The latest various-artists collection from Schematic Records, the label’s fourth, is a kind of anti-compilation. Other than its self-effacingly — and self-consciously — bland title, Well-suited for General-purpose Audio Work, the volume provides little else in the way of explanation for itself. For example, though the CD booklet is a gatefold, the interior spread is blank. What little text there is lists the titles of the collection’s 13 tracks, the names of contributing artists and the details of publishing rights. The only other bit of text serves as a kind of subtitle, “Adorable survival music by Phoenicia, Richard Devine, Otto Von Schirach and Dino Felipe of the Schematic Music Company.” Inexplicably, that list excludes several other contributors to the project, including Kiyo, Tipper (remixed by Phoenicia), Canibal A:fraux (remixed by Devine) and Monica De Miguel (assisting Shirach). And furthermore, the track listing for the LP and CD editions diverge; not only is the sequence different, but both the LP and the CD contain exclusive tracks. In the world of electronic music, Ezra Pound’s modernist mantra “Make it new” has long since given way to “Make it difficult” — but as demanding as the Schematic crew’s shenanigans can be, they regularly reward listeners’ patience. Phoenecia’s “Homosote” layers just enough doomy haze above the burbling rhythm track to make for an interesting tangle of elastic syncopation. Dino Felipe’s “Dead Wild Horses” makes the most of its five minutes, moving from a stuttering opening through an ever-altering mix of industrial sounds and flippy sound effects before settling back down again, as if the track itself has been worn out by its effort. Kiyo’s “Philiter,” the album’s seemingly final entry, is perhaps its strongest, first building a cautious beat and then dispensing with it, and leaving only the overlay to last for the track’s nearly five minutes — and if you hold on long enough, about 10 minutes after the song ends there’s a “bonus” cut with synthesized strings and a rap that reads like an avant-electronic answer to Eminem’s brand of drama.
Digital Voodoo
Each spring, the historic port city of New Orleans, Louisiana, plugs into its rich musical culture with a week-plus series of events. All manner of jazz and other indigenous regional acts, from Cajun and zydeco to the neighboring sounds of tejano, congregate at the Fair Grounds Race Course for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, widely known simply as Jazz Fest. And all the better, they bring along their cuisine — not only jambalaya, crawfish pie and filé gumbo, but boudin sausage, alligator po-boy sandwiches, and icy snoball treats.
New Orleans is renowned for its cultural near-stasis — less the city that time forgot than the city that forgot time — and Jazz Fest, which celebrated its 34th consecutive year in 2003, likewise morphs at its own subtle pace. It wasn’t until 2002 that a performance tent dedicated to the blues was added. Progress does occur. The city’s substantial Vietnamese and Middle Eastern immigrant communities are now represented in the Fest’s food courts with vermicelli plates and kebab sandwiches. One big story in recent years has been the expanding presence of jam bands at Jazz Fest. Groups such as Phish, Widespread Panic and String Cheese Incident draw large, young crowds who, in turn, help pay the bills. (Proceeds from the festival go to the non-profit New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation.) The result is an ever-growing sea of Caucasian dreadlocks, which nay-saying traditionalists consider a greater threat to the region than sprawling kudzu vines, metastasizing river hyacinth, or whatever else Mother Nature has thought up this month. But these jam acts manage to fit in — rather than overwhelm — thanks to their emphasis on improvisation and on the blues roots of rock’n’roll.
New Orleans has a lot of history, and not all of it predates Yankee occupation. Rock, for example, deserves a place at Jazz Fest. In 1945, Roy Brown recorded “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” cited as one of the earliest rock songs, at Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio on North Rampart, at the edge of the French Quarter; that spot is now a washeteria — local parlance for laundromat — with an inexplicable luau theme. Little Richard and Fats Domino recorded at J&M as well. Jerry Lee Lewis was born upriver in Ferriday and recorded his first work at J&M, and Elvis Presley filmed his best movie here (perhaps his one good movie), King Creole. And the stripped down syncopations of the aptly named Meters, the legendary New Orleans rhythm section, served as a sample database for nascent hip-hop. The jam-band community has reciprocated for its acceptance at Jazz Fest, naming its big gathering, the Bonnaroo Festival, for a song by one of New Orleans’ favorite sons, singer-pianist Dr. John.
And there is a slow-growing presence of electronic music here, in part as an outgrowth of the jam phenomenon. Now understand, Jazz Fest is still no place to go for a sure digital fix, and it’s unlikely to be one anytime soon. But from DJs to live processing, from hip-hop to what was briefly known as “acid jazz,” from after-hours parties to mid-week shows, Jazz Fest 2003, which took place between April 24 and May 4 of this year, offered a taste of jams to come. And to stumble upon electronic elements at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is a bit like running into an old friend while traveling abroad. It’s exciting to see how comfortably your buddy has settled into an exotic locale.
1. Setting the Stage: The Jazz Fest layout and lowdown
What had long been two consecutive weekend concerts has expanded over the years into a week-plus straight of 24-hour musical immersion. Jazz Fest proper runs from morning until near-dusk at the Fair Grounds, this year from Thursday through Sunday for two weeks in a row. Every club in town goes out of its way to pack its schedule with bands, and increasingly some of the most exciting events occur in the evening and during the three days between the two long Fest weekends, a situation not dissimilar to the unofficial satellite showcases held during SXSW in Austin and at the Winter Music Conference in Miami each year.
Visitors from around the world, and from deep in the bayou, come to town to take part in Jazz Fest. The Fair Grounds is divided into open-air stages and blessedly shady tents, including two devoted to jazz (the tradition-minded Economy Hall and the larger, more catholic Jazz Tent), as well as spots for gospel, blues and other music. Each year the odd big-name headliner (Sting, Lenny Kravitz, Dave Matthews) is greatly outnumbered by a cornucopia of brass bands, Dixieland combos, and accordion and washboard virtuosos.
Much as New Orleans is largely the result of technology — the city would not exist were it not for the ingenuity of levees and, later, vast pumping systems to keep the water out of, or at least under, the streets — the festival is also technologically dependent. Even the most retro acts couldn’t play to the large crowds but for the grace of microphones and amplification, and there’s enough cabling at the back of the gospel tent alone to hog-tie an elephant. There’s a certain tasty frisson to tripping over thick power lines, and elbowing past vast mixing boards, on the way to hear, say, 87-year-old David “Honeyboy” Edwards perform his acoustic blues; Edwards’ relative fame can be credited to his “discovery,” in the early 1940s, by rural-music folklorist Alan Lomax, who scoured the country with a new fangled tape recorder.
