MUSIC NEWS: Little Boots, Pet Shop Boys, Britney Spears, Beth Ditto

The editors of Modern Tonic present a weekly music update here on Towleroad. The rest of the week, they scan the pop-culture landscape for movie, TV, book and Web recommendations in their daily email.

Little Boots (aka Victoria Hesketh) is the best thing to happen to the thigh-high since Beyoncé’s Foxxy Cleopatra strutted her way through Austin Powers in Goldmember. Her import debut Hands — with production help from Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, Greg Kurstin of The Bird and The Bee and Simian Mobile Disco’s Jas Shaw — is a dancing, leaping, jumping blend of 80’s synth-pop, big beat drums and hooks galore. “Stuck On Repeat”  and “New in Town,” her Kylie-licious singles, are available on both the full-length album and her U.S.-only EP Illuminations (out today), a sampler to keep U.S. listeners happy until a domestic release date is set for Hands. (Illuminations has three additional tracks — including a remake of Freddie Mercury’s “Love Kills” — not on the album.)

This Soho boho Gaga-esque goddess, who won the BBC’s “Sound of 2009” survey, revs her synths into overdrive for some hand-clapping, foot-stomping instant classics.

For proof, check out our FREE DOWNLOAD of the Bimbo Jones Remix of “New In Town.” Her name is diminutive, but anyone following in her footsteps will have some pretty big boots to fill.

MUSIC NEWS:

Pet Shop Boys create Pandemonium: On the heels of Yes, their highest-charting album in the U.S. since Very, the Pet Shop Boys’ Pandemonium tour kicks off North American dates August 29 in Montreal.

You saw Madonna how many times?: As if you weren’t up to your neck in social networking sites, along comes Songkick, where you can share with the world all the concerts you’ve ever attended, and upload set lists, photos, ticket stubs, etc., and also keep up on who is going to which live gigs. Its database already has over a million past and future shows to get you started.

Is she the ringleader? Does she call the shots?: The real story behind keeping Britney under control.

Beth Ditto of The Gossip on working with Rick Rubin (“That gave me chills”), snarky blog comments (“I don’t Google myself”), being gay and out (“Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan – that would have been kept a crazy secret five years ago. To be part of that visibility is really important”), and her band’s forthcoming album Music For Men.

More bad news for the music biz: Album sales in May declined nearly 17% compared to May 2008; down 37% from May 2007.

TODAY’S NEW RELEASES:

Pass The Duchess on the left hand side! Fergie’s back in the fold for Black Eyed Peas’ latest, The E.N.D. (Energy Never Dies).

No longer young, Sonic Youth’s sound lives forever on the masterful The Eternal.

Cardigans’ front-woman Nina Persson does digital duty with the download-only Covers EP from her solo project, A Camp.

Helium-voiced Brian Molko breaks in new drummer Steve Forrest on Placebo’s hard-rocking sixth release, Battle for the Sun.

Will Wonder Woman fly on her album of standards?  Find out on Lynda Carter’s At Last.

Club kids can feel the mix in their coccyx with Ultra Records’ Dance Anthems.

New releases also from: Paul Van Dyk — Volume; Mos Def — The Ecstatic; Morrissey — Maladjusted (Expanded Edition); Teena Marie — Congo Square; Rhett Miller — Rhett Miller; Kasabian — West Ryder Lunatic Asylum; The Dirty Projectors — Bitte Orca.

MUSIC VIDEOS AND CLIPS:

MPHO — “Box ‘n’ Locks”
This mixed-race Londoner makes like Santigold with a Smiths-esque stroll through this bouncy single (featuring a riff from Martha and the Muffins’ ‘80s classic “Echo Beach”) from her fall U.K. debut, Pop Art.

WALE ftrg. LADY GAGA — “Chillin’”
Mark Ronson-sponsored D.C.-based rapper cruises Washington’s mean streets with Lady Gaga fronting her best M.I.A. impersonation.

DAVID GUETTA ftrg. KELLY ROWLAND — “When Love Takes Over”
David Guetta’s summer club anthem gets a downtempo remake when vocalist Kelly Rowland takes the BBC Live Lounge stage.

FRANKMUSIK — “Confusion Girl”
Even with pink sneakers and a tragic haircut, Vincent Frank (aka Frankmusik) gets the girl in this clip for the current single from his forthcoming Complete Me (out July 27 in the U.K.).

Eighth blackbird lands at Ojai Music Festival

The collective will serve as music director at an event with a rich lineage, setting up a weekend-long jam.

The Ojai Music Festival has a long tradition of picking some of the era’s most important artists to serve as its music director, a position that rotates annually. But though the festival has sometimes chosen more than one person at a time for the job, only once before has an ensemble held the distinction — in 2002, when the Emerson String Quartet was selected.

This year the title will again have multiple holders: six, to be exact, as the Chicago-based contemporary-music collective eighth blackbird (the group favors the lowercase spelling) takes charge of the 63rd festival starting Thursday.

