“Thank you for reading about all of our deaths over the past year and a half!” the band says in an official statement. “This is not a hoax. We’ve decided to take The Chopping Channel concept to its logical conclusion by ‘productizing’ an actual band member. It is also a celebration of the degree to which no idea in art was ever off-limits to Don, and offers a literal piece of him, and of his audio art, for the listener to repurpose and reuse. We are pretty sure he would have wanted it this way.”
The Chopping Channel is the ninth volume in a series of albums compiled of edited recordings from Negativland’s long-running live-mix radio show, Over The Edge. It’ll be released on Oct. 21.
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You can listen to A Seat At The Table below, and check out Microphone Check’s 2014 interview with Solange.
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To love Turnstile — born in the suburbs of D.C. and Baltimore, with an assist from Columbus, Ohio — is to know and accept the big, dumb riffs of bands like Rage Against The Machine, Shelter and even 311. Last year’s Nonstop Feeling built off the band’s singles and EPs, splitting the difference between an aggressive hardcore-punk mentality and a mile-wide-grin melodic sensibility — and, more importantly, playing with its ’90s roots.
Before Turnstile begins work on its debut album for Roadrunner Records, the band’s releasing an EP on its own label, Pop Wig. This is the freewheeling and heavy hardcore the band’s honed to great effect in such a short time, with shout-along choruses and grooves that do more than just open up the pit.
“It felt really good making these songs,” the band tells NPR. “There’s so many inspiring individuals creating things or just being humans, and this singles EP was just a reflection on the importance of letting those things or people just inspire you and experiencing things fully; no physical, sexual, musical genre, world barriers.”
We’re premiering the B-side of the Move Thru Me EP, and for convenience’s sake, the A-side is right below it. The EP closes with a cover of Give‘s “F*** Me Blind,” featuring Petal’s Kiley Lotz on backing vocals; it’s a raucously heavy and fun track about breaking down societal notions on gender and sexual norms. The band adds, “Give from Washington, D.C., rocks ass.”
Move Thru Me comes out Sept. 16 on Pop Wig. Turnstile goes on tour in late October.
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1. Even Magic Falters
“A few years ago, I kept getting sick. I tried all kinds of things to help improve my health, like herbal steams and Kundalini yoga classes. Sometimes, I felt like I was imbibing potions or concocting spells. Despite all my efforts, nothing felt like it was working. I ended up having this realization that things happen to the body that are beyond our control. Meditating on mortality reminded me of mystical stories, like the quest for the fountain of youth and encounters with wizards. That led me to read a story about Merlin. I was surprised to learn that his infatuation with Lady of the Lake led to his downfall. Magicians and wizards are often portrayed as invincible beings, but reading about their weaknesses showed a more relatable and human aspect to these supernatural characters.”
2. Your Bower
“After watching a David Attenborough special on bowerbirds, I felt compelled to write a song about their whimsical behavior. Male bowerbirds build twig-like caves and decorate them with all kinds of found objects. It’s fascinating that they tediously weave these complex designs, all in hopes of attracting a mate. I see correlation between the bowerbird’s craft and my own songwriting, as we both use song paired with intricate structure to lure in listeners.”
3. Kapunkah
“‘Kapunkah’ means ‘thank you’ in Thai. It was one of the first words I learned how to say while traveling in Thailand. Although I couldn’t speak Thai, I wanted to be able to express gratitude when interacting with people. While visiting a small island in the Andaman Sea, my friends and I met some locals who took us on a series of memorable adventures. This was such an enriching trip, and it left a positive impact on my spirit. I came up writing this festive song as a way to give thanks to everyone who took part in these vibrant encounters.”
4. Ocean
“Water is a recurrent theme throughout this album. It’s such a powerful and transformative source of energy. I spent some time contemplating bodies of water and tried to apply their attributes to my own life. For example, ponds create self-contained habitats, so I’d use that imagery when focusing on my own self-development. Glaciers move at their own pace, which I’d keep in mind while practicing patience. These musings helped me find grounding when I would feel unsettled about things. I ended up turning these thoughts into a song about a wandering sailor. The sailor wonders what it would be like to belong elsewhere, but in their heart knows that they’re right where they should be.”
