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DEVENDRA BANHART + ENTRANCE
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Popmatters.com | by Alexandra Chassanoff10 February 2003: The Choppin Block — Boston Live ReviewDo you remember the first time you heard the blues? Was it a life-changing experience? I remember the first time I heard Billie Holiday. It was the summer of 1991 and I had been fascinated, in the manner that we are with events from our adolescence, with the conflict between African-Americans and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I was a freshman in high school and had been only minimally exposed to anything outside of hip-hop (thanks to my friends), top 40 (thanks to the radio), and the Descendents or the Pixies (thanks to my older brother's record collection). It wasn't hard for me to make the leap from hip-hop artists like Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth or EPMD since the genre was already chockfull of samples from old soul or blues tracks. But nothing could prepare me for the feelings that flooded through me upon hearing "Strange Fruit" for the first time that summer. It was in the background of a video montage constructed to summarize the events of that summer. That day the genre of "the blues" was consciously defined for me upon hearing the emotion......
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Angels of Light | Everything Is Good Here | Review
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Wire Magazine/March 2003 | Tom Ridgeit looks forward rather than backThis is a troubled record. It broods, it glowers menacingly. It possesses an intensity which brings Michael Gira around full circle, back to Swans, even as it builds on the foundations of Angels of Light¹s earlier work. That¹s to say: it looks forward rather than back. Gira sings in a variety of voices, from a weary, cracked croon to a declamatory shout, from considered musings to rising hysteria. The production has broadened to encompass massive surges in sound, contrasted with intricate, interwoven melodies. It begins with ³palisades², a damaged lullaby of a dirge that sounds, paradoxically, merciless and tender. ³Do you see how they ruined your mind? Do you see how they wasted your like?² Gira sings. ³All Souls¹ Rising has an enormous, pulsating sound, ruptured by the singer¹s bitter, preaching drawl, as it builds to a frenzy of self-flagellation. ³Kosinski² casts him as a narrator describing his obsession: ³When the light shows through your window/I can see you there in the mirror/touching blond hair that¹s a river of translucent, liquid light.² Thematically, it recalls ³Evangeline², from How I Loved You, with Gira an unseen voyeur describing the object of......
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Devendra Banhart | video
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MP4.com2 live video clips from his ongoing world tourNow available on MP4.com Charles C. Leary Michigan State...
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Angels of Light | Everything is Good Here... | Review
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All Music Guide | Ned RaggettAMG rating: ****Having created some of the strongest music in his life on the previous Angels of Light album, on Everything is Good Here Michael Gira maintains the winning streak but explores a newer, more controlled delicacy. It's hardly a new move for him, of course, but in ways this album, the third in the Angels of Light guise, finds his extremes of harrowing, wrenching music and performance and a calmer, almost mystic approach more integrated than ever before. The drama in his vocals and arrangements are more than even implicit instead of directly blasting, to beautiful and powerful effect. "Palisades" sets this tone from the start, incorporating everything from backing choirs and dank, dark riffs to the quietest of arrangements into one cohesive performance. Other songs that hit the balance just right include "Nations," with its quiet, persistent vibes part a counterbalance to the more insistent guitars and piano, and the incredible "Sunset Park," words delivered as a steady mantra over a surging slow burn performance that feels like a triumphant march. Gira's gift for ritualistic theatricality certainly hasn't left him, as even a casual listen to the increasingly frenetic "All Souls' Rising" —......
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Michael Gira and The Angels of Light
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Slugmag | by Lincoln LysagerInterview / Show previewFor over 20 years, Michael Gira has been creating works of lasting importance and integrity. As founder of the seminal and constantly evolving Swans, he established a reputation for creating some of the most overbearing, honest and moving music to emerge from the East Coast “noise scene.†In addition to this, he has been active in a variety of other endeavors as a producer for other musicians and as an author, sending out ripples of unease and critical acclaim with the release of The Consumer, a collection of short stories and prose which was later followed by a spoken-word disc. Michael was born in the 50s, the son of some privilege, and his early years were spent in L.A.—quite fitting when considering the modern malaise and urban conditions that spawned the themes that run through his work. “I suppose moving to New York City way back in 1979 from L.A. did have an influence on the work I eventually made with Swans, starting in 1981,†he says. “Where I lived at the time—East Village/Lower East Side—was an extremely dangerous, decayed, wasted urban environment…only a few buildings on my block were “officially†occupied by......