The Hippodrome

Farmer Boy Download

Alixandra Macmillan-Fiedel claims she didn’t always intend to become a musician, but her percussive, expressive voice and clever songwriting are more than well suited to the profession. The California-born songstress recently recorded her first LP of cheery folk and mellow harmonies under the name Alixandra and the Tailor Sea.

A naïve friend of mine once complained that “all folk songs sounds the same,” but Alixandra achieves distinctive results because of her collaborative approach. She explains that the Tailor Sea “is not a specific group of people but rather an eclectic combination of friends and musicians” with whom she has performed and recorded. Therefore, every track is a shaped by a unique set of individuals; the single constant is Alixandra herself.

A kitchen sink of instruments (cello, xylophone, mandolin, and harmonica, among others) provide the score for the album’s diverse subject matter, which includes a love-struck farmer boy, a black crow who abhors the sun, and learning how to trust oneself. Alixandra’s lyrics balance ambiguity and concrete ideas in a ratio that invites diverse interpretations without being overtly cryptic. So although Alixandra and the Tailor Sea echo the traditional idioms of folk music, the band’s instrumental variety and lyrical inventiveness sets them apart brilliantly from the status quo, and are musical tidings not to be missed.

“TiVo and Rhapsody are joining forces to deliver digital music service directly to TiVo consumers’ televisions via the digital video recording company’s set-top box. The move continues TiVo’s drive to differentiate itself from the generic digital video recorders offered by cable and satellite television companies by offering content beyond recorded TV shows.” (From Alley Insider)

Well, that’s really a step in the wrong direction. Solve music distribution problems by putting a Napster on TV? I’m sure that will make it worth everyone’s $13 a month to have the same crappy music available on your television screen instead of just your computer. I bet the only reason your friends don’t use all-you-can-eat music services like Napster or Rhapsody is because they’re limited to their computers or mp3 players. Now everyone can be exposed to Rhapsody’s seriously lacking catalogue on their television screens as well!

Instead of blowing $13 a month on this service, spend an hour of your time downloading all the free tracks off Daytrotter (and uh, maybe The Hippodrome too), then hook up your computer through your TV speakers and get treated to some real music. Same effect without the cash transfer, and thankfully, Kelly Clarkson free as well.

While millions of people participated in, voted for, and watched the thousands of videos in YouTube’s 2006 Underground Music Contest, only four artists came out triumphant. I watched and rewatched the winners’ entries, and concluded that Ostrich Head’s “Freak Show Carnival” was one of the most dismal signs of what the world thinks the “underground” has become. The contest ended nearly eleven months ago, but the message the winning videos send is still current: to embrace your “underground” status, you have to simultaneously refute whatever MTV tells you is good, while still mimicking the most successful commercial artists in every way possible.

Ostrich Head may be the most generic rap group I’ve ever heard, which is exactly what makes this video so depressing. The video for “Freak Show Carnival” won Most Creative. I have to concede, the witty opening lines “we’re freaks, we’re freaks, we’re freaks!” is a great reason to believe that Ostrich Head has something tastier than those preppy, freak-hating, mainstream bastards. Damn, I’d rather listen to Limp Bizkit than this swill.

Don’t watch this unless candy or sex is waiting for you afterward.

Action Trap Download
The South Pole Download

If you call Va Va China a “free jazz” band, you’re only proving their point. “I honestly think that using the word ‘jazz’ is the biggest problem. In Europe they call it ‘free improvisation,’ which freed them up a bit,” says VVC drummer John Thomas Robinette III, known futuristically as JTR3. “I reluctantly use the term ‘free jazz’ as a reference only because I think it will be recognized by potential listeners.”

Despite the crossover potential of experimental noisey spazz-jazzers like Talibam! (who interestingly booked VVC’s first two shows), free jazz, or whatever you’d like to call it, seems like a genre in perpetual vagrancy. VVC is immersed in this beautiful crisis, creating a dense resonance of spontaneous form and reactive improvisation for ears to feast on.

