SKIPSTER / ECHOING VOICES OF INDEPENDENT MUSIC IN UPSTATE NY

Watch Brooklyn’s Tanlines perform their mega-jam “Real Life” at Green Label Sound’s SXSW showcase. Meanwhile, Settings continues to be one our favorite releases of 2010, EP or otherwise.

Our recent favorites Twin Sister have thrown their latest Color Your Life EP up on their website for your downloading pleasure.  Following the “free is the new black” business model, you can obtain this baby for $0.00. Alternatively, you can smugly pat yourself on the back and pre-order the CD or vinyl. For twenty-nine minutes of their trademark spacious, groove-oriented pop, it’s a bargain either way.

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Twin Sister / Lady Daydream

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Twin Sister / Phenomenons

Citay make their Ithaca debut at the Wildfire Lounge thanks to Automatic Buffalo!

This week the tundra of Western New York is thawing and music is being swept across its land! Due to the overwhelming amount of events skipster is here for you to outline everything worth knownin’ about. In our humble opinions emphasis should be placed on the Dum Dum Girls in Buffalo, Citay in Ithaca, and Air Waves in both Ithaca and Rochester.  There’s truly a bit of something for everyone this week, so go on and  get out of your house!

ITHACA:

Citay and Awesome Awesomes at WildFire Lounge
Tuesday, March 20 at 10 PM

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The Books at Cornell Cinema
Tuesday, March 30 8 PM

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Air Waves with special guests Tropical Punk .
Wednesday, March 31 at 9:10pm

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Shearwater and Wye Oak at Castaways
Friday, April 2nd

ROCHESTER:
Javelin the Bug Jar
Tonight, March 29th at 9PM

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Air Waves and Past Lives at the Bug Jar
Tuesday, March 30th at 9 PM

Autumn in Halifax at the Bug Jar
Wednesday, March 31st at 9 PM

BUFFALO:
David Gray and Phosphorescentat UB
Tonight, March 29th at 8PM

Dum Dum Girls  at Sound Lab
Sunday, April 4th at 9PM

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Trumansburg’s famed GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance has finally announced its 2010 schedule! While I don’t see a show stopper as great as last year’s Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, I can certainly vouch that it is destined to be a great time.  This year the festival takes place on the weekend of July 25th! (July 22-25) and tickets are already on sale, so go get your early bird specials folks!

Check out the full line up below!
Read More… »

Zola Jesus, Photo: Pitchfork Media

This whole week I’ve been infatuated with Zola Jesus, a name I’ve heard  before yet never actively researched. A friend recently handed me a copy of Zola’s new EP, Stridulum, and it blew me away – Zola (real name Nika Roza Danilova) has a deep voice that paints pictures with tar- it’s almost like listening to a Vampire  themed opera (and not the kind with hot 35 year olds playing 18 year olds). It’s heavy music with a heavy mood that grabs your heart and gives it a giant Indian burn. Keeping the amazing EP artwork in mind, it kind of reminds me of Beach House’s atmospheric vocals and sound dipped in a giant barrel of oil. Danilova’s voice definetly has the Victoria Legrand orbital pull, that’s for sure, which is impressive considering her young age of 20!

Nonetheless, check out the song “I Can’t Stand”, off the aforementioned EP below.

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Buy! // Download Song!

See Zola Jesus’s NY tour dates after the cut:
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While Skipster was in Philadelphia for Joanna Newsom’s set at First Unitarian Church last weekend, we managed a late-night breakfast at a diner full of black trannies. Even more importantly, I grabbed the physical 12″ of Tanlines‘ outstanding new Settings EP, which features some of the year’s most memorable/unnerving cover art. These six tracks — perched somewhere between “dance pop” and “calypso” — have seemed to conspire with the late-March sunshine, soundtracking glimpses of Upstaters jaunting outside in the 45-degree weather as if it were August.

Memory Tapes — who you’ll remember as an MVP of 2009’s chillwave scene — recently contributed a remix to the release of Tanlines’ single “Real Life,” which you can listen to below. His signature bliss-out fares much better here than on his previous redo of Yeasayer’s anthemic “Ambling Alp,” those coruscating synths tempering the song’s overflowing enthusiasm without softening it, coaxing us into its key shrug-off moment: “It was a past life thing, it wasn’t anything at all.”

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DL: Tanlines – “Real Life (Memory Tapes remix)

Settings is out now via True Panther Sounds. Buy it.