5. Calm Canary of the Arctic Sea
“One time, I read this article about a beluga whale that learned how to imitate the human voice. It inspired me to write a spin-off story where the beluga whale develops the ability to communicate to humans but is viewed as a spectacle. From there, the song explores the ideas of consciousness and existence. As fun as it is to marvel about extraterrestrial life throughout the universe, it’s heartbreaking to realize how destructive we are with life on Earth. This song channels the helplessness I feel when acknowledging the continuous damage our planet faces from human impact.
“The beluga whale is called the ‘canary of the sea’ due to its high-pitched chatter. By using this nickname, I’m able to allude to the phrase ‘canary in a coal mine,’ where canaries where used to detect environmental hazards. I wanted the beluga whale to represent an innocent messenger that could warn humans about their dangerous habits.”
6. Fourth Son
“In English heraldry, the first son inherited the family estate, while the second and third son went to work in the church as priests. The fourth son was left to carve out his own line of work. His cadency symbol was the legless martlet, symbolizing restlessness and the inability to settle due to the lack of a designated role.
“While I was working on my first album, I really identified with the concept of the fourth son. I was trying to find my own path as a musician, but felt like I wasn’t making enough progress or meeting people’s expectations. Instead of pursuing a full-time job, I took on various gigs that offered flexible schedules so that I could focus on music. Sometimes I felt looked down upon because I didn’t have a prominent position, but I knew that I had to pursue my musical endeavors. I faced a lot of external and internal challenges along the way, but I ended up covering so much ground and accomplished a lot of ambitious projects.”
7. Alexander
“Once I had this vivid dream that I was a young mother that witnessed the accidental drowning of my toddler. I woke up feeling an immense wave of grief. Later on that day, while walking along the Potomac River, I couldn’t help but recall the visceral imagery from the dream. I took a break to sit by the water and began piecing together scenes from the dream through song. If I could interpret this dream, it’d probably stem from my uncertainty around the idea of parenthood. I’m old enough to be a mother, but I’m not sure I’m ready to handle that responsibility.”
8. Will-o-the-wisp
“Last spring, my boyfriend and I were both planning respective solo hiking trips. Even though we were excited, there was some worry in the back of my head. What if we came across some conflict in the woods? I tried to rationalize that problems can arise anywhere in life, and reminded myself that fear is a present obstacle that can keep you pursuing new experiences. It was right around then that I came across the concept of the will-o-the-wisp. According to folklore, will-o-the-wisps are glowing, supernatural orbs that appear in swamps and forests at night. Known to be mischievous or even malevolent, will-o-the-wisps often lure travelers off their paths with their hypnotizing glow, only to abandon them in the dark. These troublesome spirits felt like the perfect symbol for the anxiety I was having around solo hiking.”
9. Legend of the Neighborhood
“Aaron Brown and I met in high-school guitar class, immediately bonding and developing a close friendship through music. When we graduated high school, we both bought our dream guitars. I got a nylon Cordoba and he bought a Dimebag Darrell electric guitar. It was the first and only check he ever wrote, as he died shortly after.
“When I heard the news, I went to a gathering at his parents’ house. As people were pouring out memories of Aaron, someone said, ‘He was a legend of the neighborhood, always walking that black dog around.’ When I got home, I started writing a song about Aaron as a way to process my emotions. That line that I overheard really stuck out and became the introduction to a little a cappella ditty, which in due time morphed into a groovy track celebrating his exuberant spirit.”
10. Paint-chipped Windowsill
“The lyrics for this song were originally intended for something that my friend wrote. He had this melancholic guitar track and asked if I could come up with something to accompany it. It reminded me of waking up and watching a snowstorm unfold. We never got to put that song together, but I carried those lyrics with me for years. I was just about done putting songs together for Spirit House when I came up with my own guitar part for those words. It felt appropriate to wrap up the album with this stripped-down song.”
