Author Archives: Bill Meyer

New Zealand’s underground music scene is known for its incestuousness: sooner or later everyone plays with everyone else. Perhaps that’s one reason why Graeme Jefferies has chosen to base his band the Cakekitchen in Europe. He shares with fellow New Zealanders Roy Montgomery, Alastair Galbraith, and his brother Peter Jefferies a penchant for leavening brooding […]

One band drew praise from everyone I talked to when I was in Australia–Melbourne’s Dirty Three. The music of this unconventionally configured power trio–electric guitar, violin, drums, and no vocals–includes elegiac meditations, noirish mood pieces, and sulfurous punk outbursts. Determined to avoid being stereotyped, they play in a multitude of composed and improvised styles, but […]

Like Finland’s Varttina or the Tuvan Republic’s Huun-Huur-Tu, Garmarna weds an indigenous tradition and a contemporary presentation. The group’s stringed instruments–hurdy-gurdy, fiddle, guitar–drone and skirl around the singing of Emma Hardelin as she articulates the stark, indelible melodies that are the heart of Swedish folk music. But they’re not hidebound traditionalists; Jens Hoglin’s powerful drumming […]

Jim O’Rourke has recorded several albums of improvised guitar music, and his compositions have been performed by the Kronos Quartet and ROVA Saxophone Quartet, but he doesn’t like to be called a musician. He’s interested in manipulating and sculpting sound, and in doing so he’s as likely to employ static, feedback, or an imperfectly tuned […]

Space rock, once reviled, is newly ascendant: witness the popularity of Stereolab’s Moog-dominated pop, the rise of ambient house music, and the grudging critical respect recently accorded seminal space rockers Hawkwind. The Hyde Park combo Sabalon Glitz puts Chicago back on the galactic musical map. (Sun Ra’s Arkestra, based here in the 50s, was an […]

Plenty of rock bands are bicoastal, but Ashtray Boy is the only one I know of that’s bihemispheric. In Sydney singer-guitarist Randall Lee lives and plays with one rhythm section, and in Chicago, the home of his record company, Ajax, he plays with another. Lee’s songwriting traits–a broad stylistic range and an even broader streak […]

Magic Hour is a collision of apparent opposites. Drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang once powered Galaxie 500’s lighter-than-air post-Velvet Underground pop; guitarists Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar, on the other hand, have probed the outer limits of crazed psychedelic guitar abuse in their bands Crystalized Movements, Vermonster, and BORB, as well as on […]

In rock ‘n’ roll eclecticism is often the refuge of the dilettante, but not in the case of the Dog Faced Hermans, a Scottish quartet that calls Amsterdam home. For a moment on “Virginia Fur,” a song from their new CD Those Deep Buds, the distorted guitars sound like Sonic Youth, a probing trumpet recalls […]

When the Velvet Underground’s contributions to rock and roll are tallied, drummer Maureen Tucker doesn’t usually get the credit she deserves. At a time when rock was slouching toward a dubious “more is more” aesthetic, she pioneered an egoless, minimalist percussion concept drawn from an adolescence spent drumming along to Bo Diddley records and her […]

David Kilgour is quite simply one of the best purveyors of tuneful guitar pop to record since the advent of punk. His first band, the Clean, kick-started New Zealand’s underground music scene in 1981 when its first single, “Tally Ho!,” recorded at a cost of $50, topped that country’s charts for weeks without any radio […]

Tarika is Malagasy for “the band,” inviting a not entirely fatuous comparison to the American group of the same name. The Band strove to blend traditional North American styles (blues, country, gospel, R & B, etc) with contemporary pop music. Tarika integrates musical styles from Madagascar’s 18 distinct tribes, and in its original songs it […]

Peter Jefferies spells out his recording philosophy in the booklet accompanying his new album Electricity, released on Chicago’s Ajax records: “No outboard effects. No compression. No noise reduction.” It might sound limiting, but as a recording artist and producer/engineer working with such like-minded New Zealand artists as the Dead C., King Loser, and Sandra Bell, […]

Maria Kalaniemi and the group JPP are both in the vanguard of Finland’s contemporary folk music scene, which has revitalized stagnant traditions by ignoring stylistic boundaries. JPP (Jarvelan Pikkupelimannit, or “Little Fiddlers of Jarvela,” a mouthful even for natives) play Finnish folk tunes infused with Celtic, Swedish, and classical influences. The group’s lineup–harmonium, stand-up bass, […]