Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Rescuing us from our Dark Age world image, beyond political occupations, will always be music and the arts of America, or will it? European blip-hop bands like Lali Puna, Styrofoam and the Go Find, engineered in Western Europe, are slowly shifting the epicenter of musical hip back to the eastern side of the Atlantic. <!--break--> <p><img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/laptop3small.BMP"><br> </p><p>Rescuing us from our Dark Age world image, beyond political occupations, will always be music and the arts of America, or will it? The birthplace of Jazz, Blues, Rock &amp; Roll, Country, Rap, Hip-hop, etc., where names/faces of Jay-Z or 50-Cent are more recognizable globally than their politician counterparts – Condie and Colin. But if it is hip-hop that now continues to mushroom out of the Manhattan projects, it is European blip-hop, engineered in Western Europe, that is slowly shifting the epicenter of musical hip back to the eastern side of the Atlantic. </p><p>What did the bi-polar Cold War era music scene look like? The Beatles blazed onto the Ed Sullivan Show, Hendrix, discharged from the 101^st Airborne Division, blew up in Europe with <i>The Experience</i>, then made a stunning entrance into the America scene at the Monterey Pop Festival. And later in the 70’s it was the Clash and Sex Pistols that would lob punk bombs at our shores. All these acts brought to America something familiar yet alien. Today it is the blip-hop bands like <i>Lali-puna</i>, <i>Styrofoam</i> and <i>the Go Find</i> on the Morr Music Tour, that are bringing the new to America. But the new music coming out of Europe today can not be found on MTV nor Clear Channel Radio stations. No matter how popular the music may be overseas, it can remain very much underground here. </p><p /><p>The <i>Lali-puna</i> show, Friday, Nov. 19 was literally underground: under Pearl St. in Buffalo, downstairs in some supped up building basement called <i>Big Orbit’s Soundlab</i>, that could have served as a speak-easy. </p><p /><p>The performers tonight spoke easy; they differ from punk/rock singers who look like they’ll go nuts unless they get to sing. There is no grand entrance no elaborate stage fantasia, the singer starts singing and eventually the room figures it out and goes quiet. <img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/valsmall.BMP"><br></p><p /><p>The <i>Go Find </i>began with an extremely soulful anthem, &quot;City Dreamer&quot; - the third track from the album <i>Miami</i>. The first song of the night played like it could have been the last. And why is it that third tracks on albums are consistently the most soulful? The lead singer made the obligatory introductions, &quot;we’re from Belgium, Europe,&quot; underscoring the singer’s rather justifiable lack of confidence in American’s knowledge of world geography. &quot;It’s <i>gut</i> to be in Buffalo.&quot;</p><p>The <i>Go Find</i> is a one-man band from Antwerp, Belgium. Dieter Sermus, is the practitioner of this electro-hip-blip-blop, brooding, dance-able beat, but not dance beat, technical, but not techno. There could be references to The Postal Service from Seattle, okay, but somehow their version comes off unnatural, like Spaniards rapping. Electro-pop by Americans has potential, it just hasn't been done well yet.</p><p>As if his songs were not moving enough, Dieter is also with you in his subtle physical movement, guitar strumming, head jamming to it all eventually building momentum within songs and from song to song. They are bipolar songs really, at the same time you want to give up you want to dance to it. <img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/valarcherblursmall.BMP"><br></p><p /><p>After the set, and a short break, The Go Find began playing again, only the keyboarder was now singing instead of Dieter. That’s what you thought at first but, actually it was a different band altogether called <i>Styrofoam.</i></p><p>For their European shows <i>The Go Find</i> and <i>Styrofoam</i> bring their own bands, but for the US tour they borrowed from another’s talents. This works fine because they are good friends and <i>Styrofoam</i> actually assisted Dieter with <i>The Go Find’s</i> first album, <i>Miami.