BON IVER
What a long strange trip it’s been.
After four days of battling the blistering heat, sleeping under the Tennessee stars, wandering about the 700-acre campground and singing along with musical legends, my body is begging for rest. My feet are worn, my eyes are slipping shut, my fingernails are buried under heaps of dirt. But I survived my first Bonnaroo, and live to tell the tales of an extraordinary weekend.
The eleventh annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival gathered more than 80,000 music lovers to the small town of Manchester, Tennessee for four days of peace, love, and music. While Woodstock may have pioneered the festival movement in America, Bonnaroo has taken over where the hippie extravaganza left off. Bustling with eco-friendly activism, throngs of naked bodies twirling around and mudslides forming across the farm, Bonnaroo successfully transformed technology-obsessed Americans into carefree and wild-spirited festi-lovers - if only for the weekend.
The small town of Manchester, Tennessee has welcomed the bulging crowds of Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival for eleven years - opening its quiet roads and grassy knolls to infiltration by hippies, hipsters, burnouts, ravers, rockers and every other category of music lovers imaginable. Giant RVs, cars stuffed to the brim with supplies and hitchhiking hopefuls invade the nearby Walmart en route to the festival, gearing up for four days of foregoing electricity and showers in favor of nature exploration and musical madness. Excitement flairs during the hours-long wait to the entrance, everyone eager to set up camp and start boogying down!
Don't worry, I didn't make it to Coachella either. Fortunately, there are tons of videos on Youtube this year of some of the best performances thanks to the live streaming coverage offered. Here's a list of the highlights. Look for more in depth coverage from joonbug later this week (we were on the ground too!).
Bon Iver, playing the track "Wolves." Hot off of winning a grammy, Justin Vernon played to a huge crowd on Saturday night.
Radiohead played. Need I say more? They also played for almost two hours, and you can see ALL of it below!
M83's performance to an amped up crowd on Friday night. Katy Perry rumored to be in attendence...
Pulp, legendary Brit Pop masters played a killer set on Friday. Once again, watch the hour plus set in its entirety below!
Frank Ocean opened with a Dylan cover. Awesome! Watch his set below.
It’s been a long time coming for these two beautiful minds to realize that collaboration is in order. The melody gods brought these two together at a chance meeting this year at SXSW, which ultimately inspired them to attest to their musical greatness side-by-side in the studio.
The first product of their collaborative effort comes in the form of “Fall Creek Boys Choir,” which premiered today on BBC Radio 1 and will be available on iTunes August 29th.
With Iver on the vocals and Blake on production, the two compliment each other to a truly haunting perfection. Iver’s delicate, here auto-tuned voice blends ethereally over Blake’s flawless electronic backdrop to create exactly what you would expect from such a talented super-duo.
Just as summer finally makes an appearance in Chicago, imagine fall in Paris. Crunchy leaves in every color falling swiftly upon wide boulevards, couples in berets strolling hand in hand along the Seine. In this dream landscape, Pitchfork just announced an offshoot of their annual Chicago concert series, Pitchfork Music Festival Paris. None other than indie favorite Bon Iver is tasked with cultivating the set list for the second day of the fest.
It’s taking place at La Grande Halle de La Villette et Le Grand Parc de la Villette, a sweeping, modern concert complex surrounded a 55-hectare park in the Saint Denis area in the north of the city from October 28-29, 2011. Set in lush surroundings accompanied by a roster promising to be ahead of the curve, Pitchfork Paris should be a French delight.
Kanye West's independent record label, G.O.O.D. Music, has officially been signed to an exclusive long-term worldwide label agreement with the Island Def Jam Music Group (IDJMG). The announcement was made today by West and Barry Weiss, Chairman and COO of Universal Motown Republic Group and IDJMG. This contract marks the beginning of a new era of really GOOD music. "G.O.O.D. Music is an exciting new chapter in the long and successful association of Kanye West and Island Def Jam," said Weiss. "As a recording artist and a producer over the past eight years, there is no one who has made a greater impression on the game than Kanye. We look forward to working closely with the new and established artists that he will be bringing to G.O.O.D. Music, which is already off to an impressive start with Big Sean."
For Bon Iver fans desperate for a taste of his new material, wait no more!
Pitchfork reported that a 50 second wordless clip appeared on their website Thursday; you can view the video here.
It is not certain but the music might be material from their anticipated sophomore album.
It is not certain but the music might be material from their anticipated sophomore album.
There are so many conflicting public and private personas that culminate in the egotistical, frustrating and yet undeniably creative and brilliant man that is Kanye West. After all, West consistently invites criticism and speculation with each successive exasperating public stunt and diatribe. He may be an exhausting media fixture, but West has never shied away from confronting his own demons. It's this unnerving introspection that makes Kanye West's music electric, enjoyable and undeniably important.
With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the superstar has returned with an album that speaks not only to tabloid sensation Kanye, he of the Taylor Swift debacle, the Amber Rose over-sharing, the Twitter rants and media posteuring, but also to the private emotional depths of a man at a crossroads in his life. The album blends the dark, haunted self-analysis of 808s and Heartbreak with the slick, hip-hop-faithful production techniques of The College Dropout and inspired samples of Late Registration; it's the climax of everything West has been working up to until this point.
Ever wonder what silent film scores would sound like if they were written today? The imaginative minds behind The New York Guitar Festival (which runs from January 8th to February 4th) have selected 10 classic silent films and hand-picked several guitar virtuosos to provide live soundtracks at screenings that start Thursday, January 14th at Merkin Concert Hall. The guitar masters include Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver), 2008 Grammy nominee David Bromberg, and style-morphing icon Marc Ribot.
“No instrument has spoken in more voices to more people than the guitar.”
Ever since Les Paul rigged electrical receiver components to a wooden 4x4 stud in a crude attempt to amplify the subdued sound of jazz guitar, the history of American music has been dominated by the use of guitars in every musical genre. Even the rising popularity of synth-produced electronic music in the 80s and 90s had numerous notable examples indicating that guitars are the main instrument of music delivery. The fact is, no other instrument has had such a lasting and encompassing effect on music history as the guitar.
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