2. Internal Logic: have turntables, will convert to hip-hop
New Orleans lays a rightful claim to jazz’s birthplace, but in the past decade the city’s musical fortunes have been tied to hip-hop. Mystikal, DJ Jubilee, various members of Cash Money Millionaires and of Master P’s No Limit label have occasionally made their presence known at Jazz Fest. Rap performances take place on the stage called Congo Square, which has also hosted rising Afro-beat musician Femi Kuti (son of Nigerian legend Fela) and the popular local R&B singer Irma Thomas.
Despite the scattering of rap each year, the genre is still somewhat marginalized at Jazz Fest, and even longtime attendees manage to avoid it. Here’s an example: There was a Q&A session this year with George Wein, the concert producer, held in the Fair Grounds Grandstand. At the end of the session, members of the audience got to ask questions. Local saxophonist Kidd Jordan reached the microphone and commented on how it might be necessary, down the road, to include rap at the festival to get “kids” to come along — call this the bait-and-switch school of music education. The uncomfortable silence that followed Jordan’s statement may have had less to do with the fact that he was making a speech rather than asking a question of Wein, and more to do with the fact that rappers Lil Romeo (son of Master P) and LL Cool J were on this year’s festival bill. Jordan has performed on and off at Jazz Fest since the very first one was held in 1970.
Not all of the city’s jazz elite are as blissfully (willfully?) unaware of hip-hop’s insurgence. Some actively engage the genre, turntables and all. Last year, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band played a nightly week-plus stint during Jazz Fest at the Mermaid Lounge, a tinderbox of a club situated beneath the entrance to the Mississippi River Bridge, on the edge of the gentrifying Central Business District. For 11 evenings in a row, the band played a rousing set, then brought DJ Logic up for a collaborative set, and then let Logic take over the stage, where he played until the crowd dwindled, often close to dawn. (DJ Logic spoke at length with Disquiet.com during the 2002 Jazz Fest, and that interview is available here: “Sonic Anomaly.”)
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band are likely early adopters of hip-hop. Though the group is now understood to be one of the city’s upholders of a grand tradition, when it first started out, in 1977, it was criticized for blending contemporary R&B into its sound. The Dirty Dozen has toured with Florida shock-rap sensation Luther Campbell (of 2 Live Crew) and featured Logic on its last studio album, Medicated Magic. (Logic and the Dozen record for the same record label, Ropeadope.)
Logic is an eager collaborator, especially during Jazz Fest. Last year he sat in on stage with Ratdog, the band led by Dead guitarist Bob Weir. This year he performed for one night with the reunited Headhunters (performing without Herbie Hancock), who record for the local Basin Street Records label.
For the 2003 festival week, the Dirty Dozen moved its nightly stint to the nearby Twiropa (a former mill: twine, rope, paper — get it?), and Logic inherited the mantle at the Mermaid, following such acts as jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter (former member of the rap act Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and another Ropeadope recording artist), and often joined onstage by guest musicians. Late one evening, Logic started a set with “Herbman,” the song he recorded with Olu Dara, better known to Logic’s peers as the father of rapper Nas. Logic mixed in what sounded like a loopy guitar solo from a Dead or Phish song, and scratched a brief riff with what sounded like a whistle, but, when he lifted his nimble palm and allowed the track to play out, revealed itself to be an organ track. He augments his set with a Kaos Pad, a digital device that allows for live sampling and effects. Turntablists being like magicians, Logic knew how to use illusion to his advantage, favoring tracks that themselves consisted of evident multiple layers, so it was never clear how much he was manipulating or adding, and how much he was just choosing good tunes.
What made a Logic set fit in with Jazz Fest was the sounds he chose to focus on: violins and electric guitars and funk were common elements, all of which could easily have emanated from any one of the festival stages earlier in a given day. To that end, he was seemingly sampling the day’s affair, “processing the present.” The sound was less silky and soulful than his Project Logic band, and less macho-funky than the Yohimbe Brothers (his recent collaboration on Ropeadope with guitarist Vernon Reid), and perfectly appropriate to the Jazz and Heritage vibe.
3. Random Notes: the ghost of Charles Ives, satellite shows, steps ahead and back
a. Variations on America: The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is a great place during which to hear a lot of music, often simultaneously. In the Fest’s Jazz Tent, a sizable space that could accommodate a high-school graduation, anything more quiet than a mid-tempo piano solo was likely to have an oompah overlay from the neighboring folk-art exhibit. Across a gauntlet of Porta-lets from the Jazz Tent, native American Indians plied their crafts and chanted chants. Echoes of guitar solos and roaring crowds emanated from the Fest’s distant main stage. And at any moment, an ersatz second-line parade might trounce by, horns and drums playing trad jazz in alternately maudlin or joyous modes.
During all this, one couldn’t help but think of composer Charles Ives’ fascination with overlapping parade bands, especially when a brass ensemble saunters by during another group’s set. Ives’ exploration of meshed sounds, in particular with musical quotation, laid the conceptual groundwork for musique concrete and other forms that came about as technology became affordable and readily available, following his death in the late 1950s. His skill was in recognizing not a signal within a noise, but the signal that resulted from a collection of noises, and one imagines that he would have had a blissful afternoon at Jazz Fest.
b. An Electric Spectacle: One highlight of the evening shows was a performance by the electronic acts Adult and Magas at the Spellcaster, a basement club run by local keyboardist and technologist Quintron across the street from the Saturn Bar on St. Claude Avenue. Quintron has made a career for himself with his Drum Buddy, a light-sensor beatbox he invented and that he uses in concerts around town. MC’ing the Adult/Magas show, he referred to the evening’s festivities — which were well attended, despite the relative decline in tickets sold for this year’s Fest — as a “Cajun Rave.”
