Bon Iver at Bowery Ballroom

Ok, I wanted to give a quick review of the Bon Iver show I went to last night (if you haven't heard of him, definitely check him out at http://www.myspace.com/boniver).

The Bowerbirds opened for Bon Iver. They were good--the lead vocalist Phil Moore's voice was pleasant--kind of like if Rufus Wainwright got caught in boon country with a couple of bottles of French wine along for entertainment. I couldn't get over how unhappy and discontented the backup vocalist Beth Tacular looked onstage (which was compounded by the fact that when she wasn't straddling a drum kit like she was milking a cow, she occupied the most prominent place on the stage right up front, which seemed a bit odd considering her disposition, but whatever...

As for Bon Iver, all in all I thought the show was fantastic. The songs from "For Emily, Forever Ago" were even better live than they were on the CD. Justin Vernon has an uncanny ability to conjure an ethereal intimacy onstage, exuding both confidence and humility in the same breath, not to mention having some kick ass harmonies that make my skin crawl. The melodies are pretty basic, but when he sings it's coming from somewhere authentic and I totally dig that. And hey, "Skinny Love" and "The Wolves Act 1 and 2" are just damn good songs. The only things I would mention would be that there were times, like in "Creature Fear" when there was a lot distortion added to the songs that seemed unnecessary and even jarring. Also, the final song was a total let down, with all the band members from both bands standing in one line in front of the stage and singing a cover of some song I've never heard (that didn't seem incredibly compelling to begin with, although I'm working on a rendition here, so that might be unfair). I'm gonna go ahead and say it. In theory it sounds like a nice idea...in reality it was kinda painful and overkill in its intimacy.

Oh, and more thing, as a New Yorker I would like to just say that that unlike other parts of the world, NYC fans are not big into collective sing alongs. Especially not when we are instructed to participate with guilt trips about how great some crowd in San Francisco sang the hook, and huge bright stage lights are turned on us. Bon Iver learned that the hard way last night, when they tried TWICE to attempt to cajole the crowd into a sing along. But bands shouldn't take it too hard, it's just not our style.

All in all, an awesome time and some really amazing music. I hope Bon Iver gets all the attention it deserves. The picture above is credited to my awesome buddy Nellwyn and her trusty iPhone. Danke Nell!

Chats Part 01: i'm just a me, not a blogger, read my lips

John: done
John: yeah
it's done
yup
sure is
uh huh
Ruthy: haha
ok man
going to grab dinner but i will check it out right nw
haha
it's funny
i would maybe even just say "a blog about a girl and boy making music"
Ruthy: i will post responses after the show tonight
John: you should bring your camera to the show
take some pics
and thenm write a review
and then post that and your pictures
Ruthy: arghh
i guess you're right
me: you don't have to
just a thought
Ruthy: no it's a great idea
i should do it
i
am looking for camera now
John: OMG
you are a hipster blogger now
Ruthy: no i'm a lameo blogger
John: you blog
dude
Ruthy: my camera isn't charged
John: you blog?
Ruthy: i can't use it!
John: use your smart phone
dude
Ruthy: i have a crappy chocolate
John: every blogger has a smart
phone
Ruthy: DUDE
John: dude
like
Ruthy: i'm not a blogger!!!!
John: due
Ruthy: like
John: dude
Ruthy: duddddddde
John: blog that shit
Ruthy: i'm just a me
not a blogger
read mylips
John: dude
Ruthy: no blogger here
John: like
Ruthy: dude like
go for your hipster run
and blog baout it
John: OMG
Dude
so
Like
I went for this run
and like
saw some graffiti
and like
dude
blogged that shit
blogged it I tell you
bloooooooooooooooooooged
Ruthy: DUDDDDDDDDDDDEEE
k man
i'm outtie
ttyl

----Post the posting----
Ruthy: I would just like to note for the record that 1) I had no idea John was going to post this last night while I was at the Bon Iver show and he was wishing he was there and hatching nefarious plots of posting our gchat convos. 2) This is the least funny and interesting gchat we have had lately, so I don't know why he posted it. 3) I literally was running back and forth getting ready to leave my house pre the show at Bowery Ballroom and was trying to kindly respond to his chats without getting side tracked. So if I come off like a dumb ass, that is why. Thanks John!

