this week in music

BOO AT THE ZOO

The animals will be celebrating Halloween too at area zoos and aquarium (photo by Julie Larsen Maher © WCS)

Bronx Zoo, $12-$16
New York Aquarium, $6-$17
Prospect Park Zoo, $5-$8
Queens Zoo, $5-$8
www.wcs.org

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s annual Boo at the Zoo promotion continues through this weekend with a full slate of family-friendly activities. At the Prospect Park Zoo, children can engage in bat arts and crafts, keeper chats focusing on nocturnal animals and pumpkin treats for baboons, haunted attractions, a costume parade, face painting, the spook-tacular Discovery Center, and Wildlife Witch Shows. At the Queens Zoo, children can go trick-or-treating, get their face painted, visit the Haunted Habitat, decorate their own pumpkin (first two hundred zoogoers only), and watch pumas and Andean bears get pumpkin treats. Up at the Bronx Zoo, the Halloween celebration features a haunted safari, live music by Gigi and the Lend Me a Hand Band, a hay maze and hay ride, treat stations, craft workshops, pumpkin-carving demonstrations, animal-themed magic shows, puppet shows, animal enrichment activities, a costume parade, and an extinct animal graveyard. And the New York Aquarium in Coney Island will be hosting Halloween at the A-Scarium, with a haunted sea-fari, magic shows, spooky storytelling by LuAnn Adams, live music from Annie and the Natural Wonder Band, pumpkin-carving demonstrations with Janelle Iglesias, arts and crafts with Robin Waschberger, treat stations, alien stingers, and THE CURSE OF SKULL ROCK 4-D movie screening.

AN EVENING OF VINTAGE NYC PUNK ROCK

Punk trio Futurex will be part of old-fashioned punk rock Halloween party at the Local 269 on Saturday night

The Local 269
269 East Houston St. at Suffolk St.
Saturday, October 30, $7, 9:00
www.myspace.com/futurexnyc
www.thelocal269.com

Over the summer, longtime CBGB regulars Futurex emerged from the Kennel (recording studio) with their latest album, a twenty-six-minute epic featuring such songs as “Basement,” “Monotone,” and “Road Closed.” With ex-wives Sue on guitar and Mary on bass, along with Paul on drums, the trio will be part of a special Halloween show on Saturday night at the Local 269 on East Houston St., along with Crybaby, Bunch of Girls, and Shirk Circus, who used to play CBGB with Futurex some twenty years ago. We have it on good authority that part of the festivities will include a Halloween-themed Jewish wedding performed onstage; watch out for breaking glass, from both the very loud punk rock and the marriage ritual.

VILLAGE HALLOWEEN COSTUME BALL

Theater for the New City hosts its annual celebration of thrills, chills, and much weirdness

Theater for the New City
155 First Ave. at Tenth St.
Sunday, October 31, $20, 3:30 – ?
www.theaterforthenewcity.net/halloween

Crystal Field’s annual Halloween Costume Ball at the Theater for the New City is another massive extravaganza of music, theater, dance, performance art, astrology, numerology, magic, and general mayhem, taking place on the bandstage outside and in the lobby as well as in the Ballroom, the Cauldron, the Cabaret, the Womb Room, and in the House of Horrors deep in the basement. Among the myriad performers are Jennifer Blowdryer, Penny Arcade, Alien Surfer Babes, Clowns with Gowns, Evan Laurence, Annie Wilson’s Haunted Pianoforte, the Hell Souls, the Hot Lavender Swing Band, the Love Show, Bambi Killers, Flahooley, Suspended Cirque, and Emperor Satan’s Rococoach, in addition to such productions as “The Land of Investment Banking,” “Clutter: I’m Saving My Life & It’s Killing Me,” and “The Red and Black Masque.” At midnight, the costume parade and contest gets under way, with such celebrity judges as Judith Malina, Matt Morillo, and Sabura Rashid. And believe it or not, admission to everything is a mere twenty bucks.

TWI-NY TICKET GIVEAWAY: NEON INDIAN / PRINCE RAMA / APACHE BEAT

Brooklyn Bowl
61 Wythe Ave.
Friday, October 29, $15, 9:00
718-963-3369
www.brooklynbowl.com

If you missed CMJ this month, you can get a great taste of what it was like by checking out three of the festival’s most-talked-about bands, who will be teaming up for a hot triple bill at Brooklyn Bowl on Friday night. Taking the stage first is the local group Apache Beat, who played a cool set at the Siren Festival this summer and are highlighting songs from their inaugural full-length, LAST CHANTS (Beverly Martel, October 2010). Next up are sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson and Michael Collins, who met on a Gainesville Hare Krishna commune and later formed Prince Rama of Ayodhya, now known as just Prince Rama. The trippy trio are touring behind their fourth record, SHADOW TEMPLE, which was just released on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label. The headliners, Neon Indian, formed by Alan Palomo in Denton, Texas, last year, have been making a name for themselves all over the indie map, scoring big with the psychedelic electronic tape music featured on their well-received debut disc, PSYCHIC CHASMS. The night will also include a Halloween costume contest.