c. Automatic for the People: OffBeat magazine, a locally produced roots-music monthly with an international readership, produces a thick companion volume to Jazz Fest each year, and the 2003 edition had a brief paragraph of particular interest: Dan “The Automator” Nakamura is set to produce the next album from Galactic, a local success story of a groove band that’s made a big impression in the jam community. Nakamura is best known for his work with the Beastie Boys and Gorillaz, pop acts infused with studio ingenuity. Galactic will work wonders under Nakamura’s spell. Their deep grooves, descendent from New Orleans’ Meters, are tailor made for sampling, and the group has already shown interest in electronics, having included DJ Z-Trip on the bill of recent shows (Z-Trip will be the resident turntablist on the upcoming Jam Cruise). Galactic drummer Stanton Moore worked with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, the city’s main digital-music proponent, on Clint Mansell’s soundtrack to the film World Traveler, and he included looping technology on his debut solo album, Flyin’ the Koop.
d. In the Woodwind: You also needn’t track down futurists and retro-futurists to take the digital pulse of Jazz Fest. To hear a clarinetist in the Onward Brass Band take a single note and transform it by contorting it, twisting it like a piece of soft, rusty metal for the better half of a minute, was to have no doubt as to the role jazz played in prepping our minds for electronic music — not simply as an influence, but because by robustly tweaking tone, rather than emphasizing melody, the clarinetist was working with the instrument as a machine, which he bent to his will.
4. Turncoat in Silk: onetime “young lion” plugs in and wails
For fans of electronically mediated music, one major highlight of the daytime Fest this year was an appearance by a new band led by trumpeter Nicholas Payton. A local musician who turned 30 this year, Payton came to national recognition in the wake of the jazz revolution led by a fellow New Orleanian trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, and he released a series of albums for the esteemed Verve label. Payton and Verve parted ways following his last record, Dear Louis, which was released in 2001, the centennial of the birth of Louis Armstrong, the original New Orleanian jazz trumpeter.
If Payton and Co.’s performance at Jazz Fest was typical of his new direction, Sonic Trance’s inevitable debut album might be titled Dear Miles, so much is the group dedicated to the electric-era recordings of trumpeter Miles Davis — whose early work was as praised by Marsalis as the later, plugged-in work was derided. On the second Saturday of Jazz Fest, May 3, during an hour-plus 4:00pm set, Payton and Sonic Trance ditched neo-traditionalism in favor of music deeply resonant of the fusion that followed in the wake of Davis’s electric experiments, updated with nods to dub and digital sampling. (As it turns out, the band’s debut will be titled Sonic Trance, and Warner Bros. Records has scheduled it for release in September of this year.)
The concert opened with a song that Payton called “Séance.” It had an obvious debt to Davis’ In a Silent Way, thanks in no small part to the ensemble’s pair of keyboardists, Aaron Goldberg on piano and Fender Rhodes, and Scott Kinsey (of the fusion band Tribal Tech) on two Nords: a Lead 2 (a digital instrument that imitates the sound and functionality of an analog synthesizer) and an Electro 2 (which simulates various “electromechanical” keyboards, notably the B-3 organ and piano). Sonic Trance also featured bassist Vicente Archer; Payton’s longtime drummer, Adonis Rose, and saxophonist, Tim Warfield; and a somewhat distracting percussionist, Danny Sadownick, who was an all-around noisemaker with a big grab bag of sonic toys. The jazz of Payton’s Sonic Trance is unapologetic in its electrical-ness. Payton hooked his trumpet up to a wah-wah pedal for a song that recalled the blaxploitation flair of the Shaft movie theme. He employed intense echo on a song he referred to as “Velvet Handcuffs” and on another song that he dedicated to Fela Kuti, simply titled “Fela.” As the band stretched out, it gathered the combustion of the darker Davis works, notably tracks like “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” off Bitches Brew and the distorted funk of his On the Corner record.
Dressed in a pimp-quality white suit, Payton embraced the entertainer aspect of being a band leader. One song, “Two Mexicans on the Wall” (it might have been “Two Mariachis on the Wall”), started off with a lengthy quote from “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” And as the concert progressed, Payton went further afield with his technology — sampling his own riff on trumpet, and then playing atop it. The crowd ate it up, even though the moment was more of a stunt than a compositional tool. It’s worth noting that Payton was doing similar things earlier in the concert, but he really had to draw attention to the activity to get credit for it from the audience.
Another standout moment in the set was a song he called “Cannabis Leaf Rag,” a deft and humorous concoction of one part “Maple Leaf Rag” and one part “The Entertainer.” Compositionally, the song recalled the popular trend of remixes and, especially, “mash-ups,” in which two or more songs are yoked together, often against the will of the individual compositions (not that there isn’t a strong tradition in jazz of quoting and rearranging familiar songs). Payton forged a peace between the two ragtime favorites by making his compositional technique self-evident: starting off slowly and laying the melodies out as if unfolding a blueprint; the widely spaced note placements could be heard as tentative, but the tentativeness was a ploy, and as the piece progressed it built up steam, like a locomotive getting underway.
Payton did this all with a modernist stomp — a decidedly off-kilter rhythm — that recalled, among other things, the retro-futurism of Wynton Marsalis’ Citi Movement ballet score and some of Marsalis’ better Thelonious Monk covers, notably the title cut of his Think of One album, which started with the same kind of coy pointillism as “Cannabis Leaf Rag.” Marsalis has made no accommodation for digital technology in performance, and that pronounced reticence has strongly influenced a generation of jazz players. Perhaps Payton has noted the irony that the period that inspired Citi Movement was a time, in the early 20th-century, when the tempos of composed art music and the images in visual art were grappling with issues of rapid scientific progress, in particular with automation. Think of Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” and Igor Stravinsky’s ragtime experiments. In any case, Payton — who was one of the many so-called Young Lions of jazz ushered into prominence after Marsalis’ initial success — has shrugged off any vestiges of received technophobia, and Sonic Trance played an inspired set.
Payton’s act of reverence for Miles Davis’ early electric work may run contrary to the retro-jazz refinement in which the young trumpeter emerged. But the adoption of new technology may very well run in the Payton family. On the first Saturday of Jazz Fest this year, April 26, Payton’s father, the bassist and bandleader Walter Payton (not the Chicago Bears running back, though no less imposing a physical presence) led a mid-size ensemble, named the Snapbeans, for a nearly hour-long 3:15pm show. Payton the elder’s ensemble, which performed at the smaller of the two jazz tents, Economy Hall, included a drummer, a trumpeter, a pianist and a second keyboardist on a small, electric setup. When a local radio personality introduced the band midway through their set, he acknowledged the presence of an electric keyboardist in Walter Payton’s ensemble with a sly comment that might serve as a mantra for the inclusion of electronic elements in future Jazz Fests: “He has a few less keys, but more sounds.”
