Artists-On-Albums: AOA#13 (Dean Wareham on Crazy Rhythms)

Posted via email from AHFoW (slight return)

Posted via email from AHFoW (slight return)

Kramer (Galaxie 500 Producer/ "Fourth Member"): To be perfectly honest, when they first came in and played for me, I thought these kids must be lying. There's no way they went to Harvard; they sounded so fucking retarded! One chord for an entire song, played that slowly? Come on!

Naomi Yang: I think one of my fondest memories of being in the band was when we were opening for the Sundays in England and Harriet [Wheeler] lost her voice and cancelled the London show at the last minute. Rough Trade scrambled to get a gig for us in London that night and came up with a pub; I think it was called The Falcon. It was packed and instead of the big stages that we had been playing with the Sundays we were back to being in our usual atmosphere of a tiny sweaty rock club. It was a really relaxed and completely fun gig– it just felt like we were cut loose from music business responsibilities and could just play music! I guess the music going well was always at the center of my best memories.

Posted via email from AHFoW (slight return)

Mark Richardson on Pitchfork – Today 9.5; On Fire 10.0; This Is Our Music 8.3

It’s not that there isn’t plenty of good music in this vein being made. It’s that one band, 20 years ago, did this sound so well and with so much personality, they set a difficult standard for newcomers to meet.

Alexis Petridis in The Guardian – Today/On Fire/This Is Our Music *****

That said, no one really sounded like Galaxie 500 at the time. If they didn’t appear as bafflingly other as their contemporaries Pixies [...] they still seemed alien compared to their peers.

Suitcase Orchestra

Their music was as fiery as anything that was coming out of Seattle at the time but its power was expressed gently – a breeze can do anything a hurricane can, it just takes a little while longer.

Gemma Alver on Virgin – 8/10

Despite recent efforts to emulate sounds of bands like Galaxie 500, others end up sounding like they did it on purpose.

Dom Gourlay on Contact Music – Today 9/10; On Fire 9/10; This Is Our Music 9/10

‘Decomposing Trees’ is quite possibly one of the most haunting pieces of music ever committed to tape, tenor sax coda and all.

Alex Hegazy on Drowned in Sound – Today 8/10; On Fire 8/10; This Is Our Music 9/10

Contained within this full set of Galaxie 500’s outputtings is a force stronger than you might realise.

A.Tzikas on ALTsounds

deep washes of reverb drenched guitar jangle and basic, almost skeletal arrangements of bass and drums that twinned with Warehams wavering, wailing, woeful and sometimes heart-breaking raw vocal create not so much ‘dreampop’ as an entire dream world

Mike Barnes on BBC Music

With the help of producer Kramer, the songs sound slightly distanced, which has the effect of drawing in the listener to meet them halfway.

Unbeknownst to Everett True (or at least it was until I tweeted him and told him so) he probably played a significant part in the very existence of A Head Full of Wishes. When Galaxie 500 split in 1991 I was pretty much the only Galaxie 500 fan I knew and it was only the writing of ET that made me aware that other folk missed them as much as I did. Without that reassurance I’m pretty certain that I might not have bothered to create this web site in 1994 (and the mailing list the following year).

ET has just made Galaxie 500 his Song of the Day on the excellent (and wonderfully inflammatory) blog “Music That I Like”

The bass was pure ‘Ceremony’-era Joy Division, of course, and nothing wrong with that. The drums were as responsive as I’d yet to witness in a rock band. The guitar solos increased the feeling of distance, of loneliness. The lyrics… well, I never could quite get my head around their pleasing mundaneness. I always figured they had to be something more (and even to this day remain unconvinced that they’re not).

Previously on AHFoW – ET reviews Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards.

Britta was a ‘One Day Guest’ curator at Schmooze Blog choosing three favourite videos.

photo by pirlouiiiit

Dean Wareham has a in-depth article on the BOMB Magazine website detailing the process of selecting and scoring the Warhol Screen Tests used in 13 Most Beautiful.

I came home from the museum with a reel of about 40 Screen Tests, and we started thinking about music, watching individual Screen Tests, throwing different pieces of temp music at them, sometimes a cover or a half-finished song we had sitting about, and sometimes picking up guitar and keyboard and trying to conjure something simply as a response to the subject’s actions on screen. Narrowing the selection to 13 was difficult. We had to let go of a number of great subjects—Ivy Nicholson, Imu, Amy Taubin, Salvador Dalí.

