James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain is James Baldwin’s seminal, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. John Grimes, Baldwin’s 14-year-old protagonist-slash-proxy, lives in a world structured by punishing dichotomies: salvation vs. sin, white violence vs. black survival. John, though tentatively at first, pushes at these seemingly fixed contrasts, mainly by way of his gift for reading and writing. His bookishness is a burden and a weapon, a passport and a mark of difference. He wants to swagger and play sports, but instead he “sins with his hand” while thinking about other boys, or pines after Elisha, a young teacher at church. At home, John is expected to become a preacher like his father, and yet his father shows him only rage and cruelty.

In the middle section, Baldwin unravels the backstories of John’s father, mother and aunt, but as the reader becomes privy to these characters’ buried histories, their anger and sorrow remain indecipherable to John. Still, John comes into his own as, finally, he is called to “the threshing floor.” Baldwin’s prose becomes porous and prophetic as John has visions of ancestors lost to slavery rising in resistance, and finds the strength, at last, to face himself and enter his own moment.

Originally published in 1954, Go Tell It on the Mountain remains fresh and essential, and the audiobook does justice to the subtlety and power of Baldwin’s prose.

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Ripely Pine

The first two minutes of Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s Ripely Pine seem to reinforce the notion of fragile acquiescence that 23-year-old Aly Spaltro’s stage name suggests. “Take me by the arm to the altar/ Take me by the collar to the cliff/ …Take me by the braid down to my grave,” she croons on “Hair to the Ferris Wheel” over a languidly-thumbed electric guitar, the ghost of an autoharp shuffling around in the background. But on this, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s first record cut in a proper studio, nothing is quite as it seems. Just when a lesser song might be content to wrap up its delicate reverie, the wool is ripped away and a Technicolor blast of crunchy guitars and detached-garage drums gush forth, Spaltro’s dusky voice bottoming out over the deluge. This is par for the course on Ripely Pine; these songs tend start in one place, end in another, and cycle through sometimes a dozen imaginings of themselves on the way — like “You Are The Apple” which, over seven minutes, slides from a nervous acoustic twitch to a swampy low-slung romp to a billowing, spiking orchestral swoon. The album’s lyrical turf is both elemental and surreal, like a funhouse mirror turned on a dream of an anatomy lab; hearts are eaten like strawberry cake, blood is canned like jam, love is handled like a newborn’s skull. By the end, it’s clear those opening lines weren’t a coy feint, but a trap; it’s you who is being led, and Lady Lamb the Beekeeper with her claws in your arm. And you will go with her — to the altar, to the grave, wherever — and love every weird minute of it.

Warren Ellis Picks His Favourite Albums

[To celebrate the release of their 15th studio album, Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. You can read our exclusive interview with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis of the Bad Seeds here. The band also asked us to interview Australian rock legend Ed Kuepper as part of their takeover — you can read that here. And Warren Ellis reveals the band's favourite albums on eMusic, below. — Ed.]

Warren Ellis Picks His Favorite Albums

[To celebrate the release of their 15th studio album, Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. You can read our exclusive interview with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis of the Bad Seeds here. The band also asked us to interview Australian rock legend Ed Kuepper as part of their takeover — you can read that here. And Warren Ellis reveals the band's favorite albums on eMusic, below. — Ed.]

Flume, Flume

Few have ever looked to Australia for the latest trends in electronic music. Although it has produced its fair share of innovators, from disco flirts Vanda & Young to hip auteurs The Avalanches, Down Under electronic music is largely seen as the foppish cousin to rock’s more masculine manoeuvres. There was a brief flirtation with acid house in the early ’90s, mainly fueled by British ex-pats, but interest was always confined to pockets of aficionados. Until, that is, the arrival of Flume on forward-thinking label Future Classic.

With comparisons to The Weeknd and Toro Y Moi (whom he supported on a recent London date), 21-year-old Harley Streten has seemingly risen from nowhere to produce one of the most exciting electronic debuts of the year. Breakthrough single “Holdin’ On” is a sublime slice of wobblesome R&B, while the instrumental “Ezra” has crunk beats leavened with a hook that could have been lifted from the Art of Noise. “Left Alone,” which features Melbourne’s magnificently-named Chet Faker, feels delivered straight from a Pentecostal church rather than a precocious kid from the Sydney ‘burbs, while “More Than You Thought” veers towards stomping Skrillex territory without ever resorting to the easy pay-offs the American producer favors.

This album has already knocked Justin Bieber off the No. 1 spot in Australia — an astonishing achievement for music that is still some way from being pure pop. From a trickle to a torrent: This Flume is unstoppable.

Jamie Lidell, Jamie Lidell

Jamie Lidell has made a career-long habit of swerving, with periods devoted to out-there electronic futurism and then, by surprise, vintage throwback soul. His self-titled album makes good on the prospects of both, with an expansive, prismatic sound and a heartrending voice that proves decidedly human. More digital than recent Lidell albums, which paid explicit tribute to ’60s soul, it sounds more in line with the ’80s, when the influence of New Wave brought swelling psychodrama into R&B. “Big Love” could score a scene in any number of good/bad ’80s movies (the party scene in Back to School, say), but it’s also remarkable for the way it subtly builds to a fever pitch without seeming to have changed much at all. “Do Yourself a Favor” struts and preens over a space-funk groove that would make Justified-era Justin Timberlake proud, while “why_ya_why” slows down and goes slurry over a sci-fi Mardi Gras march. All of it bursts with life and a superabundance of soul, however real or imagined the time and place for the minting of that soul might be.

Concrete Knives, Be Your Own King

It is an enduring unfairness that ’80s pop is stereotyped as the home of pompous choruses, big-shouldered blouses, billowing dry ice and unnecessarily elaborate haircuts. The same period, especially in Britain, bequeathed the glorious legacy of post-punk, which inventive and curious
groups still find interesting ways of investing, three decades on.

While it would be accurate to note that Concrete Knives, of Caen in northern France, are largely preoccupied with plowing ground first broken about 30 years ago, it would be altogether wrong to characterize them as pious curators of a period they missed out on. Though it sounds like the band members own few records made since they were born, their pure-hearted reverence for such early ’80s post-punk groups as Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Cure and Gang Of Four has resulted in an album that is intriguing and often glorious good fun.

Concrete Knives rigorously observe one of the cardinal rules of the post-punk genre: terseness. The 10 tracks on Be Your Own King are rattled out in a squeak over 34 minutes. Concrete Knives are not, however, humorless minimalists; at heart, they’re a commendably unabashed pop group. Witness the giddy shout-along chorus of “Brand New Start,” which recalls The B-52s, the surging Joy Division bassline that carries “Happy Mondays,” and the raggedly triumphant opening track “Bornholmer,” which boldly posits that Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” is territory worth mining.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away

Nick Cave’s 15th album with the Bad Seeds, Push the Sky Away, doesn’t want to be a masterpiece. Sure, it’s got a couple of songs — the lilting, menacing “Jubilee Street” and the creeping, spiraling “Higgs Boson Blues” — that push past the six-minute mark, and ponders subjects as weighty as the origins of the universe and the apocalypse (in the same song, yet). But just when the Bad Seeds — minus longtime guitarist Mick Harvey, whose departure tilts Sky toward the low end — settle into a comfortably morbid groove, Cave throws a lyrics curveball. “We Real Cool,” which takes its title from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, opens with the machine-gun stutter of a repeated bass note, with Cave sounding like a doomsaying preacher hurling words from the pulpit. But in the end, he reveals himself as just another punter with a laptop, aimlessly Googling the night away: “Sirius is 8.6 light years away/ Arcturus is 37/ The past is the past/ and it’s here to stay/ Wikipedia is heaven/ when you don’t remember anymore.”

