Legend Recognize Legend is the first solo project from Lazerbeak, one of the most members of the experimental Doomtree collective: ‘Combining elements of indie rock, pop, and hip hop production, Legend Recognize Legend is bolstered by layers of keyboards, live strings, horns, drum breaks, and group vocals’. We like.

SPONSOR

Marches, dances, boogies, woogies and outrages to his own drummer — himself. A one man rappin’ band, That One Guy is good enough to agitate your parents and your children alike.

There are a lot of a bands called The Creepers, but by far the most unique is the keyboard and trumpet duo from Baltimore. Featuring Adam Endres from Blood Baby and his Wham City compatriot, Connor Kizer, the comedic outfit pens catchy and hilarious songs about love and dating, embodying the unabashedly trashy, underdog spirit of the city that John Waters calls home.

I first saw noise musician Zbigniew Karkowski in Beijing several years ago, and I had the good fortune to be able to catch him recently when he came through Baltimore. Both times, the rather cagey and brooding Pole assaulted the audience with cement-rattling cacophony — the first time I saw him he used an analog synth, the second time he had a laptop — that was completely punk in its brevity, yet devastatingly expressive and effective, like a really satisfying punch into the sternum.

Baltimore musician/artist Bethany Dinsick processes haunting folk music through noise methods, running her sparse guitar lines and beautiful voice through loop pedals and samplers. [photo by VJP Photography]

SPONSOR

I recently caught Australian violinist/sound artist Jon Rose at Red Room in Baltimore. He used a motion-sensitive rig to his bow to manipulate sounds on a laptop while he played along. It was a very intense set. Among many other endeavors, Rose has been working on the ongoing Fence Project where he ‘plays’ the wire fences scattered across his home country.

People have drawn comparisons between Virus and Talking Heads. The Norwegian trio surely incorporates a lot of jazz, experimental, and metal (the band is a supergroup of sorts with ties to bands like Satyricon, Aura Noir, and Inferno) elements, but their distinct gothic rock sound has very little connection to David Byrne and company. That’s not to say that it doesn’t rule.

Jon Ragel takes the stage as Boy Eats Drum Machine, with a saxophone, turntable, microphone, sampler and green tom drum. He’ll be touring all over the West of America on his way to SXSW in March with his deliciously proggy power trio labelmates, Finn Riggins.

These heady times call for heady music, something spaced-out, trance-y, weird, and devilishly ecstatic to distract us from reality. Chicago’s Cave heeds this call for musical escapism, channeling Hawkwind, Kraftwerk, funk, and tribal frenzy into their mothership-beaconing groove.

SPONSOR

The latest in the flurry of experimental Brooklyn bands, Telepathe, have attracted some serious attention since the release of their debut LP Dance Mother last week. Although produced by TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek — enough of an accolade to draw thousands alone — the band are by no means riding on the crest of his wave. The sound is distinctive: synth-heavy backing dropped behind looped harmonies and chants, creating a sinister and compelling musical experience. One can guess at the influences — Gang Gang Dance, Animal Collective, Battles, and so on — although Telepathe stubbornly refuse to let this direct the music, adding a lick of 80′s paint to the equation and peeling off on their own unchartered course.

Chicago’s Cheer Accident started as a post-no-wave weirdo band typical of the Skin Graft roster, but of late, they’ve been doing some unrestrained pop and rock. They even have harmonized vocals and an occasional horn. This isn’t to say they’re commercializing – their songs are just as complex as ever, and there’s still a hint of discordance beneath the shimmering new sound.

Brian Eno and David Byrne recently finished their first collaboration in about 30 years. For the most part, Eno did the music and Byrne wrote some tunes, words and sang. It’s familiar, but completely new as well. The new record is called Everything that Happens will Happen Today and it will be available on August 18th. In September, Byrne will begin a tour on which he will be playing music from the new album as well as music from their previous collaborations – three Talking Heads albums and Bush of Ghosts, amongst them.

Listen to the new Byrne-Eno track, Strange Overtones.

Caught The Dust Dive the other night at Glasslands. They’re a bunch of hippies, but even I have to admit, they’re atmospheric live show – consisting of violin, gently strummed guitar, a few piano and sampler twinkles here and there, and sound samples from the found footage projected behind the band – is really powerful, like the warm rush of fond memories that hits you an instant before the mushroom cloud annihilates everything. Frontman Bryan Zimmerman even plays the musical saw, and you really can’t argue with that.

Listen to their track, Claws of Light.

SPONSOR

The glut of pretentious art rock bands in New York has been getting me down and making me hate going to shows. That is, until I got to catch Extra Life a couple weeks ago. These guys obviously listen to everything Tzadik puts out, but as challenging and off-kilter as their angular squall can get, they’re not averse to, you know, making music. Their intricately-composed songs are almost operatic in their structure, and feature hints of everything from Arther Russell to Meshuggah. They even break into some pleasant and jaunty folk moments. Plus, they have a violinist, and violins in rock music is rad.

