Simian Mobile Disco, Unpatterns

Arriving at the tail end of the ’90s British dance boom, Simian Mobile Disco could have easily faded into obscurity along with many of their contemporaries. Over a pair of albums and a string of remixes, however, the duo have deftly paired brightly rendered big room beats with quirkier alternative flourishes, distilling  club music’s myriad trends into more broadly accessible forms in the process. While their last long player, Temporary Pleasure, witnessed a host of collaborations and a move towards electronic pop territory, Unpatterns is much more of  a straight ahead techno-house groove, delivered in assured and un-showy fashion.

In line with current trends in underground dance music, tracks like “Seraphim” and “I Waited for You” make clear their debt to classic house motifs, layering old school vocal samples amid fizzing contemporary production. Elsewhere, the focus is less retro, with the elegant synth arcs of “Cerulean” and the sinister alien funk of “A Species Out of Control” fizzing off into the future. Either way, Unpatterns is wholeheartedly a dancefloor album, seemingly purpose built for dark rooms, big lasers, and the pleasures of an endless four-four kick drum. It’s a laudable aim, and one they’ve resoundingly achieved.

Jukebox Jury: John Lydon

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in twenty years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check back daily for his hand-selected Reviews of the Day; check out his candid interview; and follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites below. -Ed]

In 1977, at the height of the Sex Pistols’ infamy, John Lydon hosted a legendary radio show on London’s Capital Radio, in which he baffled punks with the unforeseen diversity of the music he aired. As well as a liberal sprinkling of reggae and proto-punk, there were long-haired eccentrics like Captain Beefheart, Can, Hawkwind, Peter Hamill and Neil Young. “Hang on,” cried the confused punkers, “Weren’t old hippies like them meant to be the enemy?” “No,” retorted Mr. Rotten, “they were free spirits, who made up their own rules as they went along — they were punk before punk had even been invented.” Exclusively for eMusic, Lydon here reprises that historic show, piecing together another incredible playlist of songs and albums from our database, which only further underlines the breadth of his tastes, and which is full of “Huh? Did I read this correctly?” moments. Punk purists, take cover…

Interview: John Lydon

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in twenty years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check back daily for his hand-selected Reviews of the Day; follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites here; and check out his candid interview below. -Ed]

There are few icons in rock history who’ve been as systematically misunderstood as John Lydon. Ever since his blood-curdling cry of “Des-trooooy!” at the climax of “Anarchy In The UK” by The Sex Pistols, he has been pigeonholed as the orange-haired lunatic who arrived to terminate rock ‘n’ roll, the man once known as Rotten whose musical energy is emphatically negative.

Really, not so. Few realize that he’s actually one of rock’s great enthusiasts, both a listener of staggeringly diverse knowledge and tastes, and a music-maker of fierce creativity and commitment. Indeed, after the Pistols’ first, explosive, game-changing tenure in 1976-78, Lydon reinvented himself in Public Image Ltd., which initially went to a different extreme, of macabre bass-booming improvisation, incorporating reggae, disco and Krautrock.

After 1979′s monolithic Metal Box album, PiL shifted through umpteen incarnations, each different in mood and influence from the last, reflecting not only Lydon’s restlessness as an artist, but also his love of a variety of genres and styles. Some were outraged when 1986′s Album offered up his own twist on FM-rock — was this befitting of punk’s prime mover? His answer, essentially, was: Yes, the whole point of punk was to make up your own rules, and anyway, who wants to make the same record twice?

Over the years, he would also forge one of electro’s formative classics alongside Afrika Bambaataa, and turn his hand to techno/house with Leftfield, but, after ending up in a legal stalemate with his U.K. and U.S. major labels, he drifted away from recording, in favor of step-parenting and a controversial TV career. He remained a peerlessly magnetic live performer, though, both with the Pistols and a new line-up of PiL, convened in 2009.

With the latter, he has finally concocted his first new album in 15 years. Called simply This Is PiL, it’s another departure, spurning the hi-tech sound of late-’80s PiL for a more organic, intuitive and, again, diverse sound. Already it’s being hailed as Lydon’s latest masterpiece. He’s in extra-positive (if ever potentially caustic) mood, as he gives the lowdown on post-millennial PiL, then hand-picks some of his favorite tunes from theeMusic catalog.

Is it good to be back?

Yeah! It’s been a few years there, and people have been assuming that my voice is this, that or the other, but I think I’m multi-textural, multi-purposeful, and I could shape-shift the vocal into anything I wanted to now, without much of an effort — and with no vocal training! Because I’m being really seriously truthful to myself, those are the tones and sounds and attitudes that lend exactly to the emotion I’m trying to express. There’s no pop-star in it. It’s something far better. But [sniggering] I’m still expecting young girls in the front row.

Explain your selection process for this incarnation of PiL…

I’d known Bruce [Smith, drums] from the Pop Group, and Lu [Edmonds, guitar] from the Damned, but that isn’t how we got together. We’ve sat down and tried to remember it all, but it’s impossible — there’s so many juxtapositions of events from back in those days (i.e. post-punk), that we almost accidentally fell into each other’s company. But I’m very loyal to them, and them to me. We’re proper with each other.

They’re two enormously diverse characters, and then you add Scotty [bassist Scott Firth] — he fit into this band from day one, right from his picture on the internet with a terrible hooligan skinhead haircut! Hahaha, it just made me laugh. His resumé was really extensive, and it showed a great sense of fun, that he could go from Stevie Winwood to the Spice Girls’ touring band in a heartbeat. That’s exactly the kind of open mind that we can work with. You’re not bringing judgmental musical snobbery to the table. Because a snob would have a hard time in PiL, they wouldn’t be understanding us at all.

So this is the happiest I’ve ever been, in the alleged career of music. I don’t want to stop this. It’s clearly set on a good foundation — a really honest one, and a very open one — very deep friendships. And it’s going really good places.”

This Is PiL is 64 minutes long, and has a real sense of journey about it, with lots of twists and turns and mood swings. How did you write it all?

PiL now seems to be a live-orientated band, and we all feel that that’s the best way. A lot of these songs were what you would call improvised, spontaneous. I mean, they’re thought about, but we never actually sat down with acoustic guitars and figured any of it out. Obviously, I’m loaded with thoughts running through my head, I never stop writing, but a load of stuff I’d had stockpiled for this got torched in a kitchen fire at my flat inLondon.

