Seriously good: Advice from Thelonius Monk

Some sage advice from Jazz genius Thelonius Monk as transcribed by saxophonist and legend in his own right, Steve Lacy.

Vermont Rock Lotto, Nov. 7th @ Monkey House

Matchless Music and the Monkey House proudly present, Rock Lotto @ the Monkey House. (Saturday November 7th, 2009)

$5, proceeds benefit the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program.

Rock Lotto is a unique, collaborative, improvisational, band-in-a-day music extravaganza. Here’s how it works: 25 musicians will get together at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 7th. Musicians are divided equally into five categories and tossed into hats.

1) Drummers 2) Lead Vocal (ideally also plays an instrument) 3) Guitar 4) Bass 5) Grab Bag (could be anything from guitar to accordion to tablas to laptop).

We will draw the lead vocalist names blindly one at a time. Each lead vocalist will then blindly draw one name from the remaining four categories, i.e. the drummer hat, guitar hat, bass hat and grab bag hat. These groups become a band for the day. The five bands then go to their practice spaces and put together a four song, 20 minute set. One of the songs will be a cover song. We will give you a hundred or so cover songs to chose from.

Drummers are required to supply a practice space with a P.A. This is necessary for everything to run smoothly and requires a bit of flexibility and goodwill on everyone’s part. Since my first post on Craigslist, I’ve had some questions about requiring drummers to supply a practice space and PA. Time is of the essence, and breaking down, moving and setting up drums takes a lot of time and effort. Since every band needs a space, we’re trying to make it easier on drummers and give bands enough time to write their set. That said, if you are a drummer and don’t have a space and a PA and are interested in participating, let me know. We’re trying to find extra spaces for the day.

Bands gather back at the Monkey House at 9 p.m. the same day. Musicians will only have to bring their instruments. A backline will be provided at the Monkey House. Drummers, a drum set will be provided. You can bring your own cymbals, however.

Musicians, this is about the most fun you will ever have playing music. It’s like when you started playing in your dad’s garage. Everything is new and exciting and there are endless possibilities and pitfalls. You will play with other musicians whom you never would find yourself in a room with otherwise. The classically trained violinist can play along side a death metal vocalist and a bluegrass banjo picker. Shit can get weird, awesome, or become a train wreck. This is all part of the fun.

Musicians of any style or genre are encouraged to participate. Multi-instrumentalists are especially encouraged. The only firm requirement for participation is that you know how to play your main instrument well. And while two musicians from the same real band can participate in Rock Lotto, no individual Rock Lotto band can have two musicians from the same real band. We want to keep it as random and unrehearsed as possible. Other than that there are no rules.

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN TAKING PART? GOOD! WE NEED MUSICIANS TO SIGN UP NOW. It’s not easy to get a bunch of random musicians together at 10:00 am. It’s damn near impossible, so we need all the help we can get. This will be fun. I promise. And proceeds from ticket sales ($5) will go to the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. To get in on the good times, email rocklottovermont@gmail.com.

Stash Magazine and Matchless Music = Cool Animation and Free MP3s.

Matchless Music is pleased to announce our mix for Stash Magazine’s 61st issue. Get the mix for free with purchase of this month’s Stash Magazine DVD.

Track listing:

1. Leb Laze – “Into the Sunshine”
2. Judi Chicago – “Bad Spell”
3. Tettix – “Dragon Punch”
4. Moped10 – “Zap”
5. Noot D’Noot – “Lifestyle Upgrade”
6. The Goldest – “Sunny D”
7. The Meeks Family – “You Ain’t Done”
8. Long Knives – “Headlong into the Abyss pt. 1″
9. Kasha – “Horizon”
10. David Merson Hess – “Dreampop Chapel”

ABOUT STASH 61…

Stash 61 delivers over two hours of fun and inspiration including the world’s most innovative animaton and VFX projects, Behind the Scenes extras, a 23-minute Music Video Mini-fest PLUS 10 bonus MP3s from Matchless Music.

Nexus directors FX & Mat start us off with an Olympian CG effort for the IOC, Digital Domain and director Carl Erik Rinsch intelligently combine sleek animation and a pristine render for Audi, Toronto’s AXYZ help a little porcelain dude shed a salty tear for Knorr, The Mill demonstrates the dangers of “Different Scents” for Old Spice, and Milan’s Mutado get down and hoody for Diesel before Partizan director Chris Cairns and The Mill cleanse our palettes with his hip/hilarious short film Neurosonics Audio Medical Labs Inc.

Vienna’s Eat My Dear launch the broadcast design section with their new work for Universal Music’s Urban TV, Artillery Design (out of Brighton, UK) keep the pedal to the metal for the FX rebrand and Buenos Aires studios GULA and Hombre.cosa keep MTV Latin America hopping with two new clips.

