LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
I caught up with folk duo Christy & Emily during their show at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn this past Saturday. It was more sparsely attended than it should have been because their set was awesome, and, hey, they play fun games that involved passing a mini disco ball around the audience until the music stops, when the person touching it answers a question with a subjectively right answer decided upon by Christy and Emily. They asked, “You live in a three story house. Where are you more afraid to go, the attic or the basement?” The correct answer was the basement, inexplicably. Also, the girls mentor six underserved high school women in music and song creation, all of whom performed as the opening act. Below, Christy & Emily discuss the girls in the viBe SongMakers program, keyboards in Germany, and the Vietnam War.

JM.com: So, do you guys do projected visuals with every show?

Emily: Brock Monroe does them and he came and did our record release at The Stone, also. He had all this water he was using and made this giant mess all over the floor. I think that was the first time.

Christy: Well, we’ve done stuff at Secret Project Robot, and he does stuff there. That’s really how we got started because Secret Project Robot has their Mighty Robot Visual squad and they have a lot of people who are our friends and they do that stuff really all over.
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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
Brooklyn’s The Lisps express an invaluable sense of camaraderie. Members César Alvarez, Sammy Tunis, Jeremy Hoevenaar, and Eric Farber were full of playful sarcasm, laughter, and affection before a recent rehearsal at Farber’s Fort Greene apartment, where they described to JM.com their band’s development. Originally a group with an old timey sound, their years together have brought them unexpected creative projects, including an indie rock musical and a drum set adorned with found objects.

JM.com: I read that your lineup has changed a bit over the years. How did the four of you here now get together, and how did you start out?

Sammy: César and I met about eleven years ago in college. After we graduated, we dated for a long time, and then we started a band together.

Eric: I met César in, like, 1996 or 1997. My first memory of him is I threw a party at my parents’ house. It was a pool party. They went away for the weekend, and César didn’t bring a bathing suit, but he went naked, which was cool. But then we had this jam session in our basement, and my friend had left the room and had dropped his bass off on the ground. And César was like, “Oh cool, the bass! I’ll play the bass.” And he was playing the bass naked, and my buddy walked back in the room and he got really upset. That’s my earliest memory of César.
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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
Pioneering electronic artist Mark Van Hoen has seen and done a lot within the realm of music in the past 15 years. He started off in such groundbreaking acts such as Seefeel and Scala and went on to his own pivotal solo releases as Locust and under his own moniker, where he toured with huge acts such as Massive Attack and Orbital. Also an amazing producer in his own right, Mark’s work with Mojave 3 and Sing-Sing show his versatility and skill both in front of and behind the mixing board. Since laying low in the states after relocating to Brooklyn a few years back, Van Hoen now returns with a new album and an upcoming show at The Bell House opening for Ulrich Schnauss.

JM.com: When did you relocate to Brooklyn from London and for what reasons?

Mark: I moved here with my family in April 2008. I had always wanted to live here, and the opportunity came up through my wife’s work, so we took it. I had moved from London to Brighton (a small city on the coast of England) and that was really hard for me, being such an urbanite. At the same time, London seemed to have too many old memories, and so New York was such a great opportunity to live in a big city again, and start afresh.
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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
At the risk of relinquishing my last shred of dignity, I sat down to interview the core members of No Eye Contact. To say that I am a groupie is an understatement. No Eye Contact – whose ever-shifting members have finally united to tour – is one of the best bands to have emerged from our humble hood last year. In spite of – or perhaps because of – my bias toward classic folk songwriting, I appreciate how precarious it is to do it, and how narrowly one must carve his delicate, original path. The band’s wholly refreshing brand of fuzz-garage folk recalls the best of Neutral Milk Hotel, while sifting in perfect percussive elements, found objects, and untampered mixing. The album is certainly al dente, or as Sastri describes it, “handmade, imperfect, and rough;” curious to see them live? Check No Eye Contact out tonight at the Jezebel Music Feature Show.

JM.com: How did you guys come together?

