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Are you in Vermont this summer? Do you listen to 91.1? Have you been wondering what the ambient psychedelism that makes you want to erupt into a giggle fit is all about?

Well, I am in control of the robots - that is, until they develop sentience. But for the time being, they're broadcasting only Boards of Canada.



While at one time they did live there, Boards of Canada actually is currently unaffiliated with our neighbor to the North. Instead, the group consists of two Scottish brothers Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison. The two have built up quite a mythos surrounding their band. They're part of the artist's collective/cult/Dionysian orgy Hexagon Sun. Their first four releases are nowhere to be found. They openly discuss the role of the psychadelic experience in their music. And they are forever in pursuit of the perfect album.

To get at this elusive goal BoC craft musical fragments using a combination of real instruments, analog electronics, drum machines, samples, digital effects, and anything else they thing sounds cool. Often, the group several hundred ideas only a few seconds long which they then distill into songs. When a group of songs seems to connect in that special way, they've got an album. You see, BoC is not content to merely give you an album of good sounding songs, they're after something much more, in the band's own words, spiritual.

BoC believe that music is close to the divine. They sample melodies reminiscent of nursery rhymes, that get stuck in your head almost universal. They draw inspiration from John Carpenter soundtracks and nature documentaries alike. They fill their records with subliminal messages and numerology -noting the way that science and math pervade the natural, cultural, and artistic. They want you to do more than just passively listen to their work, they want to fell it and become a part of it. So do that, and tune in to 91.1 or stream it.

Wardicus Wednesdays #8 - Sepomana!

This week we've got some highlights from Sepomana, which takes place this Friday, the 17th at 9:30. Come early to get into the Sepomana Hangover Event on Saturday in Bunker. Tickets are only 5 bones, and will be sold during dinners and lunches all this week or are available at the only box office,

Headlining the event are electro-punk rawkers, the motherfucking Death Set. This is my favorite of their songs, left off the Sepomana Sampler in the station due to gratuitous profanity. Play this shit loud.


Other famous dude, Tobacco, goes on right before the Death Set. His signature brand of psychedelic electronics are made using pre-digital age equipment.


The trio Ghost Ghost includes Middlebury alums Kevin Peckham and Tim Ireland. Kevin was around back when Sepomana was born 11 years ago and has basically done all soundwork since then until last year when he moved to New York and started his band.


Local group Brown Heir grew up in the county of Addison. Since then they've moved to the big city (Burlington) and have been rocking out with their ultra dirty jams. They're opening, so come early to get your dark groove on.


The first 190 people to show up to Sepomana get to see the Bran Flakes perform at the Bunker the following night. According to their website, "Dancing, new videos, a mini-marching band - and MANY more surprises!!!"

Wardicus Wednesdays #7 - We're Back

It's 55 degrees outside which can only mean one thing:

LEGS. I cannot wait for underclassmen to return from island nations that end in 'a' and start showing off their newly bronzed bipeds! Soon Battell Beach is going to be covered by youngsters trying to soak up the ever increasing rays of sun. Of course, they won't realize that while doing so, their backs are getting covered in mud. Afterall, It's only March and it's still Vermont. So while you're weathering out that final snowstorm, here's songs to get you ready for summertime.

ww7



The first song is Countdown (Sick for the Big Sun) by French pop masters Phoenix. These guys basically wrote the soundtrack for my summer three years ago with their debut, It's Never Been Like That. Their new release, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, is slightly more disco, but equally as bubblegum .



Next up, we've got Now We Can See by The Thermals. I've loved this band for a long time now with their unique brand of talk-rock that makes me miss Thompson. (I never thought I'd say that.)



Hells fucking YES. Metric. It's been four long years since the last real Metric release and I definitely have not been disappointed with Fantasies. Granted, nothing can touch OWU, but this will definitely piss off my roommates for the next few weeks when I wake up to the album on full blast every morning. Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to officially propose to Emily Haines. Emily, you are the coolest older woman in the world and are incredibly sexy (in a weirdly Canadian way).



Next up is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Zero is the first single from new album It's Blitz!. They've traded their Sonic Youth sound from Fever to Kill for more synths ala Blondie, but that doesn't mean it's not good. They've managed a nice balance between punk and pop. So if you were disappointed by Show Your Bones, don't worry. The YYYs are as cool and as rockin as ever.



