ACADEMIA: Music Blogs, Independent Artists, and the Shaping of the Modern Indie Landscape

Being a student has its ups and downs, but every once in a while, I fall into a rut where I love academia wholeheartedly. I certainly experienced this two weeks ago, when I had the opportunity to — with a 2,000 word journalism assignment — take a close, critical look at two of my favorite things: music blogs and independent artists. My assignment was to "look at how New Media is changing the way society perceives a group," and how New Media is changing the public's opinion of a particular group. Naturally, I wrote about how music bloggers have impacted the current indie music landscape.

Big ups to Mike Nelson, my Journalism teacher, for letting me go with this topic. (Follow him on Twitter and read his column!! It's called Sonic Boom and rules.) And of course much thanks to everyone who helped me out with my paper, y'all rule: Matt of You Ain't No Picasso, Jessica Suarez freelance extraordinaire, Dan Kreps at Rolling Stone, McGregor of Chocolate Bobka, Ian of Friendship Bracelet, Natasha of My Old Kentucky Blog, Weed Hounds. THANKS GUYS. Full paper posted after the jump. (Email me if you'd like the physical zine version.)

Music Blogs, Independent Artists,
and the Shaping of the Modern Indie Landscape
(Foundations of Journalism - New York University - Fall '09)

It’s been a good year for Weed Hounds, a young indie band of Long Island natives who produce melodic, shoegaze-tinged dreampop. Despite their proximity to Brooklyn’s booming indie scene, the band has reached more fans outside the five boroughs than within them.

“Music blogs have really helped put the word out there about us,” says singer/guitarist Laura Catalano. “We just started a band and didn’t expect anyone to ever talk about us at all.”

After forming in 2008, the band released their debut cassette tape via Austin, TX-based indie label Crooked Directions Records. “We’ve never met the guys behind the label, but we chat online,” says guitarist Nick Rice. The band has since been covered by indie e-zine Impose Magazine and on indie music blogs like You Ain’t No Picasso and Chocolate Bobka. According to the online music community Last.fm, Weed Hounds music has reached as far as the Netherlands, Brazil, Sweden and Madagascar, and their next release will be via Canada’s National Archive of Records.

For Staten Island-based rock band Cymbals Eat Guitars, 2009’s blogosphere has been even more rewarding.

“I got into Cymbals Eat Guitars when they just had a few songs on MySpace,” says Matt Jordan, founder of MP3 blog You Ain’t No Picasso. Since starting the blog at college in 2004, You Ain’t No Picasso has become one of the most high-trafficked on the web.

“The lead signer Joe contacted me on AOL Instant Messenger. I checked them out and wrote about them before they even had their album together,” Jordan said. Since the first You Ain’t No Picasso review earlier this year, the band has taken the indie-scene by storm, with glowing reviews from The New York Times and Pitchfork Media, and European tour dates with Wilco and The Flaming Lips.

Although Weed Hounds’ story may be more typical, new media’s explosion of independent music blogs has shaken the music industry and ignited fans with an indistinguishable indie-rock fire. In recent years, an unprecedented amount of attention has come from the ever-growing blogosphere, where anyone with ears, an Ethernet chord, and enthusiasm for new music can become an indie rock authority. Blogs have indisputably made it easier to learn about new indie rock artists and labels, introducing new musical types to the general public and changing the way fans perceive independent musicians and labels.

But with the vastness of the blogosphere and Internet as a whole, it has become increasingly difficult not only for bloggers to sift through mediocre and plain-old bad music, but also for artists to avoid coverage that is biased, and at time undeservedly sensational. Like record store clerks of decades past, quality music blogs have nurtured the success of artists and labels — but in many cases, blog-buzz overkill has brought bands down before they’re even given a chance to rise up.


Before blogs, in 2001, Michael Azerrad published Our Band Could Be Your Life, a 500-page text that tells the definitive account of independent music from 1989-1999, and has become an indie rock bible of sorts over the past eight years. Azerrad’s book covered the decade’s independent artists (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Replacements and more) who toured incessantly, were publicized by print fanzines and college radio stations, and were for years ignored by commercial radio, MTV and Rolling Stone.

