I had an absolute blast interviewing author Jeff Vandermeer and Adam Turla (of the band Murder by Death) for At Length recently. Jeff had asked the band to write a soundtrack for his noir fantasy novel Finch, and they delivered a haunting chunk of music that perfectly complements the mood of the book.

The conversation was fun and fascinating, particularly when Jeff mentioned that foreign publishers were using the soundtrack with the translation, as a guide to tone and pacing.

I’m procrastinating on an interview transcription to test the wordpress app for my new Droid phone. I’ve named it Skippy, after the jedi robot protaganist in Peter David’s playful reimagining of R5D4, hero of the universe.

Speaking of the Droid, I’m creeped out by the way it is being marketed to men who think Apple products are too feminine. I’m even more dismayed that I think this is pretty likely to work in the geek community.

20 bands.  9 venues.  3 nights.  1 destroyed umbrella… and a lot of beer.

A bad snap of a great band, The XX.

For the first time this year, I lucked into a badge for the CMJ music festival here in New York, thanks to business associate, blogstress extraordinaire and all around swell gal, Jen Kellas.  Previously, the hefty price tag ($500 this year) has engendered a sourish, grapey taste in my mouth, and I’ve assumed that CMJ was just like an average weekend night in NYC — hundreds of bands playing in dozens of rock clubs and theaters scattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn.  But once you have that free pass burning a whole in your pocket (because really, who’s going to jeopardize their cool points by wearing it around their neck?) you sort of feel pressure to get the most of out of it.

Theoretically, the badge lets you get into any official CMJ showcase in the city (not to mention the film and discussion panels, but I do have a day job to worry about), so you could conceivably plan some ridiculous itinerary in which you planned to hop from club to club every hour, making your own special live mixtape of super-hip indie.  But realistically, you’ve got a lot of barriers that stand in your way.  For starters, a lot of bands are just scheduled against one another, forcing you to make the kinds of Sophie’s choice decisions that make hipsters wake up in a cold sweat at night.  Dent May or The XX?  Hot Lava or The Golden Silvers?  Then there’s distance.  New York has great public transit and is super dense, but this ain’t Burning Man.  Even if you want to blow your beer money on cabs, you’re still going to find it hard to get from Park Slope to the Bowery in less time than it takes the sound guy to get more vox in the guitar player’s monitor.  And of course there’s what I like to call “rock and roll time,” the strange chronometric system used by hipsters, musicians, tricky mics and very drunk people that runs much slower and later than Eastern Standard Time.

But my biggest concern was actually just getting into these shows, as most of them are open to the unwashed masses (though to be fair, many of the badge holders could’ve used a shower as well).  While many of these shows wouldn’t sell out, several of the ones that were high on my list seemed like they might, and I didn’t want to find myself getting turned away all over town after spending all that money on cab fare to get there on time.  So my plan of attack was mostly to just get to a club plenty early to see one band I really was crazy about, even if it meant my options for the earlier time slots in the evening were limited to whatever was going on at the club I happened to be at.

Over the next few days I’m going to describe my three nights of sleepless rocking out at CMJ 2009, along with some closing thoughts about the festival itself.

I recently had a chance to interview John McEntire of Tortoise for At Length, on the occasion of their new release, Beacons of Ancestorship. It might be true that Tortoise was my favorite band, maybe for a few months in 1996 after I first heard Millions Now Living Will Never Die. It blew my mind at the time. Similarly, seeing them perform “Gamera” in concert is one of my favorite concert moments.

All of which reminds me that I have decided to try to dig deep into my memory to try to reconstruct my life as a concert-goer since my first concert (Metallica and The Cult at Pine Knob, if I’m not mistaken) to my most recent, which would probably be the Santana-esque blues guitarist I saw wailing a week or two ago at Macri Park with his whole family gathered around him grimly, holding up a sign about Jesus. A daunting project, and probably impossible, but I think that what I do pull back will be a delight.

I have a couple of new posts up on Bitch Magazine’s Blog.  The first is about the incredible performance of Dark Was the Night at Radio City on Sunday.  The Dirty Projectors, My Brightest Diamond, David Byrne, the National, Dave Sitek (of TV on the Radio), Bon Iver, Feist and Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings (and Doveman on keyboards, though I didn’t realize it at the time).  Everybody was great, dueting and collaborating enough that each mini-set bled into the others in a warm, friendly way.   Tammy and I talked about how sober everybody was, and then I was pleased to see none other than the Talking Head himself confirm this.  A memorable night.

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