</i> </p><p>The stage needs no reconfiguration. Arne van Petegem, a.k.a Styrofoam, sings from his keyboard, left-stage. He has no need to be front and center, the music stands on its own, defying the whole rock star mentality. There is nothing overbearing about the vocals, just another instrument in sequence. The amps are not cranked up to deafening levels, people are standing right in front of the speakers, without earplugs, and still they will be able to hear later tonight and tomorrow. Good music, like Neahaus chocolates, you don’t need mass quantities of. During one song Dieter wears a head-set, counting out 1-2-2-4 throughout as Arne punches away at the lab-top. Through both sets Nico Jacobs, with a mad-professor look, grounds the group in folk-like guitar licks. <img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/arneatarismall.BMP"><br></p><p>There is a proud humility, a confident humbleness to these Euro-electro-pop musicians; they don’t have to tell you where they are from a million times like artist do from Brooklyn. The lab-tops are out and these are songs they have been conjuring up all their lives. Now in their late-20’s early 30’s, they are the ATARI generation, (Arne is wearing a red ATARI shirt on stage), nurtured under Nintendo, the advent of synthesizers, cable and MTV, Satellites, Internet, now they hone their skills under a cell phone signaled sky, swapping musical files across the globe via iChat and Powerbooks. And yet the beats of Brooklyn and the Bronx, of hip-hop often slip, not crash, into their songs, and somehow a new kind of R&amp;B is created. A multi-lingual white-boy from Europe R&amp;B; with some good schooling, much time spent fidgeting with the new-wave gadgets of sound in their bedroom/basement turned studio- R&amp;B. It avoids elitist refinement because the artist is manufacturing from the home and inflections of garage jamming are preserved. #file_10#</p><p>While the black man/woman in America’s rhythm and blues passes down through oral tradition and is limited by memory, the white European’s R&amp;B he/she can bounce off ancient constructions, walls, streets, can access in the architecture, history, and cemeteries that just don’t go that far back in America. With the positioning of Europe culturally and structurally, artists must have more aged souls flying about, and thicker brews to bitch from. European brooding exposed is a slow moaning more than an all out shout. On a lighter note, <i>Styrofoam</i> get their name from, &quot;nothing in particular, it’s a good sounding word right, we just picked it out of the dictionary,&quot; says Arne. <i>Styrofoam’s</i> new album &quot;Nothing’s Lost&quot;, was released Nov. 30.</p><p>Lali Puna, of Munich, Germany, was the third band to play and opened up with the verse, <i>&quot;We’ve been done before and now we try to forge ourselves.&quot; </i>It is from their title track &quot;Faking the Books&quot; and it is a self-awareness that is foreign to our <i>new world </i>musicians. Lead singer Valerie Trebeljahr, softly laments this chorus, as the rhythm rolls out of the station. </p><p>Trebeljahr is wearing a black Ms. John Soda T-shirt, another synth-pop superstar off the Morr Music label. She is center stage behind a synthesizer/keyboard/drum-machine. She is hitting switches while she sings. On some songs her voice is mixed with taped voices, other times snippets of conversations are inserted alongside. It’s as if you are listening to some long wave radio station that doesn’t quite come in and you can’t quite make out what the news reporter is saying or what language it is in. But that's okay because the voice is almost b-roll to the instrumentation static. Adding to the fizz are drummer Cristoph Brandner and keyboarder Christian Heiß. #file_8#</p><p>The pops and curdling certainly dirty the sound up a bit, but in a profoundly jazz on Jupiter way. Where as yesterday the element of surprise was the giving out of musician, their instruments or the breakdown of communication among band members, here you still have those possibilities confounded by the unpredictable kickback of gadgets, as these things sometimes have a mind of their own. At one point in the night, the computer generated beat sputtered out of control and the drummer had to play catch-up. Brandner upped the tempo attempting to cover until Heiß got handle of the controls. What could have been a disaster opened up a porthole into what will be the future jazz; musicians diffusing hard-drive burn-outs, reconciling rhythms with their robots. </p><p>Trebeljahr’s first mic break is completely in German adding to the mystery of her demeanor. Trebeljahr doesn’t give much away through her facial expressions but her eyes tell you a lot, maybe too much. There are moments where her eyes reveal some kind of hurt and we don’t know where it is coming from. Is it the music, is it this moment, is it a memory or all three? So when she smiles though, it lights up the entire establishment. </p><p>That smile came after the up-tempo, ultra danceable, hipnotic, B-Movie. Overall her vocals are a melancholy saccharine- whispered, spoken