“Most [fanzines] started as photocopied rants by people who were frustrated at the way the mainstream music magazines largely ignored this exciting new music,” Azerrad wrote. Azerrad cites Flipside, Maximumrocknroll, and Forced Exposure as some of the most influential fanzines of the nineties. “But there were literally hundreds of smaller zines that collectively framed the indie aesthetic,” Azerrad said, adding that underground fanzines, radio stations and record shops were “punk’s most enduring legacy.”

In the age of the Internet, punk’s legacy seems charmingly archaic.


In 2009, Greg Kot published the following decade’s version of Azerrad’s text. Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music tells the story of teenagers with laptops, peer-to-peer file sharing services like Napster, and — perhaps most importantly — MP3 music blogs. Like the cut-and-pasted, hard-to-find zines of decades past, today’s ever-swelling blogosphere has its share of both high-profile and underground indie authorities.

Over the past five years, the role of the music blog itself has changed drastically. When Jordan founded You Ain’t No Picasso in 2004, he says there were three major blogs: Stereogum, Said the Gramophone and Fluxblog. “No one really knew what they were doing at first in terms of what was and wasn’t allowed, like posting full albums,” Jordan said. He says the biggest change has been the emergence of some blogs as legitimate sources of news.

“In 2004, the only way for a blog to get a scoop was with a really small band, or if you knew someone in the band,” Jordan said. Now, according to Jordan, websites like Stereogum are essential reads because “they get so many exclusives—news, premier mp3s, stuff like that.” Jordan cites Stereogum and BrooklynVegan — who this year broke news of Pavement’s tour reunion — as the two blogs to emerge as legitimate sources of news in recent years, changing, improving and professionalizing the way audiences perceive indie rock for the foreseeable future.

According to Dan Kreps, a daily blogger for Rolling Stone, the blogosphere has significantly shaped the indie landscape by spreading buzz about new bands at quickened rates. “Take [UK indie band] the xx for example,” Kreps said. “With blogs and the now-global British press, the band’s popularity has exploded stateside in a much shorter span of time than it would have in previous decades, when recommendations via monthly or bi-monthly magazines spread like the Pony Express.”

Kreps says that bands like Animal Collective were able to reach higher levels of success initially thanks to early approval from bloggers, at a time when major publications mostly ignored the band.


According to Ian Nelson, a recent graduate of UMass Amherst who pens the popular-but-underground blog Friendship Bracelet, blogs have resulted in a “snowballing effect” for artists en route to indie-rock stardom. “Every ‘new’ band that gets written up in traditional media sources like The New York Times or SPIN is the product of snowballing,” he says, “with a few small-time media outlets like independent blogs and college radio stations first picking up on them and singing their praises.”

According to Nelson, these smaller, independent outlets are followed by more well-established and influential websites, which are in turn followed by even bigger promoters and media ventures. “It’s an easily followed path,” Nelson says, “from band’s self-promotion to a small write up to a bigger write up to a cover-story, and it’s all filtered through to quickly produced musings of small-time bloggers and DJs.”

But for higher-profile bloggers like Matt Jordan of You Ain’t No Picasso, Dave Levine of Brooklyn Vegan, and Chris Cantalini of Gorilla Vs. Bear, one post alone is influential. “Fans trust bloggers,” Jordan said, “because blogs are not backed by corporations, or any sort of establishment or editorial board.”

Jordan cites Gorilla vs. Bear — named “Best New Blog” by Rolling Stone in 2008 — as a blog that fans really trust “like they’d trust a friend’s recommendation,” and he even noticed a GvB commenter once say that her favorite kind of music was “gorilla-versus-bear-core,” as if the blogger’s taste were its own genre. “Music blogging is just a really honest expression of love by fans and I think people have latched onto it for this reason,” Jordan said.

Bigger online publications and radio stations have taken notice of the importance of bloggers and included them in their coverage. At Sirius Satellite Radio, a long running daily “Blog Radio” program invites influential bloggers onto the national station as DJs, including BrooklynVegan, My Old Kentucky Blog, Aquarium Drunkard and Guerilla Vs. Bear. A new series called TunnelVision from Pitchfork Media —l the Internet’s most influential and high profile source of indie rock news and criticism — draws video content directly from bloggers around the country.