Thanks to Vernon H. Hammond III, of Nicholas Payton's management company, for additional information on Sonic Trance's personnel (along with a copy of its forthcoming album release), which was added to this story on July 9, 2003.
Related links: New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival's website. DJ Logic's website. Galactic's website. Offbeat magazine's website. Nicholas Payton's website.
Behind the 8bit
When Thorsten Sideboard founded 8bitrecs.com, an online label consisting entirely of free MP3 files, his role model wasn't Matador Records or Def Jam – it was a computer database.
By mid-May 2003, the small British electronic music label named 8bitrecs had released almost ten dozen tracks by some 50 acts. Visitors to the label’s website, 8bitrecs.com, had downloaded over 30,000 MP3 files, entirely free of charge. And the company had not sold a single CD.
But to Thorsten Sideboard, who founded the label in February 2002, 8bitrecs was still a success.
Why? Because 8bitrecs doesn’t traffic in CDs. Sideboard founded the label simply as a place for free MP3 files, a place to promote adventurous electronic music. Nothing is for sale on the website (though he does link to another label that he co-runs, Highpoint Lowlife, which produces actual CDs for sale). The 8bits roster boasts several acclaimed musicians who have recorded for prominent, traditional labels, including Greg Davis, Janek Schaefer and Rothko.
By making this music freely available via the web, Sideboard sidestepped a long list of music-industry disgruntlements. He sums up these succinctly: “The whole cycle of distribution, publicity, sales and money can get pretty overwhelming and disillusioning.”
Sideboard is not alone. There’s a growing number of organizations similar to 8bitrecs, making music available entirely for free to anyone with a computer and Internet access. Some are side projects of traditional labels, such as Term, which is an offshoot of 12K, the San Francisco-based electronic-music label run by musician Taylor Deupree.
Red Antenna, the New York-based record label, has released a series of free “Online Objects,” collections of MP3 files housed on the label’s website.
Fallt has published some 24 sets of files in its “invalidObject Series,” from artists such as Scanner, Steve Roden, Richard Chartier, Pimmon, Kim Cascone, and even the Term label’s own Deupree. These collections are available for sale as limited-edition 3″ CDs from fallt, but the label puts the files online for free.
And a label called No Type, arguably the granddaddy of free online electronic-music labels, has released almost 100 albums and EPs since 1998.
That these labels are proliferating during a crisis in the music industry cannot be ignored. Record sales are down — perhaps due to rampant sharing on such peer-to-peer systems as Kazaa and Soulseek; perhaps due to the artistic failings of the corporate major labels; perhaps due to the increase in popularity of expensive videogames among the record industry’s main customers: teenage boys.
Major labels have vociferously singled out the Internet as the source of its woes. Labels such as Sideboard’s 8bitrecs are intriguing, not only because they are sources of great listening material, but because they suggest a whole other way of distributing music, if not a whole other mindset. Many musicians have proven perfectly fine with making their songs available for free — perhaps with the hope of gaining commercial opportunities down the road, perhaps as a means of building an audience, perhaps simply as a chance to participate in the global community.
Sideboard agreed to talk about his label at length with Disquiet.com. A look at the workings of 8bitrecs provides a glimpse at an innovative province of the record industry that is, in Sideboard’s words, “hobby-driven and genuine.” To some extent, the 8bitrecs.com format resembles a “blog,” a chronologically ordered collection of online material. It also brings to mind McSweeney’s, the literary journal edited by Dave Eggers, which manages to produce a compelling whole from material that is often understood to be scraps, drafts and rejected writings by established and up-and-coming authors.
Particularly recommended from among recent additions to the 8bitrecs site are Crashed by Car’s “Elizabeth, Did You Ever Heard?” which modulates orchestral woodwinds over a static-laden beat, and Tigrics’ “Ebeck 1/30,” which splinters a pleasing melody and percussive riff with delectable ingenuity.
Sideboard came to his indie-mogul role via a circuitous route. He was born just outside Glasgow, Scotland. Following high school it was youth culture, not the academy, that provided his education. “I had all these plans for art college and aspirations to be a comic-book artist,” he says, “but at the age of 16 I was quite heavily into skateboarding, and all my friends had left school a year before me and were working jobs, bringing home enough money to finance skate trips and buy equipment as needed. I decided I’d rather go work and finance my hobbies, somehow fell into a computer sys-admin job, and had to quickly teach myself along the way.”
Sideboard’s work in computers involved him in the mid-1990s Internet economy — and after that bubble had burst, he co-founded with a friend a small record label, Highpoint Lowlife. (The label recently released its third album, DoF’s If More Than Twenty People Laugh, It Wasn’t Funny.)
Eventually he returned to the U.K., and it was while working for a content-management company in London that 8bitrecs was born. The philosophy of the enterprise — MP3 files, free for the inquisitive — was a salve after the disillusion of running a “real” label.
“One of the things I quickly learned from Highpoint Lowlife,” he says, “is how much of the music industry is not about the music, and in a lot of ways comes down to who you know, popularity and hype.” And the development of the 8bitrecs website allowed him to hone his skills at his new job, in particular to come up to speed on the company’s database system.
Not bad for a guy with no higher education, or formal musical background. “My family aren’t very musical, no, although my father did run off to Blackpool when he was 16 to become an Elvis impersonator,” says Sideboard. “From what my mother says, he had quite a good voice, but all I can think about are the photographs with the totally killer suit and haircut.”
He’s proud of the number of files downloaded from 8bitrecs. But in a characteristically low-key comment, he jokes about his attention to user data. “The logs are quite interesting to look at,” he says, “especially when you use a program to make pretty graphs from them.”
Over the course of a week in May 2003, Sideboard corresponded with Disquiet.com via email. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation. He talks at length about the learning experiences that led to 8bitrecs, the state of the record industry during the age of peer-to-peer file-sharing, and the nature of the online electronic-music community.