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1. Sucker’s Shangri-La
“I’m singing to a friend about their struggle with addiction, both singing to them and for them. The writhing is withdrawal. The vacillation is between health and sobriety and community on the one side and the familiar comfort and self-destruction inherent in substance addiction on the other. In the beginning of a person’s relationship with a substance, it does appear as a kind of Shangri-La. In the later stages, any addict knows they’ve been suckered. This could be about a destructive relationship, too.”
2. Ondine
“I like the interpretation that I’m admitting to and begging forgiveness for having betrayed a lover, but for me this is the offer of an extension of safety and protection to a person who’s in a bad relationship either with family or a domineering lover. ‘I know you’re suffering now, but if you can wait until we get a window, I’ll steal you away from this place and bring you to a better one.’ This was the first song the band finished from the record, and it set a tone for the kind of warmth and physicality we decided to bring to the rest of the music.”
3. To Die in L.A.
“Somebody doesn’t have to be your steady to break your heart. There’s almost a type of person I’ve been drawn to in my life — reckless, charming, beautiful in their way — and I’ve been that person, too. This kind of person seems to be almost impossibly alive. You can’t help but love them, even when they screw you. Part of loving them is recognizing that the world we live in will eat them alive. Sometimes these people live and die on the screen for all of to us love and for all of us to mourn.”
4. Quo Vadis
“This narrator is straight up saying, ‘I can’t be counted on.’ They’re in love, but they know that love and betrayal aren’t mutually exclusive. This person is both a narcissist and a realist. Time is a hook on a line; we get trapped in the past and in the present. Everything is special and nothing is special — it’s a drop in the ocean and it’s one in a million. All of these songs are based in personal experience, and in the one I based this on, I was definitely the narcissist. Maybe I wasn’t this awful, but then again, maybe I was and this is my cowardly way of admitting it.”
5. Your Heart Still Beating
“In a short span of months, several people passed away before their time. I was very close with none of them, but in each case, close to someone they’d known. I know how consuming that grief is, and how purposeless it feels, how emotions wash over you one after another and all you can do at all is let them come, and trust your friends and loved ones telling you that though it’ll never stop hurting, eventually it will hurt less. This song came out of the desire to comfort those people in a way I know isn’t really possible.”
6. Electric Current
“I have in a note about this song that it’s about ‘the exquisite and sometimes tenuous connections of the multiply disenfranchised.’ The love between them is simultaneously very passionate and under constant threat as a result of their lives being perceived as threats to the status quo. Again, this could be about a romantic relationship but that isn’t how I see it. I feel the person singing here is a bit of an asshole, if a charming, swaggering one, but only because that’s who they’ve become in order to defend themselves: gold-encrusted, silver-tongued, electric current personified.”
7. I Am the Earth
“When we wrote the first version, I’d wanted to write the first half as an apology that transitioned from something honest to something passive-aggressive and then finally to something aggressive and entirely unapologetic. Months later, working on a lyric for the final version, the idea of trying to embody that character and that stance was stressful, even repulsive. I imagined myself as isolated as possible, as a planet unto myself floating in space, and the inescapable amassed things from my life as just debris that had gathered around me due to natural forces. It’s essentially a very emotional letting-go of guilt.”
8. Non Grata
“‘Baby, let’s float up to heaven’ is a very dark joke about a suicide pact. I’ve dealt with depression all my life, and joking about it is a way for me to feel like I have power over it. I’m addressing a friend who I know to be the same way. I was thinking about the ridiculous, bold lyrics Thomas Pynchon wrote for his novels, using that to over-amplify and dress up lyrics that are essentially a letter from me to my friend telling him that I understand and I love him and fuck everybody else.”