and sung. She shares the stage and vocal styles with another one of the world’s loudest-softest voices, that of Markus Archer, lead singer of The Notwist. Archer is from the same neck of the woods as Trebeljahr – Weilheim, a city south of Munich. He duals as guitarist for Lali Puna. #file_9#</p><p>The poetry and delivery of these two, (check out The Notwist album Neon Golden), makes you wonder. How can foreigners transform the English language into an instrument in and of itself? Even before the lyrical meanings hits, pronunciation has spoken volumes. And how they don’t waste time with their lyrics, they get to the point, or they don’t get to the point. The point is they make their statements then get out of the way for instrumentation, there is not an explicit direction telling you how to feel or revealing what they feel. This minimalism, whether voluntary or because of vocabulary limitations, leaves the listener yearning, full of images and thoughts unfinished, very much like a blues song.</p><p>For example, for the songs about love – they technically never use the word &quot;love&quot; in their lyrics – yet the concept is implied. If they just blurted the word out, the meaning would be lost. In Eastern cultures the expression of love is ever more nuanced. The song Small Things is the length of a haiku; </p><p><em>Big mistakes<br /></em><em>Biggest hurt<br />My whole past behind glass<br />Great divide<br />Great deceit<br />The whole past on my mind<br />Remember the small things<br />You say: Remember the small things. </em></p><p>The name Lali is the name Trebeljahr was called as a kid and Puna is a reference to the city she was born – Pusan, Korea. While Trebeljahr was raised in Germany, she still exhibits a modesty more characteristic of Asian cultures and the art of Lali Puna does not suffer because of this quietness. </p><p>It is electronic-pop bands like Lali Puna, Styrofoam, and the Go Find that will be bridging the map between the West/East, the New World and newer worlds of music. You can check tour dates and all other information on these bands at <a href="http://www.morrmusic.com/"><u><font color="#0000ff">www.morrmusic.com</font></u></a>. </p><p />

<p>Rescuing us from our Dark Age world image, beyond political occupations, will always be music and the arts of America, or will it? European blip-hop bands like Lali Puna, Styrofoam and the Go Find, engineered in Western Europe, are slowly shifting the epicenter of musical hip back to the eastern side of the Atlantic.</p> <!--break--><p><img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/laptop3small.BMP" /><br /> </p> <p>Rescuing us from our Dark Age world image, beyond political occupations, will always be music and the arts of America, or will it? The birthplace of Jazz, Blues, Rock &amp; Roll, Country, Rap, Hip-hop, etc., where names/faces of Jay-Z or 50-Cent are more recognizable globally than their politician counterparts – Condie and Colin. But if it is hip-hop that now continues to mushroom out of the Manhattan projects, it is European blip-hop, engineered in Western Europe, that is slowly shifting the epicenter of musical hip back to the eastern side of the Atlantic. </p> <p>What did the bi-polar Cold War era music scene look like? The Beatles blazed onto the Ed Sullivan Show, Hendrix, discharged from the 101^st Airborne Division, blew up in Europe with <i>The Experience</i>, then made a stunning entrance into the America scene at the Monterey Pop Festival. And later in the 70’s it was the Clash and Sex Pistols that would lob punk bombs at our shores. All these acts brought to America something familiar yet alien. Today it is the blip-hop bands like <i>Lali-puna</i>, <i>Styrofoam</i> and <i>the Go Find</i> on the Morr Music Tour, that are bringing the new to America. But the new music coming out of Europe today can not be found on MTV nor Clear Channel Radio stations. No matter how popular the music may be overseas, it can remain very much underground here. </p> <p></p> <p>The <i>Lali-puna</i> show, Friday, Nov. 19 was literally underground: under Pearl St. in Buffalo, downstairs in some supped up building basement called <i>Big Orbit’s Soundlab</i>, that could have served as a speak-easy. </p> <p></p> <p>The performers tonight spoke easy; they differ from punk/rock singers who look like they’ll go nuts unless they get to sing. There is no grand entrance no elaborate stage fantasia, the singer starts singing and eventually the room figures it out and goes quiet. <img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/valsmall.BMP" /><br /></p> <p></p> <p>The <i>Go Find </i>began with an extremely soulful anthem, "City Dreamer" - the third track from the album <i>Miami</i>. The first song of the night played like it could have been the last. And why is it that third tracks on albums are consistently the most soulful? The lead singer made the obligatory introductions, "we’re from Belgium, Europe," underscoring the singer’s rather justifiable lack of confidence in American’s knowledge of world geography. "It’s <i>gut</i> to be in Buffalo."