On his debut album Atlas a couple of years ago, Branko found himself netted in a conversation – or argument, really – on cultural appropriation. The crux of the debate concerns whether or not it’s OK to grab the sounds and beats that form the backbone of various musical heritages, then repackage them as club music and sell it to naïve European and American markets.

Is Branko a culture thief, or is he expanding the musical lexicon of the world by giving a stage to sounds that would otherwise be overlooked by the mass market?

These questions and more continue to bite at Branko’s ankles in his latest record Branko Presents: Enchufada Na Zona. Though it would be nice to review this album simply on the basis of whether the music is good or not, that would be an irresponsible task. No art exists in a vacuum; there are always influences and context that must be considered whenever the subjective and objective aspects of human society collide. Whether or not he wants to identify with his culture’s past, Branko is the beneficiary of 600 years of colonial oppression, and that is no small consideration when judging the artistic value of this musical collection.

Branko, and his record label Enchufada, come from the city of Lisbon, in the small but influential European country of Portugal. From 1415 to 2002 Lisbon was also the hub of the Portuguese Empire, one of the largest and longest-lived landholding operations ever. All the wealth of a half-millennia’s worth of captured towns, cities, and nations passed through Lisbon, making it one of the most culturally diverse capitals on the planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9J6mL4qvoM

A part of this legacy is represented in Branko Presents: Enchufada Na Zona. Each track showcases a different music style, and a delightfully robust mix of voices and languages, set to an omnipresent discotheque beat. Listening to this album feels like traveling the dance clubs of the world in less than an hour. Or, more correctly, it feels like what Branko thinks travelling the world’s dance clubs should feel like – and that’s the problem.

Though it wouldn’t be entirely fair to pass the sins of a nation onto one artist and label owner, Branko is still a white European male, living in the former nexus of a global empire. Thus, when Branko produces a track from, say, two Haitian producers (“Bout Kompa” by DZgot) working in the Afro House genre, he is opening the hegemonic gates for that specific work. In a way, he’s saying to European and American music markets that this track is OK to listen to, because Branko has put his wealthy white stamp of power and approval on it.

But there’s a more complicated, and dare I say cyclical, aspect to this example. House music comes from the African-American communities of the Great Lakes, specifically Chicago. Over 30 years it got co-opted by the rest of world and is now belongs to a global dance culture. DZgot and the Afro House movement re-appropriated the house genre back to the control of members of the racial and cultural heritage of post-slavery Africa. And now Branko, a white European, has packaged a piece of that Afro House sound to sell records for his personal label. However, what makes Branko different from the so-called appropriators of the past is that he gives credit to the original artists. But does that make it all OK?

Central to this debate is the concentration of power. Indeed, if Branko was an elected representative of a global music coalition, the concerns of colonialism need not apply, because there would be some assurance of inclusivity and representation for all artists involved. However, Branko owns Enchufada records. The artists whose music appears on Branko Presents: Enchufada Na Zona are below him in the organization’s hierarchy. Branko chooses who gets represented because he made the capital investment in production equipment, studio space, airfare to “discover” people, and marketing rights.

Most people would agree that it is fair that since Branko fronted the capital risk, he should have a commanding presence in the organization. But what isn’t fair is that his right to capital is a vestige of his standing in the former empire of Portugal. He is, in a sense, continuing his nation’s most famous export –colonialism – by using his access to markets for the sake of profiting off the work of less privileged artists.

Branko Presents: Enchufada Na Zona is a great album. It’s fun, diverse, and new (new, that is, to the uncultured ears of this reviewer). But it comes with a lot of baggage. An interested person might be better served by examining the genres represented in Branko Presents: Enchufada Na Zona, and then finding artists on their own.

The post “Branko Presents: Enchufada Na Zona” – power, privilege, afro-beat, & appropriation appeared first on Quip Magazine.

