Soundcheck

The following interview was conducted days before David Bowie's death at 69. 

David Bowie was 19 when he met producer Tony Visconti. In 2016, Bowie released his experimental-jazz-flecked studio album, Blackstar. Visconti co-produced it, just as he had produced dozens of the rock icon's records over the course of their more than forty year creative relationship. And since Bowie himself had all but sworn off press, it often fell to Visconti to explicate the processes and the experiments that resulted in latter day masterpieces like The Next Day and the record, Blackstar.

Tony Visconti reflects on the influence of Mick Ronson, Jack Bruce, Marc Bolan, digital production, and Visconti's relationship with his "lead singer," David Bowie in this podcast from the 2016 archives.

Revisit spectral electronic songs by L.A. producer Katie Gately (in-studio) and old-time American music from singer, fiddler, banjo player, and scholar Jake Blount, performed remotely. Also, listen to Malian singer, songwriter, guitarist and actress Fatoumata Diawara, recorded in the Before Times, with her full band, in-studio. Then, there's percussionist and songwriter Joachim Cooder and his arrangements of proto-country tunes by Uncle Dave Macon, played on electric thumb piano, joined by his dad, guitarist Ry Cooder. Plus, the aggressive and melodic instrumental music from the Welsh astrophysicist, coder, and guitarist Gwenifer Raymond, who adapts the “American Primitive” style for "old weird Wales." 

Set list:

Katie Gately – "Waltz"Jake Blount - "Roustabout"Fatoumata Diawara – "Nterini"Joachim Cooder – "Oh Lovin’ Babe"Gwenifer Raymond – "Hell For Certain"

Hear some of the best performances from the Soundcheck Podcast series from 2020, despite 2020. From the WNYC Studio, listen to the mighty and relentless groove of Brooklyn's funky Afrobeat band Antibalas, and the dark drone of "Dublin folk miscreants," Lankum. From elsewhere, there's also a tune from John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, who took it back to the boombox recording era early in quarantine. Then, revisit the warm and mesmerizing voice of Boston-based folk-pop songwriter Anjimile. Plus, hear the looped electronic swirl and ominous rumble of the layered violin and vocals by Kazakh-British violinist and composer Galya Bisengalieva, from London. 

The phenomenal pianist Stewart Goodyear, known as both an improviser and composer, famously played all 32 of Beethoven's sonatas in one sitting, when he turned 32 years old. In predictably jaw-dropping fashion, Stewart then turned his electrifying powers to Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker,' with his own transcription of the complete ballet. (The album, released in October 2015, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best classical music recordings of 2015.) He has since recorded Ravel piano works, his own "Callaloo" Suite and Piano Sonata, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. He was supposed to have toured with Chineke! Orchestra, playing his "Callaloo" Suite this past year, but...well...2020. Instead, we'll revisit this 2015 in-studio performance of pieces from Tchaikovsky's 'The Nutcracker.' 

Scottish-born Maeve Gilchrist writes and plays new music for an old instrument: the Celtic harp, or Lever harp. Gilchrist is a curious innovator who has played, performed, and recorded with the prog-folk quartet DuoDuo and the Grammy-winning Silkroad Ensemble. In her own original music, some of it drawn from a folk and traditional music well, she has worked on sonic explorations of Celtic harp as a rhythmic instrument, which is hard to do because of the Lever harp’s limited ability to control the sustain of a note. (But Gilchrist has found a way to trick the ear by muting the strings with nylon stockings!) She performs her original compositions, including “The Harpweaver” based on poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, with the Rasa String Quartet, remotely, for the podcast.

Setlist:

“The Harpweaver” Chris Stout's “Compliments to the Bon Accord Ale House” / “Ancestral Mud” “The Calm” with guitarist Conor Hearn.

The Harpweaver by Maeve Gilchrist

Squarepusher is the nom de disque of Tom Jenkinson, who makes electronic dance music. EDM is associated with a relentless four-on-the-floor dance beat; it's loud and brightly colored and definitely part of the pop realm. Squarepusher, on the other hand, makes music that rides over a skittish, often nervous set of rhythms; his music may be somewhere on the fringes of pop, but it’s closer to the arty outsider known as Aphex Twin than it is to Tiesto or Calvin Harris or any of the other superstar dance DJs. Squarepusher did a recent project with musical robots, but his own music has somehow maintained an organic quality, a sense of playability rare in the world of laptop-based music. Hear Squarepusher perform several of his recent works in the Soundcheck studio.

Courtney Barnett's songs are wild, shaggy and wordy, mixing witty, mundane, and sometimes heartbreaking observations with devastating self-assessment. And with a sound rooted in the slack jangle-rock of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Barnett delivers plainspoken lyrics and roll off the tongue as if she's thinking them up on the spot. You can hear that in her break-out song "Avant Gardener" or in "Pedestrian At Best," from 2015's superb album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, in which she spits off a list of personal insecurities and internal monologues to an former love. The Australia native plays songs from Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit in a 2015 session, recorded live in The Greene Space. (From the Archives.)

With its 2014 record Burnt Offering, The Budos Band seems to have spent many hours listening to bands like Black Sabbath, Pentagram, or Deep Purple on endless repeat. Their riffs and grooves are way heavier, and still it's clear that the Afrobeat force is still with them. Here the ensemble leans towards scorched earth guitar distortion, some blistering brass, and the sinister droning organs, all of which conjures a far more ominous and raging vibe. While not wholly a reinvention, The Budos Band's progression feels like the logical next step from a group always looking to add something new to the mix. The nine-piece band plays some of their latest doomy instrumental funk, in-studio. (From the Archives, 2014.)

Violinist Regina Carter's album called Southern Comfort started out as an exploration of her family tree - an attempt to discover and interpret the folk songs that her grandfather, a coal miner in Alabama, perhaps would have heard during his lifetime. What resulted, however, is a deep and expansive look at how the Appalachians' blend of Irish and Scottish settlers, Native Americans and slaves combined to create the music that we today know as traditional Americana - and, how that music has continued to evolve and inspire artists throughout our nation's history. 

After visiting the Library of Congress and listening to field recordings made by John Wesley Work III and Alan Lomax, Carter - who has previously explored the jazz standards of her mother's youth and the music of the African diaspora - narrowed down the pieces that caught her ear. The resulting album includes Cajun fiddle tunes like "Blues de Basile," gospel hymns like "I'm Going Home," and even a few more contemporary songs, like Hank Williams' "Honky Tonkin'." All performed, of course, in Carter's signature imaginative - and always swinging - style. -Mike Katzif

 Set List: "See See Rider," "I'm Going Home," "Miner's Child"

Ghost of Vroom is singer/songwriter Mike Doughty’s new band with bassist and longtime collaborator Andrew “Scrap” Livingston. One of theme was in Soul Coughing and the other is in the composers' collective ThingNY. This interview, and an intimate performance from Doughty’s home in Memphis, were presented live by The Greene Space in Nov. 2020.

"Chief of Police":