</p> <p>The <i>Go Find</i> is a one-man band from Antwerp, Belgium. Dieter Sermus, is the practitioner of this electro-hip-blip-blop, brooding, dance-able beat, but not dance beat, technical, but not techno. There could be references to The Postal Service from Seattle, okay, but somehow their version comes off unnatural, like Spaniards rapping. Electro-pop by Americans has potential, it just hasn't been done well yet.</p> <p>As if his songs were not moving enough, Dieter is also with you in his subtle physical movement, guitar strumming, head jamming to it all eventually building momentum within songs and from song to song. They are bipolar songs really, at the same time you want to give up you want to dance to it. <img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/valarcherblursmall.BMP" /><br /></p> <p></p> <p>After the set, and a short break, The Go Find began playing again, only the keyboarder was now singing instead of Dieter. That’s what you thought at first but, actually it was a different band altogether called <i>Styrofoam.</i></p> <p>For their European shows <i>The Go Find</i> and <i>Styrofoam</i> bring their own bands, but for the US tour they borrowed from another’s talents. This works fine because they are good friends and <i>Styrofoam</i> actually assisted Dieter with <i>The Go Find’s</i> first album, <i>Miami.</i> </p> <p>The stage needs no reconfiguration. Arne van Petegem, a.k.a Styrofoam, sings from his keyboard, left-stage. He has no need to be front and center, the music stands on its own, defying the whole rock star mentality. There is nothing overbearing about the vocals, just another instrument in sequence. The amps are not cranked up to deafening levels, people are standing right in front of the speakers, without earplugs, and still they will be able to hear later tonight and tomorrow. Good music, like Neahaus chocolates, you don’t need mass quantities of. During one song Dieter wears a head-set, counting out 1-2-2-4 throughout as Arne punches away at the lab-top. Through both sets Nico Jacobs, with a mad-professor look, grounds the group in folk-like guitar licks. <img class="dada-image-center" src="http://rochester.indymedia.org/sites/default/files/migrate_dada/arneatarismall.BMP" /><br /></p> <p>There is a proud humility, a confident humbleness to these Euro-electro-pop musicians; they don’t have to tell you where they are from a million times like artist do from Brooklyn. The lab-tops are out and these are songs they have been conjuring up all their lives. Now in their late-20’s early 30’s, they are the ATARI generation, (Arne is wearing a red ATARI shirt on stage), nurtured under Nintendo, the advent of synthesizers, cable and MTV, Satellites, Internet, now they hone their skills under a cell phone signaled sky, swapping musical files across the globe via iChat and Powerbooks. And yet the beats of Brooklyn and the Bronx, of hip-hop often slip, not crash, into their songs, and somehow a new kind of R&amp;B is created. A multi-lingual white-boy from Europe R&amp;B; with some good schooling, much time spent fidgeting with the new-wave gadgets of sound in their bedroom/basement turned studio- R&amp;B. It avoids elitist refinement because the artist is manufacturing from the home and inflections of garage jamming are preserved. #file_10#</p> <p>While the black man/woman in America’s rhythm and blues passes down through oral tradition and is limited by memory, the white European’s R&amp;B he/she can bounce off ancient constructions, walls, streets, can access in the architecture, history, and cemeteries that just don’t go that far back in America. With the positioning of Europe culturally and structurally, artists must have more aged souls flying about, and thicker brews to bitch from. European brooding exposed is a slow moaning more than an all out shout. On a lighter note, <i>Styrofoam</i> get their name from, "nothing in particular, it’s a good sounding word right, we just picked it out of the dictionary," says Arne. <i>Styrofoam’s</i> new album "Nothing’s Lost", was released Nov. 30.