By:
Rochelle Shipman
02/21/13 10:47 PM
Tucked away on Potrero Hill, the beloved recording studio Tiny Telephone is turning 15 this year. As Noise Pop festivities get under way, indie superhero and studio founder John Vanderslice is inviting the public inside for its very first open house.
Thursday’s event likely will be more crowded than a personal tour, but is guaranteed to be cozy, with a bit of background music and many of the studio’s engineers standing by to answer questions.
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Great music always has been challenging. Radiohead never intended “OK Computer” to be immediately accessible and “Exile on Main Street” lacked the radio-ready singles that defined much of the Rolling Stones’ earlier music.
Still, sometimes you just want to pop in an album and listen to something simple: big hooks, heroic guitar solos, songs about girls.
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Power-pop purveyor Marshall Crenshaw never planned on having his own retro-minded radio show. But a funny thing happened when he was chatting with his old chum Richard “Handsome Dick” Manitoba a couple of years ago.
As the Dictators frontman raved about his DJ gig on Little Steven’s Sirius Satellite station Underground Garage, Crenshaw surprisingly found himself feeling envious.
“So I knew somebody who owned a radio station,” he says. “I just called him up and asked if I could go on the air, and he said I could.”
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For a decade, Søren Løkke Juul existed in the backing-musician shadows of three groups in his native Denmark: the electronic Morfus, an experimental all-instrumental outfit called Badun, then a Fleet Foxes-inspired folk combo called Let Me Play You Guitar. The keyboardist-vocalist learned a lot, watching from behind the scenes, until he walked offstage one night and never looked back.
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“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” Dorothy Parker once wittily observed. But Lisa Loeb begs to differ.
The bespectacled folk-popper has fared well in romance, from her lengthy relationship with Dweezil Zappa (culminating in their culinary show for the Food Network, “Dweezil & Lisa”) through her zany E! channel dating program, “Number 1 Single,” to her 2009 marriage to music supervisor Roey Hershkovitz, with whom she has two children.
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With celebrated 20th-century Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet being an ardent supporter of contemporary music, and known for premiering works by Stravinsky and Ravel, it’s no surprise that Opera Parallèle’s Nicole Paiement cites him as a principal influence.
“My personal goal, like Ansermet’s, is to promote new music and sort of help move audiences into the 21st century,” says Paiement, artistic director of the San Francisco-based troupe, which opens its season this weekend with the local premiere of “Ainadamar” by Osvaldo Golijov.
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When frustrated ex-folkie Justin Young met equally cynical guitarist Freddie Cowan, a brilliant little combo called The Vaccines was born, later releasing their fiery, punk-forged 2011 debut, “What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?” After working with The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr.
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Didn’t make it to Brazil for Carnival this month? Cut loose Sunday at the Mission’s Elbo Room with leading dread-bass DJ Kush Arora spinning alongside electro-reggae spitter MC Zulu.
Just back from India and supporting his new Little Owl Recordings EP, “The Carioca Bass,” Arora is planning a night of global electronic dance music including Jamaican dancehall, tropical-influenced sounds and his own heavy-hitting brand of dread-bass.
Arora will run the rhythms and dub live, while Chicago-based Panamanian MC Zulu does his thing.
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Daniil Trifonov, 2011 winner of the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, appears in San Francisco this week. Today, the 21-year-old will perform Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the visiting Russian National Orchestra. The program also includes works by Tchaikovsky and Verdi.
At what age did you realize that your musical abilities were perhaps a bit unusual?
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Fans of Durham, N.C., family band Delta Rae — which plays The City on Thursday — are familiar with Brittany Hölljes’ smoky vocals from the band’s recent debut album, “Carry the Fire.”
They have heard her, and her co-vocalist and childhood friend, Liz Hopkins, on Peggy Lee’s “Bless You (For the Good That’s in You)” on the “Gangster Squad” soundtrack, and with brothers Eric (keyboards) and Ian (guitar) on a YouTube cover of “The Chain” by their stylistic forebears Fleetwood Mac.
The outfit is also featured in the upcoming animated film “Escape From Planet Earth.”
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URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/archive/17541/17541?page=8&quicktabs_1=0