Get Your Tom Waits On

NPR is now streaming a full 2 1/2 hour Tom Waits performance recorded July 5, 2008 at Atlanta's Fox Theater. I love me some Tom Waits. A true artist with vision and integrity. A Classic! Mr. Waits' humor is a treat as well. To promote his current tour aptly entitled Glitter And Doom he released a press conference vid (it's recommended to watch to the end) and an interview which, was conducted by none other than Tom Waits himself. Get your link on:

Tom Waits Performance Stream on NPR

Tom Waits' True Confessions Interview

Stop Rubbing Off On Me! I'm having an outer body experience

This somehow became the mantra for this weekend. Don't ask me how or why, but it seemed hilarious in the midst of working on our tunes this weekend. After returning to our song "The Rain" on Saturday and playing it for a friend of mine who stopped by to see the space and hang out, both John and I realized that what had sounded rad to us in the studio the night before didn't sound as great with a third person in there (and especially in juxtaposition to the other tune we played her that we finished arranging called '212'). So, after she left John turned to me and said "I think we need to overhaul the song. It doesn't feel right anymore," and so that's exactly what we did. We stripped away bits that didn't add anything to the tune and took out everything that we thought didn't add anything to it. For example, we had this sample that we manipulated to sound like a crashing thunder ball of rain, which we ended up dialing down a lot in volume and just using as a subtle build up to the chorus.
I really think that part of the joy and challenge to making music is being willing to completely disassemble a song you think you've finished, and start from just its barest bones to create something even more cool and bizarre.

Speaking of rain, on Sunday we caught MGMT's show at Mccarren Pool, which--I'm not going to deny it--was even cooler because of the downpour you had to endure to watch the show. Granted, I wore cowboy boots so I was semi-prepared...can't say as much for my friends with flip flops. Too bad we got too drunk to work at the studio after. I guess it was a pipe dream to think we'd be productive after an entire day of imbibing. I blame it on the free shots at brunch. We should have known.

John's Update: After listening to the new track it really didn't snap. I have always stuck to the mantra of taking away rather than adding to make something better. Yeah man, I was exhausted after the show. Should have known: Drinking all day lowers productivity.

Fond farewell to WWW

It saddens me to announce the demise of our other band What What Where, the electronic dance rock band that John and I formed with our good friend Dinesh back in 2006. This week we officially decided to disband the project to pursue our other musical paths. Dinesh will continue DJing and manning the board at his Sweet Sounds Studio in NYC and John and I will continue our hell raising with Syvia.

And just to show that I can also offer visual stimuli on my blog posts, I'm attaching a photo from one of our last shows in late June 2008, when we opened for Mindless Self Indulgence at Terminal 5.

To all of you lucky fans who somehow managed, despite our best efforts to remain somewhat elusive when it came to merch, to receive a rare piece of WWW flair and/or demo, I would hold on to that stuff because you never know what it may be worth in a few years. Someday you may count yourself among a rare breed of music fans who own a piece of "vintage WWW."
I, for one, have already locked mine in a time capsule and buried it under the corner of the new monstrosity of a condo that's being built next door. Just saying.

First Post With A/V

Hi There -

John here, this is my first post to the Syviamusic blog. It's very exciting I must tell you! I wanted to share a video with everyone. The vid is appropriately entitled "Bert & Ernie tries Gangsta-Rap." The song in the vid is from one of my fav Hip Hop artists of all time: M.O.P.

These dudes don't fuck around. When they say they are going to kill you, I really think they mean it. I saw them live once and it was like a punk / hardcore show. People were moshing and going nuts. Producer Extraordinaire, DJ Premier, was up front moshing along with everyone else. Shit was bonkers.

So here it is, Bert & Ernie doing "Ante Up" by M.O.P.:



How's the spelling and grammar Mirsky?

When sickness strikes, the music suffers

So Sunday was a wash out, not because of rain, which would have been a godsend because I literally melt just sitting in my living room surfing away on the internetz, but because John got deathly ill on Sunday and had to cancel our session in the studio. The upside was I got some chores done that I've been putting off (like...laundry! and...watering my dad's roof plants so he doesn't kill me! and...filing away receipts! Yay!) I wished we could have finished up tweaking "The Rain" tune, but it's cool. C'est la vie and you gotta move on.

