Category: Primer

PRIMER: Lilacs & Champagne On … The Art of Sampling, From Dinosaur Jr. and Dr. Dre To Philip Jeck and J Dilla

Lilacs & Champagne had us at goodbye—namely the line in their bio that promised “something like the sound of Nurse With Wound collaborating with J Dilla.”

Not that any of this loop-led tomfoolery should be all that surprising. After all, Emil Amos—one half of the Grails-related duo alongside Alex Hall—lent us a library music mix in late 2010, calling the cult favorites a “hidden pinnacle for those who can afford to dig around in the upper echelons of obtuse record collecting in these troubled times.”

Luckyily, the following artists have done the digging for us over the years…

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PRIMER: RJD2 On … John Carpenter

Words by RJD2

I think a thing that’s drawn me into a lot of Carpenter scores is that they are in many ways exercises in minimalism. This is a sort of subtext that ran throughout the making of the Insane Warrior record [We Are the Doorways]; my general ethos in making an RJD2 record is to pack every song with as much drama and engaging content as possible. So the idea of at least TRYING to do the exact opposite was appealing. It’s a big part of how I went about the recording sessions that became this album. Carpenter is really a master of taking one theme, and both modifying it over the course of a film, as well as just placing it in a point that it propels the images. Remember, if you divorce these from the scenes, i.e. just LISTEN, they play very differently!

Here are some of my favorite films as well as scores by him…

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PRIMER: No Joy On … Canada

Since No Joy just wrapped up their fall tour with a special Halifax show alongside fellow Canadian band Fucked Up, we thought we’d take this opportunity to ask guitarist Laura Lloyd to give us a quick guide to her native country. Check it out below, alongside a sampler of songs from their first couple Mexican Summer releases…

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PRIMER: Ulrich Troyer On … 10 Essential Dub Records, Featuring a Digi-Dub Mix With Rhythm & Sound, Gregory Isaacs and More

To help celebrate the release of Ulrich Troyer’s Songs For William LP—the first installment in an experimental dub trilogy for Mala’s Deep Medi Musik imprint—we asked the producer/comic book illustrator/Vegetable Orchestra alum about 10 of his favorite pressure-cooked LPs. He gladly shared the following guide, as backed by an exclusive “DigiDub” mixtape…

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PRIMER: Horse Meat Disco’s YouTube Guide To … Disco

Photo: Darrell Berry

Words by Luke Howard of Horse Meat Disco

It’s impossible to pick 10 essential disco records as there are so many that I adore, so here is a selection of some of the influential favorites in my head…

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PRIMER: The Coathangers’ Top 5 ‘Golden Girls’ Episodes

Julia Kugel of The Coathangers @ SXSW 2010

Photo by Aaron Richter

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about the Coathangers: they’re huge fans of the greatest geriatric sitcom of all time, The Golden Girls. Well, frontwoman Julia Kugel is at least. As she revealed in a recent eMusic interview, the band’s latest LP—the barnstorming Larceny & Old Lace “is the name of a Golden Girls episode. I’m obsessed with the Golden Girls. I wrote two papers in college on the show, and I was watching one of my favorite episodes and I saw the name and was like, ‘I love the way that sounds together.’ Then I found out the play Arsenic and Old Lace was about a killer, so it all came together.”

In the following exclusive, Kugel breaks down five of her favorite GG-related YouTube clips for the uninitiated…

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PRIMER: The Pains of Being Pure At Heart On … Suzanne Vega

Photo by Alexander Wagner

Words by Peggy Wang

Suzanne Vega was a huge influence on my 11-year-old self; namely in that she inspired me to learn guitar finger-picking and wear giant men’s pants with suspenders to school. Her songs certainly still hold up, but they also take me back to a time when my English teacher was giving me all this feminist literature to read, and I was writing a lot of bad poetry that used way too many nature metaphors. I was really into female-fronted bands like the Sundays or the Sugarcubes, but what attracted me to Suzanne Vega was that she seemed effortless in her way of not actually singing. I think it predisposed me to music I’d get into later, like the Pastels and Beat Happening.

Here are my favorite albums and songs by her…

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PRIMER: Hauschka On … Five Bad-Ass Pianists

Since the prepared piano pieces of Hauschka involve everything from magnets to ping pong balls, we figured we’d ask the German composer to break down five pianists that won’t put the classically-untrained among us to sleep. His latest album, Salon des Amateurs, hits stores today and features a new groove-locked direction that has as much in common with concert halls as it does with dance clubs. You can stream the entire thing this week at The 405, or scroll down for his last full-length, Foreign Landscapes

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PRIMER: The Stories and Samples Behind Deaf Center

While most people treat our Primer pieces as basic guides to a genre or fellow artist, Deaf Center’s Otto Totland basically said “fuck all that noise” and filed fact sheets, sample sources, and the reasoning behind the names of the Norwegian duo’s key records. Frankly, it’s a little strange. And that’s fine—we wouldn’t expect any less from the guy who’s responsible for pouring rays of light into the cloudy soundscapes of Deaf Center’s other half, Erik K. Skodvin (see also: the imaginary horror scores of Svarte Greiner).

If you like what you read/hear below and live in the New York area, be sure to check out the pair’s rare stateside set at the Judson Memorial Church on Thursday night, as they set the stage for an Unsound presentation of “Beyond the Dark” with the Sinfonietta Cracovia Orchestra and the melancholic classical music of Henryk Górecki.

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PRIMER: Svarte Greiner’s Favorite Horror Films

Photoz: Chris Erlbeck

One of our favorite, and most popular, Needle Exchange mixes in recent memory was a bleak but strangely beautiful ambient entry from Erik K. Skodvin, better known as one-half of Deaf Center and the guy behind Miasmah Recordings and Svarte Greiner. Skodvin will don that very guise at Brooklyn’s BAM Rose Cinemas next Monday night, as the multi-instrumentalist performs a live Nosferatu score alongside percussionist Paul Wirkus. In related Unsound Festival news, he’ll also appear with Deaf Center at the Judson Memorial Church next Thursday, as the pair sets the stage for the music of Polish composer Henryk Mikołaj Górecki.

With that in mind, we asked the Norwegian noisemaker to discuss five of his favorite horror films, from the black comedy of Evil Dead II to the “true undefinable horror” of a sorely overlooked David Lynch series. Be sure to scroll down for streaming versions of two Svarte Greiner albums…

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