Every Grasshopper jam starts with a great big nothing sound, on or near the cusp of silence, so soft and unassuming that it almost isn't there. Then, ever-so-glacially, the frame fills with sound: Josh Millrod's penetrative trumpeting fed through the maw of Jesse DeRosa's distortion-hemorrhaging Electric Valve Instrument, the two elements weaving and warping to an extent that it can be next to impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. And just like that, it's as if the divining song they've summoned into being—be it low-level, keening drone or a no-holds-barred FX freakout—has always been there, waiting for you to finally find it. The NYC-based duo strikes odd balances between playfulness and dolor, noise and New Age; they take a stimulating yet calming approach to "out jazz," one that feels both idiosyncratic and vital.

In advance of Grasshopper's appearance at this weekend's Ende Tymes Fest, SOTC exchanged emails with Millrod and DeRosa about the nature of their sound, Stephen King, and the value of high-school music education.

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NYC denizen Elizabeth McChesney answers to "Lissy Trullie," but Lissy Trullie is also a band: frontwoman McChesney and Eben D'Amico slinging guitars, Ian Fenger folding in stubbornly insinuative bass lines, Josh Elrod's backbeat lending teeth to the whole. The fierce, spiky interplay between the four is all over Lissy Trullie, the full-length follow-up to 2009's promising Self-Taught Learner EP. From the puckered, pensive "It's Only You, Isn't It?" to the wood-chipper chug of "X-Red" to the way "Heart Sound" hits like a triple-adrenaline cocktail, there's a relentless urgency—a tawny forward momentum -that's as under-sweetened as it is habit-forming. The smoldering, husky "Madeleine" is no less arresting.

In a telephone interview Monday evening, McChesney filled SOTC in on the sonic techniques used to create Lissy Trullie.

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The titles of Lotus Plaza's two albums reveal a lot about the project's shifting aesthetics. 2009's The Floodlight Collective (Kranky) was a light-saturation exercise in an extremely literal sense, a suffocating gush of effects pedal-generated and otherwise so outsized that it was impossible to tell where instrumental parts, songs, or even Plaza principal Lockett Pundt ended or began.

Meanwhile, the followup Spooky Action at a Distance (also on Kranky) is a definitive grower that unearths its gifts by degrees: an admiration for the clarity and subliminal pacing of tunes like "Strangers" and "Eveningness" gives way to an appreciation for the way Pundt's vocals are closer to front and center, and then, just like that, diffidently confident songs rooted in traditional indie-rock aesthetics that seemed achingly familiar suddenly become companionable and comfortable.

There are bits and pieces of Stereolab, Flying Saucer Attack, Deerhunter (Pundt's main gig), and dozens of other acts in Lotus Plaza's gurgling, chiming flow, but once the current seizes you, it can be difficult to break free of it, or to even want to.

SOTC emailed with Pundt about Spooky Action, how his collaboration with his fiancé Shadya Yavari Nice Weekend came about, and the origin of the name "Lotus Plaza."

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The way Danny Brown raps isn't identical to the way Danny Brown talks, but in conversation with the Michigan MC, a few similarities pop up: the wheezy hyena chuckles, the dry sense of humor, the easy confidence, the sense that he can murder this interview shit day or night, awake or asleep, braided or permed. Rapping, Brown works in two modes: a parody of a steroid-case bruiser spitting through and a strained, crazed yelp that's half Eminem, half Ol' Dirty Bastard, with the former's ear for intricately structured rhymes and the latter's willingness to play the ham.

A decade into Brown's rocky rap career, the mean streets of Detroit are his inspiration; poverty, depravity, and how one fuels the other are as much his grand themes as exhibitionist cunnilingus or dreaming up funny nicknames for strains of marijuana. And if 2010's The Hybrid, his first high-profile solo mix tape, established Brown's urban diorama—abject gross-outs, debauched slice-of-life vignettes, thinly veiled PSAs, a brief history of his family's history with illegal substances—last year's XXX (Fool's Gold) exploded it to feature-film dimensions with the no-holds barred hedonism of its first half giving way to a series of heart-scarring sequels and prequels: straw-woman party girls like the ones Brown's been mounting emerging as broken souls, hard-knock childhood tales, gangs of metal-stripping marauders. XXX (which clocked in at No. 28 on the most recent Pazz & Jop poll) takes root and wraps its branches around the listener, the encyclopedic spiral of referents jibing with the devilishly psychedelic array of daring, wide-earred beats, the apparently endless, compressed strings of marvelous couplets. Brown has more winners in two songs than most rappers manage in an entire album. If you've only familiar with the 31-year old's breast-beating, scene-stealing spots on Das Racist, Mister Muthafuckin' eXquire, or Mach Five tracks, you haven't heard the full Danny Brown.