Scott Wilson: Let’s get the basics out of the way. Where are you from and where do you call home now? 

Gabriel Garzón-Montano: I’m from Brooklyn, by way of France and Columbia, from my mother and father, respectively. And I’m in Brooklyn now.

SW: How long have you been on tour and where have you been? 

GGM: I’ve been on tour for October, November, and December in Europe, opening for Lenny Kravitz. After that it’s been spotty with four or five day trips until now, and this is my first US tour.

SW: How’s Lollapalooza been treating you?  

GGM: Really good! I was the first artist to play. I played Bonnaroo, but that was a small stage. This one was nice and big.

SW: So, like, the media and iTunes and stuff labels you as a R&B singer. How do you feel about that? 

GGM: You know, black music changed my life, like funk and R&B music, but I equally respect and cherish weirder white music. The classical music and the Radioheads and stuff like that. So I wanted to make a marriage between those two. I feel like, sometimes when something is really funky and groovy it lacks a song, it’s just a vibe. So I wanted to bring that intentional, melodic stuff from, like, The Beatles and that side of things to the black groove side. So when people call it R&B, I wonder if people got my intentions wrong.

SW: I’m thinking specifically about songs like “Everything Is Everything,” which has this groovy feel like Marvin Gay, versus “Naeja,” which is weird and has that Radiohead connection. They’re both great for what they do, but what they do is completely different. 

GGM: I guess people base the thing on the best known tunes. Like “Pour Maman” has an R&B beat to it, but I wanted the voice to be different, kind of stoic. But they hear the beat first.

SW: What kind of headspace were you in while writing your new EP, Bishouné?

GGM: A lot of the songs were written a couple years apart, I think also these were my first batch of really serious songs that I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. It’s not like I have six albums and I have this long history to look back on. Each one comes at me with such a singular experience that each one could come at me with a different thing. Also, I had a wide array of influences: Sly & the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, and so on.

SW: What king of oldies do you listen to? 

GGM: Oh man, well, you got the Motown stuff. You got the Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Prince, Sly. Al Green is huge, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin…

SW: What about Chuck Berry? 

GGM: He’s not on rotation. Not because I don’t like him, I just haven’t gotten into him.

SW: Are you going to do anything while you’re in Chicago?

GGM: I think I have interviews. I definitely have some work to do, and then I have a show tonight.

SW: So you’re going to be a busy bug. 

GGM: Yeah. As soon as I get off tour I have one day off, then back to the studio to record some percussion. Like writing charts and stuff. I get to rest in November.

SW: You come back to Chicago in October? 

GGM: Yeah.

SW: How does place affect your songwriting? Do you need to be anywhere special to write? 

GGM: No, I can write anywhere. If I’m around people and I have my headphones on I can be working on beats and not be bothered. When I’m working on melodies I like to be in a booth though. I’m shy that way, when I’m working things out I don’t want people to hear me. Up until recently I was very bothered that people could hear me warming up my voice, so I’d have to go off somewhere. The parts where I play and sing over and over to get it right, I don’t like people hearing that.

SW: How much of the material for Lollapalooza is brand new and unreleased? 

GGM: Two songs. The second and the third from the last.

Garzón-Montano is working on his LP, which will be out soon. Check him out wherever music is checked-out these days.

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When in the herd, people don’t think about themselves. This is how raves are able to function: everybody is moving as one. People get in a flow where all they think about is grooving and listening; a good DJ’s job is to help an audience reach this stage and stay there. Alison Wonderland’s style doesn’t sound like it would work for that, from a distance. She talks to the crowd a lot from her perch atop a tower of speakers, and sometimes she talks to herself, but the microphone is set louder than the music. However, it actually blends well, for what she does. The occasional breaks in the music for her voice, usually at a yell or a scream, gives the audience something to react to. It’s like a Basquiat painting, in that the underlying image can be beautiful, but then there’s some huge imperfection, like a bright orange smear, and it somehow makes the work look better.