Like these new media outlets, MOG has also changed the way independent artists are covered. According to their website, MOG was “one of the first pioneering digital media outlets…an online community for music lovers.” In recent years, MOG has invested millions of dollars into the MOG Music Network, says their website. The network draws content from the web’s best music blogs into a single RSS feed, blasting posts out to larger audiences, and also produces the weekly “MOG Gazette” newsletter. With raised blogger profiles come raised artist profiles, bringing independent artists and labels even further into the public eye.


The sheer amount of indie bands gaining in popularity is not all that blogging and new media have changed. According to Natasha Richarson, 22, a contributor at My Old Kentucky Blog, the way an audience perceives independent bands has improved because interviews can be more relaxed and natural — a departure from the practices of traditional media.

“When I interviewed Matt from [indie band] Delta Spirit, we just sat down at the bar and had a drink and a smoke and chatted over that, and just sort of kicked it,” Richardson said. “It wasn’t uptight, and it’s nice to have that freedom.” In regards to the freedom of blogging, Richardson added that she doesn’t feel the need to cover bands that she doesn’t feel warrant coverage — another departure from the practices of traditional print media. “I don’t really have to report negatively on anything,” Richardson said.

But for Jessica Suarez, 28, a Brooklyn-based writer who contributes to Pitchfork, Stereogum, SPIN, CMJ and other magazines, the lost air of professionalism is problematic.

“I started doing print zines in middle school because I wanted to talk to bands and get free records in the mail,” Suarez said. “That is why 90% of people start blogs today.”

Suarez agrees that blogs have replaced print zines for good, but whereas zines focused on content, blogs today often serve a different purpose, she says. “Lots of music blogs are just about giving away music so their Hypem.com ranking can improve,” Suarez said of the popular MP3 and content aggregation site. “Rewards seem to go to people who are first on, rather than right about, a band.” When questions of motive come into play, the question of whether or not independent artists are being fairly portrayed becomes an issue.

“The issue of bias is interesting in blogging,” says McGregor of Chocolate Bobka, “especially because a lot of blogs are dealing with up-and-coming bands who are often friends, or become friends, with a writer.” It’s for this reason that he has grown to dislike writing about Real Estate, one of the 2009’s most noteworthy indie acts. McGregor has covered the band on Chocolate Bobka since their formation in September 2008, and has developed a personal friendship with the band. The issue of bloggers hyping friends persists throughout the blogosphere, sending out inaccurate portraits of artists.


Still, it’s all-powerful new media outlets like Pitchfork Media that are really capable of making or breaking a band. “The Internet compressed that years-long growth curve to a few months or even weeks,” reads Kot’s Ripped. “Debut albums were lauded to ridiculous extremes, and follow-ups torpedoed.”

In Ripped, Death Cab for Cutie manager Jordan Kurland explains that when websites like Pitchfork prematurely glorify artists, the results can be hurtful, as evidenced with their early praise for bands like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Said Kurland, “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is indisputably a terrible live band…[who] never had the opportunity to develop [their] sound onstage.”

With the power of the Internet and new media outlets like Twitter, some artists have taken it upon themselves to communicate with their fans and represent themselves. In fall of 2008, after Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls were horribly represented as elitist punks on UncensoredInterview.com, the backlash was relentless. By February 2009, the band had activated a Twitter account, and began representing themselves to the public and communication with fans one-on-one.


It’s clear that, for better or for worse, new media outlets like music blogs and Twitter have forever changed — and in many ways, created — the independent music media that will set trends and represent artists for the foreseeable future. Some bloggers will continue with biased reporting, while other will champion underrepresented artists and rise to prominence. If one thing is certain, it’s that indie music and music journalism will never be the same. And indeed, it’s the blogs that will have staying power after record shops have closed and trends have dwindled. “In many ways,” Suarez said, “music blogs are far more indie than any of the music they cover.”

