Vijith Assar

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

Who: Monica Bethelwood and Juliet Biemiller

When: 12/22/2011, 8:30pm

Where: Intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal, northwest corner

See also: I Heard New York: SOTC's New Series "Cast In Concrete" Records Buskers

Sorry, I know we're long overdue for another sweet busker MP3, but I've been more or less flattened by the flu that's been going around, so you'll have to excuse me if I don't feel like traipsing around out there at the moment. Instead, let's go with one from the archives that never quite made it through the editorial gauntlet back when I did decide to brave the elements last year -- here's the formidably dreadlocked duo of North Carolina singer Monica Bethelwood and her pal Juliet Biemiller, captured on the northwest corner of Bleecker and MacDougal way back when it was a hacky-looking Asian fusion restaurant (it is now a coffee shop, I believe). Bethelwood told me she'd just returned from California, and given the hobo-folk vibe I was quite content to just assume that she hitched a ride on a rusty freight train. (One of her songs was called "Hubba Hubba Hobo," actually.) She has since set up shop in North Carolina; "I moved to Asheville with 20 dollars in my pocket," she told me recently, so I like to think she now travels between her gigs doing tarot card readings riding atop a rickety old mule (one of those things is actually true).

Vijith Assar

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

See also: Cast In Concrete #6: Scott Stenten And The Sound Of Two Hands Tapping (On A Guitar)

Vijith Assar

Who: Scottish Octopus
Where: intersection of Lafayette Street and 8th Street, in front of the cube sculpture
When: 11/17/2012, about 5pm.

Things didn't go so well when I tried to record Andrew Forbes a few weeks ago over near NYU. A second expected bagpiper didn't show up, whooshing wind noises made my recording unusable, and there was also one unpleasant incident wherein a particularly nasty gust made off with a big chunk of the money in his case, forcing his enchanted onlookers to break free of their trances and run around trying to gather up the fluttering bills. I gave up pretty quickly, and then he disappeared into the wind himself, so to speak.

See Also:
- Cast In Concrete Archive

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

Who: Lenna Pierce, d.b.a. Meaner Pencil

When: November 1st, 11:30pm

Where: C line, Nostrand Avenue station, Manhattan-bound platform

John Bylander

Attention, anybody who still thinks CMJ is about concerts and wild nights: it's time for last call. One final dose of tech, marketing, and legal wisdom will be dispensed to registered attendees during the panel discussions hosted at NYU's Kimmel Student Center all day today. Sure, it starts earlier than usual this time around -- 9am sharp -- but if you decide to just sleep in and stave off last night's hangover, you'll likely spend the next 51 weeks haplessly bumbling around through what's left of the music industry, which I sincerely doubt can handle any more incompetence. Come on down.

John Bylander

Welp, here we go again--Day 3 of CMJ 2012 serves up 23 music biz panels during the day which are accessible only to people with the all-access badges, followed at night by another frenzied shitstorm of concerts, the best of which probably will decide not to let you in even if you do have one of the damn things. For our money, the finest venue at CMJ is certainly NYU's Kimmel Student Center, on the southern end of Washington Square Park. Won't you join us?

John Bylander

While you folks were all wearing yourselves out running around between CMJ showcases yesterday, I just guzzled a bunch of free booze at a press-only party and then ran home to giggle at the two boring rich dudes angrily discussing the details of their pension plans on national television. Hope it was worth it, because my own personal energy strategy was to turn in early and rest up for today's daytime programming, easily the highlight of CMJ for those of us who have no idea who the hell any of these bands are. (Pleased to meet you, Milk Dick.) But I bet you've heard of Kickstarter, SoundCloud, and TechCrunch, all of which are sending their top brass to dispense pearls and/or turds of music industry advice at today's panel discussions. No, I won't tell you where to find any of them; instead, please parse your various options using the decision tree we've thoughtfully provided.

John Bylander

Today marks the start of the CMJ Music Marathon, the annual festival during which zillions of allegedly up-and-coming bands take over Williamsburg and lower Manhattan for the better part of a week to schmooze with various music industry forces and perform at their heavily branded sponsored showcases. This makes it an especially great week for concerts in New York, as you are probably already aware. But those who were lucky enough to score one of the pricey all-access passes also get another lesser-known benefit: admission to an excellent slate of daytime programming, mostly panel discussions and presentations hosted at NYU's Kimmel Student Center, roughly two dozen every day. Since these often go unheralded and thus might be incidental to your existing CMJ plans, we've compiled a handy tool to help you assemble a schedule. See you there.

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

I first scouted out Scott Stenten for this column late last fall, when the chilly weather cost me three solid evenings wandering around midtown and the East Village looking for musicians, who apparently had all already packed it in for the winter by then. But Stenten was bravely soldiering on into the cold; by the time we caught up again last week, that situation had completely reversed, and we found ourselves in the sweltering passageway between Grand Central and the Graybar Building.

Using a doubleneck acoustic—two identical steel six-strings, with additional electronics behind a detachable flap on the back—Stenten plays entirely via an unusual two-handed fretboard tapping technique. It's sort of like Eddie Van Halen's embellishing trick, except that it's applied at all times to create fully independent chord and melody voices for each hand, much like a pianist.

Cast In Concrete tracks Vijith Assar as he records New York City's street musicians. If you'll be busking nearby soon and would like to appear in a future installment, please let him know.

I will ride hard for Prospect Park even under normal circumstances, so when you also plop a great band down in the middle of it, you've probably made my week. Upon spying an informal jam session unfolding beneath a tree, I immediately dashed back to my nearby apartment to pick up the recording gear, which is why here you're hearing some delightful new condenser mics that I usually don't bother to bring along when I'm just aimlessly wandering. By the time I made it back the band had relocated a few yards due west, since in the intervening half hour a bird had taken a shit on guitarist Jordan Shapiro's fretboard. This took him a while to clean up.