9. Company
“Like most of the songs on the record, when we started writing this, the music came long before the lyrics. Surprisingly though, the lyrics for this came very quickly. I was trying to capture as best I could the rabid feeling of being trapped in a social gathering where every smile is a bald-faced lie, where you wouldn’t be surprised if everybody tore their masks off to reveal their lizard faces underneath. Maybe it’s just me but I often feel like our efforts at pretense have completely supplanted human connection in all but a few places in our lives, and in times when I don’t have access to those sacred places, I quickly start to feel insane.”
10. Société Anonyme
“Two books I read in the not-too-distant past (Infinite Jest and Within the Context of No-Context) both deal in a beautiful and devastating way with how television and entertainment have perverted human connection. I feel like art can be an anti-dote to that, but the best anti-dote is human connection, which again can be hard to find. The solution is my opinion is to bring human connection and the lifting of the veil to the people you love and also, if you have it in you, everyone you can reach.”
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With a video shot in a freight elevator in Oakland behind a desk made of a steel slab and a work bench, this soulful character won our hearts. Xavier Dphrepaulezz is a singer from Oakland with a passion that felt undeniable. Though I watched thousands of videos, the moment I heard his voice and saw such conviction to his song I thought, “Wow, I think this guy could win.” I wasn’t alone: The other judges — Robin Hilton, Valerie June, Reggie Watts, John Congleton and Thao Nguyen — also found Fantastic Negrito and his band compelling.
In the past few days, we’ve learned more about this musician’s life and story. It wasn’t part of why we picked him, but it is amazing. You’ll hear more in an interview with him on All Things Considered tonight, but here’s a bit of that story, from the official Tiny Desk Concert Contest announcement:
Fantastic Negrito calls himself a musician reborn. As a young man, the Oakland singer taught himself to play just about every instrument he could get his hands on. But after making a record that failed to take off, he felt his confidence and artistry suffer; disenchanted with music, he simply quit. The years that followed brought major life changes: a near-deadly car accident and the resulting coma, intense rehabilitation, marriage and the birth of his son. Now, renewed creative energy has spawned the musical project that is Fantastic Negrito. He chose the name, he says, as “a celebration of blackness. The ‘Fantastic’ is self-explanatory; the ‘Negrito’ is a way to open blackness up to everyone, making it playful and international.” Judges Bob Boilen, Robin Hilton, John Congleton, Valerie June, Reggie Watts and Thao Nguyen agreed that this soulful, unbridled performance, captured at a makeshift desk in an Oakland freight elevator, stood out from the crowd.
You can watch Fantastic Negrito’s submission video here right now, and we’ll have more from him soon. On a date in late February, this band will join us at NPR and perform a Tiny Desk Concert. We’ll put that concert online around March 9. They’ll then have the pleasure of playing as part of CouchTrippin’ to Austin, a show put on by Lagunitas Brewing Co., which sponsored the contest.
Deciding on a winner wasn’t easy. People put their hearts and souls, along with a desk of their choosing, into the nearly 7,000 submissions. Some did it to win, some did it for fun. What I loved most is that regardless of motivation, people got together to do something they may not have ever done, to create something unique and something they’ll be able to share with friends and family forever. I think of all the desks dragged into nature, onto hilltops, into and around oceans, through offices and kitchens, classrooms and science labs. Friends gathered and made something memorable, and that’s my favorite part of this, our very first Tiny Desk Concert Contest.
Thank you all for participating — my eyes were red not from watching all those videos but from tears of joy.
Congratulations to Fantastic Negrito, from Bob Boilen and all of us here around the Tiny Desk!
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All of which is to say: When Dessa reworks her songs with the help of Minnesota’s VocalEssence choir, it’s not a surprise, so much as another fresh adventure for an artist who’s made a career out of them. Here she is, performing her 2013 song “Skeleton Key” with VocalEssence at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis on Oct. 26:
And here’s Dessa, again with VocalEssence at the same show, performing a new, as-yet-unreleased song called “The Good Fight”:
“I make my living as an MC and a singer with Doomtree Records, a rap label,” Dessa writes via email. “But as a little kid, I didn’t listen to a lot of rap. When I was a toddler, my dad was a lute player and the music I heard around the house was 300 years old. The sound of that sacred music, often melancholic, informs the pop music that I make and perform now. I’m particularly fond of voices moving in dynamic harmony, and to achieve that sound on my solo records, I layer my own voice a dozen times.