</p> <p>Lali Puna, of Munich, Germany, was the third band to play and opened up with the verse, <i>"We’ve been done before and now we try to forge ourselves." </i>It is from their title track "Faking the Books" and it is a self-awareness that is foreign to our <i>new world </i>musicians. Lead singer Valerie Trebeljahr, softly laments this chorus, as the rhythm rolls out of the station. </p> <p>Trebeljahr is wearing a black Ms. John Soda T-shirt, another synth-pop superstar off the Morr Music label. She is center stage behind a synthesizer/keyboard/drum-machine. She is hitting switches while she sings. On some songs her voice is mixed with taped voices, other times snippets of conversations are inserted alongside. It’s as if you are listening to some long wave radio station that doesn’t quite come in and you can’t quite make out what the news reporter is saying or what language it is in. But that's okay because the voice is almost b-roll to the instrumentation static. Adding to the fizz are drummer Cristoph Brandner and keyboarder Christian Heiß. #file_8#</p> <p>The pops and curdling certainly dirty the sound up a bit, but in a profoundly jazz on Jupiter way. Where as yesterday the element of surprise was the giving out of musician, their instruments or the breakdown of communication among band members, here you still have those possibilities confounded by the unpredictable kickback of gadgets, as these things sometimes have a mind of their own. At one point in the night, the computer generated beat sputtered out of control and the drummer had to play catch-up. Brandner upped the tempo attempting to cover until Heiß got handle of the controls. What could have been a disaster opened up a porthole into what will be the future jazz; musicians diffusing hard-drive burn-outs, reconciling rhythms with their robots. </p> <p>Trebeljahr’s first mic break is completely in German adding to the mystery of her demeanor. Trebeljahr doesn’t give much away through her facial expressions but her eyes tell you a lot, maybe too much. There are moments where her eyes reveal some kind of hurt and we don’t know where it is coming from. Is it the music, is it this moment, is it a memory or all three? So when she smiles though, it lights up the entire establishment. </p> <p>That smile came after the up-tempo, ultra danceable, hipnotic, B-Movie. Overall her vocals are a melancholy saccharine- whispered, spoken and sung. She shares the stage and vocal styles with another one of the world’s loudest-softest voices, that of Markus Archer, lead singer of The Notwist. Archer is from the same neck of the woods as Trebeljahr – Weilheim, a city south of Munich. He duals as guitarist for Lali Puna. #file_9#</p> <p>The poetry and delivery of these two, (check out The Notwist album Neon Golden), makes you wonder. How can foreigners transform the English language into an instrument in and of itself? Even before the lyrical meanings hits, pronunciation has spoken volumes. And how they don’t waste time with their lyrics, they get to the point, or they don’t get to the point. The point is they make their statements then get out of the way for instrumentation, there is not an explicit direction telling you how to feel or revealing what they feel. This minimalism, whether voluntary or because of vocabulary limitations, leaves the listener yearning, full of images and thoughts unfinished, very much like a blues song.</p> <p>For example, for the songs about love – they technically never use the word "love" in their lyrics – yet the concept is implied. If they just blurted the word out, the meaning would be lost. In Eastern cultures the expression of love is ever more nuanced. The song Small Things is the length of a haiku; </p> <p><em>Big mistakes<br /></em><em>Biggest hurt<br />My whole past behind glass<br />Great divide<br />Great deceit<br />The whole past on my mind<br />Remember the small things<br />You say: Remember the small things. </em></p> <p>The name Lali is the name Trebeljahr was called as a kid and Puna is a reference to the city she was born – Pusan, Korea. While Trebeljahr was raised in Germany, she still exhibits a modesty more characteristic of Asian cultures and the art of Lali Puna does not suffer because of this quietness. </p> <p>It is electronic-pop bands like Lali Puna, Styrofoam, and the Go Find that will be bridging the map between the West/East, the New World and newer worlds of music. You can check tour dates and all other information on these bands at <a href="http://www.morrmusic.com/"><u><font color="#0000ff">www.morrmusic.com</font></u></a>. </p> <p></p>

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America http://rochester.indymedia.org/node/2240

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America http://rochester.indymedia.org/node/2240

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America

Changing the future power balance of music: European Blip-hop Bands Enter America