Eighth blackbird’s assumption of the prestigious post — previously held by Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen — marks a milestone in the sextet’s 13-year history, conferring on it an elevated status among new-music groups. The appointment also signals a generational shift in the festival, since the ensemble’s members were all born in the 1970s.

Thomas W. Morris, the festival’s artistic director since 2004, offered the group members their present role at the conclusion of the 2006 festival, when they were guest musicians. “I was completely knocked out by them — by their calm virtuosity, their incredible showmanship,” he recalled. “I was really bowled over. I’d been thinking about future music directors and doing different things. I want to build a ‘next generation’ around Ojai.”

Lisa Kaplan, eighth blackbird’s pianist and sole female member, was thrown for a loop by the proposition. “This is kind of a funny story,” she said this spring when the ensemble was in residence at the Colburn Conservatory downtown. “During the 2006 festival, there were these video interviews, and we were asked if we’d considered being appointed music director. I said that would be like the coolest thing ever, an incredible opportunity. Then, at the end of the festival, Tom Morris came up to me and actually offered us the job for 2009.”

That was the easy part. Compiling Ojai’s four days of programming and deciding with whom eighth blackbird would collaborate over the long weekend proved more complicated.

“I felt it was very important that if we were going to have a group like eighth blackbird be music director, the whole festival ought to fit what they do and not just in terms of artists and sequence of pieces,” said Morris. “The whole feeling ought to be unusual and reflect their spirit and what they represent. And as we talked and talked and talked about this, what emerged was this idea of treating the entire festival like a large ensemble.”

The result is a roster of some 30 other musicians, including pianist Jeremy Denk, soprano Lucy Shelton, composer-electric guitarist Steven Mackey, singer-actor Rinde Eckert and two other ensembles — Tin Hat, a San Francisco-based new-music group, and QNG, an all-female recorder quartet from Europe.

“Basically what we’re doing is making it an all-weekend-long jam session, in which we mix and match everybody according to the repertory,” said Morris, noting that eighth blackbird appears unaugmented only once during the festival, when performing Stephen Hartke’s “Meanwhile.” They will be surrounded by the greatest number of colleagues as the festival comes to a raucous conclusion with Louis Andriessen’s “Workers Union.”

Some of their partners, like Shelton, known for her interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire,” are colleagues with whom eighth blackbird has an established rapport. But others represent new relationships, including Eckert, whose multimedia work “Slide” (a collaboration with Mackey receiving its premiere on Friday night) is touted as the festival’s anchor work.

Eighth blackbird — whose members also include Matt Albert, violin and viola; Matthew Duvall, percussion; Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets; Tim Munro, flute; and Nicholas Photinos, cello — has been forging relationships with composers and other musicians almost since the group’s inception in 1996.

Back then, all except Munro (who replaced flutist Molly Barth in 2006) were students at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, where an instructor picked them for a then-unnamed new-music ensemble. Not long after, they found they played better without their teacher’s direction.

The following autumn, all six enrolled in the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, agreeing to remain together for two years in the hope of forming a viable ensemble. The experiment paid off — despite some people’s misgivings about their unusual combination of instruments — and the group moved to Chicago at the turn of the millennium, then not long afterward became artists in residence at the University of Chicago. (Since 2004, they have also enjoyed a similar relationship at the University of Richmond in Virginia.)Credit for the sextet’s unusual name goes to Albert, who majored in English and was struck by the eighth stanza of a poem by Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which mentions “noble accents” and “lucid, inescapable rhythms.”

Those who wonder how a sextet of diverse instruments — as opposed to, say, a string quartet — manages to find enough music to play might be surprised at what they have unearthed, something attested to by their five albums, including a Grammy winner. “There’s actually more repertoire out there for our group than people think,” said Photinos. “We did a search and found about 200 works for our instrumentation, though not all of them are masterpieces.” To augment what exists, eighth blackbird has taken to commissioning works, which has become easier with their increasing recognition.

Besides Hartke’s “Meanwhile,” two other works written for the ensemble will be performed at Ojai: “Slide,” a festival co-commission with music by Mackey and lyrics by Eckert, and Steve Reich’s “Double Sextet,” winner of a Pulitzer Prize this year.

The Reich was a product of persistence, specifically Kaplan’s. She had met the composer early this decade in Cincinnati, where he heard her play his music. “We kind of hit it off, and I remember saying, ‘You should write a piece for us,’ ” the pianist recalled. “He didn’t say no, but he did say that he always writes for doubles, and we only have one of each instrument.” She kept in touch.

Eventually, Reich had a breakthrough: “I thought about using tape,” he said. “They could record themselves, thus doubling themselves. It works marvelously well with tape, but it’s even better with 12 musicians,” which is how “Double Sextet” will be performed.

“Slide,” a 75-minute work with no intermission, was six years in the making. “It summarizes all the things we like to do,” said Munro. “It’s this wonderful amalgam of visual and theatrical elements. We even have cellphone conversations in it. It’s everything but the kitchen sink.”