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COMING SOON: '1989: The Year Indie Broke?' Parts 3, 4 and 5; JEFF the Brotherhood WNYU guest DJ set; interview with Jonathan of Blackburn Recordings; interview with Matt of You Ain't No Picasso; Year-end stuff; a lot of other cool things!

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Weed Hounds Played WNYU, Ruled ((++Playing Silent Barn on Thursday.))

On Monday, Weed Hounds came to WNYU to play on The New Afternoon Show. Probably my favorite in studio since I started hosting NAS in September. They sounded incredible and even hung out afterward to talk about the Internet, future 7-inches on a Canadian label, and our shared hometown of Massapequa. ((All members of the band are from Long Island, just like us.))

Here's what I said about the band in the WNYU weekly update:

WEED HOUNDS are a New York-based four-piece specializing in melodic, shoegaze-tinged dream pop. Their first demo was recorded to cassette and released on Austin's Crooked Direction Records, earning them comparisons to early My Bloody Valentine, Pixies and The Swirlies. All members are originally from Long Island and attend college in NYC. Weed Hounds are about to drop two 7-inches via Canada's National Archive of Records, and another via Long Island's Rok Lok Records in January. They play Silent Barn on December 10th.

Stream WEED HOUNDS' live set here: ((CLICK))

Stream WEED HOUNDS' interview here: ((CLICK))

Download WEED HOUNDS' interview here: ((CLICK))

You can still download their demo for free at I Could Die Tomorrow: ((CLICK))

Be sure to catch the band at Silent Barn this Thursday — details on how to get in for free here — and get ready to hear a lot more 'bout these kids in 2010.

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This Week in Boston!

WRONG! Don't be these tools! There's a lot of cool shit going on in Boston.

Since I tend to make show calendars for myself all the time anyway, I thought I'd start posting them here as well. (Maybe I can help spread the word about some cool local shows? Maybe! Who knows!)

My top picks for shows this week in Boston are after the jump!


Wednesday December 2:
- Russian Circles play the Middle East Upstairs on Wednesday. Most likely they will be playing from their new album, Geneva, which is out now via Suicide Squeeze and has been in rotation at WTBU for a few weeks now. Great record!

Friday, December 4:
- The XX open for Friendly Fires at the Paradise on Friday. I'm not that into Friendly Fires, but I am so into the XX's self-titled album, out since the summertime via Rough Trade. The London four-piece (all teenagers) are going to be at the Paradise again in April. I know they are super-hyped-up but their album is also really great, so, I'm hoping to catch both shows.

Saturday December 5:
- Ted Leo and the Pharmacists (on his first tour since signing to Matador) headlines the Middle East Downstairs on Saturday night, with Titus Andronicus and Wallcreeper opening. Solid line-up; don't miss the first 2 bands! (I've been looking forward to this for like, three months.)

Sunday December 6:
- World Music/Crash Arts presents Baltimore-based duo Wye Oak (of Merge Records) at the Great Scott. Unfortunately I have a huge media law paper due on Monday so I doubt I'll be at this show, but I recommend checking 'em out.

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THIS FRIDAY: Benefit Show at Death By Audio For Mike Yaniro (of Twin Stumps)

A few weeks ago painter and Twin Stumps bassist Mike Yaniro was mugged and brutally beaten near his apartment in Queens. Yaniro was hospitalized and had to get tons of surgery to repair his jaw, eye socket, and multiple skull fractures. Yaniro unfortunately has no medical insurance and now is left with huge medical bills to pay.

To help him out, Death by Audio is holding a benefit show this Friday, organized by Kevin of White Suns, Alessandro of Twin Stumps, Rachel of Pop Jew, and Tina of Under Aurora. The show will feature sets by Sightings, York Factory Complaint (with special guest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge), Pink Reason, and White Suns, plus a DJ set by Sean Ragon of Cult of Youth. All proceeds made at the door will go towards Michael's hospital bills.

Please visit the Mike Yarino Medical Fund website to learn more about this situation and to donate to this worthwhile cause! And if you are in New York, check out the show on Friday!

(Flyer after the jump.)

