The Hippodrome

Honestly, I don’t understand why more people haven’t picked up on Motel Motel’s debut EP Old York yet. This band is one of Brooklyn’s best kept secrets, rocking anthemic go-for-the-throat hooks with timeless country twang, like Wolf Parade tearing apart a dirty old honky-tonk. Sure, they’re a young band, they’ve been together for less than two years, and half of them are still in college. But in this new-fangled internet age, with bands like Black Kids and Vampire Weekend going indie-supernova on the strength of four-song demo CD-Rs, it’s kinda surprising how far under the radar these guys have stayed.

With the upcoming release of their first full-length, New Denver, I doubt Motel Motel will be staying under the radar for much longer. Now they’ve added some delicate strings to the mix, giving their new songs a greater sense of elegance and grandeur without losing any of the drunken confidence and cocaine swagger that made Old York so damn awesome.

“Virginia Kids” starts soft and slow, with singer Eric Engel crooning like a country gentleman with three-day stubble and a loosened necktie. Then over the next seven minutes it gains momentum, builds to a climax, crashes, subsides, builds again, and finally dissipates into nothing, like one of those long songs from the middle section of Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica.

“Pedal Steel” is a more reserved number, with a long, sinuous melody winding around a gentle shuffle and cascades of strings that sound like they were lifted from a 1930s Hollywood musical. Once again, Engel’s raspy vocal stands front and center, as he sings about panoramic American landscapes with a world-weariness that makes it hard to believe he was studying psychology at the New School less than a year ago.

“Mexico,” the final track off Old York, is a breezy country-rock number that channels pretty much everything that’s cool about the Grateful Dead and features one of the most infectious choruses of 2007. Turn it up loud, roll the windows down, and drive west into the sunset. And just try not to sing along. I dare you.

Audio: Virginia Kids
Audio: Pedal Steel
Audio: Mexico

In both Heaven and Hell, there is only one album that has always played and will always play until the end of time: heaven has Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, hell has Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. If you like both of these albums and don’t believe in heaven or hell, but rather that nothing happens when you die and the only thing beyond this world is the endless stretch of cosmos in which each individual life is unfathomably small, then Helicon, the official debut by computer musician Rod O’Connor (a.k.a. Sixty Cycles or 60Hz), is for you.

Although this is O’Connor’s first official release, he’s recorded some 10-12 albums worth of material since high school, covering almost every imaginable style of electronic music, from drum and bass to ambient minimalism to psy-trance, and he’s done more than his fair share of genre-bending and experimentation along the way. His collected body of (mostly unreleased) work is approximately six days long in total.

“[This is my attempt] to make ‘noisy’ music which still harkens a little bit to this Romantic Music idea of evocation of emotions,” says O’Connor of Helicon. “But I’m not using traditional harmonies or tonal material so much, so what are those emotions that get called up? I don’t necessarily know, I just know that it’s not comfortable.”

O’Connor works primarily using a technique called granular synthesis, which is the process of cutting a sound up into lots of tiny pieces and rearranging them. While this would have meant countless hours spent cutting and re-arranging tape (see, for instance, the work of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis), the introduction of digital media completely re-formed the playing field for granular synthesis (as it did, of course, for pretty much every other medium); O’Connor uses, according to his SoundClick, only three pieces of equipment: computer, brain, coffee.

Helicon features a wide variety of source material, most of which is warped and manipulated beyond recognition into a wash of ambient textures. The title track opens the album with subtly manipulated electric guitars; “Noisey Planet” features a broken AM radio being played like scratching a turntable. Several of the tracks feature manipulated recordings of a fifteen-piece ensemble led by avant-garde jazz legend Anthony Braxton, with whom O’Connor has played live electronics at Wesleyan University.

“I included the live recordings to pay homage to his work without ripping it off per se, because I can extract the tamboral characteristics of what makes the sound a certain sound, but totally obscure any musical content that he was putting out.” He points out that Braxton’s voice is audible at the beginning of “Lacus Somniorum - Lake of Dreams.” “There’s no words, but the sound is there.”

Helicon was released for free download on Unwashed Records, a small label made up almost exclusively of psy-trance DJs. O’Connor has found a receptive audience in the dark-psy community (although some posts on the Unwashed message board complained that Helicon sounds “too harsh”).

“I was aiming for the things that I like about electronic dance music, but on my own terms,” O’Connor explains. “It has that [aggressive] sentiment, like ‘I’m a fucking sound! Listen to me!’ But it’s also got a little bit of subtlety in there. It’s not just to make you dance; it’s more about the intensity of sonic experience that I feel like a lot of the more underground dark-psy tries to have.”

O’Connor is (somewhat predictably) dismissive of any genre classifications you could apply to his music. “All these terms that you use to talk about music, they’re helpful, because you hear the term ‘bluegrass’ and you know it means something; you don’t know what it means, but it means ‘not dubstep’… the music business gives us terms like that. It’s like, how do we label this thing, this sound, this identity, that you construct by associating with this performer/group/image/whatever? How do we shape that to something that is common to all of these elements? But I guess I don’t really care about the music business. I just want people to hear it and take it at face value.”

There isn’t really much of a way to take Helicon other than at face value. When you listen to this album, it’s not hard to forget that you’re even listening to music. Like all truly great ambient music, it fills the room like a gas leak, registering subconsciously as changes in air pressure that affect you the same way a change in temperature or humidity might. The tones range from soothing and ethereal to gritty and claustrophobic, and they often change so gradually it’s nearly imperceptible until you find yourself submerged in a sea of noise that would give Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale nightmares.

