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	News Reviews Events Listen Feature Charts Credits		July 31 - August 13 Earplug is a twice-monthly email magazine, delivering a handpicked selection of news, sounds, videos, and original features to the international electronic-music community. It's been a while since Baltimore's Wham City collective felt like a closely kept secret, but this month's Whartscape fest underscored how widely the crew's appeal and reputation have spread in the last year. In this issue, Earplug contributor (and Baltimore City Paper music editor) Michael Byrne braves thunderstorms and cops to cover the festival, only to ultimately emerge wondering how long breakout artists like Dan Deacon will be able to stay rooted in the communal scene they've built. Whartscape's performance emphasis would certainly please Bill Drummond, the former KLF member whose current venture, The17, is a series of choral concerts — with a twist — designed as a way to break out of the "cocoon" of recorded music. Our feature subject, Los Angeles' Flying Lotus, meanwhile, forges a middle-path between DJing and live performance — we caught up with him to talk cartoons, cannabis, and Coltrane.



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Teaching with the Choir
Pop maverick Bill Drummond re-imagines music with The17

"Imagine waking up tomorrow and all music has disappeared."

So begins the first score for The17, a music and art project helmed by Scottish pop maverick Bill Drummond. A series of unrecorded public choral performances, The17 is "a vehicle to explore frustrations with recorded music," positing that the current glut of music has sapped it of meaning. Discarding the idea of music as product, the project reasserts the importance of experiences bound to a specific place and time.

"Recorded music is a very 20th-century way of defining our relationship," Drummond told Earplug. "I'm throwing down a gauntlet to other musicians to break out of this cocoon we're not even aware we're in, to take on the challenge of making interesting music."

Drummond is currently performing The17 in Derby, England, in celebration of the QUAD arts center's recent opening. For the piece, 100 separate groups of 17 city residents — from teachers to Bollywood dancers and pirates — are photographed and recorded singing a single note for five minutes. The recordings are then combined into a pentatonic chord and played together once, on August 22, for the 1,700 participants. After that, they will be destroyed forever.

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Matter Takes Form
London's Fabric gets a sister club

With the closure of Turnmills, Canvas, and the Key, London's club scene is starting to suffer, with smaller venues like East Village seeming to signal a new boutique era. Matter, a gargantuan new venue opening September 18, sets that outlook upside down. The brainchild of the folks behind Farringdon's legendary Fabric, the 2,600-capacity club promises 2,000 parking spaces, 60 toilet cubicles, a vibrating dance floor, and unprecedented VJ technology. "We were given a blank piece of paper when it came to Matter," Fabric managing director Cameron Leslie told Earplug. "We had a unique opportunity to create the concept from the ground up, so whether it's thumping bass lines or the strings of a cello, they will all be given a special canvas."

With one main performance space, the club will be different from Fabric's three-room mini-festival setup, said Leslie. "We won't be in competition with Fabric. Matter won't be as tribal as Fabric and Fabriclive."

But how will they convince people to head down to the O2? "We're not going to try to oversell it; that's never been our style," says Leslie. "This is not a club — it's a music venue, and we're trying to develop an alternative approach to the total sound and light experience." This means a custom Martin Audio sound system in the main room and a Void Acoustics VIP room. It also means high-speed catamarans with bars and sound systems to ferry people back up west all night. - Joe Rudkin


	MORE HEADLINES Long Live the Club Queen Baltimore club's K-Swift dies in accident more » Radiophonic Woodshed Lost tapes of Doctor Who composer discovered more » The Dog Days of Records? Mexican Summer launches vinyl subscription service more » The Sacred and the Profan Wolfgang Voigt re-launches Kompakt precursor more »

Artist:

Wire

Title:

Object 47

Label:

Pinkflag

Release:

