The Hippodrome

The 2008 Transmodern Festival begins in Baltimore this coming Thursday! This means sound installations, performance sets, DJing, and films galore. Think SXSW with a postmodern-sepia filter thrown on it in Photoshop. While I don’t have quite enough money in The Hippodrome slush fund to send myself down there, I’ll be keeping tabs on the festival, especially on the performers who remain unassociated.

One of the several artists I’ll be paying attention to is Melissa Scherrer, an interesting independent videographer and music maker. Check our her latest piece, the oddly hypnotic “Genesis”:

And while we’re on the subject of experimental-musical film, check out Mike Paré’s equally hypnotic “Transmagon 5.”

Consecutive Wives is Phillip Taylor-Parker, 20-year-old laptop musician out of San Francisco. The main man himself either likes to roleplay, or should be a guest star on Big Love. The project uses a bunch of samples interspersed with some snarky casiotones to make “one guy dicking around on a computer” into something a little more cohesive.

Taylor-Parker is also a music journalist working over at betterPropaganda, an interesting free mp3 site that hasn’t hit my radar screen before and certainly warrants some further research. The track available for download, “Bloghaus,” hits the Dan Deacon/Knife vibrations nicely without necessarily cohering to the aforementioned matriline. Whatever that means… I’m plumb tuckered!

Audio: Bloghaus

April’s gonna be a good month for Hippodromers. Dig dig dig:

The Netherfriends:

4.14.08 – Chicago, IL – The Empty Bottle
5.3.08 – Detroit, MI – CAID (Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit)

The Novel Ideas:

3.20.08 – Somerville, MA – P.A.’s Lounge
3.31.08 – Boston, MA – The Paradise Lounge

The Wailing Wall:

3.20.08 – Winooksi, VT– The Monkey House
3.21.08 – Bennington, VT – Carriage Barn at Bennington College
3.22.08 – Worcester, MA – The Q
3.23.08 – Annandale-on-Hudson, NY – The Root Cellar
3.25.08 – Middletown, CT – 202 Washington St.
3.26.08 – Clifton, NJ – Chris Faroe’s House
3.27.08 – Baltimore, MD – Buchner Hall at Goucher College
3.29.08 – New York, NY – Reboot (Rats of NiMH show)
4.11.08 – Bronxville, NY– Sarah Lawrence College
4.19.08 – Brooklyn, NY – TBA (Rats of NiMH show)
4.26.08 – New York, NY – TBA

Red Sails:

3.21.08 – Ridgewood, NY – Silent Barn
3.22.08 – Greenwich, CT – Party (Undisclosed location!?)
3.23.08 – Haverford, PA – Haverford College
3.24.08 – New York, NY– TBA
3.25.08 – Annandale-on-Hudson, New York – Bard College
3.27.08 – Winooski, Vermont – Monkey House
3.28.08 – Middletown, Connecticut – Wesleyan University
3.29.08 – The Lilypad – Cambridge, Massachusetts

Ruggero Mantovani is from Verona, Italy. This is quite beautiful.

Matt Lebofsky, a former member of Dawn McCarthy’s Faun Fables, has had his own prog project since 2001 called Midline Errors. Lebofsky plays it all on the recordings, and is sometimes joined live by a few other pranksters, including the other ex-Faun Faubler, Jenya Chernoff.

If Midline Errors has one thing going for it, it’s the transparency of recording and execution. Lebofsky clearly emphasizes volume of output (no pun intended) over polished production, which is a model I’ve started to appreciate more and more. Everything that Lebofsky has ever done with the project is available under a CC license on his website. It’s all free, but if you like what you hear, donate!

Audio: Glom