Marc Weidenbaum: You have two record labels: 8bitrecs.com and Highpoint Lowlife. 8bitrecs is a website that collects MP3 files by a variety of musicians, and organizes them into sets that are sometimes along the lines of albums. Highpoint Lowlife, on the other hand, releases actual CDs of songs, some MP3s of which are available on the site for free. Is that a proper summary? Can you talk a bit about how these two labels relate to one another?
Thorsten Sideboard: Highpoint Lowlife came along first. My friend Joey Hurt and I had often spoke about starting a label together as we had really similar taste in music, and suddenly couldn’t think of a reason not to. We put out our first release, which was a double compilation. The compilation was one disc of indie, shoegaze and art-rock bands, and a second disc of more experimental electronic music. It came together really well, with loads of local acts willing to get involved — Stratford 4, Jim Yoshii Pile-up, Boxleitner and Sappington all on the first disc, and on the second disc there were solo projects by all the members of Tarentel, contributions by Broker/Dealer, Wobbly (recording as Brindle Spork) and a whole bunch more.
The compilation was an experience — didn’t exactly sell well, as we had no idea of how to do publicity, or really what to do with the record when it was finished. 8bitrecs.com came about shortly after I moved to London. Highpoint Lowlife was sort of on hold, with both of us short of money due to relocating; 8bitrecs came about due to a couple of reasons.
I had just started working at a company who specialize in content-managed websites within the music industry, usually for small independent labels (the company is called State51), and they have this really cool database system for adding and manipulating content. I’m the system and network administrator for them, which is something I have done for years. However, I hadn’t done too much Perl coding, nor database work. So 8bitrecs.com started almost as a pet project to get up to speed with how a lot of their systems work, like a much smaller version. (For an example of their system, have a look at sonomu.net, which is a community-based alternative music reviews and news site.)
One of the things I quickly learned from Highpoint Lowlife is how much of the music industry is not about the music, and in a lot of ways comes down to who you know, popularity and hype. The whole cycle of distribution, publicity, sales and money can get pretty overwhelming and disillusioning. Putting together 8bitrecs.com, I got a few of the Highpoint Lowlife artists involved for the first content on the site. It all came together very easily, there was no time lag between getting the music and making it available, there was no stress involved over money, and suddenly you had the artist, music and a listener, with nothing in between. It’s nice that it’s that simple and immediate.
There is no real correlation between the two projects. Highpoint Lowlife is the shared vision of my friend and I, whereas 8bitecs was my own personal project, although there is some obvious crossover in what I bring to Highpoint Lowlife — the label’s most recent album is by DoF, who was one of the early 8bitrecs contributors, and also there are currently a number of albums in the works for Highpoint Lowlife from artists appearing on 8bitrecs.
Weidenbaum: You’re involved in a wide variety of projects. I want to focus on 8bitrecs, but could you provide a bit of background on what else you’re involved in, professionally and culturally?
Sideboard: I’m actually from Glasgow in Scotland. I met my friend Joe during the whole dot-com boom. We were introduced by a common friend because she knew we were both into Built to Spill. Anyway, we started hanging out a lot, going to shows together, smoking out, listening to music.
Our first venture together was this badly attended club we ran called Shoegazer. It went nowhere and we shelved the idea for a while. A few months later we had discovered this other little dive bar. It looked so sketchy from outside, with its neon cocktail sign and loitering junkies on the corner. Once you were inside, it was completely different — large anime paintings, two game consoles and your choice of games, large TV screen showing Powerpuff Girls cartoons. This place was amazing. We got on well with the barmaid, handed her a mix CD, and we got ourselves a regular weekly, which was called “:node.” We had different guest DJs down every week, which was a mixture a friends and local musicians, some of the more well-known names were Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, O.S.T., Kit Clayton.
Since moving to London, the past year I’ve been running a night with a friend from work. It’s called Not Clickable. We always have at least one live act playing and my friend and I will DJ in between. It’s been an irregular bi-monthly event, usually hosted at the Foundry, which is this crazy pub that used to be a bank vault, so downstairs you have these strange large rooms they use for art and sound installations. We’ve thrown four of them so far, and have had guest performances by LJ Kruzer, Leafcutter John, Slub, Donna Summer, and Rashamon.
London has this great little scene at the moment, with a few groups of people all doing similar kind of events, or making music. There is Sprawl, which has been going about seven or eight years now, the MidRange nights by Coombe Records, and the Slow Sound System, with everyone involved just really open and excited by the music. There are others, but these are the guys I have discovered and been impressed by in the past year. We all come out and support each others events and have this cross-pollination thing going on, which is really inspiring and fun.
Weidenbaum: Are any of the various 8bitrecs contributors a pseudonym for you?
Sideboard: Maybe! Put it this way: I have a bit of a superhero fetish!
Weidenbaum: Are the musicians you work with on 8bitrecs generally comfortable, right off the bat, with the idea of their music being available for free on the web? Clearly Greg Davis puts up his own files regularly on Autumn Records, and Motion has recorded “free” material for 12K’s Term line.
Sideboard: Yeah, everyone has been completely comfortable, although there are probably differing views regarding MP3s. I think a lot of the artists see the MP3 format as a viable means of promotion, very useful for people to hear your music when you are a small label or artist, and for raising your profile somewhat. For others, it’s their chance to put out the tracks that are maybe slightly different from what they release, bit and pieces, small favorites that fell through the cracks and didn’t make it onto a record, or a chance for them to try something new.
It’s weird how controversial the whole MP3 thing is for some people, but I guess it really does change the face of the music industry, and established models of distribution and promotion. I love it. I guess I just like the fact that it totally fucks things up, completely muddies the water and makes the major labels sweat! My own view is that there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Digital file-swapping is here to stay. Even with Digital Rights Management software, and secure media delivery type systems, there is always going to be a way to circumvent or bypass it, which people are going to use. There is no way it is going to kill the music industry, the music industry is just going to adapt to it in some form or manner, and I think it’s quite an exciting time to see how it does change.
Weidenbaum: Was there a role model for you for 8bitrecs when you started it?
Sideboard: As I mentioned, the database model developed at my work was the technical model for it, but aesthetically and musically no, there was no model. It just sort of happened.
Weidenbaum: Can you describe the month or so leading up to and the month after the launch of the 8bitrecs site — how it all finally came together, what it feel like to you as the project came to fruition?
