Music

Moses Pendleton, founder/director of Momix, is a complex artist known for crafting fantastical voyages out of the human form that straddle the line between spectacular art and circusy entertainment. Often his use of larger-than-life props, jokes and stunning backdrops become gimmicks diminishing his ultra-athletic and acrobatic dancers’ artistry. Wednesday night’s The Best of Momix was […]

D.I.Y. Do-It-Yourself. This was a phrase attached to the ethic from frontier days of punk music, both here and abroad, but it was not so exclusive to the particular musical genre. The “No Wave” movement in New York (and later, Chicago and Los Angeles) also took more experimental forms and performed in a variety of […]

In recent years, New York band Gang Gang Dance has become a creative force in experimental rock, with a sound created by intersection of a wide pastiche of influences. The conceptual bent of their new album seems to be something like a 2008 version of an album like Talking Heads Remain in Light, mixing electronic, […]

The San Francisco-based group Deerhoof can be a polarizing band. Naysayers can’t stand the cacophony, or bassist Satomi Matsuzaki’s high waif-like falsetto vocals, often mixing Japanese and English lyrics together, creating abstract nonsense. Their songs constantly contain different parts lending to an angular, at times, fragmented sound. Fans love their music for all these reasons. […]

Ben Folds has let his imagination run away with him — an imagination he’s always had, but which has been reined in for most of his recording career. First it was kept in check by the three-person, three-instrument trio Ben Folds Five, which, even when it began to add string quartets and flugel horns, retained […]

Hailing from Minneapolis, The Replacements were a fatalistic band. Headed by songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Paul Westerberg, the band drew praise from mid-’80s critics, and garnered a dedicated nationwide core of fans, but they couldn’t get enough radio airplay (thought to be too rough-around-the-edges) and thus didn’t sell enough "units." Meanwhile, live they were wildly […]

Underground instrumentalist Phil Spirito has journeyed from one obscure band to another. His membership with rex brought him together with Chicago-based band, Red Red Meat, many of whose members — including leader Tim Rutilli, Ben Massarella and Brian Deck — would later form Califone. The mixture of these two bands would result in an interesting […]

Kraftwerk is a tough band to cover in a documentary because the scope of their influence on modern music is so wide that it’s nearly impossible to grasp, and their discography is so multidimensional that something is bound to be left out. A comprehensive and interesting history on the band seems like a difficult task, […]