Listen to Extra Life’s track, The Refrain.

This is one for you Radiohead fanatics. We have a special box set to give away to a randomly selected Lost At E Minor subscriber featuring all seven Radiohead albums (minus In Rainbows).

To be in with a chance of winning this awesome prize pack, be a subscriber to Lost At E Minor’s free weekly newsletter and leave a message under this post saying: ‘Oh, damn! I need that like I need a …’ (or words to that effect). Entries close next Monday morning New York time and the winner will be announced shortly thereafter.

Thanks to our friends at Cornerstone, this giveaway is to celebrate the release of Companion To Radiohead: Best Of CD, Special Edition 2-CD, Quadruple Vinyl LP and Digital Releases Features 21 Videos, Including 9 Making DVD.

Parlophone Records and Capitol Records have announced that the much anticipated CD, 2-CD, quadruple vinyl LP and digital release, Radiohead: The Best Of will also be available June 3 as a DVD video collection. The collection’s details are announced today. 21 videos are featured on the new Radiohead: The Best Of DVD, including “Just,” “Street Spirit,” “Karma Police,” “Paranoid Android,” “No Surprises,” “Knives Out,” “Pyramid Song” and “There There.” The DVD also includes the more experimental visuals created for Radiohead songs not released as singles, and nine videos make their DVD release debuts on the new collection.

The story of Radiohead is not solely about the band’s extraordinary music. Radiohead has also made some of the greatest music videos of all time. Working with music video’s most innovative directors, including Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry, Jamie Thraves, Shynola, Jake Scott, Sophie Muller, Grant Gee, and others, the band’s commitment to visual creativity has resulted in some of the most memorable, groundbreaking and influential music videos in the history of the medium.

Radiohead: The Best Of documents the band’s huge contribution to music video as an artform. The DVD features Radiohead’s earliest videos, including “Creep,” which helped to propel the band’s first single into a massive hit in the U.S., as well as “Anyone Can Play Guitar” and “Pop Is Dead.”

Two different videos made for “High And Dry,” the band’s first single from The Bends, are included, and the glossy production for “Fake Plastic Trees,” directed by Jake Scott (son of Ridley) when the band was still arguably better-known in the States than in the U.K.

Also included is the run of great videos which began when Radiohead chose to work with young English director Jamie Thraves, who had little to his credit other than several acclaimed film school shorts. The result was the band’s first all-time classic video, for “Just.” The genius of “Just” lies in its unforgettable final twist, and the video broke new ground in the way it subtly fused narrative with the band’s performance. Thraves, who has since directed more acclaimed videos, including Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” and movies (The Lowdown and the forthcoming Cry Of The Owl), also edited two other versions – one all-narrative, another all-performance – in case it didn’t work. “Just” has won awards and has been named in numerous best ever videos polls – and it was recently parodied in the recent video for Mark Ronson’s cover version.

Radiohead’s next video would also win ‘greatest ever’ acclaim. For “Street Spirit,” the band teamed with top music video and commercials director Jonathan Glazer. His work includes the video for Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity,” the Guinness “Surfer” commercial (voted the best ad of all time) and he would then go on to direct movies like Sexy Beast. Glazer’s rigorous approach and intensity gelled with Thom Yorke, and the result was a mesmerizing and groundbreaking video. Glazer captured the hypnotic beauty of “Street Spirit” in his understated use of special effects and, in particular, high-speed photography. The still-astonishing trailer park-set video became a big award-winner, including Best Video of 1996 at British music video award show The CADS. Glazer later revealed that Thom Yorke encouraged him to simplify his ideas for the video until the slow motion footage became the backbone of the piece.

Radiohead and Glazer worked together again two years later on the video for “Karma Police.” With the director preparing to shoot his first movie, the result was suitably cinematic: it’s shot from the viewpoint of a Cadillac driver bearing down on a man staggering down a road, with Thom Yorke in the car’s back seat. Something bad is going to happen, but there’s a scorching twist in the tale. As with “Street Spirit,” the perfectionist Glazer insisted on re-shoots before being satisfied with the results.

In between the two Glazer videos came an inspired departure for the accompaniment to the hugely anticipated first single from third Radiohead album OK Computer, “Paranoid Android.” Instead of commissioning an established video director, the band invited Swedish animator Magnus Carlsson to make a surreal animated adventure featuring his cartoon slacker character Robin.

The band became enthusiastic patrons of a new wave of groundbreaking animation. Radiohead’s experimental album Kid A produced no singles or videos, but instead, 10-to 40-second animated ‘blipverts’ – many created by Shynola, a four-man group of computer animators not long out of film school. When Radiohead released the more accessible Amnesiac, Shynola directed the video for “Pyramid Song,” a superb ultimately devastating animation: a diver plunges into the sea from a concrete island to reveal a city, his home, submerged below.

