LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
I caught up with folk duo Christy & Emily during their show at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn this past Saturday. It was more sparsely attended than it should have been because their set was awesome, and, hey, they play fun games that involved passing a mini disco ball around the audience until the music stops, when the person touching it answers a question with a subjectively right answer decided upon by Christy and Emily. They asked, “You live in a three story house. Where are you more afraid to go, the attic or the basement?” The correct answer was the basement, inexplicably. Also, the girls mentor six underserved high school women in music and song creation, all of whom performed as the opening act. Below, Christy & Emily discuss the girls in the viBe SongMakers program, keyboards in Germany, and the Vietnam War.

JM.com: So, do you guys do projected visuals with every show?

Emily: Brock Monroe does them and he came and did our record release at The Stone, also. He had all this water he was using and made this giant mess all over the floor. I think that was the first time.

Christy: Well, we’ve done stuff at Secret Project Robot, and he does stuff there. That’s really how we got started because Secret Project Robot has their Mighty Robot Visual squad and they have a lot of people who are our friends and they do that stuff really all over.
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photo by Katie Ford
LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC
Josh Kolenik and Ryan Heyner grew up on Long Island, playing in separate musical projects, from a hardcore band to a country music dalliance. Now they’ve teamed up and struck a chord with glow-fi bedroom pop experiment Small Black. Their song “Despicable Dogs” recently garnered a spot on Pitchfork’s Best New Music, and they just wrapped up a busy week at CMJ. We were psyched to find out that the guys will release a full length LP in the spring and that they really love Josh’s weight-liftin’, surf-board makin’ uncle. JM.com’s Tricia Patterson met up with Josh to talk song writing, DIY production and space heaters.

JM.com: Ok, so I was reading that you [and Ryan] grew up on Long Island. Do you still live there?

Josh: No, I live in Greenpoint and Ryan lives off the Dekalb stop now. We recorded the whole album like a block from here. We mixed it here and recorded it on Long Island. It was sort of a long process so we recorded it a bunch of places but the main crux of the recording we did at my uncle Matt’s place in Long Island.

JM.com: Does he have recording equipment or a studio up there?

Josh: No, we just wanted to be somewhere where we didn’t have our friends around. No distractions. It’s crazy. It’s kind of like this workout facility with free weights and contraptions that my uncle built. I think we set up the microphone on his weight bench at one point, and the ceiling was really low so we were hunched over and there was no heat. It was pretty fun.

JM.com: No heat even in the winter?

Josh: Well we had a space heater up there, so when Ryan was working on something and I didn’t have anything to do I would just sort of scrounge for heat right up next to it.
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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC photo by Daniel Araujo

It’s hard to go for long in Brooklyn without hearing news from Vivian Girls; from the constant touring to Pitchfork Music Festival to Pool Parties to their new LP, these girls are keeping busy. JM.com’s Tricia Patterson talked to guitarist Cassie Ramone about Vivian Girls’ number-one fan, what “lo-fi” means in 2009, and the “can’t get better than this” moments they’ve had in their rapidly skyrocketing career.

JM.com: Ok, burning question, pick a tattoo any tattoo and explain.

Cassie: We all have a tattoo of a feather that we got in London at this guy’s flat for 10 pounds each. He had the hardest hand of any tattoo artist we’ve ever gotten tattoos from and it hurt like hell. I like this tattoo because it’s the first matching tattoo all of us had gotten together.

JM.com: What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned since you first released your demo back in 2007?

Cassie: We’ve learned a lot about how the music industry works and how touring works. Before Vivian Girls those were both vague concepts to us but now we have a handle on both those things.

JM.com: What kinds of things did you learn about the industry and touring? Seedy underbelly?

Cassie: Not as many seedy stories as you would expect - we work with people we trust, so most of the time we are able to avoid the bullshit. When we started the band, we had no idea how the industry or touring worked at all, and now we’ve done everything from punk tours to playing huge festivals. It’s cool to know firsthand how everything works, how to book a tour, how to release a record. It’s really interesting.
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LOCAL SPOTLIGHT NYC

photo by Aubrey Stallard

The Beets are a Jackson Heights-based band currently pumping out some of the most charming and loveable 60s-inspired garage rock we’ve heard in a while. Their new 12 song 12” LP, The Beets Spit in the Face of People Who Don’t Want to Be Cool was hot off the vinyl press in March. And now they’ve packed up their hand-drawn banners and are touring the Ole U.S. of A. with Vivian Girls and Air Waves. JezebelMusic.com’s Tricia Patterson spoke with bassist/vocalist Jose Garcia about the New York scene, touring and Nickelodeon.

JM.com: So your name, “The Beets,” any relation to that fictional band from the Nickelodeon cartoon “Doug”?

Jose Garcia: Absolutely not. Juan named the band The Beets cause he was in his kitchen and saw a can of beets. Juan is from Uruguay, so I don’t think he watched Nickelodeon. None of us had cable, so we never watched.

JM.com: How did the band form?

Jose: I met Juan at LaGuardia Community College about five years ago in art class. We formed two bands, but they didn’t really go anywhere. Then we decided to try again and it was called The Beets. It was just me and him. We didn’t have a drummer, but then we met Jacob at a show, and we asked if he wanted to play with us. We’ve been playing together for a year and that’s the history of the Beets.

JM.com: I saw on one of your stage banners you said “We are the Beets and we are from Jackson Heights”. It seems like you have a lot of New York pride.

Jose: Yeah definitely. I think anyone should be proud of where they’re from. Once we started playing the Brooklyn music scene especially, we just wanted to let everyone know that we’re representing Queens. I grew up in Jackson Heights. And its Juan’s and Jacob’s home away from home.
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