What sucks is that I started trying to work on this song that has popped into my head, which I have lyrics for but I haven't quite settled on a melody or figured out the emotion that I want to convey in the song, so it is sort of in music purgatory right now, continually shifting between being a random lyric idea and an actual part of a song. Right when I think I've got the melody that feels right, I try to recreate it or I listen back to it recorded and it doesn't work. I think I just need to spend a little more time batting around with the lyrics in my primo creative spots--which I will someday reveal. Someday. They really aren't that interesting, but I'm trying to create some degree of mystery here. I'm also trying to cut down on the amount that I end up writing in these blog posts, but it is just SO HARD! Once I sit down and write I can't stop, but I am tryi n g t o f i g h t t h e u r g e t o c o n t i n u e , s o y o u a r e n' t b o r e d.

Hmm. If I tried putting a space after every letter it would definitely make it a lot harder to write as much. Hmm... interesting.

Can't talk now! I'm in the studio!

This weekend has been a weekend of catching up on all the music writing that we missed out on last weekend, when John went fishing at some lake and I went to Massachusetts to visit my family. It was a relief to get out of New York, which can be deadly in the summer--something about the buildings trapping in heat and lots of pissed off New Yorkers planning their days around finding their next air conditioned refuge. Oh, and John's car's AC totally conked out on the commute over to the studio on the hottest day ever, so now our commute to the studio in Brooklyn is AWESOME (note my sarcasm). Man, you gotta get that fixed pronto.

In terms of the music, we had already passed what John likes to refer to as our "first hurdle"--namely, arranging our first song from start to finish, which we are tentatively titling "212." In a future blog post yet to be determined I will spend a little more time talking about my own writing process (and John will hopefully chime in with his own personal take on writing music), but for that song, I basically just started with two or three lines that popped into my head with this catchy little melody, which I tried to expand into a larger melody with a story behind it (basically, that sometimes I get anxious being alone in the apartment at night and nothing freaks me out more than weird late night phone calls from numbers I don't recognize).

Anyways, this weekend we arrived in the studio to work on our second jam "The Rain." I had thought up this song on some rainy days in June and we had already laid down some ideas around the verse and chorus melodies I had thought up. Listening back to it the past few weeks in the comfort of my own home, I just wasn't feeling the chorus anymore. It just kind of seemed like the verse was rad, but then the chorus would hit and it was a let down, so I muted the vocals and tried to think of what I heard in the music that we had already constructed for the previous chorus. I came up with some ideas and tossed around some new lyrics for the verse, recorded them at home and sent the mp3 to Johno for his take on the new ideas. He liked them, so this weekend we returned to the tune with the new ideas and started to nail down the entire song.

When we arrived at the studio I was kind of bummed to find that someone had accidentally broken the paper lamp I had brought last time. We try to set the 'mood' when we write, and the bright lights in the Brooklyn space can sometimes feel like we are in a mall rather than a studio. So I brought this paper lamp in to the space--a remnant of my brother's July 4th rooftop party--and suddenly we weren't getting frustrated or antsy about writing music. It's amazing how the little things can effect the creative process. Clearly, I was somewhat attached to this paper lamp. Perhaps you could even say that I thought of it as some kind of mystical good luck charm. Perhaps. Keep in mind that I also consider beer a mystical good luck charm. Whatever works to get the creative juices going, you feel me?

Anyways, we played around with some samples of sounds I had to create this super weird beat that sounds like an industrial explosion of water that runs through the entire song. Basically, we just would listen back to the song after doing each arrangement or test of adding/dropping out instruments or beats and then figure out if we thought it worked, and if not, what it needed to achieve the effect we wanted.

Today we will be back in the studio to finish up arranging "The Rain" and maybe even start on tackling some of the other half tunes that we have drafted up. There is talk of bringing a camera to the space and/or maybe even filming us working on stuff so we can upload it to the blog, so keep your eyes peeled for an exclusive photo of our paper lamp good luck charm, which despite being mauled by some other band's gear, still works!

