This
CMJ was my first since I started living in Brooklyn, and the first where I wasn't in a band that carried any weight in the industry. I'm not saying that
Juiced Elfers isn't a big deal, but we're not one of those bands that "rehearses" or "has songs" or any of that sellout business.
Also this
CMJ was tough because my wife was ill for most of it, which meant that I spent most of my days at home and then went out at night. If you're interested, she got bit by a black widow spider while doing a
photoshoot near DC. That was a while ago but it's had lingering effects.
I didn't see a ton of bands, and I mostly went to see friends.
When you tour for a long time, the people you meet tend to be either in
bands themselves, or are
promoters,
agents,
journalists,
PR,
label folks or
otherwise involved in the industry. It's very easy to become totally wound up in a tight little community of other people whose lives are focused on music and bands if you don't make a concerted effort to hang out with either the kids who come to the shows, or strangers you meet in the streets. Events like this can feel more like a reunion party than a music festival sometimes.
The few pictures I'm posting here were taken with my phone and are pretty weak I admit, but I am more interested in sharing my experience here than anything. This isn't pitchfork.
Above is
Sister Suvi, they played on Wednesday night. They played a good show, which was under-attended. Luckily they picked up another last minute show at sound fix, which I hear went really well. For those who don't know, the sister is Patrick from Islands' other band with Merrill and Nico. They do a world beat influenced
Ukulele party that fans of having fun will enjoy.
After that show I went down to the LES to catch
the Pack, but I was too late to see them. It was in a bar where years ago my friend Nick and I had ruined a vice party by playing nothing but extreme noise music from the third world to a bunch of coke fiends who wanted to hear whatever awful people listened to back then. Instead of the Pack, I got to see my friend
Vyle from Chicago, and some other rappers who he was rolling with. I got a bad picture of Hollywood Holt:
He's got a free
mixtape up on his
website, which I downloaded today but haven't listened to yet. It was a pretty
dancefloor intensive show, so I'm interested to see if he can pull off a recording. The show was good, but I had to leave early to get home and make sure the wife was alright.
Thursday was the Juiced
Elfers show at Pianos. It was a real nail biter. We hadn't played since our last show, months ago. Syd and Chris and I did a quick rehearsal but Nick was out of town so we were flying pretty blind. Nick also showed up very late and we almost didn't play at all. Surprisingly the show was quite packed with people and we pulled it off about 100 times better than I had expected to. Turns out MTV was there for some reason. They filmed the whole show so we're basically going to be the next fall out boy I guess.
After that Nick and
Gino and I went to try to see Cadence Weapon but the door guy didn't want to let us in despite the fact that we are all clearly famous. I feel pretty bad about missing his show. We hung out at Pop
Montreal a few weeks ago, but it would have been nice to see him. We ended up just going to the Islands show and hanging out backstage for a couple hours. It was good to see everyone and I ended up doing the rap part of Whalebone with them, as I had in Montreal earlier.
here's Gino and Despot hanging out backstage:
They make an amazing rap duo, Gino is one of the tallest guys I know and Alec is one of the shorter. It looks great on stage to me.
After that we considered going to the vice
afterparty, but nobody was too excited by that idea so we went to max fish for about a minute then I went home.
Friday-Saturday report is next, but in the meantime go get the
Glitch Mob podcast and listen to it. The Edit remix of "artsy" especially.