Midwesterners know that when the weather is ruthlessly hot, that means it’ll soon be punishingly wet. The rain comes in at about 3 p.m., and the Lollapalooza Commanders issue a weather warning that means the park has to be emptied, so the people can seek shelter. Where will a hundred thousand people all seek shelter at once? Who knows? The logic is that people will have better luck not getting picked up by a tornado or struck by lightning on the streets of downtown Chicago than in Grant Park. Whatever. The rain isn’t that bad and after it lets up the whole mess of people file right back in to see the Galantis show, pushed back to four on account of the drizzle, which the two Northern Europeans would consider a nice day.

Most people returned, that is. Some poor, sorry music reviewers came down with a headache and couldn’t go on. Lollapalooza is a long, hot, three-day noise fest and a person has to plan accordingly by taking breaks and drinking lots of water. Following the excitement and not instincts is a bad idea if someone wants to last the whole festival. Let my cautionary tale be a lesson to the masses: don’t get old, stay young forever; don’t just visit Lollapalooza, be Lollapalooza.

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But what if you don’t know a musician’s work very well? PELL is a newish act on the national level, out of New Orleans. His fan base isn’t huge yet, though his magnetic stage presence lures in passersby like sugar cubes do to wild horses. In such a situation the best thing to do, as an ensnared stranger, to find a true fan, somebody who knows all the words to all the songs, and stick by them. People like that have energy to spare and radiate it outwards. If the fans can’t infect the newcomers with fun, PELL certainly can. His call-and-response style coupled with crowd interaction and dance leadership, makes everybody feel included: “Alright y’all, move back and forth like this: left, right, left, right. You got it! Y’all are turnt up”. He ends his set with a surprise appearance by G-Eazy, and they sing in alternation to the crowd’s delight.

From above, certain shows take on the appearance of solar systems in space. Hermitude performs an entirely new, previously unrecorded set, causing the audience to erupt in dances. Following the rule of magnetic personalities and radiating energy stated above, the wildest dancers tend to be circled by other spinning bodies. There are rogues floating without a system, but they eventually get pulled into some group, and others get ejected out. At this stage, the core of the galaxy, signs and debris fly through the air, heads bob and hands fly up. Then, when PELL makes a guest appearance, the crowd goes supernova. Though the ambient temperature at Hermitude’s stage is around ninety degrees, it rises to over two-million while bodies melt into a glowing, radioactive dance orb, pulsating to the electro-bop of the Australian duo’s computers.

Please allow a moment’s digression to lament the poor, ignorant parents of the Lollapalooza teen. How unaware they must be. If only they could see the group huddled around a hot bottle of vodka, smuggled in under someone’s armpit. If only they knew what their daughter wasn’t wearing after she got out of the car that dropped her off. If only they knew what their son was saying, or what he did to provoke a fight. Such is the scene at Tyler the Creator. A serious fan would never be deterred by a few vomiting post-pubescents, but the less determined will instead visit Chet Faker. Himself an Australian, the Faker crowd possessed as many accents and languages as a UN coalition. As the lanky, bearded Aussie crooned, the audience swooned. In this environment teenage troubles melt away, and everybody in the vicinity got an automatic upgrade to become twenty-three for the duration of the set.

If Saturday’s headliner, Metallica, could be summed up in one sentence, it would be: “Go home dad, your embarrassing me in front of the metalheads!” The defining feature of that show would be the mosh pits, which ranged from delightful push-parties to flailing orgies of senseless violence. When a man is old enough to have grandkids, he shouldn’t be punching strangers in the back of the head, Metallica show or not. Nonetheless, the stage lasers were cool, and they somehow stretched the five-minute long Master of the Puppets song for a raging half-hour. It would have been a perfect show if they stuck to their pre-Black Album catalogue, but alas, they didn’t. Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire: a quick death.

So long, Lollapalooza!