So, there we were in the middle of a tour, and we plonked ourselves straight into a barn in the Cotswolds [idyllic rural area in Southwest England] for recording, with nothing prepared — I mean, doomed to go wrong! And then we invited all manner of press down, not knowing if we were gonna get two bangs, a bash and a screech together. It’s kind of frightening to put yourself into that environment, but it just seemed to help, it became almost like a live gig. If any of this was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

What did you end up writing about? There seem to be a lot of thoughts about Britain, which obviously isn’t your main home anymore [Ed. Note: John mostly lives in Los Angeles], but it is where you recorded…

They’ve always been in there. Home is where the heart is. Wherever I am geographically, this is always gonna be the way. But yes, it is aboutBritain, it’s about my life, my childhood here, it’s about our lives — a good look back to the past, to realize where we are at the present, and that will set us up nicely with the future.

I’m still standing up for this place. Maybe that’s what Britain needs to do about itself — do what I’ve done — just go away for a long holiday and come back and look at itself properly. And realize that the fine art of moaning without a constructive conclusion is a rather pointless exercise, as propagated by the Tory government.

Some songs seem very urban, with a world-y, multicultural feel, others are more based in the natural world, with a fluid, ethereal vibe. Most obviously, “Deeper Water” is about seascaping, right?

That’s something I like doing. Me and [my wife] Nora go out to sea in our boat when I really can’t bear the pressures of situations around me. It totally clears my mind. You have to step back or away or aside every now and then. Then the picture becomes much more clear, and you can describe it more accurately. You can get lost in the confusion of it all, and you begin to accept the nonsense that’s being force-fed to you on a daily basis. I’m not very good at accepting.

That song was one-take. It started out as something totally different. I thought, “I’m not very happy with that,” then we went back in and rewrote it on the spot, and what landed on the tape stayed on the tape — there was no need to fiddle with it at all. You don’t want to start trying to contain nature! Nature, being what it is, is always trying to escape from you.

“Lollipop Opera,” on the other hand, sounds much more town-y…

To me, that’s the soundtrack to my youth, the sound of Finsbury Park. It’s that juxtaposition of noise from my part of London, which I think accurately portrays the way I grew up — all those influences, the sounds, the chaos of it all, yet the fun in it. It was multicultural and ultimately good-natured. We don’t always have to be angry. When the powers-that-be leave us alone, and up to our own devices, we have a very peaceful existence amongst each other. I think it’s rules and regulations that destroy all that.

In “Human,” you say, “I think England’s died.” How exactly do you mean?

It’s generally the social aspect. They’ve turned all the pubs into swine bars. Swine bars can be quite nice too, but there’s too much of it, and it’s all so cold and indifferent, and the modern architecture — they’re de-structuring buildings with all that tubing and glass. It’s really ugly to me. I don’t feel that that’s offering me any spirit of generosity. I think it’s been put up in such a cold, indifferent fuck-you way, it makes people feel they’re not part of something in this country any longer. All I’m getting is a reflection of myself in a front door that won’t open for me. You’re looking in mirrored glass, and there you are, out on the street, and that’s where you’re gonna stay. Well, no, no, no, let me in!

In “One Drop,” you sing, “We come from chaos, you cannot change us” — a clear nod to your punk beginnings. But does it get frustrating being judged forever on the basis of The Sex Pistols, which, reunions aside, only lasted for a couple of years when you were barely out of your teens? What do you feel about that band now?

It got me everything. It got me out of the doldrums of self-pity, of growing up working-class and poor. It set me up beautifully to be an independent thinker, and to think outside of the box, as indeed I probably always did. I’m justified for the way I think, and I don’t think badly or wrongly or stupidly — these are not glib throwaway lines I put out there, there’s a lot of thought that goes into it. I want to get it right in life, I want to be accurate about it, and I want life to improve, not only for myself, but for everyone.

That’s what those Pistols songs were about, whatever people may think. They were from the point of view of the disenfranchised. No matter what benefits I’ve collected along the way, it doesn’t alter the perspective — you don’t forget what went wrong in your childhood. You don’t forget the rules and regulations that wrote you off as a misfit, or erroneously judged you.

The aftermath of the Pistols was pretty grim, with heroin overdoses, court cases and much animosity. Do you manage to think about it these days for the great stuff that came out of it?

Well, it obviously did because I’m here. So it hasn’t been negative in any way at all. The fact is, I’m alive. Thank you, world! I’ve got through so far, and I’m planning on a happy 50 from here on in again. Life is worth living.

Jukebox Jury: John Lydon

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in thirty years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check back daily for his hand-selected Reviews of the Day; check out his candid interview; and follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites below. -Ed]

In 1977, at the height of the Sex Pistols’ infamy, John Lydon hosted a legendary radio show on London’s Capital Radio, in which he baffled punks with the unforeseen diversity of the music he aired. As well as a liberal sprinkling of reggae and proto-punk, there were long-haired eccentrics like Captain Beefheart, Can, Hawkwind, Peter Hamill and Neil Young. “Hang on,” cried the confused punkers, “Weren’t old hippies like them meant to be the enemy?” “No,” retorted Mr. Rotten, “they were free spirits, who made up their own rules as they went along — they were punk before punk had even been invented.” Exclusively for eMusic, Lydon here reprises that historic show, piecing together another incredible playlist of songs and albums from our database, which only further underlines the breadth of his tastes, and which is full of “Huh? Did I read this correctly?” moments. Punk purists, take cover…

Interview: John Lydon

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in thirty years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check back daily for his hand-selected Reviews of the Day; follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites here; and check out his candid interview below. -Ed]

There are few icons in rock history who’ve been as systematically misunderstood as John Lydon. Ever since his blood-curdling cry of “Des-trooooy!” at the climax of “Anarchy In The UK” by The Sex Pistols, he has been pigeonholed as the orange-haired lunatic who arrived to terminate rock ‘n’ roll, the man once known as Rotten whose musical energy is emphatically negative.

Really, not so. Few realize that he’s actually one of rock’s great enthusiasts, both a listener of staggeringly diverse knowledge and tastes, and a music-maker of fierce creativity and commitment. Indeed, after the Pistols’ first, explosive, game-changing tenure in 1976-78, Lydon reinvented himself in Public Image Ltd., which initially went to a different extreme, of macabre bass-booming improvisation, incorporating reggae, disco and Krautrock.

