Trust artists with their art. Believe in them more than they do. | | | | In bloom: Troye Sivan at the Fillmore in Detroit, Nov. 7, 2016.
(Scott Legato/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Trust artists with their art. Believe in them more than they do.”
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| | rantnrave:// What's cool about LOW END THEORY, the long-running LOS ANGELES club night that's coming to an end this summer, is that it never tried to be. "It was really a bunch of misfits coming together," co-founder DADDY KEV tweeted on Wednesday. They came together, in October 2006, at a run-down bar in an out-of-the-way corner of the city, about a mile east of DODGER STADIUM. They were "kids from LA forging a sound and doing something that everyone thought was weird or wrong or super niche," in the words of rapper MC NOCANDO. "Underdogs coming up without co-signs." They weren't money, they weren't "industry," they weren't Hollywood. Just DJs and producers in search of a space to experiment and share. Which they've been doing every Wednesday for the past 12 years, with an almost incalculable influence on a decade's worth of electronic (and beyond) music, as heard directly through the likes of FLYING LOTUS, the GLITCH MOB and JAMES BLAKE, and indirectly through countless others who have made pilgrimages, both literal and spiritual, to the AIRLINER bar over the years. After THOM YORKE played a DJ set there in 2011, "people were looking at me like a unicorn," Daddy Kev said. "I can’t tell you how many promoters asked for his booking info. I laughed. That’s not something you can make happen based on will." The music had called him. There was, and still is, no need for an agent to call. The lines got shorter in recent years, according to NEST HQ writer NEAL RAHMAN, for a variety of reasons unrelated to the music. (Among them, Rahman suggests, might have been sexual assault allegations last year against the GASLAMP KILLER, who was a resident DJ. Low End Theory immediately dropped him, but the charges "put a damper on the event.") In its official announcement of the closing, the collective said there were several factors but mainly, "The general consensus... is that we have overstayed our welcome." And knowing when to stop the beat is as important as knowing when to start it. Fare thee well... SPOTIFY directly licensing but not signing indie acts: Slippery slope? Or ice-covered ski jump?... BON IVER's JUSTIN VERNON and the NATIONAL's AARON and BRYCE DESSNER have launched PEOPLE, a loosely structured streaming site where they and like-minded musicians will post music that falls outside their normal album and press cycles. "Hopefully," Bryce Dessner says, "this will be an environment where new types of music, new types of collaboration can pop up that don’t fit in with a standard release." The site shares a name with an experimental German festival they curated in 2016 and that will return in August. Hotelier TOM MICHELBERGER, a partner in both the site and the fest, says People is "not open to everyone, like SOUNDCLOUD, but it’s also not fully curated.” I don't know quite what that means but I look forward to finding out... BLAKE SHELTON was the big winner at the CMT MUSIC AWARDS Wednesday night... RIP JIMMY GONZALEZ and RALPH SANTOLLA. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| As it prepares to wind down its storied run, the story of the influential party by those who created it. (Originally published in the LA Weekly in 2011.) | | |
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| Under the terms of some of the deals, management firms can receive several hundred thousand dollars as an advance fee for agreeing to license a certain number of tracks by their independent acts directly to Spotify. Then, in at least some cases, the managers and acts stand to earn 50 percent of the revenue per stream on those songs on Spotify. | | |
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| Can the new, open-access audio ‘publishing platform’ attract more than just superfans of its indie-rock creators? | | |
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| One of the best indie rock debuts in recent memory by anyone of any age. | | |
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| The term ‘sad boy’ snowballed in popularity in 2009 after a tumultuous twelve months in which Kanye West’s emotive "808s & Heartbreak" landed just before Drake’s landmark mixtape "So Far Gone," sparked by a conversation with a friend which hinged on the question: “Are we becoming the men that our mothers divorced?” | | |
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| Could music journalism’s new horizon be the longform podcast? | | |
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| Meet Zubin, who some fans call “the Soundcloud Weeknd." He's a Philly sing-rapper with an incredible crew and the voice to match. | | |
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| Despite being all about flowers and sunshine and love-and putting on the best Primavera performance-Tyler remains banned from the UK. | | |
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| An excerpt from the new book 'Strange Stars' explores how classic sci-fi and the works of William Burroughs fueled Bowie's iconic alter ego. | | |
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| It’s hard to overstate Low End Theory’s impact on the larger scene. It was a formative ground for 21st century electronic music in the same way that Chicago’s The Warehouse created a space from which house music was born. | | |
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| Tidal, Jay-Z’s streaming service, has become notorious for late payments to labels, but the music industry has largely kept quiet about the matter, banking on its forward-thinking partnership deals and a higher-priced $19.99/month premium audio tier. | | |
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| I was once a resident of Yeezus Island, but this spring has compelled me, finally, to put my house on the market. I doubt there will be any buyers, though. Maybe Jonah Hill might be interested, but my optimism has limitations. | | |
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| "A trash channel that goofs on rappers." | | |
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| Long-time sound engineer Bob Pridden looks back on pop art, stadiums, and Fillmore East 1968. | | |
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| After 11 years, and several brain-twisting takes including from the Trump Administration, the lawsuit brought by Stephanie Lenz against Universal Music is settling. | | |
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| The parent company of Snapchat hasn't talked publicly often about its music strategy, but its VP of partnerships Ben Schwerin gave a keynote at the Midem conference in Cannes today. | | |
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| To be fair, she wasn’t actively trying to teach me the ways of EPMD or N.W.A. Naw, my big sister taught me the way so many of us youngins learn: I straight jacked her cassette tapes, made my own copies and put them back. | | |
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| They either go too far or not far enough. | | |
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| In this conversation as part of Red Bull Music Festival New York 2018, the Queens native looked back on the early days of his career, working with Bad Boy Records, Missy Elliott and Beyoncé and what it took to leave his mark on the culture. | | |
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| As the founder of the Last Poets, Nuriddin was a hero to everyone from Tupac Shakur to Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis. | | |
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