The Whole Music Club presents:Making Music: Dave King (Happy Apple, The Bad Plus)

Walker Art Center, McGuire Theater

Mar 11: Doors 7pm, Show 8pm

Free For All Ages

Info:

Drummer extraordinaire Dave King (The Bad Plus,Happy Apple) returns to Making Music to preview his weekend of shows at the Walker Art Center, King for Two Days. Our conversation will focus on his newest collaboration projects, Golden Valley Is Now, and The Dave King Trucking Company, which will premiere as part of the weekend’s music extravaganza March 12 & 13. Special live guest cameos expected…

Co-presented with the Walker Art Center.

Transportation Information: Bus Route 6 runs every 30 minutes between the U of M East Bank Campus and Walker Art Center. Trip takes 30 minutes.

Website:

http://www.coffman.umn.edu/whole/themes/makingmusic.php

Share & Bookmark:

• Email to a friend
• Add to Google Calendar
• Share on Facebook
• Share on MySpace

How did Lookbook begin?

M: we started a couple of years ago, fall of 2007.

M: Grant asked me to do some vocal tracks over R&B songs he’d written and I said yes of course, we didn’t release any of those songs. I don’t want to hear ‘em.

G: They’re probably on my hard drive somewhere.

Once you’re huge you can release them.

M: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs just released that sort of album, their last album that they released was the first stuff they did, they just didn’t release it.

How did you start writing together?

G: We’ve always written the same way. It starts, I write a bunch of music, I give it to Maggie, she takes it, and writes words over it.

Do you ever write lyrics or is it just Maggie?

G: I wrote…umm…I wrote all of the songs, every one. I sing them all too.

[laughs]

G: I wrote the verses of Passenger. Maggie writes primarily.

Grant, how do you start your process? Do you use Ableton?

G: I use Abelton Live and I’ve got some synthesizers, a guitar, and a bass. I usually just start with whatever I feel like starting with at that moment. It’s maybe starting with a bass line or a drumbeat. A lot of times I do start with a drum beat, and then I change everything MUCH, over a long period of time.

One track, what’s your turnaround time?

G: It depends. Some songs I write in an hour, sometimes I tweak one song over a long period of time. I throw away a lot of songs. So it differs every time. Scratch that, let’s just say eight hours per song.

[laughs]

So True to Form, how long did that take?

G: That’s a good example. True to Form was three songs before it became one. The Only Ones was always that way, I wrote it in one shot and it was done. The stuff I’m more proud of are the layered songs, I get more out of them. The heavier shit with all the layers is more satisfying, for me anyway.

When you released your EP, I Fear You, My Darkness, that’s got a different vibe to it, it’s more mellow, it’s darker than the new record. Your sound seems to be evolving.

M: We made a conscious decision to have the EP sound like that. The songs fit together much better. True to Form and Over and Over were recorded when we put that EP together. We were going to do a full length with everything but we decided it would be better to isolate that sound on the EP.

G: James Buckley and Adam Hurlburt helped us to decide to make two separate records instead of one.

It works. For the next album is there a new idea, a new type of sound you want to explore?

M: We can’t talk about it.

G: Top secret.

[laughs]

Give me a hint.

M: Grant just gave me the initial new tracks yesterday.

So you’re going to try and move in a new direction?

G: I’m so tired of people talking about us sounding like the 80s.

I won’t ask you about that.

G: Well, it does sound like the 80s, but I don’t want that to be our thing. Our new stuff will sound new.

Where did you first start playing around town?

M: The Uptown Bar. [ed. Note: RIP]

You have this great onstage dynamic, did you cultivate that or was it just a natural, organic thing that showed up when you were playing shows at the Uptown Bar?

M: It was very natural for both of us.

[both pull out Blackberries]

So I see you both have Blackberries.

G: Yeah, we’re working on a sponsorship deal.

M: How many bands do you know where every member has a Blackberry? I actually listen to the tracks Grant sends me when I’m in the car, come up with lyrics and sing them into my Blackberry.

Going back to your recording process versus your live act, you’re queuing up preprogrammed beats and then playing guitar, have you thought about doing some of the electronic stuff live?

G: We want to experiment, maybe try and do more than we have before, but this seems like the best way for us to perform this kind of music live. Many parts of our songs I can’t reproduce live with an instrument necessarily. I would like to incorporate more stuff for Maggie to do in terms of instrumentation, without making it this huge complicated setup.

M: Right now we have a really convenient setup and it’s easy to tour, we can do it in a car.

G: We’re all about efficiency.

There you have it folks. Check out Lookbook at Sauce on NYE.

Lookbook on Myspace.

Yesterday’s Company by Lookbook from Chase Turner on Vimeo.

Lookbook – Passenger from Chase Turner on Vimeo.

