vinyl

Pleasant surprise: My favorite interview gets the royal weirdo treatment!

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One of the coolest things about freelancing (and about life on earth) is that you never know what’ll happen next. Sometimes, you can go through days or weeks without anything much unpredictable taking place. But sometimes, you walk out of an event at Carnegie Hall and go to get your bike and there’s a plastic cup of wine sitting on your bike seat.

Plastic cup of wine on a bike seat

True story.

Or sometimes, you wake up and there’s a nice email in your inbox that says, “Hi, April. I came across your Medium story and would love to republish it on our site pionic.org. What do you think?”

What did I think? I believe my exact thoughts were: “Cool!” followed by, “What is Pionic.org?”

If you’re a Luddite who lives under a rock (like me), you might not have heard of Pionic, either, but it turns out it’s a pretty cool website that posts stories with names like, “Can There Be a Theory of Everything?” and “Squirrels Have Long Memory For Problem Solving.” I’m glad to have joined their club.

The Secret Lives of Vinyl Hoarders pionic story headline

You can check out my favorite interview given new life on Pionic right here. (I mean it’s my favorite interview that I’ve done. Of the ones I haven’t done, this 1995 New York magazine article that features a vaguely interview-like conversation between Martha Stewart and David Letterman might be my favorite.)

Musique concrète? Oui oui!

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I’ve blogged about Lily Wen before, and with good reason. Among other fabulous things, my excellent friend is an all-vinyl soul music DJ and Lindy Hop luminary. And not too too long ago, she started a record label called Figure & Ground.

Les Yper Sound Explorations in Drums & Sax record

I love everything about this record. Just look at the cover!!

Beside having a really hip-looking website, Figure & Ground put out a rad EP last year of spoken word tracks by Alan Watts set to groovy NYC woodwinds. This year, the label may be outdoing itself, as Lily prepares to release Explorations in Drums & Sax: 14 original tracks, inspired by ’60s musique concrète, written and performed by the duo Les Yper Sound (comprised of New York session musicians Miles Arntzen and Jas Walton), with additional genius contributed by Beastie Boys collaborator Money Mark and Sudanese pop artist Sinkane, AND produced by the one and only Lily.

Whew! I will allow us to catch our breath.

Despite the record’s close relationship with sometimes non-musical “concrete” sounds, Lily writes that “it journeys through many genres showcasing percussion & woodwinds among an eclectic array of acoustic & electronic sounds—all rooted in rhythm and melody.” In other words, its notes and arrangements might be unusual, but they’re still perfectly listenable. Time to release that breath in a satisfied and relaxing way: Ahhhhhh.

Also, the album contains a song titled “Potato Brain.”

Now I know you just started scrambling for your headphones and Sherlock Holmes pipe (because I did, too), so here’s a link to a little listening party you can have right now before the thing comes out on November 4.

Thanks for keeping the hits coming, Lily! And by “hits,” I mean of course “intergalactic instrumentals mingled with the acousmatic sounds of everyday objects.”

“We just met on the Internet. … Wait, that’s not what it sounds like!”

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Nothing wrong with meeting on the Internet, of course! But the phrase sounded funny when I used it to describe my relationship to musician and writer Mariel Beaumont as I blew in to Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory a few nights ago in search of her and not sure I’d recognize her.

Mariel wrote to me last week to say she enjoyed this interview about vinyl record collectors I wrote for Medium and asked if I had any tips for promoting work on the site. While I was super-stoked to get a shout from someone I didn’t know, I had to be super-disappointing and let Mariel know that all the strokes that article’s gotten have been courtesy of the Dust & Grooves publicity machine; no marketing genius of mine.

Church Girls

Mariel (female) with her band. One of these guys is her twin brother!

We got to talking just the same and I learned her band Church Girls was going to be up from Philly in just a few days to play a show. I told her I’d try to make it, she told me she’d put me on the list, and—this outcome is far too infrequent—we both did what we said!

After I made a few wrong guesses, she spotted me in the crowd, we chatted for a bit, I heard Church Girls’ très bon indie/post-punk/folk-type set (with a few ripping guitar solos and a little Sam Cooke thrown in), and she was even nice enough to procure me a secret beer from backstage. (Pro-tip for making friends: this effort never fails to impress.)

In addition to getting lots of love for her music from the persnickety press, Mariel has written some great stuff, including this story, on Medium, about some of the real-life lessons she took from an adolescence spent at DIY shows and basement clubs. (See, this is the extent of my marketing strategy: “Hey, blog readers—check this other article out!”)

Despite its inherent identity as a connector, we all know the Internet has a Jekyll and Hyde personality that can work to isolate us (and deluge us with crap) as well as it can bring us closer together. As something of a luddite, it’s nice for me to occasionally be reminded of the ability of tools like web publishing and email to allow us to meet new, actual people in real, physical places. So much the better when those people are genuinely cool, and offer you beer.

“If he were alive today, he’d probably subvert social media…”

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“…in the same way he helped to reinvent western culture in his own time.”

Right on!

Thus spake my friend Lily Wen: DJ, Lindy Hop champion, and now record label entrepreneur, regarding the late great Alan Watts.

Alan Watts. Image via Ingienous Designs.

The old codger himself (image via Ingienous Designs)

I feel like I’ve always been vaguely aware of this British philosopher-hippie who helped bring Eastern provocations to the West, but I felt a spike of connection with his work last week, at the pre-release party for the vinyl EP Face the Facts, out today on Lily’s Figure & Ground label.

The record takes the occasion of what would have been Watts’ 100th birthday to present four “spoken word” tracks taken from hundreds of hours of his seminar recordings, set to music by New York woodwind musician Jas Walton.

Figure & Ground’s website describes the original material as “psychedelic Californian ruminations, intriguing incantations, and compelling thoughts on existence.” When I heard some of them at the party (held at the wonderful and cozy Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books in the West Village), I did feel as though I were sitting in Watts’ houseboat living room, awash in mind-stretching inducements to alternate ways of viewing the world.

It was very cool.

Lily’s gotten some great press for her efforts, including write-ups in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wax Poetics, and Elephant (which I suggested she pitch to—yay!).

The record goes on sale in stores worldwide starting today, via Fat Beats distribution. If you’d prefer to stay in the living room, you can order a copy in digital or vinyl format from the Figure & Ground website instead.

Cheers, Lily! And cheers, Mr. Watts.

Find a job you love and…

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Back in November, I interviewed my friend Eilon Paz about his photography book Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting for Medium.

Dust and Grooves shout out

I’m reminded of it every few weeks, when Medium (thanks, guys!) sends me an email letting me know that more people have read and shared it.

The article was a ton of fun to “research” (on a bench in Red Hook on a sunny autumn day, with bags of candy), and to write, and it’s become probably the most-read thing I’ve ever published.

Maybe there’s a lesson in that?