Everything is Interesting
Papa Grows Funk is a funk band from New Orleans.
The band was started by frontman John ‘Papa’ Gros in early 2000, developing from a series of Monday night jam sessions helmed by Gros at New Orleans’ Maple Leaf Bar. Gros would invite some friends down to play, and the impromptu jams became a common bond for a handful of musicians, including guitarist June Yamagishi, sax player Jason Mingledorf, bassist Marc Pero and drummer Jeffery ‘Jellybean’ Alexander.
Ivan Neville (b. 1959) is a multi-instrumentalist musician, singer, and songwriter. He is the son of Aaron Neville and nephew to members of The Neville Brothers. While it was never a huge charting song, Neville’s ‘Why Cant I Fall In Love’ become a sleeper fan-favorite, gaining fame from the 1990 Soundtrack to the Christian Slater film, ‘Pump Up the Volume.’ Neville has played with and appeared on several Neville Brother records, as well as his father’s solo records.
He performed in Bonnie Raitt’s band from 1985 to 1987. He also contributed keyboards to two Rolling Stones albums, 1986’s ‘Dirty Work’ and 1994’s ‘Voodoo Lounge’ as well as being a member of Keith Richards’ solo band the X-Pensive Winos. In 1988, he toured with Richards. In 2003, he formed his own band Dumpstaphunk. When the levees failed in New Orleans in 2005, Neville joined The New Orleans Social Club and recorded the benefit album ‘Sing Me Back Home’ with producers Leo Sacks and Ray Bardani at Wire Studios in Austin, Texas.
Breakbot aka Thibaut Berland (b. 1981) is a French producer and DJ born.
After studying at the School of Graphic Supinfocom, he made short films (with Oury Atlan and Damien Ferrié called Overtime), advertisements and videos. He is also a CG artist with credits including ‘Arthur and the Invisibles.’
Nobukazu Takemura (b. 1968) is a Japanese musician whose style has run from jazz to house to drum and bass to chamber music to electronic glitch within less than a decade. Born in Osaka he became interested in punk and New Wave music when young. At high school, after a record store job that exposed him to Jazz and Hip hop, he had regular gigs as a battle DJ. In 1990, Takemura founded Audio Sports with Yamatsuka Eye (of The Boredoms) and Aki Onda. Their first album, ‘Era of Glittering Gas,’ was released in 1992 (after which Onda subsequently took control of the project), the same year as Takemura’s first solo album, under the name DJ Takemura. He has also released material with Spiritual Vibes (since 1993) and as Child’s View (since 1994). He is currently paired with Childisc vocalist/composer Aki Tsuyuko under the touring name of Assembler.
He founded the Lollop and Childisc labels; his voluminous releases, remixes, and collaborations make a comprehensive discography difficult, and his music often defies any easy categorization. He emerged in the US after the release of ‘Scope’ on the Thrill Jockey label in 1999, an album that features delicate melodies blossoming from oceans of white noise and staccato electronics. His unique and complex approach to melody and instrumentation has generated a catalog of collaborations with critically acclaimed artists including Issey Miyake, Zu, Steve Reich, DJ Spooky, Yo La Tengo, and Tortoise. Takemura was responsible for the sound design of Sony’s robotic dog AIBO.
Ryoji Ikeda (b. 1966) is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in Paris. Ikeda’s music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of ‘raw’ states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. The conclusion of his album ‘+/-‘ features just such a tone; of it, Ikeda says ‘a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance.’
Rhythmically, Ikeda’s music is highly imaginative, exploiting beat patterns and, at times, using a variety of discrete tones and noise to create the semblance of a drum machine. His work also encroaches on the world of ambient music; many tracks on his albums are concerned with slowly evolving soundscapes, with little or no sense of pulse.
Ilona Staller (b. 1951), also known by her stage name la Cicciolina, is a Hungarian-born Italian porn star, politician, and singer. She continued to make hardcore pornographic films while in office. She is famous for delivering political speeches with one breast exposed. In 1964 she began working for a Hungarian modeling agency; in her memoirs she claimed that she had provided Hungarian authorities with information on American diplomats staying at a Budapest luxury hotel where she worked as a maid in the late 1960s.
Staller married American sculptor Jeff Koons in 1991. Koons produced a series of sculptures and photographs of them having sex in many positions, settings and costumes, which were exhibited under the title ‘Made In Heaven.’ The marriage broke up in 1992, and their son Ludwig Maximillian was born shortly afterwards. Staller left the US with the child, and a lengthy custody battle ensued. Koons won custody in 1998 but Ludwig remains with Staller in Italy.
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Les Luthiers [loo-tee-ers] is an Argentine comedy-musical group, very popular also in several other Spanish-speaking countries. They were formed in 1967 by Gerardo Masana, during the height of a period of very intense Choral Music activity in Argentina’s state universities.