July 7

More than most rock groups, long-running English post-punkers Wire understand the logic of the digital age. Explorations of binary structures, their newer songs mold rhythms and chord sequences into one-zero, on-off patterns whose machinic delivery matches the impersonality and wordplay of the group's lyrics. On 2003's overwhelming Send, Wire played as though they'd been programmed with punch-card logic, but with Object 47 they've toned down the fury (perhaps due to the recent exit of Bruce Gilbert, the group's most ornery member), while losing little of their motorik, robotic grace. "Perspex Icon" proves the group remains capable of writing pop songs that swoon at high velocity, while the electronics of "Are You Ready?" thread smoke trails through the air, as Newman's tremolo guitar ticks away like an audio transcription of a flickering film. - Jon Dale

Artist:

Trey Told 'Em

Title:

Super Epic Thrill Jockey Mega Massive Anniversary Mix

Label:

Thrill Jockey

Release:

July 22

Conceived of as a party favor for Chicago label Thrill Jockey's 15th anniversary, this formerly limited-edition release represents a quandary for Girl Talk mastermind Greg Gillis and partner Frank Musarra. Can the pair's meticulous, pop-referencing style work outside their Top-40 comfort zone? The joys of this relaxed mix of artists from the Thrill Jockey catalog says as much about the duo's taste as they do about the label's sprawling diversity. Shifting beats entrance — whether they be Hamid Drake's drums, Radian's mechanical hum, or Tortoise's polyglot rhythms — as a wide cast of vocalists guides us from National Trust's glamorous funk to Arbouretum's dark folk and Extra Golden's bright jams. Boxed in a bit by the concept, the duo doesn't inspire dance-floor epiphanies, but it still ably proves mashup's non-pop potential, offering an expert, if slightly bumpy, tour of an indie-label stalwart. - Pat Sisson

Artist:

Syclops

Title:

I've Got My Eye on You

Label:

DFA

Release:

June 10

Syclops are allegedly a trio, one so shy that its members won't be interviewed, pose for photos, or do anything except make records that happen to closely resemble the work of the album's producer, Maurice Fulton. Fishy, sure, but in this case the ambiguity works in the supposed group's favor, narrowing the focus to the music itself. Though it's modest enough, I've Got My Eye on You offers a smorgasbord of everything from jazzy filigree ("The E Ticket") to beatbox-driven cartoons ("Where's Jason's K") and the languid, almost trancey house of "5 Out." For those who thought DFA had crossed all the way over in the past year, this adroitly handled album — whoever may have made it — nudges you to the side and begs politely to differ. - Michaelangelo Matos

Artist:

Vibert / Simmonds

Title:

Rodulate

Label:

Rephlex

Release:

June 30

Luke Vibert has made music under an array of aliases — Amen Andrews, Kerrier District, Plug, Wagon Christ — in styles ranging from disco to drum 'n bass, but few of his records have bested Weirs. A 1993 collaboration with Jeremy Simmonds (aka Voafose), the record's helter-skelter acid vibe and dark ambient electronics helped cement Rephlex's previously indefinable sound. Fifteen years later, the pair returns with 12 more tracks from the vaults, reminders of a time when genre was not set in stone. Spooky sampling experiments ("Story") alternate with sped-up electro breaks ("Room 28 Rap," complete with rapping); overdriven acid, seemingly recorded to cassette, shares space with a twinkling lullaby (with Elvis himself turning down the covers). The bulk of the album, though, is pure machine-tooled funk, propelled by overdriven drum sequences and some of the most lovingly programmed synthesizers you'll ever hear. Squelchy, silky, or serrated, they suffuse everything with the viscous glint of motor oil over mud puddles. - Philip Sherburne

Artist:

Shugo Tokumaru

Title:

Exit

Label:

Almost Gold

Release:

September 2

A self-proclaimed master of more than 100 instruments, avant-folkie Shugo Tokumaru fuses traditional Japanese tropes with the more-precious-than-thou tweeisms of Sufjan Stevens and dissonant orchestrations of Animal Collective. Using a mélange of deftly mixed guitars, mandolins, strings, harmonicas, bike wheels, ambient atmospheres, and found sounds, Exit's complex structures retain a strangely universal appeal. In this way, it's a far less tentative endeavor than earlier, more minimalist masterworks Night Piece and L.S.T. — a song-oriented CD interested in the full-throttled interaction of bizarre instruments and off-kilter harmonies. The singer's soft keen, meanwhile, is so stunningly emotional that his indiscernible (to our ears, at least) Japanese is almost an afterthought. After all, does it really matter what someone actually says when what they're saying is unequivocally clear? - Andrew Phillips