A stint at rehab

Ok, so technically not "Rehab" a la Lindsay Lohan and others, but almost as entertaining. Our band What What Where performed last night at Rehab in Alphabet City (formerly Club Midway) and had one of our best shows ever. We all let loose and just kind of ran with it, while still staying in sync. Maybe it was the energy we still had from the craziness of our previous show, when we opened for Mindless Self Indulgence at Terminal 5 to a sold out crowd of 3,000 people that made the Rehab feel so intimate and let us just let go and have fun on stage. There is something hilarious, however, about going from VIP rooms and backstage riders demanding hummus and coconut juice for our Terminal 5 gig to waiting on St. Mark's Place, alone, at midnight on a Wednesday for the M103 bus to come. And of course, I'm in that middle zone where I've drunk just enough to be pleasantly buzzed but not too much that I'm going to pass out the minute I see a soft surface, that I adamantly refuse to fork over cash for a cab. Quitting my job in the late spring when I decided to try to become a full time musician means I got zero moolah coming in, and I know I can wait it out until that damn bus comes because it's 'the city never sleeps' NYC so it has to come at some point-- maybe not in five minutes or ten minutes, and I may have to bear the sight of numerous M101 and M102 buses ending their routes right at that corner before the magical M103 emerges like a beacon of hope from the onslaught of traffic barreling down 3rd avenue, but it will come. Besides, at that point I was still kind of high on adrenaline from the show, and lugging around my vocal effects kit, and I sort of wanted that time alone waiting for the midnight bus to think about the gig we just did and watch the late night antics of New Yorkers.
Even though my vocal effects mic somehow didn't turn on when it was supposed to, and we started late due to a missing band member, it was altogether a really sweaty, awesome show. God, I wish I could do that every night.
(And for the record, I drunkenly lost my willpower and gave in to indulging John in his stupid "Knock knock" joke, although I really don't think it is as funny as he thinks it is. John, care to share?)

Saul Williams at C-stone, what?

Last night I saw Saul Williams (http://www.saulwilliams.com/) perform for a small gathering of folks at Cornerstone Promotions' offices in NYC to celebrate the release of his new album The Inevitable Rise and and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! He performed three spoken word pieces and debuted a music video. It had been a while since I have watched a spoken word performance, and I was blown away by the passion of his delivery and his remarkable grasp of word play. I almost felt like he was a Shakespearean actor in the way that he molded and delivered the consonants and vowels from his mouth. And sure enough, I checked his website and he is also an actor. It all comes full circle. Full circle.

More importantly, John and I had a chance to chat it up with Williams post-performance and find out more about his writing process, which I personally found very provocative as a lyricist and songwriter so I thought I'd share it with all y'all. He described how it starts with the music, and then listens to that and does his first pass just trying to find how he wants the lyrics to be delivered, so he will literally record a track of just sounds of consonants and vowels and how they will pop in the relation to the music with an occasional word here and there. Then he listens through that and starts doing a pass at writing actual lyrics that will create that auditory effect in those particular places in the song. It's always nice to see intelligent, creative people get the attention they deserve and I hope Williams continues to get cred for his art. I, for one, and going to take a crack at writing some songs the way he does and see what I come up with. Who knows, maybe next show I'll be getting all up in some spoken word...

John, I elect you to bang on the steel stool for the beat. It's either that, or we duke it out in a battle of words on stage, and you better hope they don't ask you to spell out your verses. Just saying... HA! :)

[Insert rousing/inspiring/uplifting first blog title here]

So this is how it really begins--no reality t.v. show, no American Idol fanfare--just a realization that the only thing I want to do each day is make music and learning exactly how to use the software for that on my computer. "Get some instructional manuals," you say? Puhlease! This girl doesn't do instructional manuals. It's all about the thrill of trial and error, and learning through experience. And then when all else fails...asking for help from the pros, and bartering software knowledge for brewskies.

I decided nothing good comes out of life without plunging in and taking risks, so I quit my job, embraced living with my parents for a little while longer. I knew that if I didn't give singing a shot now, it would never happen. And you know what? These days with all their ups and downs will never come again, so I thought, what the hell, why not start a blog and record the process. It will be a hodge podge (Great word, huh? Almost like 'porridge' but not :P) of random thoughts, video clips, pictures, and actual hilarious/interesting/

educational chat conversations between me and my bandmate John Majer.

SYVIA is a labor of love born out of a great friendship that is all about the ying and the yang. To be completely frank, this blog will finally give me the chance to show the world once and for all that I'm in fact a hell of a lot funnier than John.
Because I am. They've done studies and everything.

/Ruthy