scene&heard

Calhoun sophomore Kurt Schneider taught himself piano in eleventh grade, now he’s winning songwriting competitions. Read on to find out what he’s been doing in the meantime.

Scene&Heard: Can you talk about your music career?

Kurt: I had a late start compared with most people; I didn’t know how to read music or play until I was a junior in high school. I started teaching myself piano in eleventh grade and now I’m a pretty decent piano player. Completely self-taught, never taken a lesson.

S&H: When did you begin writing?

K: During senior year, I wrote a couple spoof songs with a friend. Over the summer, I began writing and recording music, and towards the end of the summer, I produced my first song called “Roses on the Floor.” It was a pop song and would be really cheesy if I listened to it now, but it had a fair melody.

S&H: So then was writing music just a logical next step after teaching yourself to read?

K: Sometimes if you have an urge to do something, you just have to do it. Sometimes you just have to create something.

S&H: And now you’re one of July’s winners of the Song of the Year online contest in the electronic category. What was the experience like for you?

K: I just searched on the internet for song contests, but I chose this one because the top songs chosen each month are sent out to record labels and producers and radio stations. So there are immediate results.

S&H: Have you gotten any airtime or positive feedback?

K: Well considering I just won a week ago — but if I did get anything, I’d be shocked. I have no expectations.

S&H: Have you always been into electronic?

K: Well, the reason why that song [“Taken”] isn’t on my CD is because it’s not like anything else I’ve written.

S&H: Then what is your style?

K: Pop rock, folk and a lot of musical theater nowadays.

S&H: Have you recorded at all at Yale?

K: I’ve tried to get into the Morse recording studio, but I got a letter back saying that only Morsels are allowed. But, I mean, what’s the point of having that if students aren’t allowed to use it? I sometimes go to a music lab on Orange and Elm — that’s where I recorded my entire demo.

S&H: Moving away from your music for a bit, do you think there is an interest amongst students in live music on campus?

K: Definitely. I know of some underground live music groups.

S&H: You sing for the a capella group Out of the Blue. Do you think that at Yale a capella takes the place of a known live music scene?

K: No. I mean people go to a capella because their friends are in a capella.

S&H: Have you performed live?

K: I’ve done nursing homes.

Download and listen to Kurt’s award-winning song, “Taken“

    Toad’s kicked off a semester of noteworthy hip-hop acts last night with an impressive performance by a lineup of Rhymesayers artists, including indie superstar Atmosphere.

    Supported by a live band and sporting disheveled hair and a creepy mustache, Atmosphere was in fine form, giving fans unfamiliar but still excellent renditions of his most-loved songs, including “God Loves Ugly,” “Woman With the Tattooed Hands,” and new favorite “Sunshine.” Performing for more than an hour, he gave the crowded venue filled with a surprisingly equal mix of students and New Haven residents a performance well worth the $20 ticket. Although Atmosphere came most alive when singing old favorites, the crowd responded well to his new songs too, particularly the achingly sweet “Music Box.”

    Fans waiting to see Atmosphere, though, had to sit (or rather, stand) through a seemingly unending series of opening acts — 2 hours’ worth.  Mac Lethal, a Kansas City native whose act consisted mostly of listing things he hates — Fergie, Nickelback fans, Republicans—was particularly good, but restless concert-goers had to endure three separate appearances by Luckyiam, a mediocre, top-hat wearing performer whose high point was the beginning of his act, in which he rapped to the theme song from Showtime’s “Weeds.”

    Atmosphere was preceded directly by Seattle’s Grayskul, which consisted of two MCs, a bassist and a DJ. Grayskul had impressive beats but lacked the charisma necessary to justify their hour-long appearance. Still, despite the wait, it was a lineup that provided some memorable moments and appealed to fans of Atmosphere’s work.

    New Haven-area hip-hop fans have much to look forward to in the next few months. After a spring studded with shows with Talib Kweli and Clipse, Toad’s is following with RJD2 on October 17^th, and its “Hip-Hop Live” show November 15^th will feature Brother Ali, Rakim, and Ghostface Killah.

Listen to Atmosphere at http://www.myspace.com/atmosphere

No one likes a backseat driver. Everyone, however, likes cover bands. Cover-to-Cover’s Jake Bruene and Ian Dull are doing their best to spread the gospel.

Scene&Heard: Tell me a little about Cover-to-Cover.

Jake: We had a sweet idea when we were freshman to put together a group that would make it so we could hear some of our favorite albums of all time in a new way. Our first idea was to put together Weezer’s Blue album, but instead of just guitars and drums and bass to incorporate violins and brass quartets, solo piano players. We wanted to branch out from these favorite albums and give each song a new flavor.