Radiohead subsequently collaborated with pioneering CGI artists Johnny Hardstaff, who was given the freedom to make a single video for two tracks, “Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors” and “Like Spinning Plates” (retitled “Push Pulk/Spinning Plates”), and Alex Rutterford, who created a computer-generated Thom Yorke for the promo for “Go To Sleep.”

Radiohead has often given talented directors a crucial career opportunity to prove themselves, with often stunning results. Some of the work has challenged viewers’ expectations of one of the world’s biggest bands, including Ed Holdsworth’s hypnotic collection of urban landscapes for “Sit Down Stand Up.” But the band has also given established directors the chance to express themselves in a different way.

Legendary video director Michel Gondry had just made his first movie when he directed the video for “Knives Out,” a characteristically awe-inspiring, one-shot video tracking the breakdown of a relationship, including a human version of the board game Operation. And the beautiful, ghostly feel of “I Might Be Wrong” was created by Sophie Muller, more generally found directing videos for the likes of Gwen Stefani and Beyoncé, shooting Thom and Jonny Greenwood on a no-lens pinhole camera.

While Radiohead’s later videos may have tended toward the leftfield, the video for “There There,” the first single from Hail To The Thief, directed by Bristol-based animation director Chris Hopewell, was arguably the band’s most popular and widely-seen video for years when it arrived in 2003. Part-Bagpuss, part-Brothers Grimm, it won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Art Directed Video that year.

Radiohead has encouraged directors to interpret their music in a singular fashion, and Thom Yorke in particular has been prepared to go to great lengths to realise a great concept, as demonstrated with “No Surprises,” the final video from OK Computer. Director Grant Gee, who was working with the band on their acclaimed documentary Meeting People Is Easy, persuaded Thom into a helmet that fills up with water. It’s an unforgettable (and potentially very dangerous) one-shot video as the viewer watches Thom hold his breath.

The new Radiohead: The Best Of DVD shows that Radiohead’s music videos have mirrored the band’s inspired musical progression with rare and extraordinary visual achievement.

Radiohead: The Best Of (DVD)
1. Creep (directed by Brett Turnbull)
2. Anyone Can Play Guitar (directed by Dwight Clarke)
3. Pop Is Dead (directed by Dwight Clarke)
4. Stop Whispering (directed by Jeff Plansker)
5. My Iron Lung (directed by Brett Turnbull)
6. High and Dry (UK version) (directed by David Mould)
7. High and Dry (US version) (directed by Paul Cunningham)
8. Fake Plastic Trees (directed by Jake Scott)
9. Just (directed by Jamie Thraves)
10. Street Spirit (Fade Out) (directed by Jonathan Glazer)
11. Paranoid Android (directed by Magnus Carlsson)
12. Karma Police (directed by Jonathan Glazer)
13. No Surprises (directed by Grant Gee)
14. Pyramid Song (directed by Shynola)
15. Knives Out (directed by Michel Gondry)
16. I Might Be Wrong (directed by Sophie Muller)
17. Push Pulk / Spinning Plates (directed by Johnny Hardstaff)
18. There There (directed by Chris Hopewell)
19. Go To Sleep (directed by Alex Rutterford)
20. Sit Down Stand Up (directed by Ed Holdsworth)
21. 2+2=5 (Live at Belfort Festival) (directed by Fabien Raymond)

Radiohead: The Best Of will be available in the following formats and configurations:
*1CD collection featuring 17 tracks
*Special Edition 2CD, adding 13 tracks
*4-piece vinyl set with 29 tracks
*17-track & 30-track digital downloads
*DVD featuring 21 videos

All formats will be available for purchase from www.radioheadstore.com

No Age are doing something different to the mass of noise-laden, guitar-drum duos canvasing the lo-fi airwaves at the moment. I’m just not sure quite what. Their album, Nouns, is receiving top-rate reviews after sell-out crowds after screaming, obsessive fans. The music is simply massive: a vast landscape of heat haze, somehow both tranquil and manic, punctuated by singer Dean Sprouts backdrop of barely intelligible vocals and Randall’s distorted, archaic sounding drums.

Stephen Tompkins makes some impressive Lichtenstein-esque paintings that look like Dali comic books. He is also a prolific experimental musician who makes dark, ambient sound collages and minimalist, beat-driven compositions.

SPONSOR

Only a band from Akron, Ohio could come up with the whole de-evolution theory. Apparently Devo had business cards that read ‘Chinese computer rock ‘n’ roll, scientific music + vis. arts for beautiful mutants’. This track, Jocko Homo, is one of my favorites of theirs.

The E.L.F is the outrageous new side project of the flannel-clad Gerling frontman, Darren Cross. A genre agnostic, Cross throws a tantrum on Stevie Nicks Hearts, the first EP created el solo in the dark underbelly of his Sydney home studio. The indie-infused aesthetic smashes itself against the wall, whilst 80’s synth-beats get thrown across the room like a bad break up. It’s like Beck made babies with Dannii Minogue, and the chubby new born is strange looking yet surprisingly adorable. [also read our interview with singer-songwriter Reed KD]