After 1979′s monolithic Metal Box album, PiL shifted through umpteen incarnations, each different in mood and influence from the last, reflecting not only Lydon’s restlessness as an artist, but also his love of a variety of genres and styles. Some were outraged when 1986′s Album offered up his own twist on FM-rock — was this befitting of punk’s prime mover? His answer, essentially, was: Yes, the whole point of punk was to make up your own rules, and anyway, who wants to make the same record twice?

Over the years, he would also forge one of electro’s formative classics alongside Afrika Bambaataa, and turn his hand to techno/house with Leftfield, but, after ending up in a legal stalemate with his U.K. and U.S. major labels, he drifted away from recording, in favor of step-parenting and a controversial TV career. He remained a peerlessly magnetic live performer, though, both with the Pistols and a new line-up of PiL, convened in 2009.

With the latter, he has finally concocted his first new album in 15 years. Called simply This Is PiL, it’s another departure, spurning the hi-tech sound of late-’80s PiL for a more organic, intuitive and, again, diverse sound. Already it’s being hailed as Lydon’s latest masterpiece. He’s in extra-positive (if ever potentially caustic) mood, as he gives the lowdown on post-millennial PiL, then hand-picks some of his favorite tunes from theeMusic catalog.

Is it good to be back?

Yeah! It’s been a few years there, and people have been assuming that my voice is this, that or the other, but I think I’m multi-textural, multi-purposeful, and I could shape-shift the vocal into anything I wanted to now, without much of an effort — and with no vocal training! Because I’m being really seriously truthful to myself, those are the tones and sounds and attitudes that lend exactly to the emotion I’m trying to express. There’s no pop-star in it. It’s something far better. But [sniggering] I’m still expecting young girls in the front row.

Explain your selection process for this incarnation of PiL…

I’d known Bruce [Smith, drums] from the Pop Group, and Lu [Edmonds, guitar] from the Damned, but that isn’t how we got together. We’ve sat down and tried to remember it all, but it’s impossible — there’s so many juxtapositions of events from back in those days (i.e. post-punk), that we almost accidentally fell into each other’s company. But I’m very loyal to them, and them to me. We’re proper with each other.

They’re two enormously diverse characters, and then you add Scotty [bassist Scott Firth] — he fit into this band from day one, right from his picture on the internet with a terrible hooligan skinhead haircut! Hahaha, it just made me laugh. His resumé was really extensive, and it showed a great sense of fun, that he could go from Stevie Winwood to the Spice Girls’ touring band in a heartbeat. That’s exactly the kind of open mind that we can work with. You’re not bringing judgmental musical snobbery to the table. Because a snob would have a hard time in PiL, they wouldn’t be understanding us at all.

So this is the happiest I’ve ever been, in the alleged career of music. I don’t want to stop this. It’s clearly set on a good foundation — a really honest one, and a very open one — very deep friendships. And it’s going really good places.”

This Is PiL is 64 minutes long, and has a real sense of journey about it, with lots of twists and turns and mood swings. How did you write it all?

PiL now seems to be a live-orientated band, and we all feel that that’s the best way. A lot of these songs were what you would call improvised, spontaneous. I mean, they’re thought about, but we never actually sat down with acoustic guitars and figured any of it out. Obviously, I’m loaded with thoughts running through my head, I never stop writing, but a load of stuff I’d had stockpiled for this got torched in a kitchen fire at my flat inLondon.

So, there we were in the middle of a tour, and we plonked ourselves straight into a barn in the Cotswolds [idyllic rural area in Southwest England] for recording, with nothing prepared — I mean, doomed to go wrong! And then we invited all manner of press down, not knowing if we were gonna get two bangs, a bash and a screech together. It’s kind of frightening to put yourself into that environment, but it just seemed to help, it became almost like a live gig. If any of this was easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

What did you end up writing about? There seem to be a lot of thoughts about Britain, which obviously isn’t your main home anymore [Ed. Note: John mostly lives in Los Angeles], but it is where you recorded…

They’ve always been in there. Home is where the heart is. Wherever I am geographically, this is always gonna be the way. But yes, it is aboutBritain, it’s about my life, my childhood here, it’s about our lives — a good look back to the past, to realize where we are at the present, and that will set us up nicely with the future.

I’m still standing up for this place. Maybe that’s what Britain needs to do about itself — do what I’ve done — just go away for a long holiday and come back and look at itself properly. And realize that the fine art of moaning without a constructive conclusion is a rather pointless exercise, as propagated by the Tory government.

Some songs seem very urban, with a world-y, multicultural feel, others are more based in the natural world, with a fluid, ethereal vibe. Most obviously, “Deeper Water” is about seascaping, right?

That’s something I like doing. Me and [my wife] Nora go out to sea in our boat when I really can’t bear the pressures of situations around me. It totally clears my mind. You have to step back or away or aside every now and then. Then the picture becomes much more clear, and you can describe it more accurately. You can get lost in the confusion of it all, and you begin to accept the nonsense that’s being force-fed to you on a daily basis. I’m not very good at accepting.

That song was one-take. It started out as something totally different. I thought, “I’m not very happy with that,” then we went back in and rewrote it on the spot, and what landed on the tape stayed on the tape — there was no need to fiddle with it at all. You don’t want to start trying to contain nature! Nature, being what it is, is always trying to escape from you.

“Lollipop Opera,” on the other hand, sounds much more town-y…

To me, that’s the soundtrack to my youth, the sound of Finsbury Park. It’s that juxtaposition of noise from my part of London, which I think accurately portrays the way I grew up — all those influences, the sounds, the chaos of it all, yet the fun in it. It was multicultural and ultimately good-natured. We don’t always have to be angry. When the powers-that-be leave us alone, and up to our own devices, we have a very peaceful existence amongst each other. I think it’s rules and regulations that destroy all that.

In “Human,” you say, “I think England’s died.” How exactly do you mean?

It’s generally the social aspect. They’ve turned all the pubs into swine bars. Swine bars can be quite nice too, but there’s too much of it, and it’s all so cold and indifferent, and the modern architecture — they’re de-structuring buildings with all that tubing and glass. It’s really ugly to me. I don’t feel that that’s offering me any spirit of generosity. I think it’s been put up in such a cold, indifferent fuck-you way, it makes people feel they’re not part of something in this country any longer. All I’m getting is a reflection of myself in a front door that won’t open for me. You’re looking in mirrored glass, and there you are, out on the street, and that’s where you’re gonna stay. Well, no, no, no, let me in!