The past, or more specifically its absence, comes up a lot on Push the Sky Away. Warren Ellis’s skittering loops, which recall the atmospheric spread of the soundtrack albums he and Cave have made in recent years, have no beginning and no end, like the woman on “Jubilee Street” who “had a history but she had no past.” Myth and reality jumble in an eternal present, with Robert Johnson on one end and Miley Cyrus on the other. The discovery of the Higgs boson may have brought scientists closer to understanding how the universe works, but in “Higgs Boson Blues,” Cave only has questions. Ranging from Geneva to Memphis, calling on Lucifer and the ghost of Martin Luther King, the song mingles the mysterious and the mundane until it’s not clear which is which. It’s certainly not as self-consciously weighty as Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, or as primal as Cave’s Grinderman albums, but Push the Sky Away‘s free-associative trawl exerts a strange fascination, like a dream you’re not quite sure you had.

Interview: Ed Kuepper

[To celebrate their 15th studio album Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. The band nominated Ed Kuepper for interview: Kuepper is an icon of Australian rock and also currently touring guitarist with the Bad Seeds. Warren Ellis told us, "Ed is so prolific. He has had a really long, significant career, but he just keeps moving and creating." We caught up with Kuepper mid-rehearsals to talk about his influential catalog.

Read our full interview with Warren Ellis and Nick Cave here, and check out the band's favorite albums on eMusic here. — Ed.] — Ed.]

Ed Kuepper might very well be the most famous Australian musician you’ve never heard of. The singer-songwriter and guitarist — who’s notched up nearly 40 years of almost constant creativity — played a huge part in kick-starting punk outside the USA. Kuepper was the co-founder, in 1974, of Brisbane trio The Saints, whose iconoclastic first single, “(I’m) Stranded” from 1976 predated both the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The UK” and The Clash’s “White Riot”, announcing via its thrillingly furious and full-tilt, buzzsaw squall and raw vocals the arrival of what was to become an enormously influential talent.

The Saints burned brightly but broke up in 1979, at which point Kuepper formed cultish jazz/art-rock outfit Laughing Clowns. Gnarly, feedback-favouring alt-rock trio The Aints followed and then began a staggeringly fertile and wide-ranging solo period, in which Kuepper has delivered around 18 albums (he himself has lost count) plus countless compilations and live volumes, and various intriguing, full-length reworkings. Workshy, Ed Kuepper is not. This year sees him taking time out from his solo career to tour as guitarist with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, as they promote their new album, Push The Sky Away.

Sharon O’Connell chatted with Ed Kuepper about being an honorary Bad Seed and his own long career.

If your career can be characterized by one thing, it’s constant change. Do you feel you still have something to prove, or do you simply have a low boredom threshold?

If you look back at the earliest recordings I’ve done, it’s true that things tend to change fairly rapidly from album to album. Once I’ve recorded something, I like to move on from it. In that respect, I’ve always been the kind of artist that record companies get frustrated by, because by the time an album is recorded and the tour is organised, I’m not actually playing those songs the way they are on the record. I guess I believe a recording is just that; it’s not necessarily the definitive way any one song should be presented. And there are a number of songs in my repertoire that have gone through some quite extreme reworkings.

Do you see your records as a continuum, or as individual expressions of a number of different Ed Kueppers?

It always moves around. The only thing I’m really conscious of when I’m recording is that I do my best work if I don’t get too bogged down in the detail initially. It’s something that always occurs to writers when they’re writing — “Have I done this before? Should I be doing more of this?” Or, “Should I make a point of doing something very different?” I’m not talking about this from a commercial point of view, because I don’t operate in that arena. Basically, just doing things is a good way into it. Whether I go forwards or sideways or backwards from record to record is something I can really only appraise after the event.

Do you have a single favourite album, or one creative period that you regard most fondly?

All the albums that have any real significance for me are the ones that are different from what I did before. They become important to you, but whether you really like them becomes difficult; because you put a lot of work into the writing and recording and mixing and so on, you do get to a point where you’re pretty sick of them. But when I listen back, there are good bits on quite a few of them, really! I formed The Saints when I was at high school, so those records are very important to me. And when I left the UK and went back to Australia to form Laughing Clowns, that was a big move for me as well. Then going solo…all those shifts were important.

Do you never consider resting on your laurels, or at least just goofing off for a while?

I’ve had periods where I haven’t goofed off, but I have been stuck in various kinds of ruts where I haven’t been able to do anything creatively, and I don’t enjoy that. I get quite depressed in that situation. I have this reputation as being an incredibly prolific person, but I tend to do things in fairly concentrated bursts. But no, I’ve never felt like I’m finished, like I can just sit back and say, “Oh, I invented punk rock in 1974.” I’ve never thought like that.

How is it playing in someone else’s band now, after so many years of steering your own ship?

I did play with the Bad Seeds following Mick Harvey’s departure in 2009, and we did a fairly extensive festival tour that year. But it’s completely different for me. It’s a much bigger band than I usually tour with — I tend to play in a three-piece format — and I have to work on a whole bunch of other people’s songs, so I have to think. Which I don’t have to do in my own band! But it’s great. It’s a fairly creative environment in which to work and the Bad Seeds are open-minded, so I like that.

Interview: Ed Kuepper

[To celebrate their 15th studio album Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. The band nominated Ed Kuepper for interview: Kuepper is an icon of Australian rock and also currently touring guitarist with the Bad Seeds. Warren Ellis told us, "Ed is so prolific. He has had a really long, significant career, but he just keeps moving and creating." We caught up with Kuepper mid-rehearsals to talk about his influential catalogue.

Read our full interview with Warren Ellis and Nick Cave here, and check out the band's favourite albums on eMusic here. — Ed.] — Ed.]

Ed Kuepper might very well be the most famous Australian musician you’ve never heard of. The singer-songwriter and guitarist — who’s notched up nearly 40 years of almost constant creativity — played a huge part in kick-starting punk outside the USA. Kuepper was the co-founder, in 1974, of Brisbane trio The Saints, whose iconoclastic first single, “(I’m) Stranded” from 1976 predated both the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In The UK” and The Clash’s “White Riot”, announcing via its thrillingly furious and full-tilt, buzzsaw squall and raw vocals the arrival of what was to become an enormously influential talent.

The Saints burned brightly but broke up in 1979, at which point Kuepper formed cultish jazz/art-rock outfit Laughing Clowns. Gnarly, feedback-favouring alt-rock trio The Aints followed and then began a staggeringly fertile and wide-ranging solo period, in which Kuepper has delivered around 18 albums (he himself has lost count) plus countless compilations and live volumes, and various intriguing, full-length reworkings. Workshy, Ed Kuepper is not. This year sees him taking time out from his solo career to tour as guitarist with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, as they promote their new album, Push The Sky Away.

Sharon O’Connell chatted with Ed Kuepper about being an honorary Bad Seed and his own long career.

If your career can be characterized by one thing, it’s constant change. Do you feel you still have something to prove, or do you simply have a low boredom threshold?

If you look back at the earliest recordings I’ve done, it’s true that things tend to change fairly rapidly from album to album. Once I’ve recorded something, I like to move on from it. In that respect, I’ve always been the kind of artist that record companies get frustrated by, because by the time an album is recorded and the tour is organised, I’m not actually playing those songs the way they are on the record. I guess I believe a recording is just that; it’s not necessarily the definitive way any one song should be presented. And there are a number of songs in my repertoire that have gone through some quite extreme reworkings.

Do you see your records as a continuum, or as individual expressions of a number of different Ed Kueppers?