“When Philip Brunelle, the artistic director of VocalEssence choir, asked if I wanted to work together, my first thought was, ‘When do I tell him I can’t read music?’ My second thought was, ‘Say yes before you tell him you can’t read music.’
“If you’re not in the choral scene (and I’m just starting to learn my way around), suffice it to say that VocalEssence is a big deal; it’s an internationally respected group. I scored major points at Thanksgiving when I shared the news of our collaboration.
“Months later, I performed two pieces with VocalEssence. The first is a choral version of my track ‘Skeleton Key’ (thanks to Andy Thompson for this arrangement, and to Lazerbeak for the original beat). The second is a new song called “The Good Fight,” which Andy and I also worked on together, sitting side-by-side at his piano while his toddler looked on.”
Dessa appears on a new album with Doomtree, All Hands, which comes out Jan. 27.
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I can only hope people don’t sleep on Gunn’s next album, Way Out Weather, which is due out Oct. 7. Then again, given the strength of its first single, “Milly’s Garden,” it might be a little tougher to doze this time around. Gunn’s virtuosic guitar work is still the main attraction, but his backing band of session players gives the song a Rolling Stones-circa-Exile on Main Street vibe. The sick instrumental jam that unfolds after about two and a half minutes is simultaneously earthy and epic.
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This video is all about perspective; the illusions are real, so to speak, and that’s what makes this jaw-dropping. Perspective images such as something called the Necker cube, a flat line drawing that looks three-dimensional but isn’t, make my eyes pop. And like all things in the original music video, it makes me question perception and think about how your perspective can dictate understanding. Which of course is what the song is about.
This behind-the-scenes video will expand your perception even more. In an email, Damien Kulash, the singer for OK Go and also the co-director for the video, told us, “I think I love this [making-of] video as much as the music video itself. It shows how much more intense and complicated the choreography was off-screen than it was on-screen. And I love watching the incredible team. They are the rock stars, such an amazing group of people. I already miss spending 20-hour days with them all.” The other directors of the original music video include Aaron Duffy and Bob Partington. The one-take video was done on a single handheld camera, with 28 different illusions set up in the giant workspace in Brooklyn. The setup took about three weeks to build, involving over 50 people. Tim Norwind, the bassist for the band, thinks this was the most difficult of their videos to make — not just because he had to shave half his beard — due to the choreography and the nine costume changes the band had to make in real time.
The song “The Writing’s On The Wall” is the first single from the band’s fourth and forthcoming album, Hungry Ghosts, coming out on Oct. 14.
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Before we get any further, if you’re not familiar with The Chills or the original “Pink Frost,” please stop what you’re doing right now and listen to this.
Led by songwriter Martin Phillipps, the indie-rock band from Dunedin, New Zealand, helped kick-off the “kiwi rock” movement — and arguably indie rock as we know it — in the early 1980s. Bands like The Clean, The Verlaines and The Bats took the D.I.Y. punk ethos of the late ’70s and applied it to melodies that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Kinks record. (A similar musical evolution was happening in the U.S., with R.E.M. leading the way.)
“Pink Frost” was recorded in 1982 but released two years later, after the death of the song’s drummer Martyn Bull from leukemia, so Phillipps’ distraught lyrics (“She won’t move and I’m holding her hand”) have always felt especially melancholy. Paired with the song’s signature ethereal guitar and motorik drumming, it’s a haunting experience that still stops me in my tracks.
Now, 30 years later, The Chills will soon release a new album. The band recorded an updated version of “Pink Frost” while in the studio, to reflect the way the band currently performs it in a live setting.
If you’re a Chills fan, what do you think of re-recording a classic like “Pink Frost”? If you’re new to the band, which version do you prefer?
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