Miracles of Modern Science - "Friend of the Animals"

Like all good Asian kids, I was born with a calculator in my left hand and a violin in my right. Well…not quite, but as fate would destine all the little Asian children in America, 12 years later I found myself screeching away to Bach in my dedicated practice room/prison confines. For many years, up to when I entered college, my violin was my own best friend and worst enemy, providing a great elective class in school that had no real homework, epic horse-around antics during 4^th-5^th periods doubling as “math homework time”, and a couple killer orchestra QTs to ogle at, but also imposing conditions on my TV and internet porn time.

A violin is unlike a guitar or any modern instrument in that it is decidedly low-tech; no frets to guide your fingers, no effects or pedals to dork out on, or girls to impress for that matter. A classical, stringed instrument is an unforgiving, grating device in mediocre hands, and a graceful, dulcet bard in experienced ones. Playing an instrument like the violin is not about learning some chords off a TAB music website, inviting a girl into your dorm room, and telling her you “wrote a song for her.” It is a long, deliberate, and plodding process that you really can’t appreciate unless you grew up playing one.

Which is why I give the following band, made up of only classical stringed instruments and your standard drum kit, so much love. Not only did these guys actually stick with violin/cello/bass after all their friends “sold out” and took up sax/oboe/flute in 8^th grade, but continued this arguably understated profession through college and beyond. It is a testament to their will and dedication to music that they put up with hundreds of hours of private lessons, bullshit orchestra politics, and straight up brutal competition with mad Asian kids to get where they are. You also gotta give them props for somehow meeting each other in college (in this case, Princeton), forming a band in a pretty shitty town for music (Princeton being the home of BAL crew), and furthermore actually all moving to Brooklyn, post-college, to make real music in a city overflowing with lesser musical talent.

Enter Miracles of Modern Science, staffed by Evan Younger (Bass), Josh Hirshfeld (Mandolin), Kieran Ledwidge (Violin), Tyler Pines (Drums) and Geoff McDonald (Cello). Their compositions may be classically inclined but their product is 100% rock. As singer/bassist Evan Younger told NPR in a recent interview, “We’ve gotten mistakenly booked on folk bills, and there will be people there earnest strumming acoustic guitar, and we’ll go up and be like…ready to rock!” One of their first singles, “Eating Me Alive” opens with bit straight out of Schubert, but trotting cellos soon give away to a bursting chorus, followed by a slow stringed section punctuated by light pizzicato, and a raucous bridge leading into another verse. By the end of the song, we are firmly in rock and roll territory, with the mandolin and drums leading the charge to a stirring conclusion. For a bunch of Ivy Leaguers from Princeton, you gotta give hand it to the “Jeremy Lins” of indie rock for reimagining the types of sounds we thought these instruments could make together.

We shot this session a couple months ago during the brick bleakness of winter, at a lovely little studio in Greenpoint called Spaceman Sound. Our friends Tom Tierney, Patrick Southern (from Tidal Arms) and Alex Meade-Fox did an awesome job recording the live sound and quite frankly, dealing with our bullshit both during and after the shoot. Stringed instruments are not only a challenge to learn and master, but to record as well, and these guys really did a great job given the circumstances. Hats off to them for a job well done. And no acknowledgements would be complete with thanking MOMS themselves, who all chipped in and bought us all pizza that night. Even though it was not stuffed crust, we love you anyways.

BAL And Spaceman Sound Present: Miracles of Modern Science – Friend of the Animals
A BAL Production
Recorded live at Spaceman Sound
Engineered by Tom Tierney, Alex Meade-Fox, and Patrick Southern
Shot by Steven Levine, Will Xu, Eric Schutzbank, and Aleks Gezentsvey
Edited by Will Xu
Lighting by Will Armstrong

On the optimistic state of music today

Here it comes again: the requisite explanation for why we have been offline for the entire goddamn winter. Much like side boob in Williamsburg, we tend to disappear for months on end during the cold season, only to reappear convincingly at the first sign of spring. We’ll make promises that things will be different the next time around, that we’ll never forsake you again. By now, you should know that these are all empty promises - so very barren and empty on the inside. Good thing for you, we are at the cusp of summer and you can expect a solid 4-5 months of half assed updates, inappropriate comments about bands/people/illegal activity, and meandering commentary such as the one you will read below.