It always moves around. The only thing I’m really conscious of when I’m recording is that I do my best work if I don’t get too bogged down in the detail initially. It’s something that always occurs to writers when they’re writing — “Have I done this before? Should I be doing more of this?” Or, “Should I make a point of doing something very different?” I’m not talking about this from a commercial point of view, because I don’t operate in that arena. Basically, just doing things is a good way into it. Whether I go forwards or sideways or backwards from record to record is something I can really only appraise after the event.

Do you have a single favourite album, or one creative period that you regard most fondly?

All the albums that have any real significance for me are the ones that are different from what I did before. They become important to you, but whether you really like them becomes difficult; because you put a lot of work into the writing and recording and mixing and so on, you do get to a point where you’re pretty sick of them. But when I listen back, there are good bits on quite a few of them, really! I formed The Saints when I was at high school, so those records are very important to me. And when I left the UK and went back to Australia to form Laughing Clowns, that was a big move for me as well. Then going solo…all those shifts were important.

Do you never consider resting on your laurels, or at least just goofing off for a while?

I’ve had periods where I haven’t goofed off, but I have been stuck in various kinds of ruts where I haven’t been able to do anything creatively, and I don’t enjoy that. I get quite depressed in that situation. I have this reputation as being an incredibly prolific person, but I tend to do things in fairly concentrated bursts. But no, I’ve never felt like I’m finished, like I can just sit back and say, “Oh, I invented punk rock in 1974.” I’ve never thought like that.

How is it playing in someone else’s band now, after so many years of steering your own ship?

I did play with the Bad Seeds following Mick Harvey’s departure in 2009, and we did a fairly extensive festival tour that year. But it’s completely different for me. It’s a much bigger band than I usually tour with — I tend to play in a three-piece format — and I have to work on a whole bunch of other people’s songs, so I have to think. Which I don’t have to do in my own band! But it’s great. It’s a fairly creative environment in which to work and the Bad Seeds are open-minded, so I like that.

The Namedroppers: Getting to the Bottom of 10 Musical Shout-Outs

Musicians are narcissists. It’s the chief qualification for getting on stage and soaking in the adulation of the masses. So when a band or a songwriter references another performer in a song, there’s almost always a reason for diverting the attention.

Considering the rareness of this generosity, we decided to highlight a handful of those shout-outs — the best well-intentioned, intra-musical nods

But knowing that musicians are also legendary canard-makers, we wanted to consider the plausibility of the scenarios as well. What are the chances that, let’s say, Katy Perry was, in fact, listening to Radiohead as she was making out — which she alleges in “The One That Got Away?” We get to the bottom of this, and more, in the list below.

Camper Van Beethoven, La Costa Perdida

During the ’80s, Camper Van Beethoven were violin-toting college-rock oddballs who dabbled in everything from ska and world music to fractured country and psych-pop. The David Lowery-led group took most of the ’90s off after a bitter breakup, but when the band reunited in 1999, its music was as gloriously askew as ever. In 2002, they released an elaborate, song-for-song re-do of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk; two years later came the prog-driven New Roman Times, a concept album with a politically-charged storyline referencing aliens, terrorism and a Texas vs. California civil war.

Thematically, La Costa Perdida — Camper Van Beethoven’s first album since New Roman Times — is more cohesive: It’s steeped in the cultural history, weirdo aesthetic and laid-back vibe of Northern California. This local flavor especially permeates La Costa Perdida: “You Got To Roll” is a smoldering psych-freak guitar jam on which Lowery shrieks, “Let’s make love — before we die!” right before he exclaims, “Too high, too high!” The title track, meanwhile, is a Norteño-influenced, oompah waltz, and “Northern California Girls” is a loping alt-country sprawl with Jonathan Segel’s evocative violin and plush vocal harmonies courtesy of guests such as the Futurebirds. On the twang-darkened moodpiece “Come Down the Coast,” you can also hear shadows of the Beach Boys’ heavy-lidded 1973 psych-pop opus Holland, which Lowery has cited as an influence.

But what stands out most on La Costa Perdida is Camper Van Beethoven’s songwriting. The band’s approach is no less diverse — the giddy, two-minute ska high-step “Peaches In The Summertime” comes several songs after the Flaming Lips-esque “Too High For The Love-In” — but it’s also focused, with little of the self-indulgence which often made New Roman Times sluggish. And for a band known for its wicked humor, La Costa Perdida is often strikingly sincere; for example, the album-closing “A Love For All Time” is a syrupy homage to picture-perfect beach noir music that sounds like Pulp on a tropical island. It’s an unexpectedly vulnerable way to end an album full of warped California pop, but it’s also indicative of how Camper Van Beethoven has cobbled together a fine career by doing nothing but tossing curveballs.

Eddie Huang’s Top 5 Hip-Hop Albums

Eddie Huang, celebrity chef, TV host and author of the memoir Fresh Off the Boat, is pretty sure that hip-hop saved his life when he was a bullied, racially “other” kid growing up in Florida. Even now, the influence is obvious in everything from his restaurant’s playlists to the cover of his book to his Source-esque wardrobe.

Here, he shares the top five albums that got him through his formative SPAM-launching/skateboarding/security fence-hopping years.

Interview: Eddie Huang

A Vice TV host with a law degree, a hip-hop obsession and a NYC restaurant called Baohaus (serving Taiwanese buns, named for his favorite architects), Eddie Huang is a walking culture clash. In his memoir Fresh Off the Boat, he charts the circumstances that conspired to make it so: a Florida childhood in a soulless suburb, restrictive Asian-American stereotypes and repressive parenting, street fights, racism, football, drugs, trips to Taiwan, a family restaurant business and Tupac. His search for identity led him to law school, a stint as a streetwear impresario, and a trial run as a standup comic before he settled on food as his primary vehicle for expression.

Yet Fresh Off the Boat proves that what he has to say is just as compelling as the way he says it. In this surprisingly moving story of self-invention, Huang gives even the most familiar tropes of the American immigrant experience his own original flavor, spiced with equal dashes of ’90s hip-hop lyrics and postmodern literary references and finished with a huge dollop of swagu. While Huang admits that it’s all very “idiosyncratic and personal,” his singular voice is speaking to plenty of people: On the day he talked with eMusic contributor Elisa Ludwig, he’d just found out the book hit The New York Times extended bestseller list.

Huang also gave us a list of his top 5 hip-hop records of all time. Find out which ’90s album made him proud to be a Chinese hip-hop head here.

What were your inspirations for writing this book?

My main inspiration was that I didn’t think this story was getting told enough, and that includes the multiple parts of my identity. No. 1 was being Asian in America — there’s no [The Brief Wondrous Life of] Oscar Wao for Asian people, no coming-­of-age story that represented what I went through. No. 2 was the whole hip-hop story — there are plenty of books and bad movies about the hip-hop generation, but none that represented what the music meant to me, how it got me through the tougher times in my life. I also just wanted to talk about identity politics and culture. Writing this book was like Professor X putting on the Cerebro to find the mutants — I’m trying to speak to the other people like me out there.

You mention Junot Diaz. Is there a particular literary tradition you’d like it to fit into?

I never read his work until I finished this book and my editor was like, “Dude, you should really check out Junot.” My writing is influenced by lyrics, by hip-hop more than anything, but it’s also influenced by Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. My audience tends to be people in their 20s, or at least those are the people that are coming out to events.

The cover of this book really sets it apart from just about anything out there. What’s the story behind it?

We worked on it for a long time. I brought in my boy Justin Thomas Kay to design it. I wanted it to be very ’90s hip-hop magazine-looking. We used the family photo to show the three generations of Chinese migration: my grandparents from China, my parents from Taiwan, and me and my brothers, American cats.

Your use of language is very fluid, mixing dialects and slang — is this true of your cooking, too?