Mackey, who first worked with eighth blackbird in 2003, characterized the work as “discrete musical numbers connected by a character rather than a play supported by music.” The composer and lyricist are also featured performers, with Mackey on electric guitar and Eckert, who directs the production, singing, speaking and playing the euphonium. The drama centers on a character named Renard, an enigmatic psychiatrist who had conducted a study of people’s reactions to out-of-focus slides, a metaphor for issues like doubt and clarity.

Like up to half of eighth blackbird’s repertory, “Slide” will be performed from memory, to afford the group greater potential for expression. “Memorizing allows us to add a visual element,” Munro said, “which means bringing the music closer to the public.”

They’ll take a similar approach in a fully dramatized “Pierrot Lunaire,” in which, because there’s no percussion in the piece, Duvall will play the part of Pierrot. A dancer, Elyssa Dole, will mirror Shelton, the soprano, and both will interact with Duvall. “This is sort of the idea that we want to get across the whole festival,” said Munro, in effect distilling eighth blackbird’s ethos. “We want to take chamber music and expanded its horizons.”

A Pop Singer’s Identity, Undergoing Evolution

“Now I’m walking on my own two feet,” insisted Mandy Moore at Joe’s Pub on Wednesday night. Those were her first words, in fact: Ms. Moore was singing “Pocket Philosopher,” one of the cheerier songs from her new album, “Amanda Leigh” (Storefront). Her carefree tone got a bit more intent at the first line in the bridge: “Be whoever you want to be.”

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Joe Kohen for The New York Times

Mandy Moore performing at Joe’s Pub on Wednesday.

Ms. Moore knows something about the changeable nature of identity. Ten years ago she was a teen-pop upstart on tour with the Backstreet Boys; her debut, “So Real,” sold more than a million copies, partly on the strength of an unabashedly slick lead single, “Candy.”

And for a while her career adhered to an established mode, complete with MTV talk show and celebrity boyfriends, even though she never seemed fully comfortable in the bubblegum role, later disavowing it. (Other roles, on big and small screens, have suited her fine.)

“Amanda Leigh” is Ms. Moore’s most recent bid for re-evaluation. In one sense it’s the natural follow-up to “Wild Hope” (Firm/EMI), the 2007 album that introduced Ms. Moore as a songwriter after a hiatus from the music business. But the new album leans more toward bittersweet retro-pop, with a sound that suggests the folksy side of the 1970s. Its title further encourages the idea of self-confession: Amanda Leigh is Ms. Moore’s given name.

But Wednesday’s show didn’t exactly reveal a clear picture of the self she wants to be. Performing with a drummerless cohort — chiefly Daniel Clarke on keyboards and Mike Viola, the album’s producer, on piano and acoustic guitar — Ms. Moore sang with unerring pitch in a small but focused voice. At times there was also the cushion of a three-piece string section. All the parts were in place, but Ms. Moore seemed strangely tentative onstage.

Her songs, most of them written with Mr. Viola, tested Ms. Moore’s dramatic powers. She came off as stagy and insincere on “I Could Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week,” a self-explanatory boast, and “Love to Love Me Back,” a twangy bit of yearning. “Merrimack River,” with its music-box lilt and treacly imagery, did her no favors, either.

Worlds better was “Everblue,” a ballad written with Lori McKenna that puts sentiment at the mercy of a hypothetical: “What if I loved you?” (The song is a bit like something Ms. Moore’s new husband, the alt-country prodigal Ryan Adams, might produce.)

“Song About Home” was nearly as strong: its lyrics paint a picture of rootless searching, ending with a moment’s reprieve. “I know I finally found a home,” Ms. Moore sang, adding a whispered disclaimer: “For now.”

It was during the encore, though, that Ms. Moore came alive, adding bite to her voice and looseness to her body language. The song was a rootsy take on “Candy,” oddly enough, and she seemed to enjoy it more than anything else in the set. Perhaps it was the freedom to sing what now amounts to a cover tune. Or maybe it was that the song still resonates, in its way.

“Baby come to me,” Ms. Moore belted, beaming. “Show me who you are.”

The UK takes the crown

Pick one of your favorite electronic acts and one of the following is probably true: A) it’s a pair of two producers, B) they cite Daft Punk as a musical influence, C) they’re from the United Kingdom. The entire UK has one fifth as many people as the United States, so why does it put out so much more electronic music?

Britain has always held an important place in the global music scene; it’s not just a modern phenomenon. The Beatles get credit from music historians for the so-called “British Invasion” in the 1960’s. But it’s hard to use four shaggy-haired rockers to explain the current landscape of electronic music. Surely, the recent wave of DJs and producers is more than just “Beatles fallout.”

First, the Beatles’ music is more than forty years old at this point. It has a much smaller impact today compared to what it once did (even if we consider Justice’s “A Cross The Universe”). Second, if we’re going to make the argument that “today’s music scene was shaped by yesterday’s musicians,” then most of the credit should go to the UK’s recent electronic acts– The Prodigy, Portishead and The Chemical Brothers to name a few. Still, this argument is not entirely convincing. It’s simply the nature of music to evolve; any musician in any genre can cite an influence. These influences explain how music evolved the way it did, but not why.