The post A Saturday of mixed decisions at Lollapalooza from Chet Faker to Metallica appeared first on Quip Magazine.

Being the very first musician at a major festival is a proposition akin to being the first astronaut to try out the new spaceship design. It’s an honor, but also a test of fortitude. Luckily Gabriel Garzon-Montano has the right stuff, and the small but lively crowd at his stage is as-of-yet ignorant to the trials Lollapalooza can wreak on the human body and spirit at then end of a long day. Although Lollapalooza, like any festival, is a celebration of art, culture, and music, it’s predicated on cramming a zillion people into a small, loud space, with bugs, during the hottest month of the year. Normally this is a recipe for public insurrection, but the root of the festival, any festival, is the triumph of good vibes over nature, and Lollapalooza is no exception.

During Glass Animals, for instance, the crowd appears more like organs in some massive super being than individuals. Something about the heat and melodic tunes cause a herd mentality that keeps everybody sedately swaying, always keeping a respectable distance from one another. The rules of the pit are enforced like a code of honor: nobody likes touching the slimy skin of a sweaty neighbor, so no sweaty neighbors thrust themselves on to anybody. Another interesting thing is that although Glass Animal’s audience is composed of teens and early-twenties types, there are almost no cell phones held above people’s heads. It’s as if a hive-mind consensus was psychically reached, wherein all parties would watch the show and wiggle around pleasantly without digital interference. There is one free radical in the group, a shirtless teenager charging through the ranks yelling nonsense. He stops at a stranger, grabs him by the shoulders, and raises his voice so as to disturb everybody nearby. He is not part of the hive. He has to be eliminated. The crowd works as one to push him off to the periphery and he’s never heard from again.

Broods is from a very hot country – New Zealand – so they accept the daily highs of a Chicago heat wave in rock-star form: belting every lyric, punctuating each drum beat with a stomp, moving around the stage like cooks in a kitchen – deftly and with utilitarian grace. When a performer is on-point with the precision of a well-lubed spindle in a jet turbine, it’s easy to lose oneself in the ambiance. Even for those who have no idea who or what they’re watching, the experience of being around others who are so enthralled and moving with passion forces onlookers to become participants. Like an image from some mythical druid legend, the audience dances like worshippers to the chants of a high priestess. Each person feeding and growing off the energy of the others, and Broods at the head, consuming it all. In a less pregnancy and STD aware culture, the Broods show could have dissolved into the most debaucherous bacchanal of all time. Instead, when the show ends, everybody looks around flushed and slightly embarrassed. The trance is broken and the audience scurries away like so many mice fleeing from the light of an opened door.

Whatever god watches over Lollapalooza, her symbol is the dragonfly. They feed on the insects that feed on humans, mosquitoes and flies, and as the human mass of the festival grows denser, the insect mass overhead follows in kind. While Alt-J gently erupts on stage, the audience moves zombie-like, closer, closing in until every last possible inch of space is taken up by pressing flesh, gyrating back and forth with the music. Then, as the final song dwindles off into the air, the crowd surges, rushing the stage. Cooler heads do their best to resist the stampede, but to do so is like swimming against the Colorado River. Nonetheless a few characters manage to escape, only to be consumed again by the giant amoeba of Paul McCartney fans stretching from the main stage back through half the city.

While Beatles songs coo away on one end of Grant Park, a sinister force takes over the other. Enshrouded in darkness, wearing a skull mask with glowing eyes, and standing inside a transparent cube, Flying Lotus announces to the audience, “You’re Dead” with the nonchalance of somebody saying, “Hello.” His set went on to transcend reality, time, and consciousness. The crowd could have been forty people strong; it could have been four thousand. Nothing exists during the Flying Lotus show except what he chooses to project onto his cube. Through that geometric screen the audience is treated to scenes from the peaks of Heaven to the trenches of Hell. There are no dragonflies overhead; we are beyond their domain.