In “One Drop,” you sing, “We come from chaos, you cannot change us” — a clear nod to your punk beginnings. But does it get frustrating being judged forever on the basis of The Sex Pistols, which, reunions aside, only lasted for a couple of years when you were barely out of your teens? What do you feel about that band now?

It got me everything. It got me out of the doldrums of self-pity, of growing up working-class and poor. It set me up beautifully to be an independent thinker, and to think outside of the box, as indeed I probably always did. I’m justified for the way I think, and I don’t think badly or wrongly or stupidly — these are not glib throwaway lines I put out there, there’s a lot of thought that goes into it. I want to get it right in life, I want to be accurate about it, and I want life to improve, not only for myself, but for everyone.

That’s what those Pistols songs were about, whatever people may think. They were from the point of view of the disenfranchised. No matter what benefits I’ve collected along the way, it doesn’t alter the perspective — you don’t forget what went wrong in your childhood. You don’t forget the rules and regulations that wrote you off as a misfit, or erroneously judged you.

The aftermath of the Pistols was pretty grim, with heroin overdoses, court cases and much animosity. Do you manage to think about it these days for the great stuff that came out of it?

Well, it obviously did because I’m here. So it hasn’t been negative in any way at all. The fact is, I’m alive. Thank you, world! I’ve got through so far, and I’m planning on a happy 50 from here on in again. Life is worth living.

Public Image Ltd., This is PiL

“You are now entering a PiL zone!” John Lydon bellows at the top of the first Public Image Ltd album in 20 years, and indeed you’ll recognize the place straightaway: Backed by the same guys he recruited for PiL’s 2009-’10 reunion tour (including Happy? alums Lu Edmonds and Bruce Smith), Lydon rants and chants in his long-established fashion over swirling, dub-steeped soundscapes that once in a while gather into actual songs. “One Drop” is an early highlight, with the frontman unloading some very Lydon-esque observations on English culture (“We come from chaos / We cannot change us”); later, in “Deeper Water,” Edmonds unleashes the kind of spooky-romantic guitar riff that made PiL heroes to a generation of post-post-punks. Things get a little boggy in the wacky-voices menagerie “Lollipop Opera” and the misleadingly titled “Out of the Woods,” which stretches its middling death-disco groove well beyond the nine-minute mark. But what’s a Lydon album without a bit of bollocks?

Jukebox Jury: John Lydon

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in thirty years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check back daily for his hand-selected Reviews of the Day; check out his candid interview; and follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favoritesbelow. -Ed]

In 1977, at the height of the Sex Pistols’ infamy, John Lydon hosted a legendary radio show on London’s Capital Radio, in which he baffled punks with the unforeseen diversity of the music he aired. As well as a liberal sprinkling of reggae and proto-punk, there were long-haired eccentrics like Captain Beefheart, Can, Hawkwind, Peter Hamill and Neil Young. “Hang on,” cried the confused punkers, “Weren’t old hippies like them meant to be the enemy?” “No,” retorted Mr. Rotten, “they were free spirits, who made up their own rules as they went along — they were punk before punk had even been invented.” Exclusively for eMusic, Lydon here reprises that historic show, piecing together another incredible playlist of songs and albums from our database, which only further underlines the breadth of his tastes, and which is full of “Huh? Did I read this correctly?” moments. Punk purists, take cover…

Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

A side-splittingly funny debut

Listening to Jenny Lawson — often better known by her nom de web The Bloggess  — read her side-splittingly funny formal debut Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, is to be put in grave danger. Whatever muscles that exist in the gut will be pulled like taffy. Listening while operating a moving vehicle may result in bodily harm. This “mostly true memoir” will make endorphins shoot through the brain as though driven by some fantastic opioid derivative.
Unless, perhaps, you’re Jenny Lawson. Then maybe passages about being raised by an amateur taxidermy enthusiast who creates a squirrel sock puppet (made, alas, of more squirrel than sock) will end up less like a fever dream and more like a Vietnam flashback. The saintly husbands of ladybloggers may already be one of the internet’s most well-worn tropes, but Lawson’s is more a partner-in-crime (which, if accidentally macing one’s dinner guests counts as assault, may be a more literal phrase than intended) than silent sufferer.
In certain moments, Lawson comes across as a girlier, less technophobic David Sedaris, describing with irony-laced honesty her struggles with anxiety, arthritis and miscarriage. Life lessons are learned, though almost never without some kind of very public embarrassment. You may find yourself tearing up even before hitting her gothic teen years (“high school is life’s way of giving you a record low to judge the rest of your life by”), but unless you’re one of Lawson’s unfortunate dinner guests, you’ll only be crying for the best of reasons.

Rachel Dratch, Girl Walks into a Bar

Laugh-out-loud wit and plenty of self-deprecation
“Where have you been?” is the question former Saturday Night Live funnywoman Rachel Dratch is most frequently asked, and with her humorous memoir Girl Walks into a Bar, now we know. With stories of her struggle to find an identity at Dartmouth, a “that’s show biz” dismissal from 30 Rock, the insulting roles offered to her (obese ugly old lesbians) and misadventures in romance along the way, Dratch’s tale occasionally threatens to lurch into the territory of the actress’ famous SNL character Debbie Downer. But Dratch always rescues these tales from a “woe is me” vibe with laugh-out-loud wit and self-deprecation. Dratch’s love of comedy, from her funny family to her days playing with her friends atChicago’sSecondCity, trumps every anecdote. Dratch’s story is left open-ended, as a surprise pregnancy (the actress originally mistook the symptoms of pregnancy for early-onset menopause) shook up her life and threw a burgeoning relationship into a to-this-day ill-defined state. For an entertainer who has come to make the most of the curveballs life has thrown her way, Dratch’s story is best left as it is, without a neatly-wrapped finale, letting readers know that the lack of a definitive “happily ever after” isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Lauren Groff, Arcadia

A hippie heaven goes to hell

All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff’s fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It’s a hot mess.

Still, for little Bit Stone, the first kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It’s also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it’s devastating — for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol’ bohemians and new age types who’d worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who’d half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.

Groff, who turned heads with 2008′s wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it’s tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.

Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker

Humor, intrigue and the secret life of mechanical bees

Nick Harkaway is a master of wordy, straight-faced silliness. If you want a hint at what you’re in for with his marvelous second novel, look no further than the first appearance of the mysterious Rodney Titwhistle and Arvin Cummerbund. “Those are our actual names, I’m afraid. Life is capricious. If you should feel the urge at any time to chuckle, we’re both quite big enough to share the joke.” The man they’re addressing is our accidental hero Joe Spork, a person who knows a thing or two about name baggage. Being the son of notorious London gangster Matthew Spork doesn’t help. (Harkaway, meanwhile, is John Le Carre’s kid; read into that what you like.) Joe’s attempt at a quiet life — he fixes clocks and other intricate mechanical doodads — gets a spanner in the works when the comically spooky Titwhistle and Cummerbund drop by in search of clues as to the whereabouts of the Angelmaker, a doomsday device of the highest craftsmanship. (You know, the type of rare antiquity that turns up in sleepy London clock shops.)

Suffice it to say, this is where the ball gets rolling, with Joe always pursuing one set of enigmatic men while barely dodging another. Soon we’ve got secret societies, spies, automatons, a swarm of steampunk bees, a Bond-worthy supervillain and one of the funniest, nerdiest and most awkward sex scenes in literary history.

Following up 2008′s post apocalyptic The Gone-Away World, Harkaway proves he’s just as adept at moving his chess pieces around a still-here world. Thick with deadpan British humor, inventive plot twists and memorable visuals, Angelmaker is a smart, wild, calculated joyride.

Peter Bergen, Manhunt

The full story of the most expensive manhunt ever conducted

Osama bin Laden was responsible for what is probably the most devastating attack to occur on U.S.soil, outside of the Civil War. So it makes a kind of perverse sense that he would be the subject of the most expensive manhunt ever conducted. It’s this decade-long fight to get just one man that Peter Bergen expertly recounts in his authoritative Manhunt. Notably,Bergen doesn’t skimp on the early phases of this long story, going as far back as the 1990s to show us the foundations of this massive struggle. Bergen’s familiarity with bin Laden’s deep history shines — he’s been on this beat for nearly 20 years and even managed to snag a rare interview with bin Laden in 1997. From there he makes accessible the interesting facts surrounding how the CIA managed to sift countless pages of information in its hunt for bin Laden, building a “horizontal” (instead of hierarchal) blueprint of the terrorist’s associates. It was this innovative strategy that allowed forces to zero in on the terrorist’s hideout, as it was not a lieutenant or family member but bin Laden’s lowly personal courier who eventually led theU.S. to the man himself.Bergen’s eyewitness accounts of the safe house where bin Laden lived from 2005 till his death are fascinating as only the ugly details of an infamous celebrity can be: who knew al-Qaida’s mastermind used Just for Men to keep his beard dark or had a hole in the ground for a toilet? Also intriguing areBergen’s descriptions of bin Laden’s domestic arrangements with his three wives, and the very prosaic struggles he engaged in with them. The final account of the raid that brought the mastermind to his end gives the full story of a climactic, anxiety-ridden day that most only know from sound bites and news reports. That, plus Bergen’s deep look into how the intelligence community functions in this era of globalized warfare makes this a valuable book to have in mind when assessing the President’s record going into election 2012, as well as for considering future battles in the fight against terrorism.

Charlotte Rogan, The Lifeboat

Communicates what might be resonant and timeless about such a calamity

The ship that wrecks in Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat is, explicitly, not the Titanic — Rogan’s Empress Alexandra meets its watery grave approximately two years after the sinking of its famous predecessor, according to Grace Winter, the novel’s narrator — but the book’s release was no doubt timed to coincide with the recent spate of shipwreck-mania. Lucky for us, then, that The Lifeboat communicates what might be resonant and timeless about such a calamity.

After an explosion on the mighty England-to-New York-bound Empress, Grace finds herself on an overfull lifeboat with an assortment of other passengers who were lucky enough to escape the foundering ship. Survival is, of course, utmost on everyone’s mind, and it is not long before divisions over how to survive arise. Mr. Hardy, the lone seaman on the lifeboat, leads with facts about wind speed and longitude and the best methods for rationing scant supplies; Mrs. Grant, a figure both maternal and impassive, stokes resentment toward Mr. Hardy’s authoritarian leadership. Their power struggle simmers and builds, and Grace becomes eventually, tragically, caught in the middle. Despite the desperation of the situation, Rogan resists melodrama; the events on the lifeboat take on a certain inevitability, and as Grace and the other passengers become numb with hunger and cold, so do we, too, begin to understand how the desire to keep oneself alive can come to look more like blind perseverance than vicious grappling at survival. Ultimately, The Lifeboat causes us to question what we might do if we were in Grace’s shoes — not because we’re surprised by the unthinkableness of her actions, but because we recognize her actions as all too human.

Sanjay Gupta, Monday Mornings

A taut medical drama for fans of surgical soaps

Fans of surgical soap operas like Grey’s Anatomy, ER and the late, great St. Elsewhere will find much to enjoy in CNN star physician Sanjay Gupta’s first fictional work Monday Mornings. Gupta’s novel is so like them, in fact, that it’s unclear whether the Shonda Rhimes of the world just happened to accurately capture the rhythms of hospital life, or Monday Mornings was written with those tropes in mind. Those readers whose lives are not defined by the smell of sterile disinfectant will find Mornings a thriller — where even the most minute slip-up can mean the end of a medical license or a patient’s life — while those who do pull on scrubs every day might see it more as a nightmarish, Vietnam-type flashback.
Taking place at Chelsea General Hospital’s weekly Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conference of physicians, Gupta introduces us to five doctors who’ve been called to explain bad outcomes from the week previous. Interspersed with the jargon-heavy conference, we come to find out more about the personal lives of these MDs. We’re given a secret view into their deep dedication to the job, along with their neuroses and altruism, but also their stunted personal, romantic, and family lives. When one character utters the time-worn cliché, “Sometimes bad things happen to good people,” it’s distressingly unclear whether he’s speaking of his dead patient, or his own confused life.
The physicians’ adrenaline surges and drowning exhaustion are admirably captured by narrator Christian Rummel, and though the dialogue might have been better crafted by a PhD than an MD, Dr. Sanjay Gupta has produced a taut medical drama that will undoubtedly serve as a palliative for those still mourning Chicago Hope.