Their outstanding characteristic is the home-made musical instruments (hence the name luthiers, French for ‘musical instrument maker’), some of them extremely sophisticated, which they skillfully employ in their recitals to produce music and texts full of high class and refined humor.
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Mickey Hart (b. 1943), real name Michael Steven Hartman, is an American percussionist and musicologist. He is best known as one of the two drummers of the rock band the Grateful Dead. He and fellow Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann earned the nickname ‘the rhythm devils.’ Before joining the Grateful Dead, Hart and his father, Leonard Hart, a champion rudimental drummer, owned and operated Hart Music, selling drums and musical instruments in San Carlos, California. Hart joined the Grateful Dead in 1967, and left in 1971 when he extricated himself from the band, due to conflict between band management and Mickey’s father. During his sabbatical, in 1972, he recorded the album ‘Rolling Thunder.’ He returned to the Dead in 1974, and remained with the group until their official dissolution in 1995. Collaboration with the remaining members of the Grateful Dead continues, under the band name The Dead.
Alongside his work with the Grateful Dead, Mickey Hart has flourished as a solo artist, percussionist, and the author of several books. In these endeavors he has pursued a lifelong interest in ethnomusicology and in world music. His travels and his interest in all things percussion-related led him to collect percussion instruments, and to collaborate with percussion masters the world over.
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The Rapture is a dance-punk band based in New York City. The band mixes influences from many genres including post-punk, acid house, disco, electronic music, and rock, pioneering the post-punk revival genre. The Rapture formed in 1998 by keyboardist Chris Relyea, drummer Vito Roccoforte and guitarist/vocalist Luke Jenner. In 1999 the band released its debut ‘mini-album’, ‘Mirror.’ Following this release, the band relocated to New York. They were finally joined by Matt Safer having gone through five keyboard players and two bassists in an eighteen-month period. After touring extensively for two years, the band released the six-song EP ‘Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks’ on the Sub Pop label, with the lead track featuring in the film adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel ‘The Rules Of Attraction.’
The Rapture were forerunners of the post-punk revival of the early 2000s, as they mixed their early post-punk sound with electronic and dance elements via their collaboration with the celebrated New York production team DFA. Multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Andruzzi joined the band in 2002. Their first full-length record, ‘Echoes,’ was released to critical acclaim in 2003. The Rapture released their second full-length album, ‘Pieces of the People We Love,’ on Universal Motown Records in 2006. Paul Epworth, Ewan Pearson and Danger Mouse produced the album.
Little Dragon is a Swedish electronic band, formed in Gothenburg in 1996. It consists of Swedish-Japanese singer Yukimi Nagano (vocals, percussion) and her close high school friends Erik Bodin (drums), Fredrik Källgren Wallin (bass) and Håkan Wirenstrand (keyboards). Little Dragon’s first release was the single ‘Twice/Test’ in 2006. The following year, the band signed with the larger British indie label Peacefrog Records and released their self-titled debut album. Their second album, ‘Machine Dreams,’ was released in 2009, followed by their third album, ‘Ritual Union,’ in 2011.
The band’s name was inspired by the ‘Little Dragon’ nickname Nagano earned due to the ‘fuming tantrums’ she used to throw while recording in the studio. ‘It’s a little exaggerated but there is some truth in it,’ Nagano said. ‘But we’ve grown up a bit and I realized you can’t have a fit every day because otherwise you won’t be able to stand each other.’
Shabazz Palaces are a Seattle-based hip-hop collective, led by Ishmael Butler aka ‘Palaceer Lazaro’ (once ‘Butterfly’ of jazz-rap group Digable Planets) and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire, son of Mbira master Dumisani Maraire.
The group anonymously self-released two EPs, ‘Eagles Soar, Oil Flows’ and ‘The Seven New’ (often referred to simply as ‘Shabazz Palaces and Of Light’) in 2009 before becoming the first hip-hop act to be signed to the Sub Pop label and releasing their debut full-length album, ‘Black Up,’ in 2011.
‘Original Soundtracks 1’ is a 1995 album recorded by U2 and Brian Eno, as a side project, under the pseudonym Passengers. It is a collection of songs written for mostly imaginary movies (the exclusions being songs for ‘Ghost in the Shell,’ ‘Miss Sarajevo,’ and ‘Beyond the Clouds’). U2 and Eno formed Passengers as a side-project during the preliminary recording sessions for U2’s 1997 album, ‘Pop.’
Their intention was to record a soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film ‘The Pillow Book’ as a warm up before the main ‘Pop’ sessions. Though the plan did not come to fruition, Eno suggested they continue recording for imaginary films. U2 were unsure of the idea at first, but agreed after Eno told them that producing radio hits was not the goal of the collaboration
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The Daily Omnivore 