If you’re a real artist, your personality permeates everything you do. If you come to my restaurant, it’s very loud and there’s always one of my playlists on. It’s rough around the edges, but everyone’s having a good time, telling jokes. Noise is important to me. I need fire trucks and cop cars and the TV in the background to sleep. My food is very soulful, in your face and full of flavor, and I think I write the same way — rhythmically, with a lot of flow and start and stop, a lot of movement in the words.

You can see that in the structure of the book; it’s not always linear.

For the most part we wanted it to be linear, but there are flashbacks, tangents and footnotes where I’m trying to connect the dots for readers. It’s a lot of vernacular that older people aren’t going to understand but I want them to be part of it, even if it’s not their language. My editor and I made the conscious decision not to clean up the slang or translate the Chinese or do anything that would disturb the flow. We wanted it to be unique and idiosyncratic; we didn’t want it to be about the “supposed-to’s.”

It’s obvious that the question of authenticity — in food, identity, culture — is an important one for you. How do you know when another chef’s food is for real?

When I say “authentic,” I’m not judging someone’s food, like, asking whether it’s what real Chinese people eat or whatever. I’m wondering whether the experience is authentic to this chef and if what he’s doing is telling his own story. Lots of restaurants I go to, it’s not necessarily for the food. I like the experience of eating there, the energy of the room. There might be a cat walking on the counter, but you feel like you’re home.

Between your blog and the book and your Vice show, you’re selling yourself as the product as much as the food — how much of that is deliberate?

I’ll be honest: I don’t think I actually market myself well. I mean, it’s not much of a strategy, trying to sell Eddie Huang, the short fat Chinaman. But the thing I do market is my ideology and opinions. I’m a very unlikely TV host, but on Vice I just try to drop a few gems in every episode and make people think about culture and the world. My generation, it’s like this embarrassment of riches, all the stuff we have: Internet and organic markets and wine and cheese shops on every corner. We could be doing more, but having everything at our fingertips desensitizes us and we’re letting other people do our thinking for us. I want to wake people up from the midsummer night’s slumber situation.

So is this it for you, the writer/chef/TV host niche? Or do you think you’ll continue to reinvent yourself?

I was just emailing my parents to tell them that I found out today that my book hit the bestseller list. That’s very fulfilling — when I think of everything I went through and all the people that counted me out, it’s like Tupac “Picture Me Rollin’.” But I’m 33 years old, and I’m really excited. I’m teaching a winter class at my old college, making sweatsuits with my friend for fun. I’m interested in film, so maybe I’ll do some screenwriting. I remember how big it was for me to read coming-of-age stories when I was a kid so if I wasn’t a chef or writing or hosting Vice TV, I’d go teach high school. I have no idea. But either way, people are going to be surprised.

Who Is…Jacco Gardner

When asked about his hobbies outside of music, 24-year-old Jacco Gardner didn’t list a bunch of extracurricular activities — because really, he doesn’t have any. His full-time job for the past two years has been working on his album Cabinet of Curiosities. In his free time, he hangs out with his musician friends, goes to their concerts, and works on their albums. “It’s all about music all the time,” he said. And his dedication to his craft paid off with Cabinet: The album is filled with lush arrangements that jump out of the fantastical worlds of yesteryear— from the jaunty whimsy of Lewis Carroll to the Brian Wilson’s “Heroes and Villains” keyboards.

The result makes sense, given that Gardner has cited 1960s psych-pop studio geniuses like Wilson, Syd Barrett and Curt Boettcher as influences on his process. Gardner’s studio sanctuary is also his home; the Shadow Shoppe Studio in the town of Zwaag is nestled in a North Holland industrial area, surrounded by places where you can essentially buy entire rooms for your house — entire kitchens, bathrooms, whatever you need. Aside from the occasional friend stopping by, the studio is mainly just Gardner’s playground. “So I’m not sure when you would call it a studio or just the place where I live,” he says. “It’s actually illegal to live here, but I don’t care.”

In that illegal abode, he composed his debut, playing every instrument on the album except for the drums. “I had these songs in my head and worked them up with sample drums first, and then the parts that I thought up were too difficult for me to play on drums,” he said. “I really needed a good drummer for that.” eMusic’s Evan Minsker talked with Gardner via Skype while he was hanging out in his home/studio. One room over, his bandmates were audibly working to condense the album’s lead single “Clear the Air” into a one-minute rendition to play on Dutch national TV.

On being raised in a musical family:

My parents were not necessarily very musical, but I’m the youngest of four children, and my two brothers and one sister were all into music before I was. So it seemed logical that I should do it, too. I think my oldest brother wanted to learn an instrument and kind of pushed my parents to get him some lessons, and that worked out really nice. My parents were like, “Oh, we should do that for all the children.” Instead of teaching us sports or whatever, they were like, “Maybe music is the best thing.”

My sister actually studied music therapy and she teaches basic music school. One of my brothers does a lot with radio and the computer nerd side of music — like programming and making APIs and stuff with musical purposes. My oldest brother is actually an architect, so for him [music is] more of a hobby.

His history as a multi-instrumentalist:

When I was eight, when you had to choose an instrument [in school], I learned the recorder just to be able to play songs and learn sheet music. After that, I switched to clarinet for four years and I played in an orchestra for a while. Then I was done with that, because I had to play along with a CD or to sheet music and that wasn’t really my thing at all.

So I started singing in a band, and they needed a bass player, so I learned to play bass. And then I learned the guitar to be able to write songs better, because it’s pretty hard to do that on bass. And then they needed a keyboard player as well, and yeah. From there on, any instrument with keys or strings wasn’t too hard to learn.

On his studio:

I always had a home studio. The first time I started recording, I set up a computer and a mixer and a microphone, and that was the first time I had a miniature studio. I discovered the possibilities of recording. Then I went on to study composition and music production for four years, and then the studio grew bigger and bigger. I’m an instrument collector, as well, so after a while, it didn’t fit in my room anymore, so I really needed to make it a studio.

After I finished graduating, I moved into this office building that my parents already had. My dad likes to build things, and he actually got it as well for the children, so when they graduated, they had a space to start a company or anything. Nobody really used it, so I was like, “That’s perfect for using it as a studio.”

On his father, the innovator:

When people ask me what he does, it’s always very hard to say, because he does so many things. He’s the owner of a lot of companies. He’s like an inventor, but more in a conceptual way. He does inventions which he turns into companies. He’s really busy with the world and the energy problems and everything. He’s been at that for as long as I’ve known — for 20 years or something. Before people were talking about things like durable energy at all, he was into that. He started as an electrician, basically, but he sort of grew and got some more degrees. He’s always busy creating concepts and ideas for durable energy. Like an inventor, but more than that.

He’s very independent. When we wanted to study music, he wasn’t like, “Can you earn money with it?” He’s like, “If that’s your thing and that’s where your heart is, you should just do it and be really good at it.”

On his inspirations as a lyricist:

I do get inspired by lyrics that are very symbolic. Like Nick Drake lyrics, for example — he sings about very symbolic things, but they create an image which is very inspiring. It creates another world, but the essence of these images is much more realistic. I’m not sure where I got that from, but Nick Drake does that. I think Syd Barrett does that, as well.

On transferring his songs to a live setting:

I’m still working on that. It’s very difficult. The basics are easy — the drums, bass, guitar, get the right sounds, get the right harmonies. But it’s so much layering that has to be simplified. I have to get the right sounds, and I want to do it all [with live instruments] but that’s impossible, because I’m using too many different sounds, so I have to do it digitally. I don’t want to work with computers, but I have to. Things like that. It’s very difficult, but I think I’ll get there eventually.

Right now, I still prefer the studio. Performing live is new to me. I’m better at [the studio]. But making a moment [with the audience] is really special. I really want to keep doing that. I don’t want to be in the studio all the time.

