this week in music

ESCAPE MUSIC FESTIVAL

Girl Talk will headline two-day Escape Music Festival this weekend on Governors Island (photo by PaulSobota.com)

Governors Beach Club, Governors Island
October 11-12, one-day pass $65 (VIP $155), two-day pass $109 (VIP $259), 12 noon – 12 midnight
www.escapemusicfest.com

Originally scheduled for Pier 9 in Brooklyn, the inaugural Escape Music Festival, two days of electronic and indie music and interactive art projects, has been moved to Governors Beach Club on Governors Island. The festival, taking place October 11-12, will feature two stages, with performances by Girl Talk, Placebo, Yeasayer, Mayer Hawthorne, the Joy Formidable, the Crystal Method, Ra Ra Riot, Tesla Boy, and others, along with DJ sets by Moby, STRFKR, Neon Indian, and Plastic Plates & Sam Sparro, curated by Brooklyn’s the Most Definitely and San Francisco’s Beautiful Buzzz. On Sunday, Elrow Ibiza will present Alan Fitzpatrick, Boris, Miss Kittin, Sebastien Leger, Technasia, Sleepy & Boo, Alex English, and more. In addition, such food trucks as La Sonrisa Empanada, Mightyballs, the Poffertjes Man, Chutney, Dos Toros, Manila Girl, Sunday Gravy, Two Table Spoon, Redhook Lobster Pound, and Beekman Burgers will be selling eats. The festival is open to eighteen and over only; 1.5% of ticket sales will go to local nonprofit organizations. Be sure to read the long list of what not to bring, which includes picnic baskets, chain wallets, large backpacks, umbrellas, hard-sided coolers, and tripods.

CBGB MUSIC AND FILM FESTIVAL 2014

Billy Idol will give the keynote interview and play a short acoustic set at CBGB Festival

Multiple venues in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan
October 8-12
www.cbgbfest.com

Last year, the second CBGB Music & Film Festival spread throughout the city, glomming its brand name onto already scheduled shows in addition to hosting a series of cool free concerts in Times Square. This year is another haphazard affair that probably wouldn’t please Hilly Kristal and longtime CB devotees, as there’s still no information on when and where headliners Jane’s Addiction (performing Nothing’s Shocking) and Devo will be taking the stage. The keynote interview will feature Billy Idol talking with Timothy Sommer, followed by a brief acoustic set October 9 at Center 548 by the author of the new autobiography Dancing with Myself. There will also be discussions with Daniel Lanois, Duff McKagan, Dirty South, and others. Among the thirty film screenings are Chris Cheatham’s A Decade with an Unsigned Rock Band about August Christopher, Nick Hall’s I Need a Dodge! Joe Strummer on the Run, John Jeffcoat’s Big in Japan about Tennis Pro, Robert Zemeckis’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, presented by Beastie Boy Adam Horvitz. Bands participating in the festival include the Muffs, Murphy’s Law, Rocket & the Ghost, the Howl, Crazy Pills, Session 73, We Are Temporary, Echo Station, Boy Toy, and Emily Danger. Center 548 will also be home to the exhibition “From Bathroom Stalls to Gallery Walls: A Visual Tribute to CBGB & OMFUG.” But that doesn’t mean that this festival really has all that much to do with CBGB itself. [Ed. note: It has since been announced that Devo and Jane’s Addiction will be performing as part of Sunday’s free concert in Times Square, with two stages of live music that features Midnight Mob and Ex-Cops at 11:00, Face the King at 11:30, Cheeky Parade at 12 noon, We Are Scientists at 12:30, Surfer Blood at 1:15, Devo at 4:30, School of Rock and Robert Delong at 5:25, and Jane’s Addiction at 6:25.]

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH

Nick Cave takes a look back at his life and career as only Nick Cave can in imaginative, deeply introspective documentary

20,000 DAYS ON EARTH (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, 2014)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 17 – October 16
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.20000daysonearth.com

The film 20,000 Days on Earth might sound like a 1950s low-budget sci-fi cult classic you’ve never seen, but actually it’s an unusual and vastly inventive document of the life and times of Australian rocker, poet, novelist, film composer, screenwriter, and all-around bon vivant Nick Cave. In their debut feature, installation artists and curators Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard collaborated closely with Cave on the film, mixing reality and fantasy as they follow Cave during a rather busy day. “Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it,” Cave, who just turned fifty-seven, says in the deeply poetic voiceover narration he wrote specifically for the film. “It’s all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it, and retell it, our small, precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves or to others, first creating the narrative of our lives, and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.” Forsyth and Pollard journey with Cave as he delves into religion and his relationship with his father with psychoanalyst Darian Leader, visits with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis (who shares an amazing story about Nina Simone and a piece of gum), drives around as people from his past suddenly appear in his car (friend Ray Winstone, duet partner Kylie Minogue, former bandmate Blixa Bargeld), lays down tracks in the studio (“Give Us a Kiss,” “Higgs Boson Blues,” “Push the Sky Away” with a children’s orchestra), watches television with his twin sons, and goes through his archives of photographs and other ephemera from childhood to the present day.

