this week in music

4KNOTS MUSIC FESTIVAL SCHEDULE

4KNOTS MUSIC FESTIVAL
South Street Seaport, Piers 16 & 17
Saturday, June 29, free, 1:00 – 8:00
www.villagevoice.com/4knots

Set times have just been announced for today’s 4Knots Music Festival at the South Street Seaport, allowing fans to navigate between stages on Pier 16 and Pier 17 until the final acts finish up the seven-hour show on the former. But to assure yourself a good spot, you’ll need to get there early, and it might be tough to go from stage to stage and hold on to that treasured spot way up front.

Pier 17 Stage
1:00 Steve Gunn
2:00 Hunters
3:00 White Lung
4:00 Parquet Courts
5:00 The Men
6:00 Reigning Sound
7:00 Kurt Vile & the Violators

Pier 16 Stage
1:30 Heliotropes
2:30 Fat Tony
3:30 The Babies
4:30 Marnie Stern

4KNOTS VIDEO OF THE DAY: “STONED AND STARVING” BY PARQUET COURTS

When you watch a pro basketball game these days, the squeaks of the players’ sneakers hitting the wooden parquet floors can pierce the ears in ever-more-annoying ways. Fortunately, any squeaking coming from the sounds made by Brooklyn-based four-piece punk band Parquet Courts are ear piercing in only the best ways. Lead singer and guitarist Andrew Savage, his brother and drummer Max Savage, bassist Sean Yeaton, and guitarist Austin Brown make beautiful, shrieking noise on their sophomore full-length, 2012’s Light Up Gold (Dull Tools, What’s Your Rupture?). Evoking Nick Cave, Jim Carroll, and Sonic Youth, Parquet Courts tear through fifteen tracks on the disc, stating their mission on the opening song, “Master of My Craft,” in which Andrew proclaims, “People die / I don’t care / You should see the wall of ambivalence I’m building.” The follow-up to 2011’s American Specialties also includes such self-explanatory tracks as “Donuts Only,” “Yr No Stoner,” and “Stoned and Starving”; that last track is especially likely to appeal to many of the people who show up for the free 4Knots Music Festival at the South Street Seaport on June 29, when Parquet Courts join Kurt Vile & the Violators, Marnie Stern, the Men, White Lung, Heliotropes, Hunters, Reigning Sound, the Babies, Fat Tony, and Steve Gunn. “I went to a shrink and he found my brain / and I have no ideas is what he found,” Andrew sings on “No Ideas.” But they have ideas aplenty, both lyrically and musically. As Andrew writes on the album’s liner notes, “This record is for the over-socialized victims of the 1990s ‘you can be anything you want,’ Nickelodeon-induced lethargy that ran away from home not out of any wide-eyed big city daydream, but just out of a subconscious return to America’s scandalous origin.” Is he sure the shrink found his brain? Perhaps we’ll find out on Saturday.

BIG STAR’S THIRD: AN ORCHESTRATED LIVE PERFORMANCE OF THE LEGENDARY ALBUM

Jody Stephens will lead a special SummerStage concert performance of Big Star’s THIRD on June 30 (photo by Daniel Coston)

Central Park SummerStage
Rumsey Playfield
Sunday, June 30, free, 7:00
www.cityparksfoundation.org
www.bigstarthird.com

In March 2010, Chris Stamey was getting ready to head to SXSW to ask the re-formed Big Star if he could put together an all-star band to play the group’s seminal 1970s record Third / Sister Lovers when he found out that Alex Chilton had suddenly passed away at the age of fifty-nine. With the help of Big Star cofounder Jody Stephens, the project eventually went on because, as Stamey explains on his blog, “regardless of who performed it, it should be heard out in the air, not confined to earbuds, cars, and living rooms. In the same way that Mozart and Beethoven, in their day, were heard.” On June 30, Stamey will lead a diverse group of friends in a performance of the full album, which includes such tracks as “Kizza Me,” “Holocaust,” “Kangaroo,” “You Can’t Have Me,” “Femme Fatale,” and “Take Care,” in Central Park, with vocalists Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Marshall Crenshaw, Pete Yorn, Reeve Carney, Jonathan Donahue, and Becky Stark joining instrumentalists Mike Mills, Mitch Easter, Ken Stringfellow, Richard Lloyd, Dale Baker, Charles Cleaver, Django Haskins, Brett Harris, Skylar Gudasz, Stephens, and a twenty-piece chamber orchestra featuring Jane Scarpantoni and the Uptown Horns. Big Star fans can get even more beginning on July 3, when Drew DeNicola’s documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me opens at the IFC Center, with Stephens, DeNicola, and others participating in Q&As at select shows on July 4.

THE HITCHCOCK 9: BLACKMAIL

BLACKMAIL (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)
BAMcinématek, BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Saturday, June 29, $25, 7:30
Series runs June 29 – July 3
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Based on the play by Charles Bennett, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 thriller, Blackmail, is both his last silent picture as well as his first sound film. The transition is evident from the very beginning, eight glorious minutes of a police arrest with incidental music only, highlighted by an unforgettable mirror shot (courtesy of cinematographer Jack E. Cox) as the cops close in on their suspect. After those opening moments, the film switches to a talkie in the nonsilent version, as New Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden) gets into a fight with his girlfriend, Alice White (Anny Ondra, later to become the longtime Mrs. Max Schmeling), who goes off on a secret rendezvous with a slick artist named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). When things go horribly wrong at Crewe’s studio, Frank assures Alice that he will help her, but slimy ex-con Tracy (Donald Calthrop) has other ideas, thinking he can use some inside information to make a small killing. After shooting the picture with sound — including having Ondra’s dialogue spoken off-screen by Joan Barry because Ondra’s Eastern European accent was too thick — Sir Alfred filmed some scenes over again in silence, resulting in two versions of this splendid psychological thriller, both laced with elements of German Expressionism and early film noir as well as flashes of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Look for the Master of Suspense as the man on the subway being menaced by a young boy. A DCP restoration of the silent version of Blackmail is being screened June 29 at 7:30 in the BAM Harvey Theater as part of “The Hitchcock 9,” with live music by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The series continues through July 3 with such other rarely shown Hitchcock silents as The Manxman, The Pleasure Garden, Downhill, and Champagne.