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PHOTOS: Pixies Do Fourth Night of 'Doolittle' at Hammerstein 11/25/09

highlights: Waiting outside for two and a half hours. Being bent over the barricade directly in front of Joey Santiago for the entire show. The dancing heart projections during "La La Love You." Everything about Kim Deal. Impromptu "Gigantic," wasn't on the set list. Into the White. Hey. Every single song. Totally epic. Billion more iPhone photos, after the jump.

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"1989. The Year Indie Broke?" Post #2 - Doolittle

Twenty years ago, one of the greatest albums in the entire world was released, and tonight we're going to see one of our favorite bands ever perform it live. We are the same age as Doolittle, as are most of our high school friends who will be joining us at Hammerstein for the bands' final night of NYC shows. I started listening to the Pixies in 9th or 10th grade, which was really only like, four or five years ago. In a way I kind of feel like I've been waiting my entire life for this show. We've literally lived the legacy of this album, and on this very special Thanksgiving eve, we're all pretty grateful.


[[via UglyPodcast]]

Read my story on the Pixies tour from SPIN here.

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BONUS EVENTUS DROP DEBUT RECORD ON DINOSAURS IN VIETNAM, PLAYING BRUAR FALLS ON FRIDAY

BONUS EVENTUS -- CANACEROS
DINOSAURS IN VIETNAM

July 1, 2009 - 9:35 PM
Liz Pelly: Holy shit, Birch Lane is like the next Glen Rock High School.
Dave Barritt: What is Glen Rock?
Jenn Pelly: Well, all of these bands are coming out of Jersey right now, like Titus Andronicus went to Glen Rock High School…
Dave Barritt: Oh…ok... Birch Lane Elementary School is the new Glen Rock High School. We’ll kick New Jersey’s ass.

Dave Barritt has been "jamming econo" for the better half of his young adult life. But the 20-year old guitarist — who fronts Bonus Eventus, a lo-fi pop punk band from Massapequa, NY — is unfamiliar with the term. In fact, he's unfamiliar with a lot of things that might otherwise suggest some prefabrication in his carefully crafted, booze-soaked tunes.

On Canaceros! — the band’s 35-minute debut, dropping this week on Dinosaurs in Vietnam Records — Bonus Eventus fuses rough, unpolished boy-group harmonies with raw punk verse. Their catchy tales of house parties gone awesome (and those gone awry) surface in surfy, untracked territory where Bob Mould and Brian Wilson collide, with fun-sized servings of Tom DeLonge sprinkled throughout. On a more contemporary level, they’ve got the lo-fi grit and energy of the Vivian Girls and Titus, plus all the pop and charm of 2009’s best. (Read: Real Estate and Girls).

Canaceros is an album blatantly dedicated to youth, in all its energized horrors and doo-wop joys: partying, death, heartbreak, invincibility, drunkenness, growing up, the suburbs, and some more good-natured partying because of it all. More than 75% of the album’s tracks discuss alcohol, certainly including the album’s infectious lead single, “Rough Housing,” with its much-repeated, memorable mantra: “No wasted times, just wasted times.” They could have stopped there. Thank god they didn’t.

Bonus Eventus have their vices pinned down, and they acknowledge their implications. Things get ugly and lonesome on the deep, dark howls of album closer “End of the Line,” and particularly boozy on the group-chorus of “We Will Collide”: “I know there’s more to life, than what goes on inside my head, I’ve got a lot to figure out, but I’d rather drink alone instead.”

Three-quarters of the way through, “Idle Idle Hands” shows the boys as the good-natured kids they really are, with their harmonies sounding as pure with 50s innocence as ever. “We all confessed, ‘cause we wanted to impress our girlfriends, and they just want the facts,” the guys sing in unison. “We all confess, but we wanted to stress the importance, of knowing how to act, when you’ve been so bad.”

Barritt knows his habits will have to change at some point. “Got all these problems, and drinking don’t solve them, think I have finally realized,” he sings on “But These Arms.” But until then, excuses must be made, answers must be found in empty bottles, and for better or for worse — in company and in solitude — the party must go on.