Earlier this month, Brown filled SOTC in on his writing process, his love for Joy Division, and what it means to take "blunts to the face."

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Ayline

Urban decay. Bathroom graffiti. Steam hissing violently from manholes. Designer fetish gear; black-lit dungeons and black vinyl pants; Saturday Night Live outré mascot Stefon. The music of Berlin duo Velvet Condom—a fastidiously gesticulating grind of snapping synthesizer presets, gloomy guitars, droll role-playing, and the sort of casually arch desperation you might expect from twentysomethings weaned on a steady diet of Kraftwerk, Suede, Ennio Morricone, Brian Eno, and the Sex Pistols—evokes all of the above. The sonic worlds Nicolas Isner (vocals/guitars/keyboards) and Oberst Panizza (programming/keyboards) built on 2008's sinister Safe & Elegant and last year's pulsing Stadtgeil teem with metronomic clang, tumbling disco rhythms, and Freon cool. Sometimes Isner's vocals are suffocated under layers of studio murk; sometimes they're uncomfortably upfront, as on "Silky Lolita," which, oddly, suggests a neutered, Jesus Lizard-era David Yow sitting in with Blur.

Sound of the City caught up with Isner via email to discuss the band's origins, its provocative name, and Berlin.

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via Facebook

Mister Hands, the debut album from NARC, is the sound of Balimore's Nicky Smith bisecting and pinning to cork several the electric guitar's sonic flavors: the panning-stereo patty-cake blare of "Gangrene/Snickers"; the drowsy, Drunken Master splay of "Sweater"; "Don't Touch," which bear-hugs a meat and potatoes butt-metal riff while filtering everything through a thin skein of distortion; and "Charles Rats Get It On Olson," which suggests a cross between obsessive, stress-fracture inducing scale practice on an un-tuned axe and a haunted shutter camera trying to destroy itself. Dizzying, convulsive, meditative, and downright alien in spots—"The Bomb" pensively channels teletype clicks and sci-fi FX—Hands represents a confident start to Smith's career as a songwriter, even as the world of filmmaking beckons.

SOTC emailed with Smith about Mister Hands, why he calls himself "NARC," and plans for his first feature.

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Despiritualized, part of the December 20 haul.

On Tuesday Dais Records issued God Is Truth and Light Is His Shadow by Prurient, a.k.a. Hospital Productions overlord/NYC noise institution Dom Fernow. Clocking in at almost 16 minutes, God is a reasonably inauspicious outing that's more interested in ambient texture than pulse-quickening implosions; its eye-scalping Genesis P-Orridge cover art is the most shocking thing about it. But it's nice, and it simultaneously serves as an apologia for and corrective to the Extreme Death-Synth Misadventure that was July's Bermuda Drain (Hydra Head) and a hint as to where Fernow might go next.

"God Is Truth And Light His Shadow" juxtaposes a children's conversation with droning, glowing synth chords and a surreptitiously introduced hodgepodge of demonic samples and sonic stunts; "God Is True And Every Man A Liar" is horror-flick score foreboding; "Judgement To The World" allows critics to type "Prurient" and "furious solo guitar study" and "John Fahey" in the same sentence without seeming deranged. So God winds up being thought-provoking and diversionary and artistic—adjectives not usually associated with other entries in the Prurient catalog, which tend to shock systems or set up violent, anonymous nightmares. Fernow's muse can just as easily land on power electronics as harsh ambient as black metal, then double back to any of those whenever the mood strikes; wading into the massive Prurient discography unawares is analogous to painting the town red with some dodgy dude you just met who turns out to be a charter member of Fight Club. Will you wind up dead, in jail, or bleeding in a ditch?

On some level, Fernow must have understood this, because on December 20 a crushing four hours' worth of tinnitus-encouraging Prurient music surfaced on iTunes without warning. Though the deluge consisted primarily of long out-of-print cassettes and CDs—2001's White Plains Leather/Black River Falls, 2002's Dracula Syndrome, 2003's Whooping Cough, 2006's Point And Void, and 2009's Palm Tree Corpse—new releases Despiritualized and The Annihilationist insist that this auteur remains keen to fuck shit up.

