It looks like Pitchfork is continuing to expand their festival business.
After recently rolling out the Pitchfork Music Festival’s European counterpart in Paris, they’ve just announced plans for a “full-on four-day multi-media festival” in New York City. The festival is called Forms and is scheduled for February 1-4, 2012. According to Pitchfork, “Forms celebrates and explores the interconnected and growing worlds of independent music, art, and gaming.” They’ve partnered with local promoter powerhouse Bowery Presents for booking and promotion, but have not yet announced lineup, venues, or other details. READ MORE
It was only a matter of time before Pitchfork started releasing some of the archived goodness that came out of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. The first video up is the Battles ripping through a hot version of “Futura,” one of my favorites from Gloss Drop.
In case you missed it, our own @WHITperson was there and captured these awesome photos.
I just noticed that we got a request for my TV on the Radio photos from the Pitchfork Music Festival, so I thought I’d post those along with my other remaining photos, and try to wrap things up with some comments about my experience this past weekend.
We’ve already posted photos from most of my key highlights of the weekend, including Battles, Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, and Deerhunter. Battles — now stripped down to a core power trio — seriously tore things up during their Friday afternoon slot, freaking out some of the P-fork crowd by offering up a genre-bending display of electronics, effects-pedal pyrotechnics, and driving beats. Animal Collective also delivered another one of the more challenging sets of the weekend, playing only a few of their “hits” and instead focusing entirely on new material. At times, I’ll admit it was almost too much for me, but I dig their audacity to come out hard with the new material, and I found some of the new tunes to be entrancing and very interesting to my ears. I can’t wait to hear how some of these end up sounding on an official studio release. Another big highlight for me was Fleet Foxes, who took an entirely different approach from AC, hitting on all the key tunes from their last few releases and practically putting on a spiritual revival for the indie-folk congregation. And I already mentioned my take on Deerhunter’s set in some detail, but I was also thoroughly impressed with Cut Copy, who put on all-out dance party with what I can best characterize as a throwback to 80s new wave mixed with euro synth pop (as it happens, they’re Aussies).
Which brings me to the first of three trends I took away from the festival as a whole… READ MORE
I feel like I’ve barely had a chance to wrap my head around all the great live sets I caught at the Pitchfork Music Festival this past weekend, but Deerhunter’s set was easily one of my favorites. I noticed that someone did a full rip of the webcast video and put it up on YouTube, so I highly recommend at least checking out a few minutes of this one.
Setlist (w/ timestamps):
0:00 – Intro (White Ink)
04:33 – Desire Lines
11:20 – Hazel St.
14:57 – Don’t Cry
19:12 – Revival
22:24 – Little Kids
27:20 – Nothing Ever Happened
42:25 – Helicopter
48:24 – He Would Have Laughed
I love Deerhunter’s studio work, but these guys also put on a killer live show. Their Pitchfork set featured a raw, powerful, and experimental brand of rock’n'roll, awash with psychedelic flourishes, guitar pyrotechnics and even some extended bouts of improvisation. Bradford Cox made thorough use of his effects pedals and vocal loops, especially towards the latter end of the set, creating a washed-out, reverb-laden kind of psychedelia during “Helicopter” and “He Would Have Laughed.”
I think the highlight of the set was probably this especially out-there version of “Nothing Ever Happened,” complete with long-form jamming, vocal improv freak-outs, and of course, that face-melting finger-tapping guitar riff that Cox busts out to end the tune. The riff starts at about ~37:40 here, and for the really nerdy guitar bros, check out Cox sets up that riff as a loop and then at ~38:20 changes the loop’s tempo to make it go double-time; you can hear it play through in the song’s outro as they fade into Helicopter. And, man, it’s playing like this that makes me think that these are the days of fastly-fading distinctions between “indie rock” and “jamband.” Deerhunter jams. Dig it.
Fleet Foxes brought the second day of Pitchfork Music Festival to a close to plenty of fanfare and critical support from the blogs and news outlets I’ve scanned so far this morning. I’ve got to wait for @whitperson to round up some of his last batch of photos and maybe (just maybe) a few words supporting the festival, but ahead of that we can all enjoy his amazing gallery and imagine we were there.
This one will probably get pulled pretty fast so I’d definitely recommend jumping on this video while it’s still alive. It’s a solid Animal Collective performance front to back if you ask me.
Animal Collective headlined the first day of the Pitchfork Music Festival and Whitperson was there to get photos after seeing the band twice this week, once earlier in the week when they played in Brooklyn. The stage design was awesome looking and something that made an appearance earlier in the week as well. You can also watch the entire rip of the Pitchfork webcast that’s still up on YouTube (which I’m watching right now). This is the setlist of new songs that the band has been perfecting on the road, likely for their next album… READ MORE
Our own @whitperson is in Chicago this weekend for the Pitchfork Music Festival and he’s been rocking some seriously amazing photos from the sets he’s caught. We’ll have a few more of these to come as he wraps up his coverage from the weekend in the next few days, but for now enjoy his shots from the Battles set. The band played Friday in the mid afternoon heat opposite of tUnE-yArDs which may have drown them out a bit, which isn’t a surprise when you see stuff like this performed live.
Plus Stanier friggin’ took off his shirt…the jams were too hot for his thyroid condition!
Check out Whitperson’s full gallery after the jump; seeing these shots makes me wish I was there. #FOMO. READ MORE
Here’s the full list of artists by day now set for the 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival; I’m really kicking myself for not snatching 3-day tickets right away. Single day tickets are still on sale, though, but not likely for much longer now that the artist list is really filling out. Friday, July 15: – Animal [...]
This weekend was a weird and somewhat disappointing one for live music news (that is, unless you’re a String Cheese Incident fan — more on that shortly). The tragedy being what it is following Love Parade in Germany, I’d hate to highlight something so devastating when there’s perhaps a more useful, half-hearted set of headlines [...]
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