Without resorting to the type of cheap Mayan calendar reference that… well shit, that I just accidentally conjured starting this sentence (OOPS LOL), 2012 will certainly be a year of change. At least for me. And maybe John Cusack. So happy new year… let’s get to it! Since I started this silly project with the [...]
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State of the Blog Address 2012
Holiday Mixer 2011
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Artist:
Ho ho ho, assholes! With the Christmas holiday coming up this weekend and two days deep up on the Hanukkah tip, it’s very much time to drop the annual The Decibel Tolls Holiday Mixer. You know the deal – a carefully curated collection of skewed, non bogus, brain-burning, monolithic Christmas gems that totally sleigh. Get it?! Sleigh? Slay? It’s [...]
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The Year End List 2011
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Artist:
The most wonderful time of the year, right guys? ‘Twas the end of December, and all through the blogosphere, not a creature was stirring, except for the sounds of music writers springin’ chub, strokin’ egos, and Bon Iverin’ via the storied tradition of the “best of” list. Well, The Decibel Tolls participates in that jive [...]
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[Photos + GIFs] Cropped Out Fest – 11.11 thru 11.13.11 – Louisville
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Artist:
Cropped Out Fest not only succeeded in coming back a second time, a feat not easily accomplished, the stridently fringe celebration also returned in bigger and better fashion - in terms of attendance, community enthusiasm, facilities, and that intangible vibe that can make or break a multi-stage weekend event. Cropped Out 2011 certainly became the [...]
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Information Superhighway, No Duh
Eric exists on Twitter as the pizza doggie, one of my absolute favorite online personalities. Visually and sonically, he’s Spooky Cheddar, and these two somewhat nightmarish round-trip tickets to the altered side are guaranteed to trip your shit out, like if someone slipped some real mean psilocybin into your King Vitamin this morning (if you’re [...]
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Expand Ye Horizons
Land of Tomorrow is no stranger to mixing audio and visual art mediums. The meticulously curated fringe art space in downtown Louisville celebrated its 2010 opening with a free Bear In Heaven show. Noise and avant garde musicians often provide the soundtrack to a variety of multimedia installations. Land of Tomorrow’s exhibits aim to highlight [...]
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Stays Crunchy Even in Milk
Magic Milk is a Chicago based minimalistic garage rock band, lead by the imaginative “Fuckin’ Kenny” (no relation to our Kenny). Fuckin’ Kenny is as much worried about the music as he is making Magic Milk a performance piece. They’ve got a great self titled EP with potentially controversial cover art apropos to a creepy constructed [...]
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[Photos + GIFs] Amen Dunes, Woodsman, and Dustin Wong – 285 Kent, Brooklyn – 10.21.11
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Artist:
New blog feature, you guys! Animated .gifs! Corny? Perhaps. But I like them. And when I noticed that many of my photos were shot very sequentially, I couldn’t pass up the chance. Besides, with a bill like this, these dudes deserve something more encapsulating than static images. I was in New York for CMJ this [...]
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Get Spiritual
Mix all the shit that you and I like – kraut, walls of noise, atmospheric melodies, tremolo, bliss outs – and add a few dashes of sacred geometry, Alejandro Jodorowsky-style surrealism, and Egyptology, and you’ll achieve something close to LA’s Vinyl Williams. A multimedia artist that takes spiritual exploration and sonic intensity very seriously, Vinyl Williams’ first proper full-length, [...]
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Woodsman – Mystic Places
Earlier this year, Woodsman released Rare Forms, a full-length in which the band explored both the grimy industrial labyrinth of ’70s German experimentalism and the rustic, bucolic light flights that resemble sunshine-saturated psychedelia. During my interview with the band in early April, Trevor Peterson revealed that Rare Forms did not, conceptually speaking, represent where the [...]
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REM Cycles
What a highly appropriate title for the rippin’ new 7″ from Melbourne’s Love of Diagrams – In My Dream. This is extremely well crafted, C86-informed (they even look the part) dream punk in the vein of The Vaselines, Bikini Kill, Axes-era Electrelane, Shop Assistants, and No Joy. I don’t post much these days because I kinda [...]
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Get a Pair for The Black Angels and Dead Meadow Friday Night
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Artist:
…because you’re gonna need a pair for a show this brutal. LOL, did you guys see what I just did there?! It’s called a double entendre. Dude, that was so good. High-larious. Winning. Okay, obnoxiousness over… let’s talk about what happens Friday night at Headliners. The Black Angels have had to twice cancel their Louisville [...]
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[Interview] Pigeons
Bronx, NY folk-rock unit Pigeons concoct dark, kaleidoscopic soundscapes populated by loose pop structures and abstract dissonance, shades of wintry stillness, and a hauntological layer of dust. Recently, they expanded their line-up to include acoustic noodlers from the No-Neck Blues Band and Black Twig Pickers, and got to work on their third full-length. They Sweetheartstammers, out next week on
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Cosmic Punks Take a Dark Turn
Enlightened Atlanta-based power trio The Natural Extension Concept, usually denoted simply as The N.E.C., dropped a propulsive, damn-near masterpiece in 2010 titled Is – a body of work that flawlessly explored the strata between Nuggets and Psychocandy at gulf stream velocity. Ready for another go this year, The N.E.C. reaches even further past the edge of the observable universe [...]
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[Photos] Midpoint Music Festival – Cincinnati, 9.23 + 9.24.11
Cincinnati’s Midpoint Music Festival is awesome. For 2011, the organization got their shit together and observed what works and what doesn’t with multi-venue urban festivals like CMJ and SXSW, while also making the three-day festival a uniquely Queen City venture. As opposed to past years, Midpoint condensed their territory to strictly the Central Avenue and [...]
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Where Hypnagogic Meets The Haçienda
Swiftumz, aka Bay Area witchdoctor and Hunx & His Punx collaborator Chris McVicker, comes from the Pink, Maus, and Moore school of home recording and personal eccentricity. But he adopts a distinctly Apollonian approach. His debut, Don’t Trip, sounds like a relaxed, experimental pop art version of C86 and Factory refracted through a dirty prism. [...]
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[Premiere] Chord Gets Diminished
We introduced you to Chicago’s Chord last fall. The novel post- music theory project concocts compositions based solely around the construing and exploration of the notes or combination of notes within a single chord. Truth in advertising, eh? The resulting fury sounds like a freeform, tone driven cross-pollination of John “El Jefe” Cage’s high-brow modern [...]
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Nightmares in Heaven
Just in time for Halloween, what’s more spooky than creepy old men and religious imagery? Not much, and recent HoZac acquisition The Band In Heaven‘s got all of the above in their beautifully blue-washed video for “Sleazy Dreams.” Trippy, scary, feedbacky – good clean fun. Czech ‘em on the Bandcamps.
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[Photos] Xiu Xiu – Zanzabar, Louisville – 9.22.11
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Artist:
Xiu Xiu scares audiences in the live setting just as much, if not more, as they’ve unsettled listeners over, what, nine albums. Geez, didn’t realize until just now that Jamie Stewart is the reigning Stephen King of exorcism pop. And last Thursday, demons were excised at the Zanzabar, yes sir. Lots of yelling, interspersed with [...]
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Scratch Acid and Sun Araw Added to Cropped Out Fest 2011!
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Sheeeeeeeeit. Do these artists need an introduction if you’re reading this blog? Surely not. But for the uninitiated, here’s the skinny. Scratch Acid was the David Yow and David Wm. Sims’ pre-Jesus Lizard supersonic freakout vehicle that reunited this year for a limited run of North American dates. If you don’t know, ya better call [...]
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