	EARPLUG FAVES Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit Secret Rhythms 3 Nonplace Señor Coconut Around the World PIAS Lee Jones Electronic Frank Aus Music Los Updates First If You Please Cadenza Ø Oleva Sähkö Bomb the Bass Future Chaos !K7 nsi. Squelch EP Non Standard Productions Louis Guilliaume Soulpoint I + II SD Sascha Funke "Mango Cookie (DJ Koze's Pink Moon Remix)" Bpitch Control STL Musik 4 Life Something

REVIEW: Whartscape
July 17-20
Baltimore, MD
www.whamcity.com

One of the banners that greets you in the sloping, pocked parking lot that is one of five main venues (others include a warehouse and a decrepit church) reads "Sham Shitty." This screed sits perfectly below the decapitated head of a stuffed tiger impaled pike-style on the corner pole of a barb-wire fence. In another "venue," an indie-ish movie theater a couple blocks away, a hand-painted banner reads "Worm Paste."

This is the third edition of Whartscape, increasingly visible art collective Wham City's yearly underground anti-festival (and snotty answer to the Baltimore City's more family-friendly Artscape). It's bigger than ever — four nights and two full days, all orchestrated by the same small, Magic: The Gathering-loving cadre of absurdity-obsessed artists and musicians. The difference? The headliners are big: Matmos, Beach House, Black Dice, OXES (reunited for just this one show), and, in a last-minute announcement, the debut of Who Is the Tunafish Man? — a supergroup featuring the combined blip power of Dan Deacon, Girl Talk, and Spank Rock.

Like the audience, who appear in everything from unitards to the formal attire of Southern dandies (seriously!), a lot of the performers are of the self-consciously weird, "arty" sort. It's to be expected, and, in the case of bands like Adventure, Nuclear Power Pants, Videohippos, and Santa Dads, this overt artiness is not necessarily a bad thing. The fest is broken up by fairly earnest and even (relatively) straight-up punk, rock, and folk acts like Jana Hunter, the Mae Shi, Celebration, and Ponytail. The latter, a rapidly rising Baltimore foursome, offers one of the best sets of the festival, playing severely intricate post-surf rock as lead singer Molly Siegel, a tiny girl who never stops bouncing, sings in sort of pre-lingual animal noises.

Matmos are also excellent, performing as the headliners for the festival's first night (aka the "weird one"). The group plays only three songs — one off this spring's fantastic synthesizer album Supreme Balloon, one a peculiar guitar track with Martin Schmidt on acoustic and a guest on a wah-ing electronic guitar, and the third unidentifiable, but employing a Geiger counter as a rhythmic device. Baltimore noise institution Nautical Almanac, meanwhile, place a makeshift tent onstage, performing as nighttime landscapes are projected on the outside. It's an equally odd time — choking death sounds, placid reassuring voices, skronk. It clears out some of the room, but so be it.

Dan Deacon's set on Sunday reinforces the command of the Wham City collective's leader (insofar as one exists) over an audience. The music is the same playful, tribal synth music his fans are very used to, but the focus of nearly every song is audience action; he runs his (by now) standard gauntlet, a game of sorts that gets nearly 300 people running together in a circle, and a competition called Triangles vs Circles, which involves shape costumes battling it out, and is better imagined than explained. There are a million theories to describe what Deacon's become as he's grown more popular: a gym-class teacher to adult children? Awkward conduit for communal body movement? The dude who says it's OK to smile and be a goof? But who knows what he'll become if he does lose that connection to the audience, when he's on top of a stage in front of seated fans and not on the ground in a parking lot.

