This Sunday at Summer Camp come down for only $10 with performances from Film School, The Henry Clay People, and other special guests TBA. The party starts at noon and runs till 7p. Bring your swimsuit and an appetite for delicious grub from Tagine. Free drinks all day.
Hayden has come a long way from his introduction to the U.S. as the heir to the folky mope-rock throne over a decade ago. His new album, In Field & Town, is instrumentally his most fully realized to date. He sat down earlier this month with Aquarium Drunkard prior to his show at Local 506 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and discussed the new album, evolution in his songwriting, the differences between Canadian and U.S. touring and audience anomalies in Philadelphia.
Aquarium Drunkard: You've got a new record out called In Field & Town and I wanted to ask you a bit about some of the responses to the record. Some people, long time fans, feel thrown for a loop off of the first track. They felt a stylistic or recording change - can you talk about the recording process for the album and if there were any conscientious style changes in what you've been doing over the years?
Hayden Desser: Well, it's funny you mention that, 'cause being on tour now I've noticed especially seeing previews of my show coming up and people saying 'folky Hayden' or 'if you're in the mood for a nice, mellow, poetic show then come to this' sort of thing. And it's funny 'cause what we're doing right now is mostly up tempo with a lot of instrumentation. Why this album and that change? I just had a lot of fun adding instruments to the songs and I wanted to not have too many songs with a mid-tempo - I feel that some of my albums have too many of those and it's something I kind of naturally go to and I wanted to get away from that a little bit. So the three main differences would be the tempo thing, putting a ton of instruments on a bunch of songs and the fact that a lot of them were written on piano and that kind of added a different kind of texture. I just play a different sort of rhythm when I'm writing on piano.
AD: At this point you've been recording and releasing albums for a little over a decade. How do you feel your songwriting process has evolved over the decade you've been releasing music?
HD: Well, I like to think that my recording techniques are better now than they were and I don't know. I write less and I scrutinize my songs more than I did 12 years ago. But I don' t know. It's hard to look at it as a big picture kind of scenario and dissect what it is that's different or what the exact progression is. I'm not sure. You need to tell me that. [laughs]
7,200 square feet of artificial turf? Check. 30 foot water slide? Check. 18 foot pool? Check. Amazing food? Check. Free cold drinks? Check. Moving back to Sunday? ChickityCheck! Saturdays felt like mom shrunk your favorite swimsuit. Oh it fit, but not like it used to.
This Sunday, Summer Camp returns as the last weekend stop before you have to suit up and fly right.
So come down this week for FOUR BANDS performing inside (announcing thursday) with Chris Holmes, Daisy O'Dell and £ady $inclair on the "beach". TAGINE will be serving up the most delicious eats all summer and the the best Sangria's this side of Saturn. TOMS Shoes is back, with shoes for your feet that help folks around the world.
Badminton will be there, as will the RETURN of PONG! Swim, Slide, Sun, Eat, Drink, Laugh and enjoy some of LA's best music.
Passes at the door, benefitting the new music program called the Sound School Project that goes to replace aged instruments and help update learning in downtown area schools.
See you Sunday!
George Carlin 1937-2008
The world just got a little less interesting and maybe a little less dangerous...and for the worse. Comic legend, George Carlin died today of a heart attack in a hospital in Santa Monica, CA. His brand of "fuck you" comedy scared some and brought a smile to most. He made fans think and questioned EVERYTHING. His commentary on religion, social do's and don'ts, politics and even the English language (we shall never forget "7 Words You Can't Say on Television") was always painfully accurate and dead-on.
Lightyears ahead of punk rock in the late 70's, Mr. Carlin - not quite a hippie, not quite a revolutionary, not quite an activist - paved the way for an onslaught of socio-politically minded comics that we love today (John Stewart, Lewis Black, Bill Maher, David Cross, etc). 50 years ago, his comedy started as safe routines of impersonations and Ed Sullivan-friendly one liners (a show that he appeared on in the early days). Yet, with the advent of the 60s, bringing comics like Lenny Bruce to the fore, Carlin, along with Richard Pryor and a few others, stepped out of the mainstream and walked a different path. With a new road cleared, all the other comics soon followed, and they changed the way we see comedy, music, art, television, film and other performance-based media forever.
Thank you George...
You'll be missed.
(listen to some classic Carlin, click the pink arrow here)
(original Little Radio pirate gear circa 2004)
Tired of the music choices major media outlets are offering you on the FM dial? Local college station spotty at best? Tape player broke? The answer may not be a subscription to the new XM/Sirius merger. Save your $9.99 a month pal. Satellite radio will be going the way of laser discs soon enough. Feeling a little rebelious? Well, maybe it's time for you to fire up your very own radio station.