The mid-section of Stash 61 is a glistening six-pack of visual love including the comic/tragic film fest open from Anima Boutique in Helsinki “Love in the Mountains”, the online film “A Tale of Two Spreads” from London’s Outside Line, the thought-provoking Love_Child short film from Taiwanese students Sheng-Wen Hsiao and Chun-Wang Sun, Bam Studio Films’ cool mixed media short called Voltage, the mechanical/organic clash of Artificial Paradise Inc. from Jean-Paul Frenay and Condor in Belgium, and the epic multi-media “Whale Song” video for Modest Mouse from Nando Costa and Bent Image Lab.

The second half of Stash 61 is a minefield of innovation and surprises: Happycamper and The Chimney Pot stir things up in the Rat suburbs for IF; Buenos Aires Studio Reino make sure the Lucchetti family eating their soup stays wonderfully weird; Frenzy and Firm-Studio in Paris deliver two choice words from Lily Allen to her fellow Londoners; Alphabetical Order and Swiss help Saab “Change Perspective”; Portland’s Oh, Hello give us two fresh looks at the Nike Trainer 1; Asif Mian and 1st Ave Machine grab the sneaker theme and dribble it into the realm of magic realism in their short called ReRun; Glasgow’s Axis Animation adds to their archive of top-end game work with trailers for “Rogue Warrior” and “Brink”; and Italian director Michelle D’Auria honors the genius of Soichiro Honda with a poetic branded film called The Dream Comes True.

The final act of Stash 61 begins with MIAM, a vast visual treat created by five French animation students from the Arles campus of Supinfocom. Germany’s Studio Soi follows with their clever, charming and beautifully rendered narrative short called Engel Zu Fuss.

And we close Stash 61 with a multi-award-winning short masterwork created by Aardman Animations and director Luis Cook. The Pearce Sisters are not your average siblings, and their story is not like anything you’ve seen before.

There are seven BONUS FILMS on 61 each exploring the outer reaches of the music video genre including work for Fiery Furnaces, Tim Fite, Jokeren, Lowstar, Metal on Metal, Monogrenade and Chew Lips.

The BEHIND THE SCENES line-up on 61 offers insightful peeks into Artillery Design’s FX Rebrand, Anima Boutique’s “Love in the Mountains”, Ingo Walde’s “Year of the Gorilla”, 23lunes’ Neositrin spot, and Michele D’Auria’s The Dream Comes True for Honda.

The BONUS MUSIC on Stash 61 is a 10-track explosion of audio goodness from indie music licensing specialists Matchless Music. Grab tunes from Dave Merson Hess, Judi Chicago, Kasha, Leb Laze, Long Knives, Moped10, Noot D’Noot, Tettix, The Goldest and the Meeks Family.

Congrats to Judi Chicago – Creative Loafing 2009 Reader’s Choice Best Electronic Band

For the second year in a row, readers selected Judi Chicago as Atlanta’s Best Electronic Act. Congrats to them. They’ve got a cool new video out as well called Fun City. Check it here:

Judi Chicago – Fun City.

Hobnox Audiotool – super cool Flash based sequencer

Hobnox Audiotool is a free browser based audio production tool that runs on Flash. It’s a really cool and well executed concept, as well as beautifully designed. You can get some nice sounds too.

Free Leb Laze remix of Helado Negro on Asthmatic Kitty records

Leb Laze’s brand new remix of Helado Negro’s “I Wish” has just been released! Go here, scroll down and download “I Wish (Leb Laze Tramp Stamp Remix)” for free. And don’t forget to check out Helado Negro’s full length debut on Asthmatic Kitty (Sufjan Steven’s label)!

Leb Laze in New York Times

LEB LAZE IN THE MIDDLE

Matchless Music artist Leb Laze recently performed with Prefuse 73 at the Sonar Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. The New York Times was there to cover it and snapped a photo of the set. Check out the photo above and the full story here.

Lullatone Melody Design

We’d like to welcome Lullatone to the Matchless Music family. Their music is a beautiful mix of the sublime and the dreamy, perfect floating melodies and understated beauty. Indie music giants Pitchfork.com, have given Lullatone’s albums very favorable reviews, so you know they’re doing something right. Sink into their music here. It’s like sliding into clean white sheets on a late spring morning.

