photos by Kurt Christensen

"[Friday] night, The Walkmen headlined It Came from Brooklyn, [The Guggenheim's first] concert series [which highlights artists from Brooklyn and happens to coincide with the museum's] 50th Anniversary. The band were sleek in dress and voracious in music. As they rattled off numerous tracks off their 2008 release, "You & Me", they also were accompanied by a section of trumpets and trombones. The Walkmen's songs, some straightforward and mellow and some more palpitating and post-punk, filled the rotunda beautifully without so much as a word or a chord being lost. In fact the venue of the night seemed to enhance the whole performance; the grandiosity of the Guggenheim could pose an air of overwhelmingness, but instead the performance felt wholly intimate..." [Gothamist]

High Places, the Brooklyn Steppers Marching Band, novelist Colson Whitehead, and comedian Leo Allen were also on the museum bill. For the Walkmen it was the first of two NYC shows this weekend; the second was on Sunday in Central Park (pics coming soon). For the Guggenheim it was the first of this new series. The next will feature a performance by Interpol front-man Paul Banks aka Julian Plenti. More pictures from Friday below...

Continue reading "The Walkmen, High Places, Leo Allen, Colson Whitehead & a marching band @ The Guggenheim Museum in NYC - pics "

Tickets for the first show of the Guggenheim's It Came From Brooklyn series on Friday, August 14th are on sale now. They cost a whopping $45 for non-members, and museum members don't do much better with a reduced cost of $40. The night will feature sets from The Walkmen and High Places, and an opening performance by Brooklyn Steppers Marching Band. Hosting will be comedian Leo Allen; novelist Colson Whitehead "reads selections from Walt Whitman between performances." The next edition of the series is scheduled for September 25th. None of the acts have been confirmed.

Two days after on Sunday, August 16th, the Walkmen will playing a free Central Park Summerstage show with Dinosaur Jr.

More info on the It Came From Brooklyn series, below...

Continue reading "It Came From Brooklyn w/ The Walkmen, High Places, Brooklyn Steppers Marching Band - tickets on sale"

by Andrew Frisicano

The Walkmen @ Sasquatch 2009 (more by Chris Graham)

It Came From Brooklyn inaugurates a new series of live music concerts in the [Guggenheim] rotunda. The program will showcase ten bands over the course of five Friday evenings commencing mid-August, with each night featuring a music set by two bands, interspersed with a short reading by a Brooklyn-based writer or actor. The series, taking place within the rotunda, will cast a spotlight on Brooklyn's musical renaissance by providing a platform for a new crop of musicians. The line-up includes bands such as The Walkmen and High Places.

In fact, High Places and The Walkmen will play the same It Came From Brooklyn show, its inaugural night on Friday, August 14th. The Gugg website also NO LONGER reports that Grizzly Bear will be one of the series' acts. Stay tuned for more announcements.

UPDATE: We are told Grizzly Bear is not confirmed for this. They have been removed from the museum's website....

Those shows will be the second scheduled NYC gigs for both Grizzly Bear and The Walkmen (and only upcoming U.S. show currently for High Places). The Walkmen play a free show at the Central Park Summerstage with Dinosaur Jr. on Sunday, August 16th. Grizzly Bear will also play a free show, at the Williamsburg Waterfront with Beach House on Sunday, August 30th.

The museum's Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda should add some interesting reverb effects to Grizzly Bear's harmony-heavy tunes. Especially good news if you missed the last three Grizzly Bear NYC shows, when they played May 28th and 29th at Town Hall and May 31st at MHOW.

Grizzly Bear collaborator Nico Muhly, who premiered a "scent opera" at the Gugg on May 31st and Jun 1st, recently defended the band's Town Hall show (at which he played keys) against the not-so-nice Times review...

Times: But wow, these songs are precious, and they occasionally came spangled with extras that made them even more so. The chorus was one of those elements, sorry to say.

Nico: Oh snap! Apology accepted. Now, I have major objections to the word "precious." It tends to be borderline homophobic in its coded usage, first of all, but second of all, it's a derogatory adjective with no alternative. It's reviewspeak. What I mean is: if you say, "that's ugly" somebody else can say, "no, it's beautiful." If you say, "it's over-stuffed" somebody can say, "really, I thought it was pretty thin." So the problem with a word like precious is that the scale of adjectives with "precious" on it belongs solely to the reviewer and is just a way of being mean. Case in point: this whole nonsense about Sufjan Stevens's's BQE Thing. Words like fey, twee, and precious have become these little nuggets of coded disdain, but they are really just useless self-congratulatory gestures on the part of the reviewer. What is the opposite of twee? Muscular? It all reminds me of the insane misogynist critiques of Jane Austen's novels. I guess the place for a word like that would be in a larger piece about the music world -- there was an enormous brouhaha in Iceland about the so-called Krútt scene. Krútt is probably the closest approximation in Icelandic of "precious" -- it refers to Múm, kind of Sigur Rós, and a lot of imitators: it denotes little bells, reversed glockenspiels, fairytale vocals, cutely-outfitted brass bands. Now, all of that is just a description and not derogatory; my iPod overflows with this shit. Anyway, to go to a concert of that kind of music and be like, "it's precious," all you're doing is going to a Chinese restaurant and being like, "wow, they were serving mad chinese food up in there!"

The full nearly-point-by-point analysis is up at his blog. David Byrne also recently took on a NY Times review on his blog.

All Walkmen, High Places and Grizzly Bear tour dates below...

Continue reading "Walkmen, Grizzly Bear?, High Places & other bands playing the Guggenheim, Nico Muhly critiques NY Times review"

Angela Bulloch's "Hybrid Song Box.4" (2008), which contains my 26-minute soundtrack of new music, will be on display at the Guggenheim Museum from October 24 - January 7, 2009, as part of the group exhibition "theanyspacewhatever." This is the third piece on which Angela and I have collaborated, and the first to be exhibited in New York.

Please spend some time with it if you have the opportunity. [David Grubbs]

David Grubbs' new album, An Optimist Notes the Dusk, was released by Drag City on September 23, 2008. David Grubbs performs for free, today (Nov 1, 2008), at Cake Shop in NYC at 6 PM sharp. All dates below...

Continue reading "David Grubbs - the Guggenheim, an instore, Tour Dates"

Free Admission Day
TH, Oct 30, Noon-8 p.m.
To thank New Yorkers for their patience during the three-year restoration during which the building remained opened but was covered in scaffolding, the Guggenheim is offering a day of free admission on Oct. 30, a Thursday, a day of the week the museum is generally closed to the public. This is the first free day since 1992.

The Guggenheim Museum is located at Fifth Ave and 89th Street in Manhattan.