The Botanist, IV: Mandragora

Like Xasthur and Leviathan, The Botanist is a one-man outfit that relies heavily on atmosphere, blast beats and demonic vocals. But that’s where the adherence to black metal formula ends: The Botanist combines multifaceted beats with distorted hammer dulcimers that imbue his music with harrowing, unearthly intensity and shatters all preconceptions in the process. His fourth album, IV Mandragora, is his heaviest and most musically developed. Where past releases tended toward the kitschy and clangy, IV Mandragora finds a way to make his dulcimer strings sound otherworldly. The vocals still resemble those of whiskey-drinking frog, the closest comparison being Inquisition’s Dagon, but the music is more fiercely metallic than ever. “To Amass an Army (Mandragora III)” is ominous and nightmarish, relying on layered minor-key passages and tumbling drums to express existential despair. “Mandrake Legion (Mandragora IV)” is faster and more surreal, overlapping repetitive chimes with battering double-bass beats.

The lyrics of the anonymous Botanist are even stranger than his music. IV Mandragora is a concept album about a scientist (the Botanist) who cultivates an army of mandrakes to wage war against mankind. Throughout, The Botanist seems several seeds short of a full garden: A textbook misanthrope, he dwells in his private sanctuary, The Verdant Realm, in the land of Veltheimia and talks to his plants about the day when greenery will again conquer the earth. In keeping with the dark green theme, five of the songs are named after actual flowers, giving The Botanist extra credibility for those who thrall to the work of Carl Linnaeus and Norman Borlaugh. For open-minded black metal fans, IV Mandragora isn’t just different, it’s just about essentially, expressing old themes in an entirely new way.

Interview: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

[To celebrate their 15th studio album Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. This is our exclusive interview with Nick Cave and Bad Seed Warren Ellis about their dazzling new album. The band also nominated Australian rock icon Ed Kuepper for an interview, and they share their favorite albums on eMusic — you can read those features here. — Ed.]

It has been five years since Nick Cave last corralled his ever-changing Bad Seeds line-up — which, by the by, is now approaching its 30th anniversary. In the interim, Cave has been far from idle: There has been a rip-roaring, blues-mangling second Grinderman album, a couple of movie soundtracks and even another novel, all not only proving his unflagging creative vigor, but also bolstering his standing as perhaps alt-rock’s ultimate icon.

So, the arrival of Push The Sky Away, the 15th Bad Seeds album, is a real event: Where next for this fearsomely stagnation-resistant musical auteur? The answer, in short, is deeper into the psycho-sexual imagination of 2008′s Dig Lazarus, Dig!!!, where an unforeseen, if ever volcanically smouldering calm now reigns. As with 1997′s The Boatman’s Call, it strips away the usual electrifying clamor which surrounds Cave’s baritone croon, leaving the listener to plunge deep into his lyrics of violence, sexual tension, redemption and songwriting itself.

Cave has jokingly noted that if this album is “the ghost-baby in the incubator, then Warren Ellis’s loops are its tiny, trembling heartbeat.” Ellis, who joined the band in ’95 as a violinist, has risen through the ranks to become Cave’s right-hand man, this time laying the sonic foundation-stone for many of the tracks with the bizarre self-concocted loops that click, crack and rattle away beneath the conventional instrumentation.

Talking to eMusic’s Andrew Perry about this dazzling new opus, Cave and Ellis reveal that its loose, spontaneous sound was the culmination of a long and arduous creative process. Yet, unlike so many ‘mature’ rockers, they ultimately let their instincts — however much honed by years of experience — run riot…

As ever, your songs on Push The Sky Away have a rollicking narrative dynamic to them. How do they start off down that road?

Nick Cave: The way I take in the world is by seeing it; that is very much evident in the songs that I write. I’m unable to really write the kind of song that doesn’t have a visual element, which most songs don’t. There’s that kind of song, “Whoah baby, I love you,” which doesn’t have a visual element, but a very strong emotional element, and these are the great songs to me — those ones that you put them on and they just make you feel great, or whatever.

One of my regrets, if I have any, is that I’ve never been able to write those sorts of songs. I have to be able to see the thing that’s going on that I’m writing about, or else it just doesn’t make any sense to me. So, unfortunately, I personally don’t like other people doing those kinds of songs. I don’t like those songs where you have to listen to a story to get into them. I don’t want to have to pay attention to music in that way, I just want it to hit me in the heart and do what music’s supposed to do.

So I’ve had to try and find a way over the years of writing narratively that doesn’t really require you to sit down and work out what the story’s about. You’re brought into a sort of sequence of images that have that emotional resonance, but it’s kind of irrelevant what the actual story is. It’s taken me maybe 13 albums or something to work that out.

Was there any apprehension about making the first Bad Seeds album in five years?

Warren Ellis: Not so much apprehension, but there was a certain excitement, because things have been in a state of flux, with Grinderman and various projects going on. And remarkably it has been five years since the last album, which I didn’t realize. And obviously with [long-serving Bad Seeds band leader] Mick Harvey leaving, there were a lot of different things going on.

But you don’t go into war thinking you’re going to get killed in the first hour. You have to kind of go in, chin up, back straight. You can’t go into it thinking it’s not gonna work. There’s always that sneaking suspicion that you don’t know if it will work or not, but you have to go in with a certain amount of blind confidence and uncertainty. It’s always that mix.

Primarily, obviously, the Bad Seeds exist to accompany Nick’s songs. How did you start it off this time, Nick?

Cave: The way I go about writing records is that I make a calendar date to start the new record, so I have nothing. I don’t have a bunch of notes that I bring into the office, I start with nothing at all. And I actually had a notebook that was made for me by a girl from Sydney: she’d made this kind of boutique notebook for me, because she’d heard me complaining about the fact that notebooks don’t open flat — I write in them, then try and play the lyrics on the piano, but they [claps his hands shut]. So she made, designed, a notebook that would open flat so that I could play the piano and sing from the notebook.

So that was this empty notebook that I took into the studio on that particular day and started writing the record. And as it turned out that notebook became kind of essential in the process of making the record and ended up documenting the writing of these songs in a very minute way.

I’ve always done a lot of research and stuff around the songs that I write so there are pages and pages of writing and you can kind of see these songs emerging. And when they got to a place that where I thought they were ready, I would type them out on my typewriter on the back sheets of old books — I tore out the back sheets — type them and then glue it into the book. So you had these kind of anatomies of songs in this book.

Two of the preceding three non-soundtrack records you’d made were Grinderman albums. Did you have to put your Bad Seeds head back on? Is that how it works?

Cave: Anything that I’m doing I’m writing specifically for a particular project. So I’m sitting down in the office and writing songs for the next Bad Seeds record. I’m not going “Oh, that’s a Grinderman one” and putting that aside for when we do Grinderman, I just don’t work in that way. I wasn’t trying to write anything remotely like Grinderman anyway, so if I started writing something that felt like a Grinderman song, I would dismiss it immediately.

Once the songs were written, the band withdrew to La Fabrique, a 19th-century mansion in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France, to record them. Why?

Ellis: We wanted to look elsewhere for the formation of the middle ground of the music, to look for another sound. We wanted to record it in a different way, and go and live in this studio for a couple of weeks, and see how that impacted on the recording process, and the evolution of the material. That was something we’d never done before, certainly not in my time in the band. To be in one place for that whole period of time — just ensconce ourselves somewhere, and eat, drink, and think the album. It had a real significant effect on the album, I think.

How did you get that one past your wives? Was it like going off to a holiday camp?

Ellis: No, man, it was boot camp! In the South of France, with lots of cigars. Obviously, the things you’ve done before inform where you don’t wanna go. As much as there had been this sudden urge for wanting to make albums like Grinderman, after a couple of years of that…[we wanted a change]. Also, there have been a couple of soundtracks that Nick and I have done in the meantime, which have been very different, and also impact on the way things go, or where you see you can take the musical journey.