I can think of two reasons why the United Kingdom puts out more electronic music than the United States. First, the UK itself is much smaller and more densely populated. The United States doesn’t necessarily have any less talent, but it’s music scene is more fragmented. It’s easier to tour the entire UK than it is to tour the entire US. Likewise, it’s easier to generate buzz among sixty million people than three hundred million people. Britain is thus helped by its tight-knit electronic music community.

But a small population does not imply a thriving electronic music scene. In fact, the reverse seems more feasible: a large population help. The more people in a country, the more potential producers and consumers of music there are. Here’s the second point: even though the UK puts out a large amount of electronic music domestically, much of it is “consumed” internationally. Hence, Britain also thrives because of it’s proximity to Europe.

As any wide-eyed twentysomething can tell you after returning home from his first trip abroad, Europe has a booming dance culture. European clubs stand head and shoulders above their American counterparts. They’re bigger and there’s more of them. Americans love to dance, too. But the culture is different than it is in Europe. Even though some big cities like L.A., New York City and Chicago have thriving dance scenes, most smaller American cities don’t have packed clubs every weekend.

The advantage for the UK is really the fact that it’s part of Europe, where dance clubs are the norm for teenage partygoers. Maybe asking why the UK puts out more electronic music than the US is akin to asking why it also produces more great soccer players. It’s largely a cultural response. Music, like most things, is a product of environment and circumstance. The vast UK scene first grew out of European demand and then flourished because of Britain’s tight-knit electronic music community.

Audio Bullys

Everyone’s got those “this group is going to be huge in three years” predictions that fall completely flat. Audio Bullys is one of mine. I always thought these guys were going to compete with Bassment Jaxx to be the next big thing in house music. It still hasn’t happened. They never took off the way I thought the would (and deserved to). These guys have been pretty quiet since their peak of popularity in the early 2000’s. They were supposed to release an album last September, but they pushed back the release without giving any details. Their last album came out in 2005; four years and only a handful of tracks to their name. It’s hard to stay excited with so much time between releases. Let’s hope the extra year+ of work pays off and the new LP realizes its full potential. Some things are worth the wait, but everyone has a breaking point.

Indaba Music Announces Digital Audio Workstation Built on Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX Platform

Innovative Application, Endorsed by Multiplatinum Music Group Weezer, to Bring Free, High-Quality Recording with Drag-and-Drop Installation and More to the Global Online Music Community

JavaOne Conference 2009

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Indaba Music (www.indabamusic.com), the leading suite of online tools for musicians, today, at the 2009 JavaOne conference, announced the limited beta of its innovative digital audio workstation (DAW) created to best serve the global online music community. The application, available publicly in July, is built on Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX platform. It will enable amateur and professional musicians such as Weezer to, for the first time, record high-quality audio directly to the internet, access advanced mixing, editing and looping tools as well as drag the software from the browser to the desktop with a single click. The application marks the first DAW to work both on and offline – eliminating the need for local recording software.

“With this new recording application, Indaba Music will empower grassroots and professional music creation in a way never before possible,” said Dan Zaccagnino, co-CEO of Indaba Music. “We talked to musicians around the world about how they make music online and, with the help of Sun, built a JavaFX application to serve our growing community of artists by making the music creation process more efficient.”

Since Indaba Music’s launch in February 2007, the company has grown rapidly. It is now comprised of a diverse, highly-engaged community of over 175,000 artists in more than 175 countries. The Indaba Music DAW will provide these musicians with important features including the integration of a professional clips library with high-quality loops, real-time non-destructive effects, and local caching of audio files to prevent the need for repeat downloads.

“I got different companies contacting me all the time trying to get me excited about their products, and most of the time I just don’t care. But this particular application, the Indaba Music Console caught my fancy,” said Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. “It’s like a simplified version of any of these complex professional recording programs that no one like me knows how to use. It’s going to open the door for a giant population of musicians out there, a giant resource for somebody like me.”

Historically, online collaboration demanded that musicians install recording software and upload tracks to the internet before collaborating, mixing, or editing online. With this new application, Indaba Music will enable musicians to record studio-quality audio directly to the internet.

“JavaFX is an expressive client platform for creating and delivering rich internet experiences and we are very excited that Indaba Music has chosen to build their innovative, new audio recording, editing and mixing application in JavaFX,” said Eric Klein, vice president of Java marketing at Sun.

About Indaba Music

Indaba Music offers the leading suite of online tools enabling artists all over the world to create music together online. Members can connect with an international community of musicians to create online recording sessions – editing and mixing tracks recorded in different parts of the world using its online DAW. Indaba Music continues to add valuable services and is becoming an integrated platform from which musicians can manage multiple aspects of their digital lives. For more: www.indabamusic.com

About Sun’s JavaFX Platform

JavaFX is a rich client platform with supporting tools and technologies that enable content authors and developers to create new content that combines the best capabilities of the existing Java platform with new immersive media services, which can be securely accessed from mobile phones, desktop browsers, TV and other consumer devices. Sun will continue to evolve the JavaFX platform for mobile devices, desktop, browser, and TV in future releases of the platform.