The Sweltering Sound of Chicha Libre

Two Frenchmen, two Yankees, a Mexican and a Venezuelan walk into a bar…

Amazonian-cumbia specialists Chicha Libre provide the deliriously danceable punch line to that multiculti setup every Monday night in the tiny back room of the Barbès nightclub, located in Brooklyn’s decidedly temperate Park Slope neighborhood. Since 2005, when the group played its first gigs as the promisingly named Cumbia My Lord!, Chicha Libre has evolved from what vocalist, cuatro player and songwriter Olivier Conan calls “just a cover band doing a tribute to a formerly obscure genre” to something a lot more interesting than the latest hipster ethno-quirk. The band’s second album, Canibalismo, transcends its fakeness and returns the weird to the loping, leaping delights of escuela-vieja Peruvian cumbia.

Peruvian cumbia is known as chicha, which Conan heard for the first time in the backseat of a Lima taxi in 2004. “Authentic” chicha, Conan explains over drinks at Barbès, which he opened in 2002 with his friend, fellow countryman, and future Chicha Libre guitarist Vincent Douglas, emerged in Peru around 1968 and was known as Cumbia Amazonica. In the mid ’70s it was known as chicha (after a popular fermented corn beverage), a term set in vinyl when Los Shapis released “Rica Chicha” in 1981.

Chicha has strong class connotations. In 2007, Conan released the first amazing volume of The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru on his Barbès label. “When I told the owner of [Peruvian label] INFOPESA what I was going to title his compilation, he yelled at me on the phone and said, ‘Are you kidding? Chicha is for thugs!’” Conan’s two compilations mainstreamed chicha somewhat, but not enough to completely quell class biases on either side in its homeland.

In the beginning, Chicha Libre mostly covered Roots of Chicha tracks. “It started as something of a rock band,” Conan says. “We didn’t know much about the specific Latin characteristics of the music we were playing, although we’d all played fake Latin music over the years.”

“The original chicha [was] very rock oriented,” adds Chicha Libre keyboardist Joshua Camp. “They were listening to a lot of surf music and Hendrix.” Half of accordion duo One Ring Zero, Camp plays a Hohner Electrovox in Chicha Libre. He augments this reedless accordion’s pleasingly evocative sound of a ’60s Farfisa organ with wah-wah, ring modulation, delay, and other effects.

Cumbia originated in Colombia, where it embodied a strong African influence. However, there’s almost no African polyrhythms left in Peruvian music. “Over the past two years we acquired musicians who know how to play real Latin music,” says Conan, referring to master percussionists Karina Colis, from Mexico, and Neil Ochoa, from Venezuela. “In the beginning, it was mostly quirky reinterpretations of what we thought were the proper clave or montuno [the fundamental rhythmic structures of Latin music], which were pretty much always wrong. That’s one reason I think our first record, ¡Sonido Amazónico!, is charming. I’m a little worried that the clave being in the right place might work against us.”

“We made a valiant effort to mess with it in the recording process, though,” says Camp. “I’m a big fan of ’70s prog rock, and I love those keyboard sounds, Mellotrons and synths. The most enjoyable part of making the record was playing around with electronic toys, and we did a lot of that.” Chicha Libre recorded Canibalismo during the daytime hours in the back room of Barbès’s. The band recorded 17 tracks and then spent three months taking them apart, keeping only “the percussion and a couple of bass lines,” Conan says.

With its titular allusions both to the “cultural cannibalism” of Brazil’s Tropicalistas and bad Andean horror movies, Canibalismo embodies the Barbès label’s esthetic, which Conan defines as “records that have no sense of authenticity.” Other Barbès releases include Slavic Soul Party, Las Rubias del Norte, and One Ring Zero, whose latest album, The Recipe Project, is a culinary follow-up to the duo’s lit-star lyricked 2004 album, As Smart As We Are. You can hear the Zero and Chicha overlap in Canibalismo‘s “Number 17,” a cumbia meditation on German math genius Carl Friedrich Gauss.

At its best when diving deep into the jungle, Canibalismo seeks its heart of darkness through an increasingly psychedelic Amazonian boogie. “Juaneco en el Cielo” (Juaneco in Heaven) pays homage to chicha legends Juaneco y Su Combo, “L’Age d’Or” (The Golden Age) considers the value of nostalgia, and “Lupita en la Selva y el Doctor” (Lupita in the Jungle and the Doctor) updates the Beatles’ best-known acid opus by imagining Dr. Albert Hoffman going organic with ayahuasca. And while bassist Nick Cudahy’s chicha arrangement of “The Ride of the Valkyries” is Canibalismo‘s sole cover, you can hear Chicha Libre play versions of the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” and Love’s “Along Again Or” most Monday nights in Brooklyn. And I’d strongly suggest you do so.

Hot Water Music, Exister

Comeback albums are tricky, especially for a band as beloved as Hot Water Music. Wisely, on their eighth disc (and first new album in as many years), the band decided not to recreate the past but instead forge ahead. The songs on Exister expand the boundaries of their sound without sacrificing the visceral sing-alongs that endeared them to fans.

For the past decade co-frontman Chuck Ragan has had a successful career as a folk troubadour, which makes it even more satisfying to hear those whiskey-soaked pipes crack with emotion on roaring anthems like “Mainline” and “Paid in Full.” The band’s other guitarist/vocalist, Chris Wollard, crafts songs like “The Traps” that are more pop-inspired than anything the band has done before, though the harmonizing sing-alongs during the choruses keep the music sufficiently  ragged.

There are many more captivating moments on this 13-song collection (the jazz-informed bass line and syncopated drum beat on “Drag My Body” confirms that HWM still have the best rhythm section in punk rock), but what’s most satisfying is how many chances the band took. Instead of recreating what they’ve done, they’ve taken a giant sonic step forward, their battle cry conveyed via distorted guitars and pounding rhythms.

