For over a decade, the Bay Area trio Beats Antique has remained committed to the concept implicit in their name. Their compositions consistently blend a dazzling mix of far-flung styles—often from eras long past—with inventive, danceable grooves. Shadowbox, their 10th album, further highlights their adventurous spirit through a series of ambitious collaborations the group recorded across the globe: from Moscow to Tel Aviv, London to New Orleans. As a result, the album often feels like a celebration of the places that inspired it.
Meeting up in their cavernous and chaotic studio just two days before striking out on an extensive US tour, the group’s David Satori and “Sidecar” Tommy Cappel seemed unfazed by both their impending departure and the tremendous pile of gear surrounding them. In their dimly-lit mixing room, adjacent to the retail store they just opened, which is also called Shadowbox, Satori and Cappel shed some light on the album’s collaborations, the philosophy underlying their global approach, and the significance of the shadow box itself.
Teksti-TV 666 may not be the first band to boast five (at times even six) guitarists, but there’s no need to brace yourself for some kind of deafeningly repetitive Glenn Branca-esque symphony nor, indeed, the next Eagles. While there are certain passages where the sheer number of Teksti-TV 666’s guitars are exploited to full effect—the Sonic Youth-ish “Hautakivi” being one of them—it’s not their multi-axed walls of noise that make them stand out. The Finnish seven-piece’s principal talent lies in their compositional fusion of krautrock and shoegaze with catchy, classic garage-punk songwriting. The net effect is like having Germany’s Neu! blasting through one headphone earbud and Sweden’s The Hellacopters through the other.
Psych rock meets garage punk is no easy synthesis to manage but Teksti-TV 666’s tunes are blessed with both indulgent expansiveness and anthemic immediacy. Unlike its members’ previous projects, Teksti-TV 666’s lyrics are sung in their native tongue. But even if you’re not fluent in Finnish, you won’t struggle to sing along to their many hooks—thanks, in no small part, to their use of the universal “Whoa whoa.”
They have already been likened to artists as disparate as Diarrhea Planet, Explosions In The Sky and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Such a broad range of comparisons illustrates just how hard it is to pin the band down—all the more impressive, given that they formed just three years ago. Since then, they’ve released a trio of 12″ EPs, the first of which sold out within a month, and the next two selling out in pre-order. Fortunately, Svart Records have compiled all three EPs into one tidy package. As 1,2,3 gets its Bandcamp release, Teksti-TV 666’s Timo Huotari, Tero Huotari and Johannes Leppänen told us how their seven-headed project operates.
These days, it’s not hard to make anything old sound new again. With digital technology leading to greater fidelity in audio recordings, it’s easy to make a dusty, old blues recording sound fresh and new. But Luke Owen, who runs the London-based label Death Is Not The End, isn’t interested in that. He relishes old blues recordings that crack and pop with history.
“I think there has been a tendency to focus on the more ‘clean’ recordings of bluesmen and vocalists from this period in recent years,” he says. “I think the value in a lot of this stuff lies in the simplicity.”
How does a musician still create when their ability to hear is impaired? Nashville producer L’Orange is finding out. Over the past year, he’s undergone two major ear surgeries to remove a benign tumor doctors found in his right ear, which has slowly cost him his hearing. “It’s been something I’ve lived with for a long time,” he says. “Unfortunately, [the tumor] returned a few times. So, my surgery this year was me giving up on the idea of rebuilding my ear and, instead, letting it collapse to prevent it from being threatening in the future.”
It would be natural for L’Orange, someone who depends on his ears to make a living, to be frustrated with his circumstance. Instead, he’s calm and reflective. “It’s been ups and downs,” he says. “Since this new surgery is what’s called an ‘Ear Wall Down’ surgery, it means that my hearing is unlikely to ever return. That sounds more grim than it is for me, though. I haven’t been able to hear well in that ear my whole career.”
“Well, Joyce Manor is over,” says guitarist and songwriter Barry Johnson, just a few weeks before the release of the pop punk outfit’s fourth full-length Cody. He’s speaking facetiously about the worst possible reaction to Cody, but there’s a tinge of nervous hesitation in his rapid-fire verbal delivery, one that belies the youthful bark and frenetic confidence of his output. For a band that has become synonymous with blitzkrieg sonic bursts (their songs rarely tip the two-minute mark), Cody finds the band—including fellow guitarist Chase Knobbe, bassist Matt Ebert and new addition Jeff Enzer on drums—taking a moment to slow down and breathe.
“I don’t know about jaded, but I was definitely feeling old,” says Johnson. “I’m 29 and, physically, I was feeling mentally too old for a lot of things.” The Torrance, California native still looks like he probably gets carded, his eternally youthful, boy-next-door visage handsome in a Pete Wentz-by-way-of-Mac McCaughan kind of way. “It’s better to be young and further away from death. I wasn’t feeling uninspired, but definitely old.” Almost 10 years earlier, the germ of Joyce Manor began when Johnson and Knobbe, two buddies with a shared love of blink-182, played their first gig as an acoustic duo. They quickly hooked youthful devotees with their heart-on-ragged-sleeve poetry and their mosh friendly live shows. In 2008, the duo rounded out the Joyce Manor, adding bass and drums. Along with Jersey brethren The Front Bottoms and Philly rockers Modern Baseball, Joyce Manor became the torch bearers for pop-punk, and also an integral part of the so-called “emo revival”—a bit of a misnomer for bands with more on their minds than dour self-reflection.
Bandcamp is a rock-solid platform for artists to sell their music and merchandise to their fans, and a thriving community of enlightened listeners who get that the best way to support the artists they love is by directly giving them money.