Finally, we've got The Decemberists with The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid. For the new album, The Hazards of Love, hyperliterate frontman Colin Meloy wrote a rock opera, casting Becky Stark (Lavender Diamond) as Margaret, the doomed protagonist, Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) as a forest queen (appearing in the song) and featuring Jim James, Robyn Hitchcock,and Rebecca Gates. Listen closely and you might hear Comfortably Numb on The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned) or The Who's Tommy all over the fucking album. Rather than rip-off these giants of the 70's, the Decemberists channel them, crafting a narrative that's enjoyably poppy, but also get my head banging every time Chris Funk starts shredding and the Forest Queen starts belting. If you've not been listening to this album on repeat for the past few weeks, get on it. Oh, and for a bonus: NPR has the whole thing live at SXSW.

Wardicus Wednesday #6 - Library Relics

In an effort to be remembered as the music managers who finally got the record library under control, Rachael and I have been spending a lot of time going through the stacks trying to figure ways of better organizing the labyrinth. While not actually succeeding and only finding my way out of the depths by firelight fueled by Ben Kweller albums, I did manage to find some relics of an era of music long since passed. Here they are:





Boards of Canada released their Hi Scores EP in 1996 before any of their major record releases. While not their first record, it is a nice melding of their (at the time) developing sound with some of their influences such as Warp labelmate Aphex Twin.





DC trio and distortion masters Trans Am take simple rock motifs from established bands of the past and expand them. There's something mechanistic about their songs but in a way that makes you believe that the coming robot revolution may be a good thing.





The Last Great Wilderness is the final album by C86ers The Pastels. It is the soundtrack for the David Mackenzie movie of the same name. Bleak and distant, it separates itself from The Pastels normal sound in order to recreate the winter highlands of the band's home as portrayed in the movie. (Also, the movie is pretty good.)





Finding this album apart from other Sleater-Kinney works and refiling it correctly was my personal high point of the work in the library. (Though I realized that people need to play it more and marked it my pick of the month on the shelves in studio.) I remember when the album came out six years ago and, damn, that makes me feel out of touch. At the time I liked it because I was angry and I wanted to rebel and shit and the songs, like, meant something. I still like it because I'm angry but also because every song is perfectly crafted.

Wardicus Wednesdays #5 - Thursday

I'm back from the north country (where the internet is a public access terminal in the local library) and I brought some music with me.




I know that the Olympics are in China and that it's 2008 not 1980, but Moscow Olympics rock. The five piece from the Philippines has a little bit of twee, a little bit of shoegaze and a little bit of straight up pop. See also: Asobi Sesku, Galaxie 500





New Cansei de Ser Sexy. If the last album was about alcohol and making love to Death From Above, this album is about hard drugs and fucking to HEALTH. It's still dancey as all hell, but it's harder and dirtier and riot grrrler. See also: Ratatat, Le Tigre





Ra Ra Riot are good at chamber pop. They may not be the best, that title belongs to the band's influences -the heavy hitters of indie rock, but it's summer and they're fun. Perfect for short walks (or drives) to the park/beach/liquor store. See also: Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend





Sennen is about BIG. Big noise, big spaces, big walls. They group is from Norfolk and it shows: they sound like ambient, nu-gaze and post-rock all rolled into one. I'm really digging these guys right now. See also: Mogwai, Verve

Wardicus Wednesdays #4 - Wicker Park Fest.

First, I don't care that it's not Wednesday. I like alliteration. I just finished my summer class, so give me a break if I'm a little behind this week. On to the post.

There are three major reasons why Wicker Park Fest is better than Pitchfork.
1) The price - I paid $30 to go to one day of Pitchfork. Wicker Park Fest was only $5 and that was a donation. I only paid it because I'm a good person.
2) The location - Wicker Park Fest is only 3 L stops from my apartment, while Pitchfork is 45 minutes on a crowded train. Also, it's smaller so you don't have all those out-of-towners coming to flood the streets with their dunks and deep-v's.
3) Post-rock - Wicker Park Fest loves less accessible music like math rock, post-rock, post-math-rock, neo-post-rock, and also Prefuse 73. While Pitchfork had the heavy hitters, Wicker Park Fest had the goodies. For example:




Nomo blends funk, afro-beat, and free jazz wonderfully. Influenced by the likes of Sun Ra and even played a cover of "Rocket Number Nine" during their set. The band has not one, not two, but three drummers. And a tenor sax player who resembled Bruce Willis. What more could you want?