Sideboard: Well there was never any plan laid down beforehand. I got the idea for it one night, started programming on it a night or so later, and probably had a working model within a week, then emailed and asked some friends to contribute music. I thought it was a fun little project but didn’t expect it to go anywhere, but it just kind of grows, and has attracted some really great music. There was never really any sense of fruition as such, as there were no real goals to start with, but I do get a sense of accomplishment when I hear from someone enjoying the music, who has maybe discovered a new artist, and especially when I hear that someone has made a connection through the site, like one of the artists being contacted because their music was heard. That to me is the payback, if I have provided a forum or platform for something to occur for someone, to facilitate.
Weidenbaum: It’s interesting to learn that 8bitrecsis run on a database. The site is so elegant, one might have imagined it was simply a set of hand-coded HTML pages. Have you been concerned at all about bandwidth costs? What are you up against, as you try to maintain it on a regular basis?
Sideboard: I pretty much tried to keep the design simple. Actually that’s a lie, it’s just that I have very basic HTML skills! There are a few tables, and a CGI script calling database reads, and it just prints the rows of the table. The database has all the artist info, track info, file locations, oh and the front page, the kinda blog/news section. The site pretty much just takes you straight to the music. At first it was run on a Solaris box that I left with friends. It was just running from a home DSL line, which was fine to start with, however their ISP would always have at least 8 hours downtime a month. I think it must have been scheduled maintenance as it was always during the night in PST, but for me in London, it was the whole daytime, which was really frustrating. As more files were added and the site grew in popularity, I started to worry about the bandwidth usage on these poor guys who were doing me a favor hosting and taking care of my box, so I finally moved it onto the machines at my work. As we are a service provider of sorts, we have a co-location facility with a good deal of bandwidth, so it’s not really a problem anymore. We handle so much traffic already, that 8bitrecs barely makes a dent.
Weidenbaum: I appreciate your description of how quickly 8bitrecs came together, once you had the idea. What have you learned along the way, and what do you do differently today than you did in the first month or two of the site’s existence?
Sideboard: When I first started the site I originally had discussion boards and a calendar system, hoping it would foster a small community and have artists post local shows. That never really took off, there were very few postings on the boards apart from myself, and it was as if there were tumbleweeds rolling through — you could hear the lonely wind howling. The calendar, also, was only me posting London shows, and kind of irregular at that. I decided to go with the Unix philosophy — keep tools simple, one tool for one job — so I simplified the site so that it was just music, and I think that’s been good. It means I have less maintenance to do on the site. Adding an artist to the site is a one-step process.
Weidenbaum: Are you in touch with other free, online MP3 labels, such as Term and No Type? Do you listen to their music?
Sideboard: No, I’m not in touch with any of the other MP3 labels. I actually keep thinking about that, but never seem to get round to it. When I discovered there were other MP3 labels our there, I went and explored the ones I could find, and was very impressed by how long they had been going, technical features of the site, and most importantly by the amount of and the quality of the music. Most recently I have downloaded the Super Science tracks from monotonik.com, which are amazing!
Weidenbaum: I can’t help but note the possible correlation between your two labels, Highpoint Lowlife and 8bitrecs, and the moment at which they came about. Here’s what I mean: Highpoint is a traditional label that makes CDs, and it was launched at the height of the Internet bubble, when many folks who were making money were spending some of that money on creative side projects. 8bitrecs, which is entirely free to anyone with Internet access, started after the tech bubble burst, and lots of folks were out of work.
Sideboard: It actually turned out kind of reverse. Summer of 2001 when we started Highpoint Lowlife, the bubble was already in mid-burst. I has suffered my first lay-off, and had plenty free time, but not too much money. My friend Joe had some savings, which weren’t Internet related, and that what was how we financed the first release. 8bitrecs was created after I started working in London, so the building of that was all squeezed into my after-work hours. I really see your point though, because I know I used MP3 file sharing services pretty heavily when I was out of work to keep up on new music. I should mention, my disclaimer, I have a guilty spot about file sharing, and I always try and purchase music when I have money. I use Soulseek a lot to listen to a lot of releases that I’ll read about, and when I do like something, I’ll go out and buy it. Most recently with the Opiate and Styrofoam full-lengths on the Morr Music label, which I should mention was also a major inspiration for starting Highpoint Lowlife — if you notice the packaging for our first double Cd compilation, the digipack is the exact same layout as the Putting the Morr Back in Morrissey compilation!
Weidenbaum: I wonder about how inherently organic it is to access electronic music, in particular, over the web. Do you think there’s anything to the suggestion that much electronic music is produced on the same technology one would use to build a website?
Sideboard: I would totally agree with you there. It’s much more natural for music made on a computer to appear so quickly on the web. There are less guitar bands and performers on 8bitrecs than I would like, and I think it is to do with the amount of work involved in recording a live band or real instruments. With electronic music, recording is just part of the whole process. You record and you go back and edit, and when you are finished, or you are taking a break, you have a recorded track there already. It’s very easy and straightforward for you to export your track as an MP3 for further listening, and just an extra step to either post it your site or email it to a friend.
Weidenbaum: There’s so much corporate hand-wringing about the impact on record sales by grey-market music sharing online. I wonder about the impact of free MP3 labels on traditional labels — if there’s so much good music available online, in streaming format and downloadable MP3 files, then who has time, or need, to listen to music you have to pay for?
Sideboard: At the moment there aren’t nearly enough Internet MP3 labels to have much impact on record sales, and of all the labels out there, all of them that I know of are electronic-specific, so it does seem kind of niche. It wouldn’t be beneficial for the artist or labels if there were no need to buy music, and if the music business started using the net as its main distribution media, you can bet the online outlets would have some kind of access fee. That could mean a whole paradigm shift in the industry, from paying for a product, you could perhaps be paying for some kind of subscription service, so I can see how the prospect of so much change would be very scary to the majors.