Alternative and Indie Music

There’s a much-quoted lined from that old Blues Brothers movie, in which a staff-member of a rough-and-tumble redneck bar offers that the venue’s stage plays host to “both kinds” of music: “Country and Western.”

It feels a little like that being billed as a guide to Alternative and Indie music. Yes, both kinds. The seeming interchangeability of those two words —which, at root, stand more for vague ideals and beliefs than any kind of specific style— may have you wondering something:

Are ‘Alternative’ and ‘Indie’ essentially interchangeable terms?

Well, yes and no. The basic rule of thumb used to be that the difference was only about location. Alternative was the preferred American term, Indie came straight from the British isles.

Indie, Yeah?

Yes, indie is, at heart, the English expression. In the UK, indie started out, simply, as the trade term for records released on independent record-labels.

In the wake of punk-rock in the late 1970s, the do-it-yourself ethos had flowered in England. With labels like Rough Trade, Factory, Mute, and Cherry Red all growing in stature, in 1980 the UK Indie Chart began, chronicling, simply, the best-selling independently-released singles in the land.

Oh, C86, So Much to Answer For

Yet, at some point, the simple classification changed. Many point to the iconic cassette compilation C86, which was given away with an edition of English weekly NME in 1986. The compile sought to chronicle a burgeoning English guitar-pop underground called, at the time, either ‘cutie’ or ’shambling’. As these descriptive names suggest, these bands played a twee, amateurish form of home-made music drawing deeply from sunny ’60s acts like The Byrds and the Velvet Underground.

Given that, at the time, Rough Trade recording artists The Smiths —a proudly indie band whose obvious debt to The Byrds contrasted with their frontman, Morrissey, a fey, rakish wit out to evoke Oliver Wilde— were the biggest band in the UK, it makes sense that C86 became a landmark.

Featuring bands like The Pastels, The Shop Assistants, and Primal Scream, C86 became a huge hit, then a buzz-word, then a catch-all. Sometime thereafter, indie meant being synonymous with this particular style, this particular cassette.

Stylistically, this meant a retrophonic, largely sexless, form of music; with jangly guitars and the vague taint of nostalgia. Indie no longer referred to the factual realities of record distribution. Indie was somewhere between a state of mind, and a singular guitar tone.

This Indie World

After quarter-century of sexually-frustrated, bookish boys and block-fringed girls playing proudly indie music, you’d think it would’ve made indie a definable style, if not a singular sound. Yet, as I originally said, this depends on which side of the pond you’re on.

In America, indie often means twee, meek, Anglophilic; and it always means retrophonic. To be indie is to do so without distortion, without aggression. And, given the state of modern American radio, this almost by nature makes indie acts underground bands. In fact, aside from The Shins, I can’t think of anyone with a true indie-pop sound whose made a run on the American charts.

They Were All Yellow

Yet, back in England, birthplace of the word, ‘indie’ has come to mean something else entirely. No longer a term used, often proudly, to describe bands with down-to-earth attitude and do-it-yourself beliefs, indie has come to be shorthand for a most dire form of non-rock.

In Britain, these days indie is routinely used as a catch-all to describe an ever-growing succession of impossibly bland, laddish bands playing inoffensive, melancholy ballad-rock. Their kings are Coldplay and Snow Patrol, two outfits of indistinct, fresh-faced guitar bands who’ve made a mint by playing soft, jangly songs free from tension and edge. But Coldplay and Snow Patrol are the ones you know, the ones who made it outside the British Isles. If you’ve heard of —or, worse, actually heard— The Fratellis, The Kooks, or Razorlight, you likely live in the UK.

The Verdict

So, yes, there is a distinction between ‘Alternative’ and ‘Indie,’ and now that you know, you too can use each judiciously. As for the differences between indie, indie-pop, and indie-rock, well, um, you’ll just have to use your imagination. Because there aren’t any, really.

A Night When Harmony Reigns

Music moves; it can’t do anything else. Grizzly Bear’s songs rev without going anywhere. With broad vocal harmonies and harmonic motion built from unusual guitar tunings, the band gives you beauty until you can’t stand it. I found myself lost in a few bright, bursting moments of its show at Town Hall on Thursday. They felt like static pleasures, though. The concert sits in my memory like a slide show.

Skip to next paragraph Multimedia Related Music: Riding the Wave of High Expectations (May 24, 2009) Music Review | Final Fantasy and Grizzly Bear: Two Bands Have a Night in the Orchestral Realm (March 2, 2009) Blog ArtsBeat ArtsBeat The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion. * More Arts News Enlarge This Image Chad Batka for The New York Times The bassist Chris Taylor played other instruments as well. Enlarge This Image Chad Batka for The New York Times The indie band Grizzly Bear, with Ed Droste on lead vocals, performing during a well-attended concert at Town Hall on Thursday night to promote its new album, “Veckatimest.” There is a nearly suffocating fussiness in this band.