The reduction in the quantity of sound you generated — you saw that coming?

Ellis: Well, yeah, things have been very full for a while. There was a real desire to pull it all back, and let the songs speak in a different way. It’s why you hopefully don’t make the same record twice. This record sounds like the Bad Seeds to me, but different again — almost a marriage between the atmospherics of Your Funeral…My Trial, but with the sparseness of The Boatman’s Call, but nothing like either of those, in terms of the content or emotional impact.

So you turn up at La Fabrique, Nick’s got his batch of songs, you set all the gear up — what happens next?

Cave: Some of these songs, people hadn’t even played them through when we recorded them. Like “Higgs Boson Blues,” I’d never sung the whole song through, right, because especially with something like “Higgs Boson Blues” — it’s a journey, that particular song. Lyrically it’s a journey, and musically it’s a journey as well, a slow-building thing. And that sense of not knowing where the song’s going makes it really interesting to listen to — and we would’ve lost that if we’d tried it two or three times once we’d worked it all out.

So The Bad Seeds are just following the singing, and I don’t even know what the singing is supposed to be doing anyway, I’ve just got a bunch of lyrics which I’m actually editing as I’m singing. So the whole thing is…there’s a sense of newness and adventure and spontaneity to the recordings.

Warren, you’re as close to Nick as anybody: do you ask him what his lyrics are about, so you can get the right mood?

Ellis: Not really, no. The occasional question might get asked, but it’s generally not really the time. You’re not in there to do an interview with the guy. Nick continues to be a writer who very much is concerned with what’s going on with him now. He’s not trying to write a song like he’s 20 anymore — never has, in fact. He’s always been writing about that particular point in time, and it’s a continued journey for him. The narrative is evolving, how he wants it to.

For a single, “We No Who U R” is very brooding and unsettling. What is it about?

Cave: I don’t really want to pin down what was going on when I wrote that song, but I knew what the little birds were, and I knew who the trees were and all the rest of it. But once the music got put to it, it opened up a lot and it became about a much wider, more interesting, ambiguous sort of thing. I know I’m not really telling you anything about it, but it’s not just, “Hey we know who you are and we’re going to come and get you.”

The editing of a song is largely what makes the song for me and I think that actually if I had started going like ‘I want you to burn’ [as he had in a discarded lyric] it would have pinned that song down to a particular thing and made that song a smaller idea than what it is. By leaving that off it’s much more open, broader.

Certain songs seem to be partly about the songwriting process itself. A couple of tracks after “Jubilee Street,” you get “Finishing Jubilee Street,” where “you” — the songwriter — finish that song, as per song title, then go to your bedroom for a lie down, and have a dream about your imaginary child bride. Did you relish the idea of messing with convention, taking the listener out of usual framework of “first this song, next another song”?

Cave: A lot of them were very much connected to being in my office in Brighton and writing. And for some of them, it was the summer so I was outside in my basement patio which is mentioned on occasions, writing the stuff out there as well. So ultimately the record is about a time and place but it’s also about the nature of songwriting as well, on some level. The songs are very often about the process of writing the song I’m singing, if you know what I mean.

There is a real Jubilee Street in Brighton. Was it the inspiration, or maybe the backdrop, for what unfolds in either song?

Cave: To be honest, I thought Jubilee Street was a different street! [laughs] I got it wrong. And then I found out that Jubilee Street was the street with Carluccio’s and the library, and it didn’t really match the street that I was trying to conjure up. So it’s a Jubilee Street of the imagination, shall we say, and obviously the street that this guy’s walking up, with this sorry whatever-she-is, working girl…All I can say is, don’t go down to that Jubilee Street to find any action like that, [laughs] you’re going to be very disappointed!

With that overlapping of songs, it really feels like there’s a narrative flow to the whole album, like everything is inter-connected. Was that the idea?

Cave: The sequencing came about a lot easier than on some of the other records. It had its natural flow that we sort of discovered when we were actually recording stuff, but the songs for sure do have a vague kind of abstracted narrative within the sequencing. So they’re kind of joining hands, and characters flip from one to the other.

Mostly because of the atmospheric consistency of the sound, it ended up very much like a record that you put on, and you enter, and you go through a sequence of songs and you go into a new world, a different world, and the final song kind of releases you from that world. It’s an old school record, in the sense that the songs bolster each other up and refer to each other, and on some level need to be listened to as a bunch of songs.

Ellis: Yeah, it’s like you’re on a journey with the writer. It feels quite surreal, at times. It’s sort of hovering around somewhere. I like that, that it’s open-ended and not very clear-cut, because it keeps you guessing. Hopefully it feels like you’re in the moment with the song, because the songs are real snapshots of that particular moment, when we’re making it. I think the sound of it has that, too. Nick Launay [producer] did a really mighty job with the sound of it, it’s very ‘present’. You feel like you’re sitting on the stool with Nick singing.

On the title track at the end, there’s the lyric, “Some people say it’s just rock ‘n’ roll but it gets you right down to your soul.” Did you intend that line to sum up the whole record?

Cave: There’s something really reductive about that line after this kind of — like, “Higgs Boson Blues,” and all of this journeying through time and place. It kind of telescopes down into something fundamental, and I was very, very pleased with that as a line, to be released from the record, even though it’s kind of throwaway, and not the sort of line I write, and not a visual line.

So, while picking up on some of the threads on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, your style of writing is still on the move — continuity within change?

Ellis: All creative people are like that, there are always themes that run through, like that’s your signpost that it’s them. That’s always the challenge — you want it to be different, but you don’t want it to be willfully different, so that it doesn’t feel sincere. You’re always looking for that feeling where you still feel like it’s being true to your voice, but it’s gone somewhere else.

Wonderful as Status Quo are, that’s the example of getting stuck in a rut — although they were quite exciting in their early days. But you wouldn’t want them to do a rap record — for a start, they wouldn’t be able to play the next Jubilee party for the Queen, would they?

Tour Diary: Lenny Kaye in Japan

[We've been lucky enough to have Lenny Kaye — longtime guitarist for Patti Smith and curator of the unbelievably influential Nuggets set — writing for us since 2006. Occasionally, his full-time job takes him to fascinating locales. We asked if he wouldn't mind keeping a record of his tour of Japan last month with Patti Smith. The results are, as we've come to expect from Lenny, engrossing and enlightening. — Ed.]

January 22, 2013: Sendai, Japan

I am sitting in Gas Panic, just off Shibuya Square in Tokyo, having an Asahi and toasting my return to Japan. The basement bar is loud with American hip-hop. I can feel the disorienting cross-cultural currents from the 14-hour plane journey, plus the time it takes to get from Nagoya Airport, and the five minutes walk from our nearby hotel. But here I be, at the beginning of a two-week Japanese tour for Patti Smith and Her Band, with a bonus beat of Seoul to cap our Asian adventure.

I was last here in 2009, when we journeyed to the summer festival that is Fujirock, and before that in 2003, when our band circuited the island. There were previous visits — a solo show in Tokyo in 1989 backed by guitarist Go Ohgami, whose album I produced in the mid ’80s; a record release by Feed, another Japanese band who availed themselves of my studio encouragement in 2001; our debut Patti tour in 1997; and more Fujirocking in 2001 and 2005 — but the fascination that this country holds for me is deep and abiding. My father worked for the Japanese megacorporation Mitsui in the 1960s, and early on I became intrigued by the artistic sensibility of this fascinating country, from the manga and anime that takes “cartoon” storytelling to new heights, to the ritualistic ceremonials of tea and sake, to the spirituality of Zen’s sense of oneness with the universe.