For a smaller label starting out, the idea of a small donation web fee for downloads based on the honor system could be very nice. Listeners could be under no obligation to pay for anything, but if they liked the service, you could use PayPal or an online store. I had one idea for a fee based project — when I was toying with the name of Foiled by a Science Hero, I thought about inventing around ten super-villains, writing and drawing a small origin/story for each of them, and then getting a musician who could be suitable for doing music fit for super-powered people — I wanted to ask people who make fucked-up, big music – Hrvatski, Kid 606, Knifehandchop, Hellfish + Producer — that kinda artist, and make it a fee-based entry, like $5 entrance to the page, you could download PDFs of the storylines, and the ten MP3s, all encoded at a high bitrate. I like the amount of free labels out there and the stage it’s at, where they are all just hobby-driven and genuine. If the net/mp3 labels turn out to be some kind of phenomenon and receive too much attention, it would probably detract from the enjoyment. I think there is a feeling of having found a little untapped goldmine when you come across good net labels, which would change. I often wonder about how to stop things from growing too large — you know, like a club that starts to get too busy and kills what was special about it to start with — trying to maintain a balance of intimacy and keeping it personal.
Weidenbaum: I understand what you’re saying about your “guilty spot” in regard to using Soulseek and other services to downloaded files. Have you seen 8bitrecs material distributed illegally — posted, for example, on someone else’s site?
Sideboard: No, I’ve never come across that at all. I do see things turning up on Soulseek occasionally, but that’s about the extent of it.
Weidenbaum: I like the idea of your having based an album design at Highpoint Lowlife on the Morr compilation you mentioned. Along the same lines, I like how the typeface and colors on 8bitrecs.com reminds me of my early computer experiences — I can’t help but see 8bitrecs as a kind of wish fulfillment for wishes made, perhaps subconsciously, when we were just teenagers. Can you recall your early experience with computers?
Sideboard: My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K back in about ’83 or ’84, I guess. Countless hours programming games into the computer from the pages of a magazine, which never bloody worked! At school we used BBC Micros a few years later, and then when I started working I got a shiny new DOS-driven 386. I went on to do Novell and Windows support for a few crap years, but it wasn’t till I discovered Linux that I really threw myself into computers and their history and lore. I sort of started a small museum collection myself with a few old Mac SEs, a Commodore 64, and a dot matrix printer. It never got very far. I took a trip to Bletchley Park, the home of the WWII code breakers, and at the end of the tour they have a great computer museum, where I finally got to see a real PDP-11! I was stoked. So yeah, I guess the 8bitrecs imagery comes from that fascination with old machines and their monochrome displays. I work in a console terminal all day long, so it’s just sort of familiar.
Weidenbaum: I often feel like I’d be happy if the Internet never got any better — if ISP connections never got faster, if file formats never changed. The current state of the web, with the ease of producing text and sound and making it freely available, could keep me satisfied as a reader, a writer and a listener for a very long time.
Do you mean you don’t actually want things to get better, or just that you are satisfied with how they are at the moment? I still get frustrated with network speeds when I am copying around large amounts of data, but in general I would agree the current conditions are definitely ample for most tasks.
I mostly mean that the current state of the web is more than sufficient for most tasks, and that too much time and money is spent “improving” the system rather than refining the currently available tools. Anyhow, is there something in particular that threads through the various music you represent on 8bitrecs? I think in particular of the electro-acoustic element, of the mix of clearly earthly sounds with electric percussion.
Sideboard: The music is quite mixed, but I do believe there is an overall coherence when all of the music and artists are taken together, perhaps from the attitudes and ethos of the artists themselves. I think there is something of a community network feel to it. Although there are people who I have contacted directly, a lot of the artists have come to the site from word of mouth. One example would be after Si-cut.db contributed a track, he mentioned 8bit to a few others, one of whom was Motion, who is in contact with a lot of Italian sound producers, so he told some of his friends, and I was contacted by Mou, Lips! From there, whether because they were friends of Mou, Lips! or just aware of them, I was contacted by quite a few Italians, who are now well represented on the site. There is something of a global feel to the artists. The States is pretty well covered, there’s quite a few from London, a few from Scotland, contributions from Italy, Israel, Australia, Sweden and Hungary.
Weidenbaum: That’s interesting about your having originally had broader plans with 8bit, and then having narrowed down to a specific thing: putting up MP3 files. Now that you’ve refined the goals for the site, what plans do you have in the next six or 12 months for it?
Sideboard: I think I’m going to have to do something with the navigation of the site at some point. As more artists are added, I think it’s unwieldy to scroll through the list of all the artists. The streaming could do with some work. It’s quite nice how it works at the moment where it downloads the playlist to your MP3 player, which means you can delete, rearrange and skip through the playlist without having to listen to a predefined stream, but I would like to have some kind of filter — something like, play all tracks added in the past week or month, and so on. I’ve been working on it steadily, just rearranging things and doing changes as needed, for the past year now, to the point where it’s quite nicely stable and easy to maintain, so I’ll leave it how it is for the moment and see how it goes.
Related links: The 8bitrecs webpage. The Highpoint Lowlife webpage.
Big Loada Ninja
The relationship between the worlds of electronic music and hip-hop is particularly evident in the form of Big Dada Records, a rap record label that is an offshoot of Ninja Tune Records, which is the British home to such accomplished electronicisists as Amon Tobin, Funki Porcini and Coldcut. Big Dada has recently released for free downloading and streaming ten promotional cuts by various of its artists, plus an additional six promotional videos for streaming. Listen past the rapping, and the sonic elements share a common ground with Ninja-style electronic music, with their emphasis on low-budget electronics, danceable rhythms, and taut samples. For more information, check out the Big Dada website, at BigDada.com. What follows is an annotated list of those files, produced in coordination with Big Dada. In the interest of time, the files are listed in order of recommendation, starting with the essential:”¢ TTC‘s “Je N’Arrive Pas a Danser” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). Leave it to a French act to make the strongest impression on a British label. For an even better TTC cut, check out “De Pauvres Riches” in the video section, below.
”¢ LoTek Hifi‘s “Ram Dancehall” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). More Caribbean flavor, with a title that could grace a Bruce Sterling cyberpunk short story.
”¢ King Geedorah‘s “Next Level” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). A messed-up jazz beat and a host of guest rappers distinguish this cut.
”¢ Infesticons‘s “Hero Theme” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). Spare as a Motown rhythm section, with a light dusting of hardened strings, this track backs an endless boast by member Mike Ladd.
”¢ NMS‘s “Brave New World” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). A rapidfire wake-up call, featuring Company Flow member Big Justoleum (aka Biggs Jus).
