Wire live at Coachella 2011!

By far the nicest new surprise this year has been talented beatboxer Beardyman from the U.K. Using a blend he claims is 100% on-the-spot recorded vocals, his beats move the room while evoking a format of hip hop we haven’t seen since Doug E. Fresh. In fact, he even makes me reappreciate my sworn enemy, Bob Marley!

He has no recordings out yet, but with this kind of talent and creativity, there are a lot of places this witty young man could go.

MP3: OY live at Dublab

The interview appeared in L.A. RECORD issue #100.

photos by Daiana Feuer

[View with PicLens]

JOHN CALE + BEN GIBBARD + MARK LANEGAN AT UCLA’S ROYCE HALL ON THURS, SEPT. 30. 8PM / ALL AGES / $38-68. HTTP://WWW.UCLALIVE.ORG/.

Killer: “This one’s for Warren Zevon…“

Vampyre Love (Ultra Live) by RTX

Planet Earth’s mighty RTX surge forth with this “ultra live” Pentagram cover recorded on a camcorder at an old Safari Sam’s show with Easy Action and No Age. This will be coming out on a special one-sided 7″ on Outlaw but you can listen above, and while you listen, maybe you should go read Kurt from RTX’s interview with Pentagram’s Bobby Liebling! (Every word in this post useful for your life!)

Here’s Rodriguez live at San Francisco’s Amoeba with the same backing band—the Fresh and Onlys!—that he’ll have tonight at the El Rey. Read our interviews with him and opening band Glasser and see you tonight!

Cinefamily will present a special tribute to Mitch Hedberg on Sunday night including never-seen footage of his TV pilot, live performances, TV appearances and Mitch’s directorial debut Los Enchiladas! Certain to be a crucial night—tickets here and more info below!

Much like his obvious antecedent, Steven Wright, the late Mitch Hedberg dealt in surrealist snippets and ingeniously obvious wordplay, where the only real set-up needed for any joke, which rarely lasted more than a few seconds, was your becoming in-tune with his personality. Whereas Wright’s delivery is incredibly dry and snail-paced, Hedberg’s was fast ‘n furious, spoken to the floor while he hid behind a pair of sunglasses, in a captivating drawl halfway between “stoner” and “beat poet”. Hedberg died prematurely in 2005 at the age of 37, and is remembered with admiration and affection by his fellow comedians and friends. The Cinefamily, with generous assistance from Mitch’s widow and fellow comedian Lynn Shawcroft, has gone through her voluminous archives to unearth rare footage of live performances, TV appearance, and his unreleased MTV reality pilot (“The Mitch Hedberg Project”). The night will climax with a screening of Mitch’s lone directorial effort, the autobiographical 1999 feature film Los Enchiladas.

L.A. RECORD is happy to co-present (with L.A. FilmForum and Cinefamily!) the re-engagement of the mind-debriding Japanese avant silent A Page Of Madness, previously scored live by Gaslamp Killer and re-scored tonight by British duo In The Nursery, who have also contributed original new music to The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Cinefamily explains:

The U.K.-based group In The Nursery returns to the Cinefamily to score another silent classic, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page Of Madness. The most modern, challenging Japanese silent to survive the WWII firebombings, Madness throws the viewer into a maelstrom of hallucinations and obsession, and easily stands way out amongst its kabuki and jidai-geki contemporaries. A haunted man takes a job as a janitor in an insane asylum where his wife is committed; his fantasies of liberating her blend into the mad, confounding visions of the inmates. Told without intertitles, the narrative takes a back seat to pure visual expression. Kinugasa synthesizes every available experimental technique known at the time: his use of superimpositions, flashbacks, rapid montage and complex subjective camerawork rival the innovations of Murnau and Gance for sheer audacity. Lost for half a century after its completion and rediscovered in the early ’70s by Kinugasa himself in his own garden shed, A Page of Madness is a stunning, singular work, and the live score provided by In The Nursery’s twin brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone is equally as captivating, incorporating the latest music technology with traditional Japanese instrumentation and percussion. The evening’s screening will feature The George Eastman House’s beautifully restored 35mm print!
Dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926, 35mm, 60 min.

Starts at 8 PM at Cinefamily at 611 N. Fairfax Ave.—all ages and tickets available at the box office or online here!