S&H: Can you describe the different artists during the Weezer show?

J: We had a violinist and an acoustic guitar player from the Yale Symphony Orchestra do “My Name is Jonas.” We had a beautiful female piano player — very Regina Spektor — do track two, “No One Else,” creating a little bit of irony because the song is about jealous love. A rapper on “The World Has Turned;” a sick band rocked out on “Buddy Holly;” another sweet band on “The Sweater Song;” an acoustic duet on “In the Garage;” one of the best piano players we’ve ever heard on “Say it Ain’t So” take us through a journey of circus music, reggae, sweet, slow Elton John harmony. We had The Battle Kites play “Only in Dreams,” which was awesome — I think they might have thrown together that band for the show, so we like to think we gave them a little bit of a boost. Up until the last day we had a brass quartet from the School of Music on “Only in Dreams,” but The Battle Kites picked it up at the very last second.

(More after the jump) 

The Go! Team’s new release, “Proof of Youth,” is not an album, but a series of sounds that try to become an album, and fail (gloriously). Listening to “Proof of Youth” you are not lifted from your mundane world and given fleeting insight into a universe of beauty. Instead, you witness a band trying to make Music, and failing. The failure is what makes The Go! Team’s music so fun, so honest, and so worth coming back to for this second release.

To understand The Go! Team’s music, you have to first understand its drumming. It is clumsy, loose, and awkward drumming. The drums are too loud and too heavy, and because of this they force themselves to the front of each song, and once there become lost and confused. They try earnestly to keep up with the sounds that swirl around them, to provide a rhythmical anchor for the group despite their own lack of rhythm, but they fail, coming off as sloppy and amateur. In short, they are pathetic imitations of Drums, incompetent, burdened by a human inadequacy that extends beyond the percussion and into the entire album.

(More after the jump)

Yale’s live music scene usually only consists of the lone courtyard serenader strumming his acoustic guitar. Pat Dewechter, James Pollack and Andy Wagner — the organizers of the Bridge, an “open mic” night previously held in the Saybrook 12 Pack — are trying to change that.

Scene&Heard: How would you describe the live music scene at Yale?

Pat: It’s really off the beaten path. It consists of guys who love to play in front of people but only can find that through roommates or in a courtyard, on cross campus — that sort of thing. It’s made up of people who just grab their acoustic instruments, sit out and play.

S&H: Do you think then that Yale students aren’t interested in live music?

James: I’m always surprised at how few shows Toad’s has that cater to Yale students. Maybe there will be one or two a months, and you know, someone may be really into the Bruce Springsteen cover band but I think to have a great venue like that in the middle of campus that’s not doing shows all the time is really detrimental to the live scene here.

(More after the jump)

Check out other performances at the Winter Arts Festival show, hosted by the Bridge in February, 2007:

Andy Lavine

Jon Davenport

Liana Moskowitz and Eliza Schafler

Cain Soltoff

Eddie Quinones

Noah Lawrence

Lauren Russell

Dana D’Amelio

I saw Ani DiFranco in concert once. I was a little girl, and my mother had taken me to a folk festival in upstate New York. All the ex-hippie parents were cheering wildly for Ani as their face-painted kids scampered happily in the grass. DiFranco ascended to the stage, grabbed the mic, and bellowed, “FUCK!”

For eighteen years, Ani DiFranco has channeled this unapologetic fierceness into folk songs wearing punk clothing, ardently championing her liberal, feminist ideology. “Canon,” a career retrospectivce, does a praiseworthy job of selecting songs from DiFranco’s substantial repertoire. The two-CD best-of divides her music into two vague categories. The first CD nicely sums up her earlier, more conventionally folk-y period, starting with the song “Fire Door” off her first CD and venturing into more exploratory territory towards the end with the spoken word track “Fuel.” The second CD continues to chart her experimentalism, from increasingly politically charged lyrics to instrumentation with drums, horns and unconventional harmonies.

“Canon” also contains its fair share of live recordings, including some tracks from her live CD “Living in Clip,” which are vibrant and full of energy. In the songs “Gravel” and “Untouchable Face” we can hear DiFranco playing to her adoring crowd, laughing, sighing and practically spitting her words out. The sounds of the audience’s adulation are also a nod to DiFranco’s extraordinarily devoted fan base and her status as something of a cult figure.

Unfortunately and inexplicably, “Canon” also includes a track called “Distracted,” a recording of some of DiFranco’s stage banter, including the following phrase: “And so now, like, now it’s so funny, like, all the, you know…”

Despite this single unpleasant detour from DiFranco’s otherwise sharp and thoughtful songwriting, both CDs are strong throughout, and perhaps even sufficiently varied to keep the listener engaged for the two-plus hours needed to listen to the whole thing. For devoted fans or those just discovering her, “Canon” is a commendable compilation of some of DiFranco’s best work.