Raky: Josh and I went to high school together. He is three years my junior, so we met my senior year, in the theater department. We did a play together.

Josh: My Favorite Year. It’s really bad. We did that and we played in a Jeff Buckley cover band together. Although I couldn’t really play guitar very well at that point.

JM.com: What was it called?

Raky: Buckley Band. I played drums in that and Josh played silent guitar.

Josh: I didn’t know the chords so…

Raky: We turned his volume down and he just strummed a lot.
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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
The loft where Teletextile practices is sparse on one side (the living room side, where a metal futon and burnished yellow velour couch share the space with a small wooden keyboard and an asymmetrical painting), and rather lovingly cluttered on the other side (the practice space side, where stringed instruments surround a small harp, a Wurlitzer, and a stand of bells). These are – some of – the tools of Teletextile’s trade: what they use to draw out their lushly textured and layered songs. Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Pamela started using the name Teletextile years ago; the lineup has morphed into what it is now, with bassist Caitlin Gray and drummer Luke Schneiders. On a cold but bike-able Sunday night, the threesome sat down with some strong home-brewed coffee (Luke works at a coffee shop) and talked a little musical shop, starting with how they went from being a five-piece to being a three-piece in the new year. Teletextile plays Jezebel Music’s Feature Show on Thursday.

JM.com: You lost two members of your band recently. What happened?

Pamela: We’d been working on an album for two or three months and it wasn’t going at the pace I wanted. We were working with a new engineer who I really liked and we had some great conversations with him. So we got together and started talking about how we were going to make this work. The main factor was that two of our band members are just very busy people. Brian who played keys for us tours with Cymbals Eat Guitars and they’re out of the country or on the road three weeks out of the month sometimes. And our guitarist just started a Ph.D. program in September. It’s kind of been a holding pattern waiting around for them, and we realized that it’s not realistic to keep doing that, so we asked them to leave. We love them and they’re amazing musicians, and we miss them. And we’re scared as fuck to do this!
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The year 2009 has come to a close. As the end-of-the year and/or decade lists pile up in the blog world, it’s hard not to wonder which musicians have been overlooked. As much as we try to follow our intuition and stay on the cutting edge, sometimes we can’t help but feel like we’re in the middle of a pack of lemmings, all hurtling in the same direction at cyberspeed. That’s why we thought this story seemed fitting as a sort of atypical end-of-the-year post. It reminded us that it’s hard to say which of our favorite bands of 2009 we’ll want to revisit in ten, twenty, thirty years, and it’s exciting to think that a group we’ve overlooked this year might get a break long after we thought that time had passed.

Chicago’s Walter Smith, Cliff Frazier, Brad Donaldson, and Keith Donaldson (along with Brad and Keith’s brother, David, now deceased) recorded in the sixties and seventies as the Green Berets, High Society, Walter & the Admerations, and, with Andre Williams, as Velvet Hammer. They started singing soul music together in their early teens, and like so many young artists, they came away from the studio with no money and none of the rights to their records. Because they were all drafted during Vietnam – just as one of their records began to chart highly – the Green Berets could never fully take advantage of their shot at stardom. But in the forty years since their studio days, the Green Berets’ records have become much-desired by collectors, selling for up to $5000, and in June they were contacted by Bob Abrahamian to conduct an interview on his Chicago-based radio show, WHPK’s “Sitting in the Park.”