In many ways, Cancaceros is to 2009 what Vivian Girls was to 2008 — a concise, lo-fi punk record that’s accessible but edgy, with all the right influence in all the right places. It’s got the drawn out, emotional slow jams (“End of the Line”), the straightforward Wipers-tinged raucousness (“She Says” and B-side “Country Won”), the undeniable gem of an opener (“Rough Housing”) and the unyielding surfy, Beach Boys vibe. But while Vivian Girls was the perfect complement to a morning commute, I’d save these party jams for the P.M.

'Canaceros!' is out this week on Dinosaurs in Vietnam Records. The band plays Bruar Falls this Friday at 8 p.m. with Liam the Younger, Shark?, and Sentence Diagrams. 245 Grand St, Wburg, Brooklyn. Free.

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An Interview with Bonus Eventus

(Full disclosure: Bonus Eventus are our best friends ever since kindergarten, and are a part of our label Dinosaurs in Vietnam. Meaning they actually rule 500 times harder than anything we write about them might suggest.)

Musically, Long Island's Bonus Eventus are spot on. Catch that epic, face-melting guitar solo on “Heard She Was A Saint,” off of their debut album Canaceros. But the first thing to know about the band — Dave Barrit, a junior at SUNY Albany, on guitar/vox; Johhny Hoblin, a junior at Queens College, on bass; Matt Ludwig, a junior at Fordham University, on guitar; Tom Moran, who also performs solo and with LI hard-rock superstars Exemption, behind drums — is how undeniably, inexplicably blind they are to their imminent coolness.

This band is not a gimmick. Dave has never listened to the Minutemen, or the Wipers; he’d never heard of Bruar Falls when asked to play a show there last week. His roommate graduated from Glen Rock High School in June of 2007. He doesn’t understand why I think that’s really cool. The last time I was in his car, his rotation included albums from bands like The Strokes, The Beach Boys, The Hives, The Cribs, Kings of Leon and Fleet Foxes.

We (me, Liz, Dave, Matt, Johnny) all met at Birch Lane Elementary School. We graduated in 2001, met drummer Tom Moran in middle school, then all graduated from Massapequa High School in 2007. Frontman Dave Barritt and guitarist Johnny Hoblin have been playing music since ninth grade (2004). Bonus Eventus played their first show in summer 2006. It was a backyard show. In October 2009, after spending their summer recording most of their debut album, I played "End of the Line" on my radio show on WNYU -- Patrick from Pop Tarts Suck Toasted happened to be tuned in, and named them "Band of the Week." A steady flow of positive reviews have come in ever since.

With our parents gone for the weekend and beers popped on a late July evening, Liz and I sat down with our long-time BFFs in the basement of the house we grew up in for some real talk on what Bonus is all about. Check it here, after the jump.



What inspires the music?
Dave: Alcohol, a lot of the time. All of my songs are about, like, really horrible decisions that I made under the influence…so I’d say that alcohol contributes. It’s kind of a joke sometimes.
Johnny: Just, being a teenager and having a good time…

What other alcohol-induced bands do you look to for inspiration?
Dave: The Velvet Underground, I’d say.

Can you talk about the song "Rough Housing"? How did you write the song? What were you doing when you wrote the song?
Dave: I feel like that embodies our songwriting process. We went to Vermont instead of going to prom. We just really, just partied the whole time and it was wild and it was awesome, and I went home and just decided I wanted to write about it. It’s really literal. It directly references everything, but at the same time I feel like people really enjoy it because, you know, the chorus, ‘no wasted time, just wasted times.’ It’s not that literal, where everyone’s like ‘I wonder what he’s talking about’ … I guess our songs are all just really based on very personal experiences.

Johnny: We’re not a band that beats around the bush. All our songs are about real people, real experiences with real people. Just girl troubles, regretting the night. We’re a rock band.

What does Canaceros mean?
Dave: It’s a slang term that means drunks who enjoy cheap liquor. So everything that embodies our lifestyle and all of the songs, basically.

What percentage of the songs on the album are about drinking?
Dave: Oh god. Rough Housing, clearly. At least 75%. The other 25% are about girls. In a broader sense our songs are about more than alcohol … even like. “Wet Help” is more about being depressed about a girl than about alcohol. It’s always prevalent in regards to what’s going on though.