Robinette formed VVC after a long stint with the usual rock permutations, including shows with Volcano, I’m Still Excited!! and some dude you’ve probably never heard of named Sufjan Stevens. Swapping in and out players to fit the sound Robinette was hoping for, the final lineup was solidified with David Cloyd on Bass and effects, Dan Mintz (who Robinette hooked up with on Craigslist) on electronics, Patrick Wolff on tenor sax, Matthew Brown on Trumpet, Richard Miller on alto sax, and Robinette on drums. “I wanted this Ornette Coleman-style of improvised counterpoint but with electronically generated sounds to fill in where chords went before. This combination of horns turned out to be extremely effective,” Robinette says.

While VVC certainly wasn’t the first one to throw some electronics into a jazzy mix, they may be the first band that begins to acknowledge where this style fits in today. “I feel like we could share a bill with an avant-rock group like Gang Gang Dance as much as play with noise or new music musicians,” he says.

From either side of the equation, it’s hard to ignore what boundaries VVC is breaking. If you peg them as closer to an experimental rock band, then they are lifting the moratorium on complete “jamming,” something still taboo on the scene today. From the more obvious jazz perspective, VVC utilizes a form of sonic experimentation found rarely in the genre and much more in experimental music. Robinette recalls one show where he made “a kalimba-type instrument out of the spokes on my bike. When you cranked the wheel a piece of metal was raked across the spokes created a cool out of tune sound.”

Even more so then the sonic experimentation, parts of VVC’s work call to mind a Radioheadish “Life In A Glass House” type of form, as horns build in density over a loosely defined structure. This is particularly noticeable on the second of The Hippodrome’s tracks available for downloads, “The South Pole,” which reaches a screeching climax over stunning, improvised harmony. While Wolf, Brown, and Miller’s horns are flexing half-valves and tritone patterns, the rest of the band provides a warm bed of low end for the sound to evolve in.

With all this creative energy at the band’s fingertips, it’s no wonder that VVC is recording as if their lives depended on it. None of these recordings, however, were or ever will be in a studio setting. On the band’s unusual process, Robinette explains that “we record as many shows as we can and earmark the best full shows as potential releases. These are all lo-fi recordings. The point is the performances are exemplary and this is the only record of them. Plus, we cannot afford studio time. We are the new guard of independent music by default. We will release it digitally and then make limited edition hard copies to be sold at shows.”

A pragmatic approach, no doubt, but after hearing these tunes, you may be still wondering why VVC has not been picked up by a label. I asked Robinette why this is so. “Who needs labels?” he asked me instead. “I don’t want money to be driving this band. Seeking it will lead to its demise. We can record for next to nothing. We can put out a record for cheap and get it out to the world for almost nothing.”

“The only thing we lack is the name to get people to recognize it.” Well then, enter The Hippodrome and your audio-hungry brain.

Strawberries Download

“We kind of hope that our music will somehow save the world.” Verbatim, this is the answer that Lee Pender of the New York based band Boy Crisis offered when asked why the band creates the music that they do. So what is our savior’s style? From what I can tell, it’s a charismatic mix of dance-inducing beats and flippantly sexual lyrics that doesn’t take itself too seriously. When Tal Rozen quips “you can do me up like Woodrow Wilson/ carry my children,” and “I wanna be your South Beach diet,” it’s evident that Boy Crisis is aiming to bring their listeners along for the ride.

BC’s quest to fill the world with love, sex, and dancing began in 2005 when Rozen, Alex Kestner, and Victor Vazquez began creating music together at Wesleyan University. A year later, the band was on the brink of breaking up due to their inability to play their creations live, when Pender joined as, “a Christmahanakwanza present to the world.” Since Pender’s arrival, Boy Crisis has been able to bring their sound to clubs across New York City, the ideal environment for their individual brand of dance rock.

BC draws on influences you might suspect, like Justin Timberlake and Michael Jackson, to bands a bit harder to hear in their sound, like Battles, Animal Collective, and Kylie Minogue. While these artists have impacted their lives from a distance, the boys of BC recognize the changes they’ve made on each other. “I think we influence each other musically and personally,” says Pender. With Kestner handling the production, Vazquez and Rozen writing lyrics, and Pender on “wiitar,” the band often finds themselves sitting around a computer throwing ideas back and forth until something good comes out of it. Pender added that, “the best stuff strikes us … but you notice you get struck less often when you don’t ever sit down with the intention to get struck.”

In any case, sex sells and BC sells sex in a wonderfully intoxicating way. It’s hard to do it justice on a recording, so if you’re in the Big Apple, get your butt to a show.