”¢ Infinite Livez‘s “Pononee Girl” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). A bare-bones electro cut, with thick bass and sci-fi effects.
”¢ Roots Manuva‘s “Bashment Boogie (Shadowless Tomz Remix)” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). Echoes of Jamaican dancehall rhyming accent this mid-tempo party song.
”¢ New Flesh featuring Roots Manuva as Cecil Pimpernel‘s “Norbert & Cecil” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). Rudimentary scratching and a light funky offbeat rhythm make this track particularly memorable.
”¢ Majesticons‘s “Brains Party” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). Leave it to a British rap act to quote, repeatedly, the Pet Shop Boys’ “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money),” and add a certain element of threat.
”¢ LoTek Hi Fi‘s “Fire” (MP3, Real Audio stream, Windows Media stream). Much of the Big Dada roster has a certain Jamaican vibe, LoTek Hi Fi in particular.
Also available, six new Big Dada videos:
”¢ TTC‘s “De Pauvres Riches” (Real Video, Windows Media). Rough animation reminiscent of Robert Longo’s paintings of battling yuppies flesh out this highly recommended track, assembled from snippets of woodwinds and raw beats.
”¢ Gamma‘s “Killer Apps” (Real Video, Windows Media). The rapper as organization man, pummeling the competition on his daily commute.
”¢ Roots Manuva‘s “Witness the Fitness” (Real Video, Windows Media). Not since Biggie Smalls has a mature rapper so effortless embodied a man-child.
”¢ Ty‘s “We Don’t Care” (Real Video, Windows Media). Making a name for himself touring with Afrobeat legend Tony Allen, Ty raps with himself in this low-budget video.
”¢ New Flesh‘s “Lie Low” (Real Video, Windows Media). Tag-team jump cuts from a dynamic duo.
”¢ New Flesh‘s “Stick and Move” (Real Video, Windows Media). The trio raps widescreen in this schoolyard anthem.
Rockapaloozer
Folks expecting anything in the way of digital music from the upcoming Lollapalooza summer tour will apparently be disappointed.
The touring festival is back after a six-year absence, headlined by the rock bands Jane’s Addiction and Audioslave. The festival was once renowned for its adventurous spirit, but the acts initially reported for the 2003 edition are almost uniformly guitar-based rock bands, plus a bit of hip-hop, as well as a belly-dancing troupe. For full details, check out the tour’s website at Lollapalooza.com.
Jane’s Addiction is led by singer Perry Farrell, who founded Lollapalooza in 1991. Lollapalooza is widely regarded as having reinvigorated the festival circuit for a generation of music fans raised in the cathode glow of MTV. In Lollapalooza’s wake, tours such as Lilith Fair (founded by singer Sarah McLachlan in 1997), Ozzfest (overseen by heavy-metal eminence grise Ozzy Osbourne since 1996, long before an MTV reality series transformed him into a lovable alterna-patriarch) and, more recently, Area: One (which was founded by techno-pop star Moby), not to mention H.O.R.D.E. (the Blues Traveler-sponsored festival that ran from 1992 through 1998) and Warped Tour, took notice of the festival’s multiple-stage and genre-grab-bag approach.
The apparent absence of electronic music during Lollalooza 2003 is particularly striking, given that Farrell toured behind his own solo DJ album, Song Yet to Be Sung, in 2001. It would be hard to argue that the decision to exclude electronic music is primarily financial, since a number of the acts on Lollapalooza 2003 (Burning Brides, Cold, the Distillers, Kings of Leon, the Music) are hardly household names. Furthermore, the serial festivals Coachella and All Tomorrow’s Parties both focus heavily on electronic music.
From initial reports, the closest the tour gets to digital output is a pair of industrial-flavored rock acts, A Perfect Circle on the main stage and 30 Seconds to Mars on the second stage, and a pair of solid hip-hop acts, Jurassic 5 on the main stage and Pharoahe Monch on the second stage. (Of course, bands may be added down the road, and there is vague mention of “interactive wireless spectacles” in one press release.)
Electronic music had been a common sound at Lollapalooza for its initial seven-year run, from 1991 through 1997. Those tours included various electronic acts, notably Stereolab, Moby and Cocteau Twins. True to Jane’s Addiction’s epic-rock sound, much of the electronic music on these earlier tours focused on industrial music, including the bands Nine Inch Nails, Ministry and Front 242. The last Lollapalooza tour, in 1997, was particularly high on electronic music. It featured the Prodigy, the Orb and Tricky.
The 2003 tour starts in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 3 and ends in Seattle on August 23. It coincides with the release of the first Jane’s Addiction studio album since 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual. The new album is titled Hypersonic.
In related news, former Rage Against the Machine singer Zack de la Rocha teamed up with DJ Shadow to record “March of Death,” an anti-war song, in late March. The song had been available at MarchOfDeath.com. De la Rocha split from his three fellow Rage Against the Machine members over creative differences in the fall of 2000. While that remaining trio formed Audioslave with Cornell, whose previous band had been the grunge stalwart Soundgarden, de la Rocha has been reportedly recording with hip-hop and electronic producers for his forthcoming solo album. Various outlets, including MTV News, have reported that Shadow, Trent Reznor, Dan “The Automator” Nakamura and Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs are among de la Rocha’s collaborators.
Whereas Lollapalooza has been reborn as a largely alternative-rock affair, the generally rootsy jam band community is welcoming electronic music with open arms. In contrast with Lollapalooza’s straight-ahead rock this year, the second Bonnaroo festival, the jam-band summit scheduled this June 13 – 15 in Manchester, Tennessee, includes on its bill such electronic-oriented acts as Tortoise, Mix Master Mike, Kid Koala, DJ Z-Trip, Particle, DJ Spooky and RJD2 — in an otherwise pastoral setting headlined by the Dead, Widespread Panic, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, James Brown, the Allman Brothers Band and Lucinda Williams. And a newly announced second 2003 Bonnaroo — Bonnaroo NE, to be held August 8 – 10 in Riverhead, New York — will include Cut Chemist, X-Ecutioners and Disco Biscuits; the NE headliners include the Dead, Dave Matthews (performing with Tim Reynolds) and Bob Dylan.
Related links: Lollalapooza’s website. All Tomorrow’s Parties’s website. Coachella’s website. Bonnaroo’s website.