The film reveals Cave, the leader of cutting-edge groups the Birthday Party, Grinderman, and the Bad Seeds and author of the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, to be an intelligent, introspective, engaging fellow with a wry, often self-deprecating sense of humor and a hunger to create. “Mostly I write. Tapping and scratching away day and night sometimes,” he says while typing away with two fingers on an old typewriter in his home office. “But if I ever stopped for long enough to question what I’m actually doing? The why of it? Well, I couldn’t really tell you. I don’t know.” The film begins with a barrage of images of Cave and his influences throughout the years, whipping by machine-gun style on multiple monitors, and ends with Cave onstage with the Bad Seeds, becoming the fearless musician that has defined his career. In between, he’s a contemplative husband, father, son, and friend, an artist with a rather unique view of the world and his place in it. At a special event at Town Hall on September 20, Cave participated in a postscreening Q&A with Forsyth and Pollard, performed solo songs at the piano (playing what one fan described as a “dream setlist”), and spoke often about “transformation.” In its own way, 20,000 Days on Earth, which has been held over at Film Forum, is a transformative documentary, a groundbreaking, unconventional, and thoroughly imaginative portrait of a groundbreaking, unconventional, and thoroughly imaginative artist. (For more on Cave’s history, be sure to check out the online Museum of Important Shit, which highlights additional strange paraphernalia from Cave’s life and career.) Following its month-long run at Film Forum, 20,000 Days on Earth makes its way to Williamsburg, where it is scheduled to play at Nitehawk Cinema through October 25.

FIRST SATURDAYS: ¡VIVA BROOKLYN!

Caecilia Tripp’s “Music for (prepared) Bicycles” rides into Brooklyn Museum in multiple forms for First Saturdays program

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, October 4, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

After taking September off for the annual Labor Day weekend West Indian American Day Carnival celebration, the Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturday program in October will have a decidedly Latin feel. ¡Viva Brooklyn! will feature live music by Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra and youth orchestra Fat Afro Latin Jazz Cats, La Mecánica Popular, and Los Rakas; the dance performance Bailes de Ida y Vuelta by Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana; rumba and salsa lessons with Global Rhythms; an art workshop inspired by Mayan textile design; pop-up gallery talks in English and Spanish highlighting works by Latino artists; a screening of William Caballero’s How You Doin’ Boy? Voicemails from Gran’pa, followed by a talk about Puerto Rican American cultural influences; a screening of Caecilia Tripp’s Music for (prepared) Bicycles (after John Cage & Marcel Duchamp) Score Two, along with the participatory project Music for (prepared) Bicycles, in which Tripp and visitors will create a drawing of a musical score from a sonic bicycle; an interactive mural by Don Rmix in collaboration with Brooklyn Street Art; and “Pimp My Piragua,” in which Crossing Brooklyn artist Miguel Luciano will serve shaved ice from his custom-made tricycle. In addition, you can check out such exhibitions as “Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement,” “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe,” and “Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Works, 1963–74.”

CROSSING THE LINE: “KILLER ROAD” BY SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE & JESSE AND PATTI SMITH

Soundwalk Collective, Jesse and Patti Smith, and Lillevan collaborate on an exploration of Nico’s death in Crossing the Line presentation

Soundwalk Collective, Jesse and Patti Smith, and Lillevan collaborate on poetic audiovisual exploration of Nico’s death in Crossing the Line presentation

KILLER ROAD
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Thursday, October 2, $40, 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

A limited number of tickets have just been released for Killer Road, a one-night-only event that is part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line interdisciplinary arts festival. On October 2, Soundwalk Collective, the international trio of Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi that specializes in site-specific audio installations, and mother and daughter composers and musicians Patti and Jesse Smith, will convene at Florence Gould Hall to present a tribute to Velvet Underground lead vocalist and Factory actress Nico. The presentation, originally performed earlier this year in Nico’s native country of Germany, focuses on Nico’s death at the age of forty-nine in 1988 while riding a bicycle on vacation in Ibiza with her son Ari. Soundwalk Collective will incorporate samples from the harmoniums that Nico played — one of which was given to her by Patti Smith after her original instrument was stolen in 1978 — as Smith reads Nico’s last poems (“Facing the wind / it’s holding me against my will / and doesn’t leave me still”) and video artist Lillevan provides visual projections. “Patti was very kind to me,” Nico said about Smith, as noted in Richard Witts’s biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon. “Early in 1978 my harmonium was stolen from me. I was without any money and now I couldn’t even earn a living playing without my organ. A friend of mine saw one with green bellows in an obscure shop, the only one in Paris. Patti bought it for me. I was so happy and ashamed. I said, ‘I’ll give you back the money when I get it,’ but she insisted the organ was a present and I should forget about the money. I cried. I was ashamed she saw me without money.”