Tickets are $15 each, but twi-ny has a pair to give away to one lucky reader. To enter the contest, send your name and daytime phone number to contest@twi-ny.com no later than Friday, October 29, at 12 noon. All entrants must be at least twenty-one years of age. One winner will be chosen at random. Good luck!

McKIM BUILDING RESTORATION

New-Trad Octet will help welcome in restored McKim Building at the Morgan (photo by Schector Lee)

Morgan Library
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Saturday, October 30, free with museum admission of $8-$12, 4:00
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org
www.new-trad.com

After a nearly five-month restoration, the Morgan Library’s 1906 McKim Building will reopen to the public on Saturday with a full day of celebratory activities. From 12 noon to 3:00, musicians from Mannes College will perform. At 1:00, Morgan director William M. Griswold will give a lecture about the restoration of the landmark structure and the museum’s collections. And at 4:00, Jeff Newell’s New-Trad Octet will give a concert featuring their unique brand of early American music, with a focus on the splendid exhibit “Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress.” Newell notes on the band’s website, “We’ll be playing our ‘restored’ arrangements of historic music from the Gilded Age, including some of Twain’s favorites.” Tickets for the events are free with museum admission on Saturday. Also on view at the Morgan are “Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968,” “Degas: Drawings and Sketchbooks,” and “Anne Morgan’s War: Rebuilding Devastated France, 1917-1924.”

GEOFFREY ARMES CD RELEASE PARTY

Googie’s Lounge
154 Ludlow St.
Thursday, October 28, 8:30
212-533-7237
www.livingroomny.com
www.geoffreyarmes.com

Teacher, producer, arranger, engineer, singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Geoffrey Armes will be holding a CD release party for his latest album, INSIDE A WALL, on October 28 at Googie’s Lounge on the Lower East Side, the follow-up to 2008’s STRETCH AND BREATHE 2: BERLIN DANCE WORKS and SPIRIT DWELLING: MUSIC FOR YOGA AND OTHER SOUL TRANSFORMATIONS. The British-born, New York-based Armes, who plays piano, electric piano, toy piano, synthesizers, bass, percussion, and guitars on the record, developed ten songs “from fragments first mooted in West Berlin” in 1982. His jazzy, lounge-y, atmospheric world music mixes Bryan Ferry with Donald Fagen, to both good and not so good effect. “Stealing out into the night / This is how I plan my flight / Watching others fight their fight / I really care unless it’s my plight,” he sings on “Things Are Strange,” not necessarily one of his more poetic passages. Better is the end of “Café Einstein,” on which he laments, “You on the sugar / Look across at me / You tell me it’s over / And I am free / Oh stand to go / Please please leave it easy / There’s nothing else I can say.” Armes’s stated goal is “to create a safely adventurous creative acoustic space so that a kind of spontaneous ordering of sonic inspiration can take place”; the Googie’s gig should be filled with plenty of sonic inspiration amid his ambient soundscapes. Also on the bill are Tajna Tanovic at 7:30, Shayfer James at 9:30, and Llana Stampur at 10:30.

WHITE LIGHT FESTIVAL

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s SUTRA will make its U.S. premiere at Lincoln Center’s music-centric White Light Festival

Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, Rose Theater, Avery Fisher Hall, David Rubenstein Atrium
October 28 – November 18, free – $90
www.lincolncenter.org

A sort of extension of July’s annual Lincoln Center Festival, in which the vaunted institution stages more experimental works from around the world, the inaugural White Light Festival consists of three weeks of dance, theater, and concerts “focused on music’s transcendent capacity to illuminate our larger interior universe,” as explained by vice president for programming Jane Moss in the festival’s chic booklet. The series begins October 28 with Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble’s free performance of THE SOUL’S MESSENGER in the David Rubenstein Atrium at Broadway and 63rd St. at 8:30 and continues with such eagerly anticipated programs as the U.S. premiere of Belgian-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s SUTRA, Katarina Livljanić’s JUDITH (A Biblical Story from Renaissance Croatia), Tallis Scholars’ unique take on Arvo Pärt’s MAGNIFICAT, and Roysten Abel’s inventively executed THE MANGANIYAR SEDUCTION. Other highlights include Antony and the Johnsons teaming up with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Hilliard Ensemble and saxophonist Jan Garbarek playing OFFICIUM NOVUM at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, and the Hilliard Ensemble, the Latvian National Choir, the Wordless Music Orchestra, and Alex Somers and Jonsi from Sigur Rós performing CREDO at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle. There will also be free panel discussions on “The Sound of Silence” with Karen Armstrong and John Luther Adams, Janet Cardiff’s free sound installation “The Forty-Part Motet” at the Agnes Varis and Karl Leichtman Rehearsal and Recording Studio at Broadway and 60th St., and several postshow White Light Lounges in which ticket holders can mingle with the artists.