And as the clock strikes ten, and the performers end their shows in time with the noise ordinances set in place by the City of Chicago, the International Space Station makes a scheduled low pass. Lit by the full moon, it’s the brightest moving object in the sky. On this Friday night two of humanity’s greatest collaborative accomplishments wink at each other.

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Calling in to his Brooklyn apartment, Quip talked to Nick James Murphy, better known as Chet Faker. “I’m not on a lease, just staying here for a few weeks. I’m homeless.” The new Chet Faker album, Built on Glass, dropped in April and set off a lengthy British Isles, Australia, and New Zealand tour followed by a TBA North American jaunt. “I’m thinking about hanging around Brooklyn for a year after the tour. Get a change of scenery.”

In a rambling conversation that covered topics as diverse as his first breakthrough song “No Diggity” to his recent interest in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, we delved into Built on Glass and how it came about.

“The album is honest, it’s about me. The thing I’m realizing is that I have to answer a bunch of personal questions about myself.” The title, Murphy told me, is meant to imply a legacy founded on an honest yet fragile base. It’s symbolic of what he wants to be as an artist and where he wants his music to go. It’s an audibly different album than Thinking in Textures which sounded faster and poppy. Built on Glass is melodic and emotional. “It’s a big jump between the first album. From 22 to 25, a lot of things happened to me in those years. There was a lot more content to draw from.”

When I asked what sort of influences he was listening to or what media he was imbibing while working on the new album, Murphy couldn’t point to any single thing. “It took two years to do the album. I went through a lot of different phases. The songs each have their own background, but I can talk about specific songs. Like for “No Advice,” the airplane version, that’s based off Brian Eno and Music for Airports.” Chet Faker derives from the subconscious, the music’s origin resides deep within Murphy’s head: it’s an amalgamation of many diverse ideas.

Murphy described his music and artistic process by relating the story of Sisyphus. “You have to be uncomfortable to make art. Life is uncomfortable.” He constantly has to toil to get something out, like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the mountain, and then once the album is released or the tour ends and the rock goes falling back down the hill, Murphy starts over from the start. That’s life, he says, and it’s about the pleasure of doing the work that’s important, not the end goal.

Built on Glass was created in Murphy’s Melbourne studio, a former meat locker in a rented space. His personal things are in storage while he spends the summer touring.  “I don’t think I’ve planned ahead more than six months in the last six years.” Sitting in his off-lease New York apartment, Murphy’s reprieve after two years of working on the album will last just until the end of April, when the tour begins. But as he said, the work is the fun part.

The post Cross-Continental Conversation with Chet Faker appeared first on Quip Magazine.

The first thing you notice at a PAWS show is that all three members – the guitarist/lead singer, the bassist, and the drummer – are right at the front of the stage, yes even the drummer, and they all have microphones, ready to banter together with the audience as equals between the songs. Here’s an example:

Guitarist: We always tell you our names but we never get to hear your names. 

Drummer: You, what’s your name? 

Guitarist: How about this, on the count of three everybody just yell out their name at once… One… Two… Three

Audience: (noises)

Guitarist: That sounded horrible. 

Bassist: Did somebody say their name was “Go Home You Scottish Fucks”?

PAWS is a Scottish trio composed of Phillip Taylor, Josh Swinney, and Matthew Scott. They opened this night at Chicago’s most bro-positive music venue, Lincoln Hall, for indie-pop rockers We Are Scientists. The crowd is an even mix of men and women with a significantly large number of backwards baseball caps and American Eagle ¾ length shirts. PAWS, however, is not a bro-band (not that bros are bad people. My own brother is a bro). Their music is a little punky, a little prog-rocky, reminiscent of Husker Du or one of the better 90’s alternative bands. They play fast and their topics range from selling out and getting paid to how it sucks when your friend gets cancer.