So you guys are a party band…what would you say is your motive, ultimately?
Johnny: Some bands are out there to be really obscure and different … make grand statements. We don’t really have that. This is something that people can connect to. There are so many bands out there trying to do something different. We just want to have a good time and be a breath of fresh air.”

Dave: When we play, we have a good time, and we really just try to translate that onto everyone watching us. We’ve played shows that we don’t even really remember playing … but if everyone was having fun and gives us a good review, then, whatever.

Other bands try really hard. Sometimes I feel like…all my songs are 4/4, same chords and drum beats, but if everyone’s having a good time, who cares?

What would you say has been the best moment for the band so far?
Dave: Right now, I’d say, because we’re really close to finishing an interview.

How about some band lows?
Dave: Mom and dad aren’t so into house parties. That’s a big drag in Bonus. Moms and Dads, haha. The worst.

Where did you record the album?
Dave: Joe Lorenzo of The Abberlines recorded it. He goes to NYU. We would just kind of go over, bring some beers and record…really low key and relaxed. Separate tracks. Ideally, if we had the tools to make a live album, we would. But we don’t have a PA, so we can’t record straight to tape or anything. Would be really difficult. Also, since we don’t have a PA, when we practice we just yell really loud, which is probably where we get the vocal style from.

So many bands call themselves “DIY.” You guys are very, very DIY, but you choose not to recognize it.
Johnny: But we don’t do it alone…we have people who like to watch us. We don’t have any money.

Your EP was wrapped up in newspaper, you book your own house shows, and you don’t have a PA.
Johnny: That was fun, we made the demos in the car on the way to Boston for a house show.

You guys want to play primarily house parties.
Dave: I feel like the thing that keeps from being classified as DIY is that … the reason I want to play house shows as opposed to bars is not to make a statement. But if there’s like a crowd and they’re into it, it’s more fun. If we go out of state and play a bar, you’re guaranteed like two 40 to 50 year old guys, maybe there’s other kids who are into it….at a house show, you know everyone’s going to be ready to party, ready to dance and have a good time. We have a better time, it’s a better atmosphere. Even backyard shows, it’s free and open. We don’t want to charge people to see us…we’ll play for free. Why am I going to charge my friends $10 when they can just come to our next house party and see us? I always feel so bad when people have to pay.

Sooo....you learned your instruments at a really young age?
Dave: Matt started as the tambourine player. We didn’t think our drummer could play a show, we need some sort of percussion. Then he picked up guitar in college. Now he writes songs.

Johnny: Dave and I had Mr. Perticone at Birch Lane, and the same private teacher [from Birch Lane], Mr. Locke. Mr. Locke, I owe a lot too. Gary Locke’s the shit.”

Can you talk about the recent Boston show.
Dave: We got really drunk, played a house party in Allston. The crowd ended up in a big, duct-taped ball.

Jenn: Yeah, I taped everyone together.
Dave: I was so happy that happened.

Jenn: I thought everyone at the show needed to be together, both figuratively and literally. Carpe diem, sieze the day, so I just taped everyone together, then brought Bonus into the enormous duct tape ball. Then I realized what I’d done and ran out.
Dave: It kind of symbolized everything that we hoped for to happened and experience at a show. We want the people listening to be as much into it as possible…it was symbolic. I want the kids listening to feel the same way.

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Watch: Tune-Yards and Dirty Projectors @ the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, 11/17/09

Tune-Yards at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, MA 11/17/09:


MP3: Tune-Yards - Fiya
MP3: Tune-Yards - Sunlight

Dirty Projectors "Two Doves" at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, MA 11/17/09:


MP3: Dirty Projectors - Two Doves
MP3: Dirty Projectors - No Intention

More videos + set list after the jump


Dirty Projectors "Stillness Is the Move" at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston, MA 11/17/09:







Dirty Projectors set list at Paradise Rock Club 11/17/09:
Remade Horizon
No Intention
Temecula
Fluorescent Half Dome

Fucked for Life
Gimme/Thirsty

Two Doves
Spraypain
The Bride

Ascending Melody
Cannibal Resource
Stillness is the Move
Bitte Orca

Wittenberg III
Knotty Pine

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