The Sweltering Sound of Chicha Libre

Two Frenchmen, two Yankees, a Mexican and a Venezuelan walk into a bar…

Amazonian-cumbia specialists Chicha Libre provide the deliriously danceable punch line to that multiculti setup every Monday night in the tiny back room of the Barbès nightclub, located in Brooklyn’s decidedly temperate Park Slope neighborhood. Since 2005, when the group played its first gigs as the promisingly named Cumbia My Lord!, Chicha Libre has evolved from what vocalist, cuatro player and songwriter Olivier Conan calls “just a cover band doing a tribute to a formerly obscure genre” to something a lot more interesting than the latest hipster ethno-quirk. The band’s second album, Canibalismo, transcends its fakeness and returns the weird to the loping, leaping delights of escuela-vieja Peruvian cumbia.

Peruvian cumbia is known as chicha, which Conan heard for the first time in the backseat of a Lima taxi in 2004. “Authentic” chicha, Conan explains over drinks at Barbès, which he opened in 2002 with his friend, fellow countryman, and future Chicha Libre guitarist Vincent Douglas, emerged in Peru around 1968 and was known as Cumbia Amazonica. In the mid ’70s it was known as chicha (after a popular fermented corn beverage), a term set in vinyl when Los Shapis released “Rica Chicha” in 1981.

Chicha has strong class connotations. In 2007, Conan released the first amazing volume of The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru on his Barbès label. “When I told one artist what I was going to title his compilation, he yelled at me on the phone and said, ‘Are you kidding? Chicha is for thugs!’” Conan’s two compilations mainstreamed chicha somewhat, but not enough to completely quell class biases on either side in its homeland.

In the beginning, Chicha Libre mostly covered Roots of Chicha tracks. “It started as something of a rock band,” Conan says. “We didn’t know much about the specific Latin characteristics of the music we were playing, although we’d all played fake Latin music over the years.”

“The original chicha [was] very rock oriented,” adds Chicha Libre keyboardist Joshua Camp. “They were listening to a lot of surf music and Hendrix.” Half of accordion duo One Ring Zero, Camp plays a Hohner Electrovox in Chicha Libre. He augments this reedless accordion’s pleasingly evocative sound of a ’60s Farfisa organ with wah-wah, ring modulation, delay, and other effects.

Cumbia originated in Colombia, where it embodied a strong African influence. However, there’s almost no African polyrhythms left in Peruvian music. “Over the past two years we acquired musicians who know how to play real Latin music,” says Conan, referring to master percussionists Karina Colis, from Mexico, and Neil Ochoa, from Venezuela. “In the beginning, it was mostly quirky reinterpretations of what we thought were the proper clave or montuno [the fundamental rhythmic structures of Latin music], which were pretty much always wrong. That’s one reason I think our first record, ¡Sonido Amazónico!, is charming. I’m a little worried that the clave being in the right place might work against us.”

“We made a valiant effort to mess with it in the recording process, though,” says Camp. “I’m a big fan of ’70s prog rock, and I love those keyboard sounds, Mellotrons and synths. The most enjoyable part of making the record was playing around with electronic toys, and we did a lot of that.” Chicha Libre recorded Canibalismo during the daytime hours in the back room of Barbès’s. The band recorded 17 tracks and then spent three months taking them apart, keeping only “the percussion and a couple of bass lines,” Conan says.

With its titular allusions both to the “cultural cannibalism” of Brazil’s Tropicalistas and bad Andean horror movies, Canibalismo embodies the Barbès label’s esthetic, which Conan defines as “records that have no sense of authenticity.” Other Barbès releases include Slavic Soul Party, Las Rubias del Norte, and One Ring Zero, whose latest album, The Recipe Project, is a culinary follow-up to the duo’s lit-star lyricked 2004 album, As Smart As We Are. You can hear the Zero and Chicha overlap in Canibalismo‘s “Number 17,” a cumbia meditation on German math genius Carl Friedrich Gauss.

At its best when diving deep into the jungle, Canibalismo seeks its heart of darkness through an increasingly psychedelic Amazonian boogie. “Juaneco en el Cielo” (Juaneco in Heaven) pays homage to chicha legends Juaneco y Su Combo, “L’Age d’Or” (The Golden Age) considers the value of nostalgia, and “Lupita en la Selva y el Doctor” (Lupita in the Jungle and the Doctor) updates the Beatles’ best-known acid opus by imagining Dr. Albert Hoffman going organic with ayahuasca. And while bassist Nick Cudahy’s chicha arrangement of “The Ride of the Valkyries” is Canibalismo‘s sole cover, you can hear Chicha Libre play versions of the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” and Love’s “Along Again Or” most Monday nights in Brooklyn. And I’d strongly suggest you do so.

Sale: Essential ’90s Records

Maybe it was the moment Garbage, Eve 6 and Candlebox all announced their first full-lengths in what felt like forever. Or the news that Everclear, Sugar Ray, Lit, the Gin Blossoms and Marcy Playground were all touring together this summer. Either way, 2012 feels like the high school reunion that never was, a look back at the ’90s through rose-colored glasses and seemingly sudden reunions.

With that in mind, eMusic’s editorial staff has decided to host our own special gathering, a thorough rundown of some of our favorite ’90s records, including hints of art-damaged grunge (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots), major label-pursued pop-punk (The Offspring, Bad Religion, Rancid), and whatever you wanna call Björk, Faith No More and Butthole Surfers. All available for $4.99 each through June 6th…

Interview: Butch Vig

Garbage’s creative urges on their first album in seven years (Not Your Kind of People, available now through their new STUNVOLUME imprint) take a similar shape as their late-’90s heyday — driving synths, downcast electric guitars — which makes sense: The band says they were inspired by what they haven’t been hearing in the marketplace lately.

eMusic’s Dan MacIntosh caught up with the band’s iconic drummer Butch Vig, who spoke on how Garbage reclaimed their unique sound, going indie, and how they band let seven years fly by.

Garbage was quoted in a recent album-previewing press release as saying the “new songs have been inspired more by what we haven’t been hearing rather than by what we have.” What do you mean?

There’s a style of music that we like — electronics, bubbly guitars and pop melodies and atmospherics and big beats and trashy drums, all blended together. That’s the sound of Garbage. And I think we realized there’s nobody that sounds quite like us, and that’s one of the inspirations that made us want to make another record; is to make a record that sounds exactly like who we are because nobody else is doing that.  To me, our new album sounds like our first album, vibe-wise.

Your new album is on STUNVOLUME Records, and I read recently in NME where you said, “We started out on independent labels both in the U.K. and in the U.S. and then they ended up getting bought up by bigger corporate labels. In the end, no one from those labels seems to care or know who you are as a band and we just didn’t like that experience.” How was this experience different?