The Mae Shi also put on a fantastic Sunday show that reaches back a few years to their stellar, 15-minute noise-punk blast Heartbeeps, as well as including this year's somewhat tamer, more ordered HLLLYH. The afternoon's headliners, Black Dice, get rained out by a quick-moving thunderstorm (the culmination of organizational and technical problems that inevitably arise when DIY ethics are practiced on such a scale). Similarly, the late-night warehouse dance party that's supposed to close out the weekend — a near-literal sauna of half-naked dancing bodies culminating in Who Is the Tuna Fish Man? — gets busted by the Baltimore City Police sometime after two in the morning. What's left beneath the burnt-out buildings and warehouses is a sea very sweaty and still ecstatic fans wandering the dark city streets — a rough, but appropriately weird, end to a helluva weekend. - Michael Byrne


	MORE EVENTS Celebrate Brooklyn! Summer Series Through August 9 New York, NY Central Park SummerStage Through August 17 New York, NY P.S.1 Warm Up Through Sept 6 New York, NY Audioriver August 1 & 2 Plock, Poland Creamfields Andalucía August 9 Playa de Guardias Viejas, Spain c/o pop August 13-17 Cologne, Germany Like Minded August 14-17 Petrcane, Croatia Outside Lands August 22-24 San Francisco, CA Numusic September 3-7 Stavanger, Norway Minitek September 12-14 New York, NY A Day in the Life September 13 County Wicklow, Ireland Decibel Festival September 25-28 Seattle, WA The Warehouse Project September 26 - January 1 Manchester, UK Pop Montréal October 1-5 Montréal, QC

Stefan Goldmann: Live at Sunday Best (MP3)
Exclusives from Stefan Goldmann's forthcoming album dot this sunny, unbridled set recorded during last month's Sunday Best party in Brooklyn, along with analog curiosities and deep-funk gems.

LISTEN

Ewan Pearson: Prime Time Promo Mix (MP3)
Recorded to promote Prime Time, a new party presented by Eamon Harkin and James Friedman at New York's Love, Ewan Pearson's 30-minute mega-mix offers one hell of a champagne blast across the prow, spanning the likes of Stimming, Rekleiner, and Ane Brun.

LISTEN

Jackmate: Space Is the Place Between the Waves (MP3)
Philpot Records founder Jackmate (Michel Baumann, aka Soulphiction) turns in a rich, shuddering, and downright devastating hour of house, techno, and dubstep from Rod Modell, Lawrence, Robert Hood, Burial, and more.

LISTEN

Mark E: RA.112 (MP3)
England's Mark E made a name for himself with edits of Janet Jackson and Womack & Womack, but his original productions for the Running Back label are just as soulful. See where he gets his stuff on this mix of edits, classics, and curveballs.

LISTEN

Hardway Bros: Heavy Weather Mix (MP3)
Sean Johnston (aka Hardway Bros) qualifies this as a "warm-up set," but that hardly does justice to the dubbed-out splendor and grinding intensity of a session that runs through Godley & Creme, Chicken Lips, and Sally Shapiro, before going out with a bang with Ivan Smagghe and Tim Paris' Vegas-ready "My Kind of Woman."

LISTEN

Looking for more hot mix sets and fresh new tracks? Check out Blentwell for an ongoing document of the evolution of blended music online.


	WATCH Ghosts of Techno Ghostly Records profile watch » Trio en Estilo Latino Señor Coconut, "Da Da Da" watch » Rip City Rules MTV News profiles Portland, OR watch » Back to His Roots Roots Manuva, "Again and Again" watch »

Flying Lotus Strays from the Swarm
LA artist generates buzz with unique beats

Opening with the sampled sound of Godzilla's piercing roar, LA-bred producer and DJ Flying Lotus lit up the crowd at Slovakia's recent Wilsonic Festival, confidently barreling through a set that segued between original compositions, Madlib joints, MF Doom rhymes, and even dubstep from Burial. Like the shifting, restless music on his new Warp album, Los Angeles, the mix suggested he's fervently trying to redefine the downtempo, hip-hop-oriented template. Earplug's Patrick Sisson sat down with Flying Lotus right before his Wilsonic set and discussed his big break on Adult Swim, the whip test, and growing up in the shadow of jazz legends John and Alice Coltrane.

Earplug: How has Los Angeles influenced your music?