In Johnathan Rice’s newest album “Further North,” the 24-year-old singer/songwriter successfully combines granola folk music with a head-bopping rhythm that is easy to groove to.

He continues the use of avant-garde sound effects begun in his previous album “Trouble is Real,” utilizing the sound of a camera winding to set a beat in the first single of the album, entitled “Stay at Home.” In the beginning tracks, Rice successfully draws the listener into his groove with lyrics such as “I took a camera on vacation to put Miami in a frame.” His words are not lost among the instrumentals, which are soft enough to underscore his vocals and complement Rice’s raspy voice — which recalls both the softness of John Mayer and drawling, elongated style of Dave Matthews Band — complements his folksy lyrics and soft rock appeal. The single “We’re All Stuck Out in The Desert,” while suffering slightly from the monotonous repetition of the title line, perfectly exudes Rice’s left-of-center viewpoint, with lyrics such as “an investment banker started something so I broke his neck.”

The lyrics and beat of most of the tracks are intriguing enough to arouse the curiosity of most soft rock aficionados, while accessible enough to appeal to many mainstream music listeners. The final half of the tracks on the album tend more towards the rock end of the musical spectrum, as Rice’s voice hardens and evolves with the tracks to a completely surprising end with the tracks “Hard to Believe” and “It is Best to Keep it All Inside,” depressing and cynically self-pitying creations which seem unbelievably anti-Rice. An evolutionary album for the artist, Johnathan Rice’s “Further North” is certainly worth a few listens.

Listen to Johnathan Rice at www.myspace.com/johnathanrice

The comments made by Curtis Jackson (a.k.a 50 Cent) preceding the release of his latest album, “Curtis,” indicate that he’s stressed out. His big talk about halting recording if Kanye West beat him in sales just shows that America’s favorite Candy Shop gangster feels threatened by his “non-confrontational” teddy bear friend.

One look at the album photograph gives the impression that he’s been pulling all-nighters for months working on a dissertation in hip-hop dominance. Is this a plea for sympathy? Yes, probably.

(More after the jump)

Simian Mobile Disco is all about the synthesizer, to the point of naming their debut album after one of its parts, the ASDR envelope. The tracks on “Attack Sustain Decay Release” are electronic to the point of occasionally sounding like four-minute monologues by R2-D2. Condensing Simian Mobile Disco’s repertoire from hundreds of songs and mixes into forty minutes simultaneously highlights flaws in the duo’s music and leaves the listener feeling cheated.
Simian Mobile Disco, composed of James Ford and Anthony Shaw, is a production and remix team who broke from the “electronically enhanced psychedelic folk band” Simian on a US summer tour in 2005. Leaving behind the rock elements of Simian, Simian Mobile Disco is more pop and dance-oriented, and do DJ sets with other groups like Justice. Shaw and Ford dropped a number of singles and did notable remixes of bands like Air, Muse, and The Go! Team before the release of “Attack Sustain Decay Release.”

(More after the jump)

Regrettably, summer 2007 is already little more than a blur with only a few things standing out:

1) I read many blogs at work, though what was discussed in said blogs, I cannot recall

2) Michael Vick

3) The abomination that was the “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” Epilogue

4) Buying my very own metallic blue Fender P Bass — my very first eBay transaction that did not involve American Idol tickets

Though I’ve yet to join a band, I did support several other bands this summer - not by legally purchasing their music, but by purchasing a ticket to their summer tours. Here are some of the highlights…

The warm up: Coachella Valley Music Festival, Indio, CA, April 27-29

Nothing complements rock n’ roll like a sweltering sun. For three days, I braved gridlock traffic, 110+ degree heat and every LA-area prep school hipster to feast on a veritable pantheon of music styles and genres. The acts were as diverse as Hot Chip, Manu Chao and Lupe Fiasco, the performers as old as Willie Nelson and as green as Lily Allen and the set lengths anywhere from Air’s 20-minute disappointment to Rage Against the Machine’s too-long reunion set.

James Murphy and the rest of the LCD Soundsystem joint took the prize for the best set of the weekend. Though they performed in the “rave” tent, complete with spinning disco balls, flashing lights and ecstasy, the most arresting song of the evening was the mellow finale: “New York I Love You But Your Bringing Me Down.” Following LCD that evening were the Brooklyn punks of The Rapture, who kept the beat strong and the limbs shaking. Other standouts include Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon, Lupe Fiasco (all three of which performed on the main stage) and Ratatat (who blew everyone away).

(More after the jump)