Daedalus is an eccentric dj who performs his sets dressed in Edwardian attire (notice the mutton chops). He's shy and frequently shows humility when the audience cheers his mixing of 40's & 50's samples with homemade beats and pop lyrics. He's an extensive record collector, a Ninja Tunes spinster, and all-around boogie maestro.





The homegrown Chicago band Joan of Arc was formed by Tim Kinsella in the wake of the break of of Cap'n Jazz. Using subtle electronics and sampling techniques, the band is often described as "difficult." I don't get it. It's pop music.




Here we have another Chicago band, Maps & Atlases. They do math rock. I wish I had gotten video of the performance instead of just this picture because it's funny to watch hipsters try and shuffle in 7/8.





Finally for some post-rock. Red Sparowes (sic) consists of members of a number of other musical projects, most notably Isis. They are set apart from the rest of the post-rock clan by their extremely long song titles. I mean, this song's full title is "The Great Leap Forward Poured Down Upon Us One Day Like A Mighty Storm Suddenly And Furiously Blinding Our Senses." Damn. These guys were loud and dirty. My ears are still ringing.

Wardicus Wednesdays #3 - Covers

For whatever reason, I've been listening to a lot of covers over the course of the summer. In lieu of any new music, here's the best of them:



Dan Rossen - Too Little, Too Late
Dan Rossen lends his haunting vocal talent to Jo Jo's Too Little, Too Late. According to Pitchfork, he recorded the song for fellow Grizzly Bear member Ed Droste's 29th birthday. Too cute.



Mobius Band - Digital Love
Former Sepomaners Mobius Band released the Love Will Reign Supreme EP last Valentine's Day full of covers of songs about love. The last track is the beautifully arranged electroacoustic version of Daft Punk's Digital Love.



Final Fantasy - Peach, Plum, Pear
This version of Peach, Plum, Pear is off of Final Fantasy's Young Canadian Mothers 7". Notice the volume change at 1:56 when Owen Pallett moves closer to the mic. Meh, it doesn't bother me as much as Joanna Newsom's voice.


Dr. Dog - Heart It Races
Dr. Dog covering Architecture in Helsinki. God, I love this. I've listened to it ten times a day, everyday, since the beginning of summer.



Math the Band - Zelda Theme
Math the Band's Cover EP is available for free download on their myspace. It's chock-full of 90's greats. Of course the song I remember the most from the 90's is the Zelda theme (I probably heard it for a month straight while (re)beating Ocarina of Time.)

Wardicus Wednesday - #1

I've decided to revive an old tradition here on the blog and bring you weekly updates on what I've been listening to, what I should be listening to, and what I hear at parties.





This is all over the blogs these days. The kids just can't get enough of it, and I can see why. The album is filled with distorted riffs coming from squeaky guitars and sometimes there are even squeakier violins. Throw in some distant vocals and you've got lo-fi mastery that owes more to the Velvet Underground circa The Velvet Underground than Pavement.






This is Tape, and they're the best new thing I've heard in a long time. If Octopus Project, Port Blue, Explosions in the Sky, and Talk Talk spent a night on barbiturates and lots of wine, Tape would be the love child that rose incarnate from the resulting orgy like Venus from the sea. They blend instrumentation and electronic noise together quietly, powerfully, and transplendently.






Everyone should know these guys. They just put out a new album entitled Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust. Say that ten times fast. No, try it in English: With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly. It's different than any other Sigur Ros album you've heard, but when was the last time Sigur Ros put out an album that wasn't. I'm assuming by now that everyone has heard the single Gobbledigook, so here's something else.






The incredibly blurry picture above is of Dan Friel. He is a member of Brooklyn-based noise rock band Parts & Labor, but I'm going to write about his new solo album. Friel plays keyboard and guitar and sings but does all them through every sort of comb filter and vocoder imaginable. Sounds kind of like Dan Deacon, but less dancey and more... well... noisy.




And finally, a little anecdote. Yesterday, returning from class, I stopped off at the Whole Foods in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. I only needed a few things: some soymilk, yoghurt, peanut butter, &c.. I was in the dairy section looking for yoghurt, but there was a man between myself and it. However, I was also between him and the milk that he needed. We met each other's eyes, did that thing where one person steps out of the way, but the other moves too, and kind of shuffled around each other. It was awkward, but I got my yoghurt and Andrew Bird got his milk.

I don't actually have the song I was going to share, but it's Don't Wait For the Needle To Drop by Dosh. It features Bird plucking some nasty beats. Hypemachine it or something.