For a long time now I have been very cynical about the state of indie music and the commercialization of indie culture. For me, The Arcade Fire winning best album at the Grammys wasn’t a moment of celebration, but rather a cultural event where all the worse aspects of indie rock – lack of imagination, stagnant progress, obsession with the past – were unduly celebrated by an establishment hoping to capture a piece of indie “coolness”. And this isn’t to say that The Arcade Fire made a bad album, only that The Academy foisted an award upon a band that wasn’t necessarily doing what they did best: creating new and innovative sounds. Bon Iver winning the award for Best New Artist the following year only confirmed the tired state of mainstream-indie music, as he was neither “new” nor “best”, only “boring”.

But then I remember what got me into this game in the first place. I remember the electrifying feeling I felt when I first heard Panda Bear’s Person Pitch for the first time. It was like nothing I had heard before, and this coming from a long time Animal Collective fan who had gotten accustomed to some of their zanier, far out sounds. Or when Santigold self-titled dropped new wave sounds complimented by dance floor beats that rocked my shit for months straight. The kind of genre-defying sounds that reinvigorates your faith and hope in music. The excitement of discovery. In the last ten years, only a few acts have emerged that have truly broken new ground in our little community, and even fewer who have had the critical mass to actually define a style. AnCo. The Walkmen. Even Grizzly Bear, with whom we still have mad unresolved blog beef with. As musicians they are goddamn amazing; as people, they truly do suck. I digress though.

As much as the bands I mentioned above differ, they all share in them an innate curiosity for new styles and sounds, and a desire to constantly redefine our notions of who they are as musicians. Maybe music is less about personal preference, and more about discovery. Maybe if our ideals and expectations were less rigid and more open minded, we’d avail ourselves to discover new tunes that we might have ignored before. The most compelling artists today – St. Vincent, Diplo, Santigold are just a few that come to mind – are defined by precisely their inability to be easily classified. So I think, if we look at music from a different perspective, that which is somewhat more disconnected from ourselves, we can stop focusing on how X artist is a disgrace to rock, or ___ is ruining dubstep. There are a million new sounds by a million different artists and maybe it actually hurts us all to focus on the bad ones instead of just going out and finding new ones.

In contrast to summers past, I’m feeling super optimistic about the possibilities for music, both live and recorded. New Liars album out soon. New Santigold just dropped. Mad Decent Block Parties. Radiohead twice in Newark, once in Camden. Moomahton. Zoo in August. All good stuff that gets me super pumped to be back into music, and hopefully bring you some killer footage. We’re back baby!

Tidal Arms - Live at the BAL CMJ Showcase

Tidal Arms - Several Circles / Hair and Teeth

So CMJ came and went. Holy god, was that shit weak sauce or what? No, seriously, what of value actually happened over the annual conference that is supposed to drench Manhattan and Brooklyn in some acute, fall freshness? By our count, other than the usual free liqs that we hook up with precision, it offered not much at all. 

The music/media/ancillary business behemoth that this conference has become offered us a week dominated by either bland, "is-this-2002?" indie pop/rock/whatever, or fuzzed out, reverb heavy electronic noise, swooned over by tired voices - be they rapping or singing. 

But it's not all gimmicky trash, we swear. See, this is where us BAL boys come through. We put on a dope showcase. It had bands that fit together on a bill. Shocking! Really strong, sturdy songwriting - imagine that! Not to mention, actually invigorating performances where the artists put energy (you know, not the ironic/detached boredom type) into their playing. Holy shit, it's like we reinvented the whole damn game. 

