Connecticut's Have a Nice Life is responsible for one of the year's most acclaimed, highly conceptual albums this year, Deathconsciousness. The two discs (entitled The Plow That Broke The Plains and The Future, respectively) feature music spanning over five years of collaboration between the two artists, and are accompanied by a 75-page booklet on medieval Italian heretics in lieu of liner notes. Combining elements of shoegaze, new wave, ambient drone, post-rock, experimental industrial, avant-garde dark metal, and electronic music, and citing references such as My Bloody Valentine and Joy Division to their credit, the original and only pressings sold out within hours. Full stream of all 85 minutes available here. Direct mp3 samples here and here.
posted on Jun 28, 2008 - View this thread

New York No Wave Archive. "No Wave was a short-lived but influential music and art movement in downtown New York in the late 1970s and 1980s. The name was a reaction to the sanitized Punk Rock trading under the name 'New wave' for those people who wanted a sanitized version of punk." Also, outside of "No New York."
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread

It was 30 years ago today that Elvis Costello and the Attractions appeared on Saturday Night Live. They'd wanted to play Radio Radio but SNL said no as it was thought to be 'anti-media.' So they started playing Less Than Zero, but stopped eight seconds in and played Radio Radio anyway, which led to them being banned from SNL for 12 years. Tip o' the hat to the Post Punk Progressive Pop Party.
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread

Control, the biopic covering the the life and untimely death of Joy Division's singer Ian Curtis, opens in the US today (on a limited release) [ trailer | fan site | on set interview ]. This is director Anton Corbijn's debut full length film [ interview ] and was co-produced by Tony Wilson (a giant in the Manchester and UK music scene, sadly missed. Check out 24 Hour Party People [trailer | clip]) . Control opened in the UK several days ago and the reviews are largely positive [ Guardian | Times Online | Independent | Channel 4 | Time Out | Manchester Evening News ].
posted on Oct 10, 2007 - View this thread

Devolution: Nature's U-Turn is a new music video concept by rock band KoRn for their single Evolution. The premise? Mankind isn't evolving, it's devolving... getting dumber by the day. Wait. Haven't we seen this before? We have, and Devo's Gerald V. Casale isn't happy. "We denounce this as impostors playing with fire." he says of Korn on the Club Devo website. He elaborates in a new interview with Rolling Stone, including a possibility of their first new record in 20 years. Devo's also put out a new song, "Watch Us Work It", which appears in a commercial for Dell laptops [youtube link], with a official music video and single release to come.
posted on Jul 26, 2007 - View this thread

On the cusp of DEVO's first tour of Europe since 1990 , it's become clear that, though largely cast aside after their 1980 hit "Whip It", DEVO's influence is finally being felt on modern audiences, around the world. DEVO has inspired tribute bands, some traditional, some not. They've also spawned new bands, domestic [MySpace link], and Foreign like Japan's POLYSICS [YouTube], and Germany's Mutate Now [YouTube]. With musical inspiration like this, can't we forgive such missteps as Devo 2.0?
posted on Jun 15, 2007 - View this thread

The site French New-Wave isn't what you think it is. Neither dedicated to the film movement nor the band Nouvelle Vague it instead catalogs French new wave music from the 1980's. It has interviews and much other information, but the real treasure is the media section which includes a photo gallery, streaming radio and, most importantly, links to sites where you can listen to French new wave songs (unfortunately, some of the links don't work).
posted on Jun 12, 2007 - View this thread

Happy Birthday Ric Richard Otcasek turned 58 today. It's All Mixed Up, I had no idea he was so old. Well, no matter how old you are, you still need to let the Good Times Roll, so Let's Go wish him our very best, since it's pretty much Touch and Go for any rock star approaching age 60. Though many of the Cars hits where sung by the late, great Ben Orr, Ocasek was one of the more recognizable front men of the 1980s. So distinctive that, on April 18, 2006, he was ranked number 50 in The Boston Phoenix list of "The 100 unsexiest men in the world." Ocasek has had a low-key, but reasonably successful career as a solo artist, written a book of poetry and had a cameo role in the John Waters feature film Hairspray. He also appeared on the Colbert Report where he volunteered to lead a commando mission to "rescue" Stephen Jr., the baby eagle at the San Francisco Zoo. Ric also is notable as a producer, though he is probably best known (or infamous in indie circles) for producing Guided by Voices' much maligned Do the Collapse. As for my own personal connection, the first time I saw him was in 1984, when the Cars played a show with Wang Chung and the last time was when I stood next to Ric at Luna's Farewell show at the Bowery Ballroom, a well known Nightspot. Nice guy, he let me buy him a beer. It was, he said, Just what he Needed.
posted on Mar 23, 2007 - View this thread

"I would like to do better, to be better than I am". He's the French New Wave maverick and Academy Award winner (at 26, for his first short) who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "the greatest film ever made", duly censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "the first modern film of sound cinema", shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "to stop death in its tracks" (French language link), only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of la bande dessinée who learnt English by reading comic books and in the Seventies dreamed (French language link) of making "Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the MGM old-school musical and operetta nut so in love with design that "half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt" to him. Now, Alain Resnais' new work, just shown at the Venice Film Festival where his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film inspired by an English play with 54 short scenes, music by the X-Files's Mark Snow. (more inside)
posted on Sep 8, 2006 - View this thread

Discography as iconography of a po-mo epoch. Relayed from Boing2 because it's the glorious visual epitaph for GenX nostalgia. I'm almost crying over here, and activating eBay.
posted on Oct 18, 2005 - View this thread

AppreciationFilter: Edwyn Collins --Scottish Britpop Master--from Nu-Sonic as a teen in the 70s, Orange Juice ("Rip It Up") in the early 80s, to "A Girl Like You" and "Magic Piper," and still going strong decades later. He even created a British sitcom, West Heath Yard, and now supports up and coming bands. Even if you've never heard of him, you've heard at least one of his songs, whether in Austin Powers or elsewhere. More history here, from his old site. (and you can hear 18 streaming songs of his on the main link, above.)
Edwyn is now in the hospital after suffering a serious brain hemorrhage.
posted on Feb 26, 2005 - View this thread

newwavephotos.com You will find here a selection of photos (mainly B&W) taken mostly in the late 70's and early 80's of popular and not so popular "rock", "new wave" and "punk" groups.
posted on Aug 17, 2003 - View this thread

Boy George Nearly Killed by Glitter Ball There is just something so strangely ironic about this, that made me laugh and spew coffee all over my monitor this morning. Apparently witnesses at the scene said the ball missed landing directly on singer's head by just two inches. Darn!
posted on Dec 17, 1999 - View this thread