As the story goes, Richard Lewis of Dig Deeper heard them singing on the show and just had to get them out to New York to perform in concert. Richard, and Michael Robinson, the other man behind Dig Deeper, track down their favorite soul singers, many of whom have fallen off the radar for decades, and bring them to Brooklyn to perform in their monthly Dig Deeper concert series. JezebelMusic.com recently talked to Richard and Michael about what it means to them to get an opportunity to see these artists perform their own songs live, so we decided to talk to the artists, too, to see what this comeback show of sorts meant to them. Erin Sheehy sat down with the Green Berets just hours before their Dig Deeper show at Southpaw in late October. You can also read her interview with the Dig Deeper guys here.
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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
You wouldn’t be wrong if you called Richard Lewis and Michael Robinson show promoters, record collectors and DJs, but oftentimes these guys sound more like detectives. For the past two years, Richard and Michael (DJ Honky and Mr. Robinson when they’re behind the turntables) have been tracking down their favorite soul artists and bringing them to Brooklyn to perform at a monthly night called Dig Deeper. It’s harder than it sounds. Often you’ll find that the people behind some of the best mid-sixties soul records, from the heavy hitters like Don Gardner and The Mighty Hannibal to total unknowns like Eula Cooper, have become nearly untraceable. But Richard and Michael scour the earth, from illegal blues clubs in Sweden to the projects of East New York, to bring these musicans to the fans they might not even know they have, and to introduce them to a new set of converts. Check back soon for our interview with October’s Dig Deeper artist, The Green Berets, and if you want to see what Dig Deeper is all about, head over to Southpaw on January 23 to catch Darrow Fletcher.

JM.com: When or how did you become a big fan of soul music?

Michael: Well I go back a little further than Richard. Back when I was a teenager I was already DJing in London, back in the early eighties. The music at the time was horrible in England. It was called jazz-funk. Unfortunately it’s still kind of popular now. It filled me with horror, it really did. Around that time there was a thing in London called acid jazz, and although there were contemporary bands recording stuff like that, I was buying a lot of Prestige late sixties 7000 series, and then mixing in what I didn’t really know was James Brown’s backing band. The J.B.’s had a great LP, Doing it to Death, with like a ten and a half minute track called “La Di Da La Di Day,” which I would still play now cause it was time to get two drinks and have a chat with a pretty girl in the front of the bar. People used to sell soul packs: twenty records for two pounds. This was when I was living on ten or twelve pounds a week as a student, I’d buy the extra-thin turkey slices, sixteen in a pack, they were like, wafer-thin – you could see light through them! And I had two a day – I mean it was ridiculous – because you know, I had to buy music. It kind of took on a life of its own to the extent that by the time I was 24, I moved to America, because this was where the music came from. I got off the plane here not knowing anyone in the city. And then my very first weekend one of my all time favorite singers was playing. I got to pretend to be a journalist from a blues and soul magazine, got backstage, got to have him dedicate a song to me. So the first person outside of work who knew my name in New York was a singer called Chuck Jackson.
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photo by Mardi Miskit

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
One thing to keep in mind before the New Year - it pays to play it by ear. Last week I sprinted to meet Savoir Adore at the Bedford stop a few (40) minutes late, and found Deidre, Paul, and David chatting contentedly over beers. With no questions in mind, I thought it brilliant that Deidre suggested they interview each other. Smart cookie, savvy businesswoman. It was no Murphy/Barrymore, but I was privy to some otherwise private insights, and got a look into the iTunes-addled, creatively-torn psyche of a band on the brink.

JM.com: Would you say you’re a local Williamsburg band?

Deidre: It’s an interesting question. We live here, but all of our writing and recording happens in upstate New York.

Paul: A lot of people ask about our relationship to Brooklyn and what Brooklyn does for us, and we write most of our material upstate. We really only moved to Williamsburg about five months ago. It’s really pleasant.

Deidre: We have to work a little harder to earn a living but it’s totally worth it.

Paul: I don’t know why I never thought about living here. There was a weird stigma about living in Williamsburg when I was in college. But it really offers everything that’s great about living in New York, and everything that’s great about living in a small town.

David: Savoir has got an interesting history. It started out as a weekend concept EP, where they took 48 hours, made an EP, just Paul and Deidre as friends who wanted to do something fun. They wanted to break out of the box, they were both in a bit of rut in their singer/songwriter circles, acoustic guitar. They said, “no acoustic guitar. Keyboards, drums, bass, maybe electric guitar. Basically do something really quickly, and really fun.” And that was the first Savoir Adore.

Deidre: The name existed long before the band.
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