Running close to $50 in total, last month's haul serves as a sort of survey course in lesser-known, under-trumpeted Prurient releases. Recognizing that maybe you don't have $50—or that you've already blown through most of the iTunes gift cards you got for Christmas—Sound of the City invites you, dear reader, on a guided tour of these releases.

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copyright 2011 Kit Macchi // @greenshock

Baltimore's Lexie Macchi isn't so much a relentlessly inquisitive sound-shifter as she is a Renaissance Everywoman dynamo. There is, seemingly, nothing she can't do or hasn't done. The Crazy Dreams Band, which she fronted, exploded Gang Gang Dance's polygenre supernovae into something capable of setting Aiwa speakers aflame. Her eponymous Lexie Mountain Boys project fused theatricality, acapella girl power, and boisterous, giggly humor into a cross between performance art and a mass stand-up routine. (Did I mention that Macchi does real stand-up, too? She does.) Tween Omens—her newish duo with fellow Mountain Girl Amy Harmon—seems to explore the ill effects wrought by a steady intake of lead paint chips, crystal meth, and amateur European techno. Like pretty much everybody in Baltimore, she's thrown down with former Baltimorean Jason Urick. And her solo work—much of which is available in maddeningly limited-edition form—is even more open-ended, ranging from unrehearsed stream-of-thought monologues to maniacally Cubist vocal anti-studies to strategically cut-up-and-over-stitched vocal collages to garbage-trawler noise stews that recall the late, lamented Baltimore chunk-unit WZT Hearts.

Recent dispatches on Macchi's Soundcloud page are light on vocals and heavy on the kind of sustained and staggered drones that do interesting things to listeners' personal plumbing, suggesting that her muse is on the move, though the UMBC student/Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture employee doesn't have any official recordings in the pipeline at present; this seems fitting, given the crackling nature of her live performances.

Sound of the City emailed with Macchi about song-making, her earliest musical efforts, and the states of her larger projects.

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via WFMU

The word "grinding" means different things to different people. For video-game enthusiasts, it represents the expository dead stretches where no action is happening. In drug-dealing culture, it signifies a never-ending hustle. In youth club culture, it's the dance style formerly known as "freaking." For skaters, grinding involves sliding the base of a skateboard over an obstacle while remaining upright. And grinding is—very literally, in the traditional sense of the word—what New York musician Kyle Kessler does best; she twists fluorescent bulbs and adjusts dials on soundboards connected to speakers and unleashes clashing, granite waves of noise. In her hands, tones turn centrifugal, collide, rattle and clank. Rollercoaster cars click forebodingly along corroded tracks. Yellowjacket-piqued and buzzing, this is rough, industrial-strength stuff: deeply impressionistic bleatings electronically filleted and flagellated miles beyond the bounds of decipherability, until there's nothing left but franticly rhythmic fodder; depleted-battery smoke-detector psychosis; poks and pops uncannily similar to the sound of woodpeckers attacking trees; heaving, distended beats and tea-kettle screech frequency-scrambling capable of driving even the most indoctrinated of Lasse Marhaug disciples to smash their speakers if caught in the wrong mood. Kessler does unforgiving metal-tooth comb drill-nausea; she can bring emergency Broadcast System null-drone like nobody's business.

Yet as 2009's pulsating Beyond the Meniscus (Trepanner) demonstrates, she's also capable of utilizing noise, feedback, and oscillation as framing devices for Omni chord-borne introspection and languor, bending and twisting and hammering keys until iridescent rainbow fusillades spiral free in loops. Sound of the City emailed with Kessler—formerly known as Kyle Clyde and Olympia Zadora, now performing as Penny Royale—about pop music, the media course she's teaching this winter, and how she wound up making noise.

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The store's interior in happier times.

The Hospital Productions store at 60 E. Third Street is no more, according to reports by East Village Radio and EV Grieve (which has photos of the storefront bearing a "For Rent" sign). The store, a physical extension of Dominick Fernow's identically named label-cum-distro that served as a backdrop for uncompromisingly bleak, multi-format music shopping and intensely claustrophobic noise shows, closed its doors at the beginning of December. While the Hospital website makes no mention of the shuttering and does not indicate whether the store will resurface at a new locale, there are no indications that overall operations will cease; an email inquiry seeking comment was not returned by press time.

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