If you’re going to play to bros (again, perfectly fine people) who don’t really understand your music and head bang, mosh, or raise their drinks at inappropriate times (assuming there is ever an appropriate time) you could do worse than Lincoln Hall. The sound quality there is excellent and the second floor balcony seating provides an opulent refuge from the scumbag music reviewers in the pit. Plus the lighting guy was spot on, “It feels like I’m in the ocean while sharks are feeding” said an audience lady during one of the more intense songs where the band is bathed in red light.

As musicians, the PAWS guys are very tight. Their instruments are beat-up and well used from years of touring and practicing, but they never miss a note and don’t even need to watch each other for cues. Though between songs they get a little sloppy: the bassist tripped over nothing and fell over at the beginning of the set.  Regardless, the general feeling from the audience seems to be that it doesn’t matter what PAWS says or does because Americans just like to hear Scottish accents. And as the guitarist explains the difference between America’s Funniest Home Videos and the UK’s version, You’ve Been Framed, we hang on to his every word.

PAWS’s new album Youth Culture Forever debuts soon and we get to hear a few songs off it tonight, but there will be another US tour in October where it will be pushed a little harder, so they say. Check back for the tour dates to see if PAWS will be in your hometown.

The post Paws rocks themselves right off the stage at Lincoln Hall appeared first on Quip Magazine.

Though that’s just an initial shock. Like most music, it takes a few listens to get through the “this sounds like this” reaction all music lovers go through when they hear something new. And although Azier uses drum machine effects and zip zap laser sounds for that vintage feel, the production is vastly more complicated than anything that came out of pop music’s dark ages, three decades ago.

Azier is a one-man show. He started his own record label (Hylas Records/BMG, now Universal Music France), and he does all his own singing and song writing as well as composition, though he did get a little production help from fellow Berliner, Robin Hunt. Even without looking up the “about” section on his Facebook page, a trained ear can detect certain facts from the evidence provided by the speakers. For one, Thomas Azier is European. The Kraftwerk-esque Euro club vibe is strong with this one. In fact, he’s Dutch, but he’s been living in Germany and composing music in the Berlin club scene for seven years or so.  Delving a little further into his background, Azier says he was fed up with how jaded and ironic the Berlin club scene was. His music is more naïve and romantic than a lot of people were into when he started, so he had to study hard to gain a foothold in the discothèques where techno and EDM were king.

The songs of Hylas speak to this disillusionment with Berlin and take on an autobiographical feel. “Ghostcity”, for instance, is clearly about the need to leave a city before it consumes you, though not alone. The other major theme of Hylas is the need to be with women. This is an oversimplification in its most extreme, nonetheless Hylas is an album of love songs: getting away with somebody, losing somebody, being with somebody. Some of the songs towards the end get a little roller-rinky, as in you could slap on some skates and hold hands to the dreamy flow of songs like “Golden Wave”, with the DJ saying, “Couples only on the floor”.

Thomas Azier probably knows a thing or two about holding hands. He’s a hard guy not to notice, especially when he opens his mouth. The most striking thing about Hylas is that sweeping, crooning, catcalling and lullabying voice. Thomas Azier can sing like the Devil Himself. No doubt it was that enthralling voice, coupled with his chiselled cheekbones and rogue earring dangling Billy Idol-style, that helped him gain popularity in the basement clubs during the early years of creating Hylas. Yes, Hylas took several years to make. There’s a lot of attention to detail on this album, very well thought out, it’s that German influence, perhaps.

Though Hylas has its roots in the clubs, it’s not dance music. It’s active stuff, but the vocals are too intense and the lyrics too evocative to lose your body in. It’s the kind of music you sit back and listen to. Music for staring out of windows to. With such a powerful voice and superb composition, Thomas Azier is setting a high standard for himself. Though vintage sounding, Hylas’s dynamic melodies make it an innovative and genuine work from an artist the world will be getting to know a lot more of in the years to come.

Release date: March 10, 2014

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