CMU, The Whole
Nov 5: 8pm – 10pm
Free For All Ages, Seating Limited
Info:
Erik Funk has left an indelible mark on the Twin Cities music scene. First as the guitarist for the legendary punk band Dillinger Four, Funk now co-owns Triple Rock Social Club, a music venue for those seeking cold beer and good conversation. In only a couple short hours, Funk will talk about the beginnings of D4 and their most recent release “Civil War” on Fat Wreck Chords, in addition to what he’s got cooking across campus at the Triple Rock.

A less than capacity crowd at a show that cost a lot of money to get
into, 20 bucks for a line-up of mostly local bands, it’s Saturday
night at Intermedia Arts, for Clapperclaw. There are people milling
about the parking lot drinking mini-glasses of micro-brewed beer,
average age seems to be 26. More over 40’s than under-21’s. I shell
out the 4 dollars for a Budweiser tallboy and meet friends in front of
the stage, a weird two-person experimental theatre piece is underway,
in about five minutes it should be done, Free Energy, the headlining
band, after that.
Paul Sprangers looks like he’s from out of town, he’s tall, very
skinny, has straight long hair, and a style rarely seen around these
parts, a cross between Mick Jagger and a Camden junky. He’s the lead
singer of Free Energy, and one of the founders of now-defunct
Minneapolis outfit, Hockey Night. Shortly after nine p.m., Sprangers
is joined on-stage by his four band mates, in a flood of lights,
grabbing the mic stand with Steve Tyler flair, Sprangers kicks off
their set. Free Energy’s music has a very 70’s glam rock feel,
listening to individual songs its easy to hear influences from Bachman
Turner Overdrive to Billy Joel to Queen. In “Free Energy,” the title
track from the band, guitarist Scott Wells drives the melody with a
sound similar to Slash’s in “Sweet Child of Mine.” Single “Something
in Common,” starts off with drums and bass similar to Queen’s “another
one bites the dust.” I spoke to Paul, Scott, and the bands Drummer,
Nick, who is also involved with St. Paul band Superhopper. Sipping on
free Bud light in a purple and gold can, Paul told me why Philly is
better than New York and about the people in Philly, apparently when
you’re in a band in Philly you make sure everyone knows about. “There
people like to self-promote, you know,” Paul told me, “Here everyone
you meet is in a band and there’s this kind of Midwest humbleness
about music here.”
Free Energy are on tour again this fall and will return to the Twin
Cities to play at the 7th street entry Nov. 7th. – Justin Flower

City Pages’ David Hansen interviews guitarist Nick Ryan..

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Next Tuesday (November 18th), The Black Keys, the fantastic blues-rock duo from Akron, OH, will put out their new full length concert DVD, ‘Live at the Crystal Ballroom’.

The DVD was filmed by director Lance Bangs at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR this past April and features 17 live performances along with music videos and behind-the-scenes footage of the making of their latest album ‘Attack & Release’.

Watch the DVD Trailer:

Lance Bangs was kind enough to answer a few questions about the DVD:

More Cowbell: It seems like you’ve been doing more full concert films as of late, compared to mostly music videos & documentaries/films in the past. Has that been a conscious decision on your part? Do you have a preference between a scripted music video or a live concert?

Lance Bangs: I would say that I’ve been filming bands live since I was a teenager, but that in recent years there is more use for performance footage being released online or on DVDs, and fewer outlets for music videos.  It’s generally more fun to travel with a band or performer to an interesting venue while they are on tour and figure out tactics for filming a great performance that will be happening in real time in front of an audience at 11 o clock at night than it is to meet that same band on a film set at 9 o clock in the morning while they are doing publicity several weeks before their tour begins and film some aspect of the same song over and over without a real audience.  I love everything that goes into filming live performances, and over the years I’ve built up an arsenal of custom rigged/hot-rodded cameras that give my footage a different feel that what most traditional concert films might look like.  I’ve also enjoyed assembling a sort of band of camera operators out of artists/musicians/photographers/personal filmmakers/friends that I can travel with, instead of using traditional “professional” camera operators.

More Cowbell: What are some of the biggest challenges involved in shooting a live concert film vs. directing a music video. I’d imagine it can be fairly hectic at times, knowing you’ve only got one take usually (unless it’s shot over multiple night shows), not to mention the live concert factor where anything can happen.

Lance Bangs: I definitely prefer when a band plays in the same interesting venue over multiple nights, as has happened with Arcade Fire, Slint, Sleater-Kinney, Fugazi, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sonic Youth.  It helps to shoot in venues that are well set up for my style of filming, like the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, the Showbox in Seattle, Irving Plaza in New York, the 40 Watt in Athens Georgia.  I’ve had some funny things go wrong when there was only one night to film.  I directed a large HD concert shoot a few years ago where I hired some of the camera operators from the Star Wars films because the venue was a union house, and if I’m hiring union camera operators I at least wanted them to have shot a Star Wars movie, right?  The footage and sound recording were going well, but between songs the performer announced to the crowd that he “wasn’t really feeling it” and the performance sort of drifted off semi-detached.  I’m not sure they ever even watched the subsequent edits…

More Cowbell: The lighting and overall stage show seems a bit more elaborate than I’ve seen at Black Keys shows in the past. Have they just been adding more as of late, or was some of it added specifically to this show for the DVD filming?