It can’t be altered: it’s the life force of the music, which is full and tense, and extremely cold. (On Grizzly Bear’s new album, “Veckatimest,” on the Warp label, the band has gotten colder still, even as its pop melodies start to beckon.) On Thursday nothing in these orchestrations was free to wriggle, but sometimes it seemed that the drummer, Christopher Bear, could have reduced his kit down to a bass drum and a cymbal without violating the heart of the songs. Rhythm is a frozen concern here, several orders less important than harmony. The set began with precise four-part vocals in “Southern Point” and then expanded when the Brooklyn Youth Chorus joined the band for “Cheerleader” and “Fine for Now.” There’s occasionally a churchly minor-key ambience in Grizzly Bear, signifying the sublime. It’s an artier cousin to the early ’60s records produced by Phil Spector and arranged by Jack Nitzsche — and the band borrowed from that team directly in its take on the Crystals’ “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” the show’s encore. But the throaty yelling of Darlene Love or the Ronettes or the Crystals served as a streetwise release valve for the tension of those old records. Grizzly Bear has no release valve.

The band has two songwriting powers, Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen, who both sing. Grizzly Bear prefers full-band songwriting credits, so it’s not clear who’s responsible for what. But when Mr. Droste sings lead, the harmonies seem to come from the natural properties of the voice; when Mr. Rossen sings lead, the songs get browner, based in the harmony of his unusual guitar tunings. I found myself wanting more Rossen. His voice is grainy, with some modesty, opposed to Mr. Droste’s brassy swoon. But Mr. Rossen’s guitar harmonies are so rich, and his echoing strums so carefully applied, that those songs took on an oppressively ascetic fragility. This was especially true live — he, like the rest of the band, has almost zero body language — and especially in Town Hall, during a two-night stand that seems to represent this Brooklyn indie band’s ascendance to a kind of highbrow mainstream. Burdened with murky sound for a band that has fairly high audio needs, Thursday’s show was mostly studied, intellectual tension.

I respect Grizzly Bear for echoing unlikely moments in the history of sound: little bits and pieces in the arrangements of its songs variously suggest, besides Phil Spector, the Partridge Family, Dr. Dre and the ’70s folk band America. But wow, these songs are precious, and they occasionally came spangled with extras that made them even more so. The chorus was one of those elements, sorry to say. Otherwise, in “Knife,” the bassist Chris Taylor ran his high vocal harmony through a kind of Doppler effect on his microphone; elsewhere he played single notes on the flute and clarinet on his knees through another tone-alterer.

I left Town Hall grinding my teeth. Grizzly Bear performs on Sunday at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn, (718) 486-5400. The concert is sold out.

Iggy Pop: “Literature’s like coke, music’s like heroin”

PARIS (AFP) — “Literature’s like coke and music’s like heroin! Literature sharpens the mind, music stupidifies,” laughs punk legend Iggy Pop, whose new album is inspired by a French novel about “death and sex”.

Released this week, this latest offering from the long-haired, blue-eyed 62-year-old godfather of punk not only takes its inspiration from Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island” but also carries a French title, “Preliminaires” (Preliminaries).

Why? “I felt that the whole plot of the novel is a preliminary to death,” he said in an interview.

“And at my age everything you do is a preliminary to death: whether you’re gonna fuck or not, work or play, chase money or freedom, ideas or cynicism… You’ve got the clock.”

Iggy Pop — real name James Newell Osterberg — was lead singer of The Stooges, the 1960s-1970s garage rock band that influenced heavy metal and punk rock and whose live acts included Pop taking drugs, self-mutilating, verbally abusing the audience and leaping off stage.

His best-known solo numbers include “Lust for Life”, “I’m Bored” and “Real Wild Child”.

The idea behind this somewhat melancholy album came after he was asked to write music for a documentary about Houllebecq’s novel which Pop sees as being about “death, sex, and the end of the human race”.

“The book had soul and at the same time it showed great skills in just calmly illustrating some things that were inside my mind about sex, death and the opposite gender,” he said.

A resident of Florida, he first read it in a French seaside resort during a typically cool European summer and enjoyed it’s “mid-life sci-fi crisis”.

Literature, he said, had always been important to him, with a lot of William S. Burroughs in his early works along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Initially billed as a quieter album with jazz overtones, it mingles jazz, rock, pop and blues.

“It was great to embrace a broad variety of styles, very funny,” he said. “I didn’t do most of the work myself, all I did was the vocals and acoustic guitar and I shipped it out to the musicians. They sent back tracks and I could chose. Like a menu!”

Houellebecq enjoyed the song “Spanish Coast”, comparing it to early Stooges numbers, and particularly liked “A Machine for Loving” because of the choice of words, the musician said.

In another surprising departure, the raw-voiced singer delivers a popular old French number on the album — “Autumn Leaves”, the song originally written by poet Jacques Prevert, with music by Joseph Kosma, that became a hit for Yves Montand decades ago.

“I really wanted to sing well, it was a challenge and I’m satisfied that I did a good job,” he said.

More Music With Iggy

An Overview of the 2009 CMA Music Festival

Each Summer, over 100,000 fans meet in Nashville, Tennessee to meet and be entertained by some of today’s biggest country music artists at the CMA Music Festival, formerly known as Fan Fair. The humidity can exceed the temperature during these four days in Tennessee, but if you ask any fan that’s attended the musical festival, they’ll agree it’s worth every drop of sweat, and every aching muscle from all the walking. Read my overview on what CMA Music Festival is all about, and what events are planned during the festival week.