After a day of acclimatization, we take the train north to Sendai. In March of 2011, the epicenter of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful in Japanese seismographic history (9.0!), and the resulting tsunami devastated the eastern shoreline on an imaginable scale. A half hour’s drive from Sendai shows a bleak landscape devoid of, well, anything. This closest metropolis has had to show remarkable resiliency in the face of catastrophe. The disaster inspired our song “Fuji-San,” and by starting our tour here, not a usual stopover for visiting American musicians, we hope to pay tribute to the indomitable spirit of those faced with the task of rebuilding and commemorating. Yuki, the wife of our tour manager Andrew, sets up a booth to accept donations and raffle off a band drum-head, and we donate our show’s proceeds to benefit a local orphanage. A small gesture, perhaps, but one that encompasses the Japanese bow of respect and honor, as the rising sun begins a day anew.

January 23-24, 2013: Tokyo, Japan

Two nights, two shows, two very different venues. Though one doesn’t want to stretch an obvious touristic parallel, this is very much like the capital itself. Tokyo is a dizzying metropolis, pretty much newly constructed after the Earthquake of 1923 and the cataclysm that was the Second World War, brimming with population and chaotic motion and flashing signage and loudspeakers urging commerce; and yet, there is an underlying sense of tradition and calming order. No one jaywalks, patiently waiting until a light turns green even if no traffic is in sight, and ritual courtesies are adhered to with decorum and politeness.

So it is in our performance spaces. Shibuya Ax, on Tuesday, proffers a rowdy stand-up audience that crowd-surfs and jostles each other in time to the music; Wednesday’s Orchard Hall is seated, and though the attendees attentively stand in place through most of the show, there is little stage-rushing or mayhem. As a special bonus, as much for us as the crowd, we’re joined by Noguzo, a ceremonial taiko drummer, accentuating the sonic booms of “Fuji-San.” Afterward, our backstage is graced with Sheena and the Rokkets, one of the longest-lived bands in Japan. I must say Sheena and lead guitarist Makoto don’t look a day older than when they first appeared on the scene in 1978, full of a belief in rock ‘n’ roll’s transformative power. Seeing them reaffirms my own kneel at the shrine of feedback.

And then a day at liberty. I wonder where to start my roam, debating between the gizmo-tron and gadgetorium that is the “Electric City” of the Akihabara district; or Harajuku’s pop-culturati shopping labyrinths. I choose the latter, and soon find myself wandering the lanes of Takeshita Street, marveling at the many niches of fashion on display — here’s a punk store delivered whole from 1977, alongside a shop where Victorian meets Goth meets X-Rated fairy tale. On the four floors of Kiddyland, there are trinkets galore, amid displays devoted to favorite cartoon characters. Speaking of which, I note the disappearance of the Beatles-only emporium that was here the last time I visited, and its replacement by many devoted to K-pop and J-pop idol singers of the moment.

But that doesn’t mean music’s charm is entirely transitory, beholden to the short attention span of generational allegiance. That evening, I am graciously invited to visit the home of our promoter rep in Japan, Shinichi “Chris” Kurisawa. We had been talking about old ska records on the train, and now — a true connoisseur — he is ready to spin some of his rarities for our mutual delectation. He drops the needle on one of his two turntables, sends it through a vintage Ampex tube amplifier to a single mono 15″ speaker; and let the sound system begin. Our journey takes us through Jamaican masters like virtuoso guitarist Ernest Ranglin and the horned geniuses of Roland Alphonso and Don Drummond, moving us effortlessly into soul and blues (here comes Fenton Robinson!). Enhanced by copious cups of shochu, the potato-based distillation that seems to split the difference between sake and vodka, a good time is had by all.

January 26-27, 2013: Nagoya/Kanazawa, Japan

The bullet train takes us west from Tokyo. Out the window, Mt. Fuji gazes majestically upon us. There is progressively more snow on the ground. We are heading into Japan’s hinterlands. Nagoya is the fourth largest city here on the main island, home to one of the most impressive castles I’ve ever seen; and Kanazawa, on the west coast bordering the sea, has a similarly ancient feudal feel, though the main building has had to be painstakingly restored time and again following devastating fires in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But we don’t have much time on this trip to explore ancient Japan, since almost upon arrival in each town it’s showtime. The weekend means our concert starts early in the evening. We’re onstage by 6 p.m., off by 7:30, and at dinner in a nearby restaurant having chicken wings (Nagoya’s specialty) or slices of the freshest sashimi (Kanazawa) by 8. The early performance and the fact that Club Quattro in Nagoya is on the 8th floor of a department store only adds to our sense of dislocation. Not that the audience seems to mind. These are some of our most responsive crowds, only too willing to call-and-response the refrain of “Fuji-san” back at us as we scale that immortal mount in song.

January 28, 2013: Osaka, Japan

Entering the world of Japanese popular music is like opening the gateway to an alternative universe. I wander the overflowing aisles of Tower Records (still the major outlet here, with branches in many cities) and gaze at the myriad of singers, bands, idols and anti-idols. Every genre and moment in time seems to be represented. The sheer quantity and variety humbles not only my own inclination to figure out who’s who and where’s-the-hits, but makes me again rue the one-way street that is our cross-talk with other musical cultures. Everywhere I go in Japan, I hear English-speaking hits of many eras: I am listening to Fleetwood Mac in a sukiyaki restaurant at breakfast, shopping to disco familiars in a mall, or entering a collector’s store which specializes in American oldies (I find a copy of Jim Bakus’s “Delicious,” and because it’s one of my all-time favorite records I can’t resist buying it in such an exotic locale) knowing that except for the occasional “novelty,” none of the bands on display here could be touring America in the same manner that we are in Japan.

I don’t have to wonder, for instance, what Yeti vs. Cromagnon sounds like, since they resemble the Heartbreakers circa 1977 in their black leather jackets and guitarist’s yellow Les Paul Junior, just like the one Johnny Thunders played. Or the Neatbeats, who release vintage “mono” recordings that echo classic Brit Invasion groups.There’s lots of punk and home-grown reggae, and a ’90s revival underway with bands like Guitar Wolf, the Blue Hearts, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, Number Girl and Bloodthirsty Butchers the subject of catalog highlights. Two groups that pique my interest are Blankey Jet City, who broke up in 2000 only to recently reform; and the more mod-ish Bawdies, whose 2012 hit single “Rock Me Baby” about says it all in the Japanese resurrection of classic retro sound.

But even these traditional guitar-wielding bands pale in the overwhelming multitudinous that is J-pop, which presents a vast array of girl/boy groups that dance, sing and partake of the latest fashion and digital technology to create hits that are viral, colorful and transitory in the most ingratiating way. The textures are futuristic, the production techniques state-of-the-art (the sound is future-now), and despite the lack of deeper meanings, they present a riot of motion and beguiling come-hither.

Of the girl groups, AKB48 is the largest, both in size (there are 48 members on stage, and another 39 “trainees”) and popularity. Conceived in the Akihabara electronics district of Tokyo, as much cheerleading squad as dance troupe, their intricate choreography and chant-along singles have spawned many sound-alikes in other cities: there are similar assemblages in Nagoya (SKE48), Osaka (NMB48), Fukuoka (HKT48), and even outside Japan, in Jakarta (JKT48), Taipei (TPE48), Shanghai (SNH48). One has to love pop’s ability to procreate. There is heated discussion in the newspapers about whether the chastity clause in the girl’s contracts that prohibits them from dating is legal, but this is hardly scandalous or even revolutionary in the world of manufactured teen appeal.

In the midst of all this, I find my own mash-up of idolatry. BABYMETAL are three ‘tween girls who perform in front of a skeleton-costumed band, doling out slabs of metallic genre signifiers: slashing guitars and crunching riffs and rat-a-tat bass drumming, skull-crushing readymades lightened by bridges that sing-song and dance routines that spin at a dizzying pace. Yeah, I know: I’m being manipulated by someone’s idea of savvy marketing. But hey, isn’t that the point?