We’re masters of our own destiny, which is a good thing and a bad thing. The great thing is that we have complete control over what we decide to do, but with that comes a lot more responsibility and a lot more work. You know, in the past a lot of things like marketing and the artwork and everything that you would delegate out to the label. Now we are the label, so we oversee everything. But that’s OK.

I mean, in a way that’s how we started out. When we released the first album it was on an indie label, Alamo, here in the U.S. and Mushroom Infectious in the U.K. and the rest of the world. It was just a handful of people at those labels. We worked very hands-on with them, and as they got bought out, we ended up being on these corporate labels and we could just tell there was nobody that really gave a shit about us or understood who we were. And certain things just fall between the cracks. So we’re back to being hands-on with everything.

Is the label just for the purpose of putting out your music, or do you run it as a label, perhaps, for other artists that you know and enjoy working with?

Well, so far, we’re just releasing our album. But down the line, we want to sign some other artists and do some collaboration — use the label as a vehicle to do whatever creative projects we see fit to get involved with. We’re setting up the infrastructure now with our press team, with our marketing team and the people we’re doing artwork with.

Your reputation before Garbage was as a producer. And I wonder, when it comes to making Garbage albums, do you switch hats and sort of change your mindset? Or do you go into being the recording artist with the same mindset that you would as a producer?

I think you’re right. I wear two different hats, really. When a producer, I’m working on someone else’s music and their vision. If I’m working with the Foo Fighters or Green Day, it’s their songs and it’s my job to help them reach that vision and where they want to go with those songs. In Garbage, I’m a musician and a songwriter and I’m working on my songs, or our songs, and that’s a completely different thing and my production ideas. Obviously, I have a lot of production ideas in terms of how the record should sound. But so do Shirley, Duke and Steve, and that’s why all four of us are listed as producer because we all are extremely opinionated on the way the record should sound.

I love the way you describe yourself in the press release: the four-way brain-filter.

It is a four-way brain-filter, and we agree on a lot of things and there’s a sensibility that we share, but we argue about a lot of things and that tension is good, I think, because ultimately it pushes everybody a little bit harder to sort of get on the same page and also get the sort of performances that we’re all into.

Shirley is such a special frontperson. What is that that you think makes her so good at what she does?

Well, first of all she’s an amazing singer. I’ve always loved her voice from first day we met her. She doesn’t sound quite like anybody else. I think when you hear a Garbage song on the radio, no matter what we do sonically, whether it’s fuzzy guitars, or it’s atmospheric or a ballad or whatever, her voice defines us in a way. And she really has one of the most charismatic voices in rock ‘n’ roll.

Can you tell me a little about the process of writing songs? So, when you write songs, do you sit down in a room and write together? Or do you bring pieces to the studio?

Well, we do both. Every song kind of has its own path. The first song we wrote on the record, “Battle In Me,” came from a jam of all four of us being the studio in Hollywood with nothing. We hadn’t written anything. We just sat down and started fucking around and that came out, basically. The same with “Man on a Wire.”

A lot of the songs, like the title track, I was in the car one day and I just had that line come out. I didn’t have any melody or chords or anything. I told Shirl…I called her that night. And the next day we sat down, all four of us in the studio, and Duke and Steve each had an acoustic guitar and Shirley sat there and I was just tapping some beats on a drum machine just trying to figure it out.

Why did it take so long to record a new studio album? Were you just busy with other things?

Well, we needed to take a break. We were pretty burned out after Bleed Like Me. I don’t think anyone knew it was going to stretch into seven years, but it was important for all of us to reclaim our own lives, our personal lives. As for me, I just got back into producing. I love being in the studio, so that was easy for me to lose track of time. And it wasn’t till about a year ago when Shirley called up everybody and said, “I think we should get back together, and see if we can, with no expectations. Let’s just see if anything comes out at all.” So she kind of got the ball rolling.

You guys must have a very unique chemistry.

You know, we really do. We’re a family, like three brothers and a sister. And we know each other very well. I mean, we like hanging around with each other. A lot of sensibilities we share. I think that’s one of the reasons that we’re able to keep making records together. This is our fifth proper studio album together, and there’s a sense of being in a club when we go in. We laugh about it. We make fun of each other. There’s no one that’s too precious about anybody’s role in the band. So I think that’s a healthy way to work with someone. Shirley’s a great singer, but Duke and Steve and myself don’t consider ourselves great musicians. We’re pretty average musicians, but I think we’re pretty good at maximizing our abilities and sort of understanding how to use our strengths at what we do best.

It doesn’t sound to me like this was really a reunion, in the sense that you had somehow broken up and you decided to get back together. It just seemed like to me that this was just the right time to do something again. Would you characterize it that way?

Yeah, we never broke up. We went on a hiatus, but there was no talk of breaking up. I mean, we still kept in contact. We just hadn’t done any recording. So I live fairly close to Shirl in L.A., so we’d bump into her at dinner or I’d see her at parties or clubs or whatever. I keep in touch with Duke and Steve. Steve’s been my partner at Smart Studios for 25 years and Duke and I have been in bands forever, so we’re really good friends. Everybody let the band fall by the wayside, but none of us ever intended to quit. It was just a long-needed break.

Hilary Hahn & Hauschka, Silfra

Cross-genre collaborations are inherently risky. For every peanut-butter-and-chocolate innovation, there are a dozen sardines-and-chutney mismatches. That classical violinist Hahn would improvise with a composer (Hauschka) who favors prepared piano and electronics was not an obvious fit. But the result is a considered studio product that still sounds spontaneous.

They stick close to classical norms on a few tracks – notably, “Krakow,” where Hahn plays bits of melody over Hauschka’s chord progression on an untreated piano. More often, they make music of alternately clashing or meshing textures, complementary gestures where, occasionally, listeners can’t be sure which instrument’s making which sound. While this is largely due to Hauschka’s mechanical and electronic alterations to his piano sound, Hahn also deploys a wider variety of timbres than she’s used before.

This may disturb classical purists, and some Hauschka fans might feel that the ambient sound sculptures that characterized his previous albums is less soothing in this context. The lengthiest track, “Godot” (12:34), creates an atmosphere of expectation so tense as to verge on sinister. But then, that unease lurked below the surface of much of Hauschka’s previous work, so the still-beautiful Silfra is a natural and welcome progression.