To be sure, Helicon is not for everybody; there is nothing to grab you and pull you in. You have to just let it happen to you. Put it on as “background music” while you do your homework or cook dinner. Don’t wait for anything to happen, just let it unfold and see where it takes you. It may not be comfortable, but it is powerful, moving, and - somehow, despite all the cold, hard zeroes and ones that went into making it - utterly, undeniably human. And besides, if all you want from music is a feeling of comfort, listen to Music for Airports.

Audio: Helicon
Audio: Noisey Planet

The diverse and humble Guy Capecelatro III is one of New Hampshire’s best kept musical secrets. Fellow New Hampshire musician Jason Anderson interviewed Capecelatro last year, and found some beautiful stories and ideas.

“Music, for me, is about sharing and expressing. I think my lack of real desire for success, musically, has enabled me to continue to really enjoy writing and playing music. If my expectations has been higher I may have fallen victim to that inevitable disappointment which many friends have sadly experienced. Hopefully I’ll always putter about,” says Capecelatro of his musical attitude.

And indeed, his music is fitting of his words. Wistful, carefully chosen words fill up the large discography Capecelatro has compiled in the last few years. This past February alone, Capecelatro finished four full length albums. He distributes under his own label, Two-Ton Santa.

Besides Jason Anderson, both Nat Baldwin and The Hippodrome’s own Jesse Rifkin have taken an interest in Capecelatro.

“My first encounter with Guy’s music was watching him and his band soundcheck at the Red Door in Portsmouth, NH,” Rifkin tells me. “Even then, with all the volume adjustments and false starts, his songs astounded me so much that I could hardly do anything but sit there stupefied and watch. When the time came for his full set that night, I figured I knew exactly what I was in store for, but still, the music that Guy and his bandmates played that night just totally crushed me on a level that I wasn’t prepared for.”

Most impressive to me is Capecelatro’s embodiment of the new musician in a new industry. His down to earth attitude and willingness to distribute his work to anyone interested are wise ideas. I hope to hear alot more from this talented artist in the future, and judging by his antithetical reaction to the pompous-rock-band-stuck-in-the-pre-filesharing 90s archetype, I don’t think it will be hard to do so.

Audio: Listing
Audio: Mrs. Armbruster 1886

In hardly four years, The Wailing Wall has made its way through more than thirty musicians, numerous tours, and several carefully constructed records of songs that took years to perfect. Jesse Rifkin, the leader and lifeblood of the group, has graciously permitted The Hippodrome to release not one, not two, not fifteen, but three exclusive tracks for your downloading pleasure. All are from his forthcoming record, Hospital Blossoms, and judging from these prereleases and his past history, I don’t think he’s going to remain unsigned much longer.

As you’ll guess from the quality of the recordings, Rifkin’s musical history is filled with collaborations with contemporary visionaries. He’s played or recorded with the likes of Jason Anderson, Adrian Orange, and The Castanets, to name just a few. On the latest record, he’s joined by six good pals, including engineer and co-producer Chris Roush, who is Rifkin’s upcoming tourmate.

Influentially, The Wailing Wall has always taken careful stock of its predecessors. Leonard Cohen infused lyrics, Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter-era piano chords, and Microphones rhythmic intensity have made the band’s live show a spectacle to behold.

On how the record is different from past work, Rifkin tells me that “it’s the first release of mine that I didn’t record, which was kind of a big deal. In the past everything was just sort of patched together — I would play everything. This was us playing the songs as we played them live. Chris [Roush] and I took more liberties with the production… but the performances are as they were on stage.”

This is an interesting approach considering the stark mood shift from Rifkin’s past work. “It’s a much darker record, all the songs were written during a pretty horrible period of my life. They were definitely a coping mechanism, and they helped me work out what was going on in my head… it was six months, probably actually eight or nine where things were just the worst they’d ever been. I don’t know that it’s more honest, but it’s differently honest than the other stuff because everything that I wrote during that period is on the record. I did my best to cut out the whiny, indulgent parts.”

Rifkin adds “that the record gets sort of increasingly hopeful toward the end because I did come out of that awful period… it’s not just this one big dark miserable Cure record, you know?”

It’s precisely this energy of the live band that carries even the melancholic sections into an energetic and inspiring place. Not surprisingly, the record is much like Rifkin’s live performance. The method The Wailing Wall uses live never gets flaky or lurid, as Rifkin utilizes the Akron/Family “vibrational energies” strategy to tailor each show to the audience. This strategy will undoubtedly help Rifkin, who is touring just with a guitar, a loop pedal, and his incisors across the northeast, beginning on March 14.

While performing Hospital Blossoms without the assuring support of his former live band will be a challenge, time has proven that The Wailing Wall can do it.

Audio: Sister, I
Audio: Hospital Blossom
Audio: Morning

Imagine yourself in an Animal Collective cover band. Most people look down on cover bands but it’d still be bad ass ’cause it’s an Animal Collective cover band, right? Right. The Netherfriends are kind of like that except they aren’t a cover band or identical to Animal Collective. The first time you hear the Netherfriends you’ll make the Animal Collective comparison but eventually realize that this trio is awesome in their own right. Did I mention they attend three different colleges in Chicago? Yep it’s true!

Silly facts aside, one of my favorite things about The Netherfriends is their emphasis on vocals. The group really knows how to sing and uses this to add to the music rather than detract from it. Often their sound is psychedelic tribal magic, but they occasionally slip into other genres which is never a bad thing since they do it well. Their chanting, “yeah yeahs”, and “ahhhhhs” are very welcome on top or beneath their instrumentals.

The band is so very young too; they just started last August! Their age doesn’t show through a bit thanks to the seasoned sound that takes careful stock of the current scene. If they’re able to achieve this kind of polished sound in less than a year, what magic will they brew given more time?

Audio: TAC TAC
Audio: Stop Smoking A$$hole, Cigarettes