THE HITCHCOCK 9: THE RING

The bell is sounding for the start of BAM series featuring nine early silent films by Alfred Hitchcock, beginning with THE RING

THE RING (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)
BAMcinématek, BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Saturday, June 29, $25, 3:00
Series runs June 29 – July 3
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

When one thinks of Alfred Hitchcock, such psychological thrillers as North by Northwest, Psycho, Vertigo, Notorious, and Rear Window come to mind, not The Manxman, Easy Virtue, The Pleasure Garden, and The Farmer’s Wife. But it is these early, British silent films that are the focus of BAM’s exciting new series, “The Hitchcock 9.” The program runs June 29 through July 3 and features brand-new DCP restorations of nine romantic melodramas made by the Master of Suspense, each one shown in the Harvey Theater on the new Steinberg Screen, with live musical accompaniment. The series begins with 1927’s The Ring, a tantalizing tale of a love triangle set in the world of boxing, a favorite sport of Hitchcock’s. When Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) shows up at a county fair and takes a liking to Mabel (Lillian Hall-Davis), who sells tickets to see her fiance, “One-Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), battle all comers for a cash prize, Corby decides to get in the ring with Sander to impress Mabel; little do they know that Corby is a professional. Soon the two men are also fighting outside the ring, to win the heart of their beloved. Comic relief is supplied by Gordon Harker as Jack’s trainer, who makes some very funny faces throughout. One can see Hitchcock’s visual style emerging in The Ring, as he employs little dialogue in favor of dramatic montages, ghostly superimpositions, and shadowy lighting. The film also deals with issues of class and financial success, themes that will become prevalent in much of Hitchcock’s work. Produced at Elstree Studios and the first film to be released by Gainsborough Pictures, The Ring will be screened at BAM on June 29 at 3:00, with a live score performed by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER

Eleanor Friedberger will get personal at Music Hall of Williamsburg on June 29 (photo by Michael Rubenstein)

Music Hall of Williamsburg
66 North Sixth St.
Friday, June 28, $17, 9:00
www.musichallofwilliamsburg.com
www.eleanorfriedberger.com

There’s something extremely comforting about Eleanor Friedberger’s voice, whether she’s singing about loneliness and heartbreak or the streets of her adopted hometown of New York City. With the Fiery Furnaces — the constantly shifting experimental outfit she formed with brother Matt in 2000 — on extended hiatus, the Chicago-born Friedberger has just released her second solo album, Personal Record (Merge, June 4), the follow-up to 2011’s Last Summer. Written with John Wesley Harding, the new songs have a more accessible indie pop feel to them, with infectious melodies and even repeated choruses that harken back to the classic rock she grew up on. Several of the songs feature demonstratively emotional titles — “I Don’t Want to Bother You,” “I’ll Never Be Happy Again,” “You’ll Never Know Me” — although the lyrics are somewhat more abstract and poetic. On the album opener, “I Don’t Want to Bother You,” she sings, “And you’ve given me everything I ever wanted / I want to be scared and I want to be haunted / Judgment impaired by your hair as it falls on my face / You’re a disgrace.” “When I Knew” boasts an irresistible Velvet Underground–like bounce, while she takes a look back, and ahead, on “I Am the Past,” explaining, “I am the past / You’ll never forget me / I’d probably come back and stay if you’d let me / I am the past and you cannot ignore me / You’ve got no idea what happened before me. . . . But mostly I’m me / I’m the past to infinity.” The album concludes with the anti-lullaby “Singing Time,” in which Friedberger repeats, “Singing time is over,” but here’s hoping that for Friedberger, singing time keeps going and going and going. She’ll be playing the Music Hall of Williamsburg on June 29, when she’ll also present the debut screening of her short film, “She’s a Mirror,” based on a song from the sweet new album.

4KNOTS VIDEO OF THE DAY: “TAKE THE MIRROR” BY WHITE LUNG

“I want to warn you,” White Lung declares on “Bag,” from their May 2012 sophomore effort on Deranged Records, Sorry. Consider yourself warned. On June 29, the Vancouver quartet — singer Mish Way, guitarist Kenneth William, bassist Grady Mackintosh, and drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou — will be playing the 4Knots Music Festival at the South Street Seaport, pummeling the crowd with songs from Sorry, which features ten tracks that crash through in less than twenty minutes, as well as their 2010 full-length debut, It’s the Evil, in which eleven songs pass by in a far more leisurely twenty-four minutes. Also on the bill, which spreads across two stages, on Piers 16 and 17, are Kurt Vile & the Violators, Marnie Stern, the Men, Parquet Courts, Heliotropes, Hunters, Reigning Sound, the Babies, Fat Tony, and Steve Gunn. Like we said, consider yourselves warned.