A Little CMA Music Festival (AKA Fan Fair) Background

The CMA Music Festival first started as a way to relieve some of the congestion during the annual country music DJ convention in Nashville. Since there were so many artists in attendance, fans converged in Nashville, hoping to get a glimpse of their favorite stars. The CMA and the Grand Ole Opry concluded that if a festival were created for the fans, it would be successful, and so the CMA Music Festival was born, originally called Fan Fair.The first Fan Fair was held in April of 1972 at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. Included were many of country’s most noted artists performing over 20 hours of live music. There were over 100 booths where fans could take photos and get autographs of their favorite stars. Approximately 5,000 fans attended that year. The Odessa Chuck Wagon Gang of Odessa, Texas, served up their “Texas Menu” of barbecue, beans, slaw, onions, pickles, bread and beverages.

Starting in 2004, the CMA decided on a name change, and Fan Fair was renamed the “CMA Music Festival.

Entertaining Your LIfe

How To Read Music

It’s certainly possible to play music without being able to read it, just as it’s possible to be able to speak without being able to read or write. In both cases, the person who cannot read or write is missing out on an opportunity to comprehend and communicate better. Learning to read sheet music can improve your grasp of music theory, enable you to play music you’ve never heard before, and allow you to more easily relate your musical ideas to others. The skill can take a while to master, but the basics are laid out for you here.

Look The Step Of This Lesson :

1. Study the staff. There are five lines and four spaces, each of which represents a single note. The space above or below any given line corresponds to the note above or below it on the scale.
2. Identify the clef. The first symbol written on a staff (the five lines on which the notes are written) is the clef, and it tells you which lines and spaces on the staff correspond with which notes. The two most common clefs are the treble clef and the bass clef.

Treble or G clef with G note

Treble clef: The treble clef, also known as the G-clef (because it circles the line for the G note), is used in writing music for most musical voices (soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, and tenor), most woodwind instruments, stringed instruments (violin, guitar) and high brass instruments such as the trumpet. It also typically corresponds to the notes played with the right hand on the piano. The notes played on the lines of the treble clef staff are, from bottom to top, E, G, B, D, F. The order of these notes can be remembered with the use of mnemonic phrases such as Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, Elvis’ G’uitar Broke Down Friday, or Every Good Boy Does Fine. The spaces between the lines, from bottom to top, correspond to the notes F, A, C, E, a sequence which, obviously, spells “FACE.” 

Bass clef or F-clef with F note

Bass clef: The bass clef, also known as the F-clef because it defines the line for the F note between two dots, is used for lower-pitched instruments such as the bassoon, the bass, and low brass instruments such as the trombone and tuba. The piano part played by the left hand is also usually written with a bass clef. The notes played on the lines of the bass clef staff are, from bottom to top, G, B, D, F, A. This order can be remembered with the aid of phrases such as Good Burritos Don’t Fall Apart or Good Boys Do Fine Always. The spaces between the lines, from bottom to top, correspond to the notes A, C, E, G. The mnemonic device All Cows Eat Grass may help you remember the order of these notes.

1. Determine the key signature. Directly to the right of the clef there may be one or more flat or sharp symbols before the notes begin. This group of symbols is called the key signature. If there are no so such symbols, then the key signature is “natural” (neither sharp nor flat).

• Key signature in A-flat-major and f-minor

A flat symbol on a line or a space tells you that all notes on that line or space should be played flat (one semitone lower than they would otherwise be played.) Thus a flat symbol on the line of the staff that corresponds to “B” would indicate that all “B” notes in the piece should be played as “B-flats,” which are halfway between “A” and “B”. The symbols that look like lowercase letter “b”s are flats.

• Key signature in B-major and g-sharp-minor

A sharp symbol tells you that all notes on that line or space should be played a semitone higher than they would otherwise be played. The symbols that look like number or pound symbols are sharps. The key signatures progress in what is called the “circle of fifths”; that is, each key is a musical interval of one fifth from its neighboring key. In key signatures containing flats, the name of the key is the flat to the left of the last flat. A key signature with four flats, B, E, A, D, for example, is the key of A flat.

• The exception to this rule is the key of F, which has only one flat. In keys containing sharps, the name of the key is one step above the last sharp; for example, if there are three sharps, F, C, and G, the name of the key, one step above G, is “A”.
• Notes can also be designated flats or sharps by flat or sharp symbols placed right before them within the piece of music. In this case, only the corresponding notes in that measure (see next step) are modified.
• Natural signs cancel a flat or a sharp.

If the key signature tells you that all “B” notes, for example, should be played as “B-flats,” a natural sign can be used before a single “B” note to indicate that that particular note and other “B” notes in that measure should be played as “B,” not as “B-flat.”

• Be sure to check for key changes. Key changes will be indicated throughout some pieces and will look like a key signature. When this happens, change the key you are playing in as is indicated from there on out, or until you come upon another key change.