Sound hard? It isn't. Sound illegal? It is. But let's just say for a minute you don't care. I'm going to run you through the ins and outs of how to equip and operate your very own FM radio station, while giving you some insight into the legalities.
(Radio Caroline - circa 1964)
I'm not going to get into it much here, but the history of pirate radio is very cool and worth some time on the wiki. In the 1930's, the Mexican border was like the radiowave wild west with Mexican border stations setting up mega-watt "border blasters" to evade U.S. regulations. Famed Disc Jockey Wolfman Jack even made his mark spinning R&B from just over the border from Del Rio, Tx and years later in Rosarito Beach, Baja California. My cousin, Gene Fowler, wrote a a book called Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves that's definitely worth a read. From the UK in the 1960's, came stations like Radio Caroline and Radio London, who were both broadcasting from ships anchored in international waters. The theme that keeps repeating here, is getting music and information out to people while disregarding regulations designed to protect large corporations. Sound familiar?
Disclaimer: If you have shitty taste in music, please stop
reading this and go get a satellite radio subscription. There are
enough people in the world with terrible taste in
music who have radio stations.
Seriously.
Keep reading, there's much more. Link below.
Tune-In to Future Sounds with Larry Little today from 10am-12pm and win a pair of tickets to see Islands with AWOL One and Crayonsmith at The El Rey Theatre tonight. The show has been moved from The Henry Fonda Theatre to the El Rey. All tickets will be honored. More tickets available here.
In 2004, with the help of some friends working for beer and music, we built the flagship studio for Little Radio. It was in the front room of an old single screen movie theatre on Adams Blvd, next door to Fais Do Do in mid-city Los Angeles. The long term plan was to turn the old 40's theatre into a club and radio station (sound familiar?), where we'd broadcast radio shows in the day and live shows at night.
A couple months after launching LR, with the help of Jenny and Mo, I started putting on shows at Fais Do Do on Wednesdays, while broadcasting the performances live online, and on the pirate signal 104.7FM. Silversun Pickups, 50 Foot Wave, The Movies, The Dagons, Kennedy, Rex Aquarium, Let's Go Sailing, The Kites, Helen Stellar, Electromagnetic, Geisha Girls and many other local heroes played those early days. I recently dusted off an old hard drive and starting listening to our first live broadcasts and I have to say, they're damn good. I'll be randomly posting these performances every now and then so check back. Look for The Movies tomorrow. Have a look in the Posters and Photo Gallery for a log of the last 4 years. So fun.
Dave
It's time for everyone's favorite weekend getaway. Summercamp is back and it's bigger and better than ever. Watch the video below for all the details, then go HERE FOR PASSES. See you at camp!
Little Radio is happy to announce a new partnership with our good friends in Austin, Transmission Entertainment. Transmission Entertainment is a small collective of venue owners/booking agents, who's venues include Club Deville, Mohawk, Red 7, Lambert's and the recently acquired and soon to be renovated and renamed, Bourbon Rocks.
In addition to the partnership, we also launch two new websites that share content and grow together. Every day, through our clubs, radio station studio and websites, we'll be both venue and virtual as we combine music discovery with live experiences. Audio and video archives will be created to provide exposure for both new and known artists, while helping bands create unique content for the web. Check out the Live Sessions in the Sights and Sounds tab.
Stop. Listen. Look.
Justin Frankel, a longtime associate of our pal Ian Rogers, is someone who has contributed A LOT to the digital music world. He's best known for best known for creating the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer system. He's also the man behind Nullsoft which released SHOUTcast, the platform that most internet radio stations (us included) use to broadcast online.
These days, his company Cockos Incorporated creates music production and development software. Under the radar, is their new program called REAPER, a digital audio workstation that every musicain should take a look at. Reaper is a no-nonsense, full-featured digital audio sequencer for multitrack recording and production. Sized at just over 3 MB and with no copy protection, it's meant to be a simple alternative to Pro Tools. Reaper is a amazing tool for musicians and bands and is worth a read and a test drive. It's currently available for Windows, with a Mac version in beta that should be full tilt soon.
Download REAPER for free, here.
Friday, May 30th, our friends Dead Meadow return to the Little Radio warehouse to record their next Matador Record's release, Dead Meadow Live at Little Radio. We'll be filming and recording their entire set in front of 600 of their biggest fans. They'll be joined by local Los Angelenos Entrance and Winter Flowers.
There will be a limited number of tickets made public for $13.00, so get them HERE now. Tickets include free drinks all evening. The show is 21+ only.
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