miike Snow
We ended Saturday by checking out part of Tchami‘s “future house” set at the MixMag Tent. It was big, bright, and booming.
Tchami
It was also packed. The crowd couldn’t fit under the tent and extended well beyond it onto the beach.
So…much…house music!
We got back to our Air BNB place tired, sandy, and a bit sunburned, but ready for Sunday. We spent most of Sunday morning and early afternoon at Chicago’s Gay Pride Parade with friends, but then headed back to the beach in time to see STRFKRplay a fun set of dance rock that came complete with dancing and crowd-surfing astronauts.
STRFKR
We had time for some steamed chicken buns and turducken sausages before moving to the Park Stage for the first time all weekend to see Thundercat play a wild jazz fusion set that left some people confused and others (like me) wowed by the virtuosity of it.
Thundercat on the loose!
We zipped back to the Beach Stage to see Cut Copy, who delivered the best rock set of the whole weekend. They came to kick ass and apply sunscreen, but they were denied the sunscreen. The whole crowd was bumping, and beach balls and rolls of toilet paper (“I feel bad for anyone who ends up sad in one of the port-a-potties,” said my wife) flew in every direction.
Cut Copy
We ended the night, and the festival, with Flying Lotus. I’d been keen on seeing him for a while, and it was worth the wait. The sun had set and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees from the start of the festival into the low 60’s by the time he started his set. Mandy was wrapped in a blanket and a lot of us were huddled in the crowd like penguins trying to stay warm off each other’s body heat.
It was a great set, full of stunning 3-D visuals and great mixes of both dance tracks and deep trip-hop stuff. One beautiful moment was when he mixed in Angelo Badalamenti’s theme to Twin Peaks.
Is this Laura Palmer’s eye?
The whole set was a mind trip. I wish I would’ve had 3-D glasses, but when I mentioned to a guy behind me how the visuals were 3-D he said something along the lines of, “I’m glad I’m not seeing it in 3-D. That would probably freak me out.”
It was a good time. Mandy summed up a lot of the crowd well. “It looks like a lot of people missing Greek culture over summer,” she said. Don’t get me wrong. We didn’t run into any douchebags. We did bump into a lot of trashed people, however. One woman was sobbing as we all left the venue. I stopped to make sure she was okay. She hugged me, told me I was “a good soul,” and then disappeared into the crowd.
Will we go back? We might, if the dates work out and the lineup is good. I sure wouldn’t turn down a press pass!
“they pack both a purist intent and an inescapable weirdness into songs
as adventurous as they are catchy.” – NPR Music
“a wonderful retro-futuristic mess” – Los Angeles Times
“spacey, proggy, psych detour.” – Rolling Stone “Artist You Need To Know”
“Theirs is a fuzz-shrouded kind of rock ‘n roll displaying an imaginative urge to re-smear the already kaleidoscopic boundaries of the inventive modern crop of modern psychedelic music.”
– Paste “Best of What’s Next”
Los Angeles-based Wand announce the release of Plum, out September 22ndvia Drag City Records, as well as lead single, “Plum,” and its accompanying video, and a tour that embarks on the heels of the album’s release. Plum is Wand’s fourth LP since the band formed in late 2013, but their first new album since 2015. After a whirlwind first two years of writing, recording, and touring, their newest document focuses teeming, dense, at times wildly multichromatic sounds into Wand’s most deliberate statement to date, with a long evening’s shadow of loss and longing hovering above the proceedings.
In late winter of 2016, the band — Cory Hanson (guitar, vocals), Lee Landey (bass) and Evan Burrows (drums) — expanded their core membership to include two new members — Robbie Cody (guitar) and Sofia Arreguin (keyboards, vocals). The change in lineup naturally led to a shift in working method. The songwriting process was relocated to the practice space, where for several months on and off the band improvised, while recording and archiving as much as they could manage. And while previously Wand songs had often been brought to the group substantially formed by Hanson, now seedling songs were harvested from a growing cloudbank of improvised material, then fleshed out and negotiated collectively. This new process demanded more honest communication, more vulnerability, better boundaries, more mercy and persistence during a year that meanwhile delivered a heaping serving of romantic, familial and political heartbreak for everyone involved. The resulting Plum delicately locates the band’s tangent of escape from the comfortable shallows of genre anachronism.
Watch the video for “Plum” below. As Hanson describes it, “The song transpires between our collective harmony and individual dissent. It felt like we were each trying to obstruct a clear path in order to discover new space. As a total accident, ‘Plum’ wound up being a miniature blueprint to the musical language we developed together over months of dedicated writing.”