Flying Lotus: Anybody who creates art is a mirror for his surroundings. You'll ultimately be inspired by where you are. When I'm in London, it's a different vibe. When the weather's shitty over there, it's all depressing and dreary, and that rubs off on the music. What I love about LA is that it can be pretty and ugly; it can be fun and exciting; and it can also be very laid back. You have the mountains and beaches; you can go to the woods and the desert. We're a little spoiled.

EP: How did your aunt, Alice Coltrane, influence your philosophy on life and music?

FL: It's more life than music. She set such a crazy example. She had so many people around her who were dedicated to learning from her. For the longest time, I never understood why she had all these devotees. I realized growing up that she was heavy — a very serious, spiritual person. People say she was a "God-realized" person, but it's way deeper than that surface one-liner about her. She just wanted to help people, especially those trying to create.

keep reading »


	MORE FEATURES The Downturn Begets the Downbeat Recessions spur great music more » "But This One Goes to 12" Raster-Noton celebrates a dozen years of clicks and pops more » On the Road with Radiohead An outtake from I Wouldn't Start from Here more » Event Horizon Andrew Hamilton takes classical minimalism to extremes more » Curved Lines and Break Beats Novelist China Miéville on drawing for Blevin Blectum more » Serendipity in Perpignan Mlle Caro & Franck Garcia talk to Textura more »

Each issue, Earplug sneaks a peek inside the crates of our favorite DJs. We'll even help you beef up your own bag: click on selected titles to preview tracks, download MP3s, or purchase vinyl.

Icy Demons
(Obey Your Brain/Eastern Developments)
Chicago, IL
www.icydemons.com

Featuring ex-members of Man Man, Need New Body, and Bablicon, Chicago's Icy Demons bring a welter of mismatched influences to their weirdo, homespun pop. Veering from cranky analog synths to heartfelt harmonizing and unabashedly bright-eyed yacht rock, co-founders Chris Powell and Griffin Rodriguez provide the core of the group. They're aided in the studio by Jeff Parker (Tortoise), Josh Abrams (a collaborator of Prefuse 73 and Sam Prekop), Russell Higbee (Man Man), and Chicago improvising cellist Tomeka Reid. Check RCRDLBL.com for a free download of the title track from their new Obey Your Brain album, Miami Ice. In honor of the release, Rodriguez and touring member Chris Kalis offered this list of "Top 10 records currently in rotation at the Shape Shoppe (on the Numark portable turntable)."

Count Bass D, Dwight Spitz (High Times/Metal Face)

Donuts

Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yellow Magic Orchestra (Alfa)

Sly & the Family Stone, There's a Riot Goin' On (Epic)

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (Virgin)

Michael Jackson, Bad (Epic)

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel (Charisma)

J. Spaceman / Sun City Girls, Mister Lonely: Music from a Film by Harmony Korine (Drag City)

George Clinton, Computer Games (Capitol)

Kool Keith, Spankmaster (Overcore/TVT)

Neil Young, Trans (Geffen)

Managing Editor
Philip Sherburne

Deputy Editor
Andrew Phillips

Contributing Editors
Doug Levy
Patrick C. Sisson

Cover Art
Manya Fox

Production
Axel Anderson
Tom Starkweather
Daphne Yang

Founder
David J. Prince

Contributors
Todd L. Burns
Michael Byrne
Joe Colly
David M. Cotner
Andy Cumming
Jonathon Dale
Geeta Dayal
Rachel B. Doyle
Marc Gilman
Janet Leyton-Grant
Jorge Hernandez
Aaron Leitko
Martin Longley
Steve Marchese
Michaelangelo Matos
Colin James Nagy
Nick Parish
Tomas A. Palermo
Tim Pratt
Bernardo Rondeau
Joe Rudkin
Jesse Serwer
Oliver Spall
Andrew Stout
Bruce Tantum

	About Us
	Earplug is an email magazine dedicated to electronic music and its many dynamic styles and influences. Published twice-monthly, it features a handpicked selection of music news, cultural spotlights, tip sheets, CD reviews, original reporting, and music festival previews and reviews. Earplug offers only pure editorial and unbiased news — no money is accepted from any artists, labels, promoters, or companies seeking mention.

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