WNYC.org: Songwriter Devendra Banhart joins host David Garland for an in-studio performance of his recent songs. With a unique delivery and sound, Devendra's voice is startling and fascinating listeners at his performances and on his new CD, "Oh Me, Oh My."
Despite a relatively small recorded output and little media recognition, Bark Psychosis was one of the most innovative artists of their era. From rather uninspired origins as a teenaged Napalm Death cover band, the British group evolved by leaps and bounds, moving from moody, lush pop to ambient soundscapes to taut, atmospheric experimental music; their work was so revolutionary, and so impossible to define, that noted critic Simon Reynolds even found it necessary to invent a new sub-genre -- "post-rock" -- simply to categorize their vision. Read More
A trailblazing force in psycho-acoustic music, avant-garde composer and performer Alvin Lucier was born in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1931; educated at Yale and Brandeis, he also spent two years in Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship before returning to Brandeis in 1962 to teach and conduct the university's chamber chorus. His breakthrough composition, Music for Solo Performer (1964-65) for Enormously Amplified Brain Waves and Percussion, was the first work to feature sounds generated by brain waves in live performance; biological stimuli played an increasing role in Lucier's subsequent work as well, most notably through his notation of performers' physical movements. More
<img src="www.antville.org" align="left" hspace="3" height=240">Michael Gira founder of Young Gods Records: "2 years ago I first heard the crude home made recordings of Devendra Banhart, then a homeless, wandering, neo psych/folk hippie artist and musician, not yet 21 years old. We released these recordings on YGR because we'd never heard anything quite like them, ever. His voice - a quivering high-tension wire, sounded like it could have been recorded 70 years ago - these songs could have been sitting in someone's attic, left there since the 1930's. The response was astounding . Devendra soon moved here to NYC (from SF), where he lived in squats, couch-surfed, and finally found himself a home (very recently), suddenly riding a tidal wave of press acclaim, 3 or 4 US tours, tours in Europe, a special feature on NPR (for God's sake) – in short, a seismic shift in his fortunes." More