Read the full essay on the BOMB Magazinbe website.

Dean Wareham

I know I don’t do this for every concert but… it was a special night (for me at least) so in honour of that here’s a round-up of what’s out there on the Internet about Dean & Britta’s recent show at The Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline.

Show organiser Lindsay Hutton who suggested the show to The Carnegie Hall has a post on Next Big Thing…

In terms of mellifluous guitar, there simply isn’t anyone that hits the intersecting vein between Tom Verlaine and the racket we must attribute to Lou reed and Sterling Morrison like Dean Wareham. The program is curated brilliantly and it requires the same of the location it plays at.

Scottish independent music magazine Is This Music? has a review and also a nice set of pictures on Flickr

But is it art? For a casual music fan it’s some great indiepop combining the best bits of Luna / Galaxie 500 that just happens to have a film show as an added bonus. Serious art historians will see it as a display of seminal pop art with a pretty authentic VU-themed score. Either way, everyone wins.

Scottish newspaper The Scotsman has a short review on their website…

“Moving portraits” of figures like Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Dennis Hopper, who magnetises the screen with his flickering expressions of pain and rage, they allow us to recognise the individuals by their body language and facial ticks as well as their features.

Murray Ramone has immortalised the evening in song – check it out at his MySpace page and check the lyrics out on the blog post…

and after the show was over
dean came over to chat to andy
I wonder if he did know or remember
the optrex that came in so handy, back in dublin

Over on YouTube there are a couple of videos [one, two] shot from the balcony…

There’s a short review in the Dunfermline Press…

13 Most Beautiful…works not only as a touching musical homage but a piercing glance into the social history of the 1960s New York Art scene. Mesmerising stuff.

I’ll add to this post with anything else that might turn up…

The New Gay: When did you first realize you were straight?
Dean Wareham: I remember looking at dirty magazines, probably around age 10, and being aroused by photos of naked ladies. I did make out with a girl named Wendy Little at age 8 but it wasn’t particularly sexual.
Britta Phillips: When I was 7. I had fantasies about David Cassidy.

Read the full interview at The New Gay.

I think at a certain point I realized that several people are going to be upset by this and by that, and if I went back and took out every thing that was going to upset somebody, it would just be a puff-piece and not a very interesting book. And I think part of the larger point I was trying to make about being in a band is that it’s all about conflict. And so I wanted to go into some of that conflict.

Read part one of the Dean Wareham interview at Make Major Moves. Part two will be published tomorrow.

UPDATE: Part two of the interview is online now – more talk about the book, about 13 Most Beautiful and about Galaxie 500…

It’s hard to sing those songs, too. I feel like I need to cough, and I sing real high. Your voice naturally lowers as you get older, I think. And also, I didn’t know how to sing at all in Galaxie 500 [...] That’s absolutely part of the charm of it, when people say, you know, the vocals on the first Galaxie 500 album sound like I’m singing from outer space. I think I was thrown out there in front of a microphone and I’d never really been in that situation, I hadn’t practiced in front of a microphone, and I only got one take of everything. I’ve since learned that it’s on the third take that I start to get it good. It’s never the first. Sometimes the second. With vocals, that is.

Read part two of the Dean Wareham Interview at Make Major Moves.

Thursday we’ll be eating cheesesteak sandwiches in Philadelphia; before our show at Johnny Brenda’s, Friday it will be chili dogs before our gig at the Black Cat in D.C., and Saturday night we will eat and perform at Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. This last is an early show – Cheval Sombre will go on at 7:30, we’ll be on at 8:30. These will likely be our last non-Warhol shows of the year, at least here in the USA.

Read the full post at Dean & Britta’s iLike blog.

Don’t be a rock star. I’ve seen people around me have their lives destroyed by drugs. It just depends on what kind of person you are. Like, some people have a “go” button and a “stop” button, and some people just have the “go” button, meaning that they take drugs and just take more, and more, and more. It could be 6 in the morning and they’ll say, “Okay, I have to get more now.” I’m not that kind of person.

Read the full interview at Decider NY

We are planning on playing a bunch of Galaxie 500 songs; we did this at the Zipper Factory last year and it was fun and I managed to hit all the high notes. The Galaxie 500 video “Fourth of July” ran on New York Noise last week, followed by amusing comments from some young children. Warning: the video contains violent war imagery in addition to gorilla and clown suits.

You can view it here; click on Episode 89, Section 1