1. Time signature highlighted in blue

Observe the time signature. To the right of the key signature, if a key signature is present, will be the time signature (also known as the meter signature). The time signature typically consists of two numbers, and it looks like a fraction. It may stay constant throughout a piece of music, or it may change from time to time throughout a piece.

• A bar line or measure line

The top number normally determines how many beats are in a measure or bar (a measure is defined by vertical lines, or bar lines, that run perpendicular to the staff). For instance, if the time signature is 3/4, there are three beats in a measure.

• The bottom number in the time signature normally determines what kind of note gets one beat. This number is most commonly 4, which means that a quarter note (see next step) gets one beat. It may also be 2, which means that a half note gets one beat, or 8, which means that eighth notes are used to determine the length of the measure.
• 4/4 time is so common that it is sometimes designated with the letter “C” (“common”) in the time signature instead of with a fraction. Likewise, 2/2 time is sometimes designated by the letter “C” with a line running down through it, and is known as “cut” time. More complex time signatures may have an 8 or some other number on the bottom, but these are beyond the scope of this introductory article.

1. Play the notes and rests in relation to the time signature. Now that you know which lines and spaces correspond to which notes (thanks to the clef), you can read the piece from left to right. The symbols will either represent notes or rests. Rests indicate silence, so they do not designate any pitch; they are typically placed in the same position on the staff. A variety of symbols are used to indicate the duration of a note or rest relative to other notes or rests.A whole note or semibreve appears as a “circle” on the staff in a measure and is worth 4 beats in common time. A whole note is the base unit to which all the other fractional notes are related.

• Whole rests look like dark rectangles hanging down off the second line from the top of the staff and are worth the same duration as whole notes. However, there are some occasions where a whole rest can indicate an entire measure, even when a whole note does not. For example, in 3/4 time, a whole note simply cannot be used, as it is too long for a measure; however, a whole rest is sometimes still used to indicate silence for the entire measure. You can remember that whole rests come DOWN from the line because it’s like a hole was dug.

Half notes or minim are worth 1/2 the duration of whole notes. They appear as an empty circle with a straight line (also known as the “staff”) dropping down off the left side or going up off the right side. In 4/4 time, a half-note receives two beats.

Half rests look like dark rectangles sitting on top of the third line from the top of the staff and are worth the same duration as half notes. These can be differentiated from whole rests because the half rest looks like a top hat–hat and half sound similar.

• Quarter notes or crotchet are worth 1/4 the duration of whole notes. They look like solid circles with a straight line coming off of them (as in the half notes). In 4/4 time, quarter notes are worth 1 beat.
• Quarter rests are designated by a unique symbol that looks something like a bird flying sideways. They are worth the same amount of time as quarter notes. Sometimes they are represented by a symbol that is the mirror image of an eighth rest, shown later.
• Eighth notes or quaver are worth 1/8 the duration of whole notes. In 4/4 time, they are worth half a beat, so two eighth notes equal 1 beat, the equivalent of a quarter note. A single eighth note looks like the quarter note, but has a single “tail” (more properly known as a flag) that curves back along the staff toward the solid circle.
• Two or more eighth notes together are connected by a single horizontal bar at the bottom or top, instead of having flags. This bar is known as a beam.
• Eighth rests look a little like a leaning stick figure person cut in half vertically and holding his head in his outstretched hand. Or like a stylized number 7 with some kind of growth–hopefully it’s benign–on its top left end. They are worth the same duration as an eighth note. The one in this picture is actually a sixteenth rest, having two flags on the top.
• Sixteenth notes or semiquaver are worth 1/16 the duration of whole notes. In 4/4 time, they are worth a quarter of a beat (four of them together make a single beat). A single sixteenth note looks like the eighth note, but with two flags instead of one.
• When they’re connected, it’s with two beams, not one.
• A dot next to the note or rest means that it should be lengthened by half of the note’s normal duration. A dot next to a half note means that the note should be held for the duration of 3/2 of a half-note — in common time, it would be three beats.[1]
• There are notes and rests of shorter durations than sixteenth notes and rests, which continue the pattern illustrated above. Rests lasting longer than one measure may also be designated by a bar running through more than one measure with a number on top. The number indicates the number of measures of silence and does not necessarily correspond to the number of measures through which the symbol actually runs.

1. Pay attention to how the notes are played together or in succession.

• D-minor triad

Frequently you will see two or more notes “stacked” on top of each other on the staff. This is a chord, and indicates that all the notes should be played at the same time. Chords may only be played on polyphonic instruments (instruments on which you can play two or more notes independently or as a chord) such as the piano and guitar.

• If there is an arc connecting one note’s circle to another note’s circle, this is a tie, a slur, or a phrase mark. A tie occurs between two notes of the same pitch, and means that the notes are connected and should be held out for the total duration of the tied notes. A slur occurs between two different notes, and means that the notes should be voiced or articulated as little as possible. In the case of vocal music, it means that the pitch will change while still singing the same syllable. A phrase mark generally is used over a series of notes, and means that you should play them continuously without a break in the musical thought.
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