Lance Bangs: The band happened to have a great young lighting designer named Mike Grant with them for that tour, and they had also asked for the footage to be pushed towards the look of old grimy film, which ended up accentuating the lights as they flare and bloom.  The sensibility was to treat it like old damaged film instead of clean High Definition video.

More Cowbell: From what I’ve seen of the DVD, you not only captured the band’s raw energy extremely well, but the crowd energy as well. Did the band have much say in what they were looking for in terms of the overall look and vibe, or did you sort of have free reign?

Lance Bangs: To be honest, it was just a camera test I was shooting myself, not a commissioned shoot by the band, record label, or management.  I had gotten to know the Black Keys when they toured with Sleater-Kinney years ago, and then shot a phenomenal performance at Arthurfest in Los Angeles in 2005 which I was directing a concert film of.  But when they played the Crystal Ballroom that night with Jay Reatard opening we hadn’t planned to make a releasable concert DVD, I was just shooting the show for my own archives as a camera test.

The Crystal Ballroom is an unusual venue and I’ve often had to film there but had trouble with it’s particular idiosyncracies:  the floor has springs in it so that it bounces up and down, making tripod shots vibrate and handheld operators have to battle against seasickness.  The stage is in a corner, and the soundboard is pretty far away but near a staircase that can’t be blocked by risers or tripods.  To accommodate all ages the venue has a divider running from one edge of the stage through the middle of the room dividing the drinkers in the back, so wide shots from the back of the room show an empty strip in the middle of the crowd, with low-energy people drinking beer from plastic cups taking up half the frame.  There is usually no photo pit, and you can’t put a riser out in the crowd to set a tripod and shoot over the crowds heads because they need the middle of the floor clear as a fire escape lane.  There isn’t room to shoot out at the crowds from behind the bands because the stage is in a corner with solid walls behind it.

I wanted to test some new theories about how to shoot better in the room than previous attempts, so my colleague Aubree Bernier-Clarke arranged some friends to do a multitrack recording, and we tried some new camera positions and approaches to deal with the peculiar layout and the bouncing floor.  The show ended up being great, the band had a particularly good performance and the crowd was even wilder and more demonstrative than I had expected.  When our editor Kjerstin Rossi had assembled a song or two I sent it to the band, and their management and label got excited about releasing the footage as a concert DVD.

More Cowbell: Do you have a favorite moment or song capture that turned out even better than you’d imagined? Any funny/amusing behind the scenes moments that didn’t make the DVD cut?

Lance Bangs: “I Got Mine” was skullcrunching, and shows what is great about the Black Keys live.  “Girl Is On My Mind” has the single best moment though and came early in the set, perhaps my first sense that things were working and this should be seen by people and not just disappear into my archives.  The handheld camera between the band and front row of the audiences reveals a kid so stoked that they yell “YEAH!” directly to the camera with stage lights hitting their braces and then they flash a double thumbs up while dancing

…..This was exactly the sort of personal moment of what is so transcendent about live music that I live for and that I don’t regularly see in the way other people film live performances.

Thanks so much to Lance for taking time out of his busy schedule!

And lastly, More Cowbell would like to give one of our lucky readers an autographed copy of the bands latest album courtesy of Sneak Attack Media. To enter to win, send your name, email, and mailing address to kyle@morecowbell.net with the subject ‘Black Keys Giveaway‘ by this Sunday (11/16) at 7pm.

Good Luck!

The Black Keys (official)
The Black Keys (MySpace)
Sign up for the Black Keys Mailing List

ATF: For people that haven’t had the luxury of seeing you live, describe what a typical High Places show entails?
Rob: I think the thing is different for people, and I wish you could get across on the record is we like it to be pretty loud. Its definitely not delicate sounding live and I wish the record doesn’t sound delicate. I feel like its pretty beat driven. That’s the thing that tends to surprise people.
Mary: We want to sound a little more dub. We have two keyboard stands with a bunch of electronics on them. We have percussion and drum pads and I do a bunch of stuff with my vocals like reverb, delay, and looping. We try to get that stuff down as much as we can to kind of free ourselves up. Someone just compared us with Stomp, which we joke about a lot.
Rob: Who?
Mary: I can’t remember. I think if we tried to recreate all our sounds live we would like Stomp. We’d be like blowing into bottles and stuff.