ATLANTIC ANTIC 2014

Atlantic Ave. between Hicks St. & Fourth Ave.
Sunday, September 28, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.atlanticave.org

Brooklyn’s most popular street fair, Atlantic Antic, turns forty this year, and it’s doing it in style with an extensive lineup of special guests and live performances, along with games, family-friendly activities, art exhibitions, book readings, dozens of vendors, and plenty of politicos. There will be live music from the Windsor Terrors, Junior Rivera and Charanga Soleil, the Black Coffee Blues Band with Popa Chubby, the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band, Dead Leaf Echo, Le Sans Culottes, and headliner Brown Rice Family World Roots Band, a welcome-ceremony dance by the Brooklyn Ballet, and the presentation of the Ambassador Award to Assembly Member Joan L. Millman. And for the twenty-first year, the New York Transit Museum is hosting the Bus Festival on Boerum Pl. between State St. & Atlantic Ave., featuring vintage buses (Betsy, Bus 2969, Bus 3100, Tunnel Wrecker), workshops, free tours, and other fun things, with admission to the museum only one dollar.

BJÖRK: BIOPHILIA LIVE

BJÖRK: BIOPHILIA LIVE (Nick Fenton & Peter Strickland, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, September 26
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.biophiliathefilm.com

“Welcome to Biophilia, the love for nature in all her manifestations, from the tiniest organism to the greatest red giant floating in the farthest realm of the universe. . . . In Biophilia, you will experience how the three come together: nature, music, technology. Listen, learn, and create. . . . We are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through new technological innovations. Until we get there, prepare, explore Biophilia.” So announces British naturalist Sir David Attenborough at the beginning of Björk: Biophilia Live, Nick Fenton and Peter Strickland’s lovely film of Icelandic musician Björk’s final show of her Biophilia tour, a more-than-two-year journey in which she presented a dazzling multimedia concert experience based on her 2011 album and genre-redefining interactive app. Filmed at the Alexandra Palace in London, the cutting-edge in-the-round show features Björk performing such complex songs as “Thunderbolt,” “Moon,” “Crystalline,” and “Virus” from the hit record, accompanied by the twenty-woman Icelandic chorus Graduale Nobili and a group of visually dramatic instruments built and/or adapted specifically for her, including a pendulum-swinging gravity harp, the percussive hang, a gameleste, and a Tesla coil. In addition, most songs have related animation that ranges from the far reaches of space to deep inside the human body. Fenton, a longtime documentary editor, and Strickland, the writer-director of such fiction films as Berberian Sound Studio and Katalin Varga, often splash the animation on the front of the screen, immersing the viewer in a vast array of shapes, colors, and scientific imagery, like a turned-around Joshua Light Show. But even amid all the gadgetry and computers, Björk is the real star, ever charming in a wild wig and futuristic costume as she sings in her engaging accent and unique voice, enchanting the audience for more than ninety minutes as she brings together nature, music, and technology in a whole new way. We saw the show when it came to Roseland in March 2012 and can heartily affirm that Fenton and Strickland have done a wonderful job of capturing the feeling of being there, something that is rare in concert films.

Björk: Biophilia Live opens September 26 at the IFC Center; the 9:20 screening each night will also include the Channel 4 documentary When Björk Met Attenborough, in which director Louise Hooper goes behind the scenes of the three-year creation of the tour as it prepares for its debut performance in Manchester in June 2011. In the four-part, fifty-two-minute film, Björk visits the British Natural History Museum with big fan Attenborough as they talk about the sound of sound in nature, transcendence, prelanguage, and the evolution of singing, beginning with lyrebirds, and meets with Henry Dag, the inventor of the solar-powered sharpsichord, Andy Cavatorta, who created the gravity harp for her, and Evan Grant, who discusses cymatics, visualization, and the vibration of sound. In addition, another Björk fan, Dr. Oliver Sacks, delves into the connections between music and the brain, and Damian Taylor and Scott Snibbe go inside the development of the app. Tilda Swinton’s narration feels too much like an industrial video hyping the project, but otherwise When Björk Met Attenborough, also known as Björk and Attenborough: The Nature of Music, offers fascinating insight into Biophilia in all its incarnations.