lullatone

More about Lullatone…

The delicate lap-pop project Lullatone came together shortly after Shawn James Seymour moved from his hometown of Louisville, KY, to Nagoya, Japan, with his girlfriend and bandmate, Yoshimi Tomida. The two initially met in an intercultural communications class at the Bellarmine University. At one point during class, the teacher asked the exchange students what they had trouble adjusting to in America. Tomida replied that she was having trouble adjusting to American food, so after class Seymour offered to take her to a local Asian market. They ended up having a picnic, and Seymour moved to Nagoya with her about a year later, where they moved into a tiny apartment. It was there that he was inspired to start writing what he called “tiny songs.” Seymour, who didn’t sleep much at that time, would stay up late composing and recording lullabies for Tomida, making use of whatever he could get his hands on: xylophones, keyboards, music boxes, sine tones, harps, toy drums, ukuleles, cymbals, shakers, wood blocks, pillows, whispers, heartbeats, bubbles, and, as Seymour put it, “a lot of daydreams.” The result was a set of warm, meandering lullabies that came together on Lullatone’s 2003 release Computer Recital. Another album, entitled My Petit Melodies, was released soon after that on the Japanese label Childisc. Little Songs About Raindrops, the band’s third album, was released in 2005. The new release used a wider array of instrumentation than the previous recordings, featuring Tomida’s breathy, childlike vocals and a rich tapestry of organic sounds. 2006’s Plays Pajama Pop Pour Vous found Seymour and Tomida continuing their exploration of shimmering, organic tones. 2007’s Bedtime Beat followed in the same tradition of cute nighty-night whimsy.

Short films shine on the silver screen

Thanks to Julia Wejchert of the Vermont Cynic for this article.

Short films shine on the silver screen
Collaborative film project brings animated shorts to the Roxy Theater

Julia Wejchert

Published: Monday, April 13, 2009

What do you get when you take over 100 people, mix their work together, add some sex, some murder and some electronic music?

Either a really strange murder mystery or PSST!3, a collaborative film project of 17 animated, short films.

An international film project organized by Brian Dougherty-Johnson, PSST!3 had a screening at the Roxy Theater in Burlington on April 9, presented by Matchless Music and Tick Tick.

Inspired by the children’s game telephone and “the Dadaist game of Exquisite Corpse” according to the PSST!3 Web site, PSST!3, which consists of animated short films, separates each film into three parts, with different teams of people making the beginning, middle and end.

PSST!3 is the third installment in Dougherty-Johnson’s PSST! film series.

The films that make up PSST!3 share a common method of creation, but differ greatly in tone and animation style.

The films’ topics range from gruesome to cute to conceptually complex: cuddly cartoon animals are killed in a forest, a woman’s dress takes on jet-pack abilities and one film even rhymes.

Each of the films that make up PSST!3 face the issue of cohesiveness, as the sections are often quite different. For the most part, they creatively succeed, using everything from time travel to stories-within-stories to do so.

With different animators drawing the scenes, PSST!3 showcases many different styles coming together to tell quirky, clever short stories.

Although a film made up of unrelated shorts is a bit strange, the films that make up PSST!3 are dynamic and intriguing. They easily retain viewers’ interest as they drift between alluring cartoon worlds.

The music in each film adds a nice compliment to the animation. Even if the stories can be a bit peculiar at times, this is an asset rather than a liability as animation is a medium that lends itself well to the abstract.

Ben Jastatt, who produced the music for one of the short films, became involved with the project through connections he made when working for Cartoon Network. A Burlington local, Jastatt arranged for the screening at the Roxy.

“I just thought it was a really great project, really unique,” Jastatt said. “It’s a huge worldwide collective project and I thought other people might want to be a part of it too.”

“All the screenings have been set up by people involved,” Jastatt said. With these people being from all over the world, there have been screenings of PSST!3 everywhere from Los Angeles to London to New York and even Lithuania.

Seeming more like moving art than the romantic comedy playing one theater over, PSST!3 rejects the idea that the purpose of film making is commercial success.

A quote from Walt Disney on the PSST!3 Web site reads “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies” — focusing instead on interesting, quality work and creative freedom.

PSST!3 is an innovative and aesthetically pleasing project that takes a novel idea but manages not to let the idea overshadow the artistic work of the films.

Thanks to Everyone who came to last night’s PSST!3 screening

Thanks to everyone who came to the PSST!3 screening last night. Glad you made it out. Glad you enjoyed the films. Glad to be glad you’re glad. Go to the PSST!3 website for more info, to purchase DVD’s and to say thanks to the curator, Bran Dougherty-Johnson.

Special thanks to Tick Tick who helped with promotion and screen printing and JDK Design who were gracious enough to lend out their gallery for the after party.

Additional special thanks to our sponsors Tag New Media and Magic Hat Brewery for helping us pull off last night’s screening and after party.

And thanks to Merrill’s Roxy and Fluid Bar Service for theater and catering.

And one more thanks to Dan Bolles at 7 Days for the press.

Thanks Burlington!