Here at Skipster HQ, we keep a backroom full of indentured servants who stay busy generating new content ideas while we sit around and listen to Kate Bush. Finally, we’ve got something fresh and exciting to share with you: Parallax Views, a feature where guest contributors deliver their thoughts on buzzy new indie tracks. Call it Skipster’s first foray into cultural anthropology.

Essentially, our mission with this project is to contextualize the music we focus on within the wider Upstate community. We want opinions from people who have never browsed websites like Pitchfork and Hype Machine, people whose musical interests operate outside the influence of South by Southwest. If there’s anything we dislike about the state of independent music, it’s that cliqueish behavior that keeps so much behind closed doors. We genuinely want to know how what’s happening in this self-contained world is perceived by the outside.

With each new entry, we’ll give a quick background on the contributor followed by his or her responses to a series of prompted questions. Stay tuned.

The weekend has been busy, with Psychedelic Horseshit last Thursday in Rochester, Joanna Newsom in Philly on Friday, and finally City Center, Niao and Spiral Bodies in Ithaca on Saturday. Well…now that it’s Sunday night, I finally have some time to sit back, breathe and realize the weekend and its fun has slipped away. When thinking about tomorrow I’m getting considerably nauseous , however, the one thing I can count on to carry me through the day (a day in which I know will be filled with ridiculous requests and last minute work) is music. Is that corny? Oh my god, it’s so corny.

That said, here are four songs I’m counting on, and if you’re in my boat, hopefully they’ll help you stay afloat too (oh, hai, see what I d1d theRRe?)

Tune Yards

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tUne YarDs// Real Live Flesh
(Merrill Garbus AKA tUne YarDs will be hitting Buffalo on April 8th with Xiu Xiu! I’m currently still on the fence in regards to how I feel about Merrill, however I cannot deny her vocal and percussive talent. Formulated opinion TBD.)

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Goldfrapp // Believer
(Off of Head First, out this Tuesday on Mute Records!)

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Gang Gang Dance // House Jam (Hot Chip Remix)
(Gang Gang Dance…oh, how I yearn for their newest album. Currently you can download this Hot Chip remix of “House Jam” on the band’s myspace.)

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Sleigh Bells // Holly
(Sleigh Bells just announced their debut full length, Treats, will be released May 11th on MIA’s own record label, NEET recordings in conjunction with Mom + Pop Music. Seriously, everything about this equation is pure gold. Thank God the bells are hitting Western NY in April to give us a taste of their Treats.)

skipster ally Bob Proehl, local Ithaca promoter under the alias, Automatic Buffalo, sent us this nice reminder about K Recording Artist City Center’s show this Saturday. Considering Bob is a wordsmith, I’d rather let his message stand alone than ruin it! So without further adieu– Bob Proehl, everyone:

So this Saturday, Fred Thomas of Saturday Looks Good to Me brings his new band City Center to Ithaca.  Finally.  Like, I’ve been trying to get Fred back up here since forever o’clock.  The band released its first record last year, and for my money, it was one of the best albums of 2009.  Informed first and foremost by Fred’s uncanny gift for crafting pop melodies, City Center uses those melodies as a sort of map to explore vast sonic landscapes.  There’s a definite Animal Collective influence going on, but City Center remains melodic throughout, setting the listener adrift but never leaving them stranded.

Okay, see that right there?  That’s why I’ll never get a job writing for Pitchfork.  Sigh.

Anyway, it’s a goddamn beautiful album, and having seen Fred perform some of these songs in their more nascent form over two years ago, I can tell you it makes for some pretty compelling performance.  Joining Fred on the bill are NYC minimalist musicians Niao and Spiral Bodies.

Automatic Buffalo presents: City Center
The Giving Tree Cafe, Ithaca (The Old ABC Cafe on Stewart Ave)
When: Saturday, March 20th // Doors: 9 pm
All Ages, $5

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City Center // Heat Isn’t the Word

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City Center // Open House

Erykah Badu’s incredible New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War has aged beautifully since its 2008 release, unusually so considering its Bush-era timeliness and bizarre self-indulgence, and we’re finally about to taste the follow-up. Part Two: Return of the Ankh drops 3/30 on Universal Motown. Get an early look at the mind-bending cover art — in which android Erykah finds a Garden of Eden sprouting out of her head, or something — and grab lead single “Window Seat” below.

Erykah Badu – “Window Seat”

Note: Badu appears 4/6 on The Mo’Nique Show. This sounds like essential viewing… for obvious reasons.

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