LIve! From 14th Street! with Art in Odd Places and Masterdisk

Hey there, just wanted to let everyone know about this project happening tomorrow on 14th and 10th ave, NYC. At 2PM in the park between the west side highway and 10th ave, right in the center of the grassy hill there we will be cutting a record, live.

A while back I went to Masterdisk in midtown to check out their mastering facilites and learn a little bit about what goes into cutting the lathe master that gets plated and stamps out the records that we buy in a store. Checking out the lathe cutting room with Alex and watching him cut a record in front of us was pretty amazing. After seeing a tweet from them around the same time about wishing they could throw the lathe cutter into a truck and cut a live record...well that got us thinking...couldn't we live stream a performance to the lathe cutting room a few blocks away instead?

At the same time Art in Odd Places was having their annual public art project across 14th Street and having worked with that great festival before we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to attempt this under the umbrella of AiOP with the help of Masterdisk and 4 great bands.

Since this project is about communication and what happens in the translation between technologies we then wanted to tie in some of those recording landmarks with the bands pieces.

Matt asked Kevin from Animal Hospital to work with the earliest recorded audio from Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph. A demented lo-fi scratchy tune from possibly Édouard-Léon himself.

I talked to Pat from Ashcan Orchestra to listen to the first radio broadcast off the coast of MA in 1906 to see what they'll come up with.

Finally we gave our friends in Soccer Mom (10" out on sweaters and pearls!) an image of the voyager disk for inspiration.

Matt suggested we could go one step further and call in a band to play over the phone and that's when we thought of The Hussy in WI.

The three bands will play live for each side of the record and Matt and our trusty technicians/photographers Jim Manning and Rob Coshow will capture it all, while I'm at Masterdisk with engineer Alex DeTurk making sure it's coming through and watching the record being cut. When it's finished I'll jump in a cab and head down to the park to listen to the record with the bands and anyone who decides to show up.

I'll be posting pieces of the final audio and some video of the performance in the coming weeks. I'm excited, the weather looks like it's going to hold out, and it should be a pretty crazy spectacle on a Saturday afternoon. Go check out these bands, they're all super great guys for working with us, and I hope it's as exciting for them.

HLH Show at Gallery Kayafas....Look mom, I made a single!

Just wanted to take a second out of 7Inches everyday to mention the Harvey Loves Harvey show at gallery Kayafas in Boston.
HLH is the art collaboration of my friend Matt and I.
We're showing a bunch of work based on music related actions like listening to Sonny Rollins' album The Bridge, on the Williamsburg Bridge, reenacting the London Calling album cover at the Trader Joes's where the Palladium used to be...plus a live performance by Soccer Mom, who have graciously come up with entirely new material based off a piece we did for the Sol Lewitt show at Mass MoCa. We haven't even heard it yet, it will probably only ever exist performed at our show...unless we press more singles some day

I'm glad I finally had an excuse to cut a real 7", thanks to single piece slate, they came out great, they did black and clear, which I've never seen, and they are thicker than the normal lathe's I have. We pressed a couple of 7" of the field recordings listening to Sonny and our original "Would Sol Lewitt approve?"...as with all art, they are priceless....well you can buy them.... through the gallery.

It actual got me to get serious about releasing a real single that people can actually buy through 7inches the blog...so be forewarned, the label is starting soon. The first release is going to be be awesome and is still a surprise, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Thanks.

Interview podcast with Boston's Soccer Mom

I talked with William Scales and Dan Parlin of Soccer Mom a few weeks back after catching a show of theirs in Boston.
Their "Bill Cosby in Glamorous Chains" single has really grown on me and I wanted to find out the mysterious history of Soccer Mom, some of the gear they were using for that massive, overwhelming sound and of course why they chose the lowly 7" single for their first release.
On the way to that very show in fact, my friend Matt and I hatched a plan to see if they would be a part of an art show we'll be putting on January 21st at Kayafas Gallery:

What Are We Doing? is on view January 21 through February 20, 2011 at Gallery Kayafas. Works on view include a selection of 10 photographs and 14 videos from the series of intervention projects called 14 Actions For 14th Street commissioned by Art In Odd Places in 2009. Also on view are The Bridge {refrain} created for The Work Office project at the DUMBO Arts Festival, which features a set of custom 7" albums recorded on site, and Would Sol LeWitt Approve? -- a musical performance of LeWitt's rules for Conceptual Art. There will be screenings of the short film What Are We Saying? during the run of the exhibition.

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Gallery Kayafas is located at 420 Harrison Ave in Boston

Soccer Mom, among others, will be making an appearance and reinterpreting, Would Sol LeWitt Approve?... bringing both of my favorite things in the world together.
A recording of that performance will probably make it's way onto a 7" in the future...it was only a matter of time...

Download the interview here. (MP3 29min)