January 30, 2013: Hiroshima, Japan

How can you imagine? And then you’re here.

There is the river, one of six that course through this city. As we walk solemnly over its bridge toward the Peace Museum, staring at the skeletal remains of what is now called the Atomic Dome in the distance, a sense of déjà vu permeates the air. The horrific scenes and their shock waves have been seared into collective memory. To know that this city was the first to witness warfare at its most destructive, to think of the poor souls caught in the inferno and ash, jumping into this river that flows so gently now, to understand that this entire vista was once reduced to rubble and ruin, is to once again shudder at mankind’s penchant for annihilation. In war, there is no moral absolution. No matter the cause, it is the innocents who suffer.

There in the museum are the scorched remains of a schoolgirl’s uniform. A watch stopped at 8:15 a.m. on an August morning. A little boy’s transit card, scorched and torn. The happenstance of weather, knowing that had there been cloud cover over Hiroshima on that sixth day of the eighth month in 1945, the target might have been nearby Kokura. Not that it matters. The Earth was about to enter the Atomic Age, wherever the chosen spot.

That night, as we play, the ghosts are dancing.

I wake early the next morning. Looking out my hotel window, off to the left, I can see where Ground Zero — directly over Shima Hospital, now rebuilt — was and ever will be. But if I look to my right, there is the soccer field of Fukuromachi Elementary School, where children are kicking a ball, surrounded by a city that has been grown from scratch over the ruins, an archeological layer of generational rebirth and remembrance.

January 31-February 2, 2013: Fukuoka, Japan/Seoul, Korea

The body of water that takes us from one country to another is called the Sea of Japan on one side, and the East Sea on the other. Crossing it changes the channel of pop from J to K, and these days that does imply a difference. Has the balance of power in hit-making shifted?With the success of PSY’s “Gangnam Style” has come an interest in all things Korean, and I’m about to see its neighborhood up close — or, as close as you can over a visit that lasts less than 48 hours.

The last show in Japan is in Fukuoka, on the shore of Kyushu, the most southerly of Japan’s islands. We’ve been here before, and perhaps will again, with a sold-out crowd at Drum Logos, and a final toast to our Japanese promoters.

The flight to Seoul takes about an hour and a half, the same time it takes to drive from the airport to our hotel on the outskirts of Gangnam. The neighborhood, once you get off the large eight-lane avenues replete with all your well-known western chains, contains a plethora of restaurants and bars on its back streets. Since it’s pouring rain on arrival, I take refuge in a nearby mall, which could be a shopping plaza anywhere in the world. Fleeing in haste, I find the small barbeque restaurant on a side street in the shadow of the massive Seven Luck casino that initiated me into the local grilling customs the last time we visited.

I get my indoctrination into K-Pop much as the rest of Korea’s inhabitants, through glittery television shows which feature the acts cavorting in rapid succession. On this night, Music Bank provides a confectioner’s dreamworld, beginning with the current number one chart song, “Shower of Tears,” performed by Bae Chi Gi featuring Ailee. From its guitar introduction, which paraphrases “St. James Infirmary,” Bae Chi Gi’s rapping (“I should have known in the end that your selfish heart wanted a different fluttering”) and Ailee’s plaintive vocal chorus, I am intrigued by the mélange of influence and its easy translation to my own western ears. In fact, discerning any hints of traditional Korean modes and scales is impossible. Welcome to the world.

Crayon Pop sing-songs “Bing Bing,” 2Yoon hoe-downs with “24-7,” the Dolls (not the New York) count their “9 Muses,” and Sistar 19 channel their inner J-Lo with “Gone Not Around Any Longer.”These are girl groups; the boy groups are similarly coiffed and bust-a-move energetic, rotating singers and personas: Boyfriend’s “I Yah,” Infinite H’s “Special Girl,” while Jeong Hyung Don’s “GangBuk Dandy” bears some passing resemblance in vocal register and approach to PSY.

It’s hard to say how K-Pop will play outside of the Asian market. In some ways, its lightweight gossamer (there are no references to hard clubbing or coital hi-jinx) and language barrier will mean it will have to adapt, and perhaps change its very nature, to succeed. PSY himself might be another here-today, gone-the-way-of-the-Pony tomorrow (there are similarities in the dance step). That said, these songs are appealing. Fighting it out for the top spot on Music Bank is Girls’ Generation, with the theatrical “Paparazzi,” whose video references “Singing In The Rain,” of all things; they hold the current number two song in Korea, the addictive “I Got A Boy.”They have signed a U.S. deal with Interscope, and if the Pussycat Dolls can have a chart hit, why not this KoreAmerican dance squad?

But for my musical mojo, the triumph of CN Blue, a four-piece guitar band that — shock horror! — is playing their instruments and singing live on this television countdown, and whose “I’m Sorry” wins the night’s competition hands-down. It’s perhaps a pointer that the K-Pop phenomenon won’t be as cookie-cutter as might be intimated. And when Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine come visit backstage at our show, themselves beginning a far-east tour and celebrating the release of their much-anticipated new album, I begin to fantasize what this sort of cross-pollination might do for Korea’s embrace and assimilation of UnPop.

On the way home, I have my own cultural potpourri courtesy of inflight entertainment. I watch a Chinese language detective film called The Bullet Vanishes set in the 1920s; a black-and-white documentary of Arthur Rubinstein playing a concert in Moscow in 1964 that leans heavily on Chopin; and The Master.

So many forms of human expression; so little time.

Mazes, Ores & Minerals

They might be steeped in admiration for Pavement, Sebadoh and Guided By Voices, but Manchester’s Mazes take their cues from ’90s lo-fi’s murky sense of fun rather than its slacker angst. Swerving past the sadness of Lou Barlow and compadres, the trio head instead for its gleeful sense of experimentation, a willingness to gobble up ideas like a packet of Skittles. With the follow-up to 2011′s A Thousand Heys, Mazes treat their music like a toybox rather than a workstation, picking up brightly colored noises and chunky plastic melodies to chew and rattle until they hit the right combination. Sometimes, this results in fingerpaint smudges of sound, like the charming clockwork instrumental “Significant Bullet” or the silver-nitrate piano of “Leominster”; other times, they take the thread of a pop song and let it wind itself up into a strung-out guitar exploration. The title track, with its literate lyrics and laconic attitude, tips a hat to the elegance of Malkmus before spiraling into a disheveled Soft Boys panic attack, while the rustling prog drums of “Sucker Punched” and the pressing groove of “Skulking” provide enough rough surfaces to snag attention. Not afraid to wander or wonder, Mazes make sure there’s intrigue around every corner.

Comanechi, You Owe Me Nothing But Love

Most of the male/female guitar ‘n’ drums duos that have emerged in the past decade take their inspiration either from the blues or scatty lo-fi. But London duo Comanechi are made of harder stuff. Guitarist Simon Petrovitch unleashes fearsome, boulder-sized riffs that are a distillation of lunatic metal troupe Electric Wizard, while drumming singer Akiko Matsuura summons up fiendish shrieks. Partly thanks to Akiko’s extra-curricular work in groups like The Big Pink and Pre, this second album has been a long time coming, but it’s worth the wait. A new drummer, Charlie Heaton, has liberated Akiko to ramp up Comanechi’s pop pugilism, and as the artwork suggests, this is a saucy listen. “24 hr Boyfriend” is about Akiko’s knack of making mincemeat of would-be suitors, while album centrepiece “Patsy” is a brilliant eight-minute onslaught of riffs under intensely naughty double-entendres. You Owe Me Nothing But Love is a gloriously rude listen; we suggest giving Comanechi what they ask for.