Coming to you live in full effizect are our boys, Brooklyn's Tidal Arms. For those that may not know them, we strongly urge you to check out their debut LP, The Sun Exploding. Shit is on straight repeat like it's jamming out the old Aiwa 3-disc changer as we get ready for school in the morning. 

Plundering the depths of heavy rock/metal, Tidal Arms leveled us in the room with an amazingly tight set. Combing across some of our favorite genres - Tidal's addictive combination of post-hardcore riffage, math-rock time signatures, and fat slabs of startlingly pretty melodies - we were more than impressed. For evidence, check out what we cut together, the swirling, slow-building "Several Circles", and the apocalyptic churn of "Hair and Teeth".

Your Guide To Free Booze at CMJ 2011

CMJ is finally here, and with it brings our annual guide to free boozing. You gotta love how far some of these hosts go to convince you to come. You see, almost all the free booze events are the smaller, "neffed the f- out," headscratch "who?" type shows where the music itself isn't enough to bring a crowd of any size. Most of these presenters are well aware of how average their particular bands are. They know the deal. How to convince someone to see a crappy band? Same way most of us get laid - alcohol!

Peep the quality Google Calendar technology below. Notice how we've color-coded each entry depending on type of booze. Yellow for free beer events. Green for hard alcohol sponsored events. Blue for a mixture of both, or an unspecified open bar. Red for BAL events that we squeezed in. Click on each entry to load more details like where the event is located, or how to RSVP. You can even subscribe to this calendar on your Android/iPhone and get alerts as you get wrecked. What less do you expect from BAL? Oh yeah, a beastly 4 band rock showcase (open bar from 8-9 PBR + well) Wednesday and a dubiously dicey 8 band loft party on Saturday. 

Presenting...The Graveyard Smash (An Unofficial CMJ Rager)

RSVP For this show on Facebook

We all know that CMJ is the most anarchic music festival in the world, but did you know that a majority of CMJ events are non-official and “off the books”? In the spirit of things, we decided to “cook the books” with a delicious smorgasbord of ear-tingling goodness. With 8 bands occupying two separate stages, this is our most ambitious, devious, and straight-up diciest show yet.

Straight out of Brooklyn’s favorite “artistic community” of Bushwick, BAL Presents: The Graveyard Smash, a mini music festival with all the rapport of a big fest, with none of its comforts, prestige, or celebrity. Instead of $4 waters, help yourself to an unlimited supply from the bathroom tap. Instead of the fresh air of an outdoor fest, breathe in the stale air of a dodgey, 100+ year old industrial loft. VIP bracelets? Everyone is VIP!

With so many bands spanning so many genres, there’s bound to be something for everyone. From the pop-deconstructing Idiot Glee, to visceral art-rockers Grandfather and raucous hardcore noisemakers Descender, our lineup is chock full of new sounds, up-and-coming talents, and animated sets.

Filling in the bill will be Brooklyn-based solo troubadour and loop machine master Idgy Dean, Shoegazers Sight Seeing, and experimental rockers Leonia. Get ready rock out, cocks out, in a massively fucked-up concert only BAL could have possibly dreamed of.

NEVERLANDS STAGE:
Grandfather: http://grandfathermusic.bandcamp.com/

Descender: http://descender.bandcamp.com/

Life Size Maps: http://lifesizemaps.bandcamp.com/

Leonia


BAL STAGE:
Idiot Glee: http://idiotglee.bandcamp.com/

Idgy Dean: http://idgydean.bandcamp.com/

Sight Seeing: http://sightseeing.bandcamp.com/

Gospels: http://facebook.com/gospelsnyc

Directions:

L train to Jefferson Ave, hang a LEFT on Wykoff till you get to Flushing Ave.
Make a LEFT on Flushing Ave till you reach Stewart Ave, make a RIGHT
Take a LEFT onto Johnson Ave ½ block. There will be people outside to let you in.

BAL Presents: The Graveyard Smash
Live at The Neverland
538 Johnson Ave, Brooklyn
8:00 doors
$5 to get in
For help dial (646) 481-7032