Bertrand Goldberg left his thumbprint all over the city of Chicago, but the architect also lived one of the greatest lives of the 20th century.  He moved to Berlin to study at the Bauhuas, narrowly escaped before the Nazi takeover, and was present at the historically significant moment when two giants of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, met in the late 1930s.

Goldberg is also the mind behind one of the most recognizable pieces of American architecture of the last fifty years, Marina City in Chicago.  The building crept back into the popular consciousness in 2002, when the band Wilco featured Marina City on their critically lauded album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The A.V. Club recently did this fantastic feature on the building.

Chicago: The Wilco towers

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You might know Amy Klein from her time in punk smartypants band, Titus Andronicus, where she shreds on guitar and violin.  Or maybe you know her from Brooklyn-based feminist group, Permanent Wave, where she recently helped organize a protest against the acquittal of NYPD’s rape cops.  There’s even a chance you know her because you’re involved with the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, where Amy is a member of their 2011 Think Tank.

Regardless of how you get there, Amy Klein is worth knowing.  She is quickly emerging as a role model for young girls in a time when it feels as if people like Amy no longer exist, and the fact that she’s also Jewish makes it that much sweeter.  Young Israel is telling women they can’t be President of the Board, but it shouldn’t worry you too much, because Amy and her contemporaries (of which there are few) are creating their own groups outside of the conventionally accepted Jewish or cisgendered institutions that are inclusive, self-aware, and more importantly, tuned into the needs of today’s youth.

When we met in person, I tried not to fawn over her, but of course I ended up dwelling on Amy’s stellar 2010 article for Flavorpill where she scolds Rolling Stone for excluding women from rock and roll.  In the process of writing that article, she reveals that it was girls like Liz Phair and Bikini Kill that inspired her as a kid–exactly the kind of role models that seem to be in short supply today.

I asked Amy for her top 5 Jewish lady role models, and this is her list, in no particular order:

Emma Goldman
Susan Sontag
Misc. female relatives
Sara Marcus (another Big Jewcy!)
Anne Frank
Honorable mention: Adrienne Rich
Honorable mention: Mindy Abovitz of Tom Tom Magazine. (Check out our interview with Mindy.)

It’s nice to see such a diverse mix–writers, political activists, poets and drummers–made by someone with such a diverse set of interests.  When I looked for some of the more typical markings of a Jewish upbringing, I found a history more along the lines of what you’d expect from a radical lady like Amy:  she graduated from Secular Humanist Hebrew school, she wants to have Iggy Pop at her Seder and her great-grandfather took piano lessons from “King of Ragtime” Scott Joplin.  Considering that most of us barely got out of Socialist summer camp alive, it’s hard not to be impressed.

Not that I’m surprised–when it comes to Amy Klein, she’s anything but ordinary.  Read her empowering take on rock and roll, gender inequality and most everything else here.

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Peter Silberman has a nice Jewish boy’s face but with two strikingly blue and unintentionally sad eyes that have seemingly underwritten the discussion of his band, The Antlers, since the 2009 release of their emotionally wrought breakthrough, Hospice. That album tells the story of the relationship between a terminally ill patient and her hospice nurse as a metaphor for an abusive relationship. The affecting narrative performed by Silberman’s haunting vocals and a crescendo-laden instrumentation struck a chord with many listeners. As the band grew more popular, the story and its partially autobiographical nature started to get away from them, morphing into one of indie rock’s great mythologies.

As it grew increasingly hard to separate the story from the band members, The Antlers started working on a new album. “It began to feel like we were being pigeonholed as a ‘sad band,’” Silberman says, “but we’re not particularly sad people. We have a lot of different feelings about things.  There’s a whole spectrum of emotion to explore and I think that’s what we were trying to do on this record.” That album, Burst Apart, is not exactly bubblegum but it’s definitely an easier and more varied listen.  Still beautifully composed, it is a display of how much the band has grown and what could be expected from them going forward.

I recently talked to Peter about the new album, the evolution of their sound, and a possible back-up dancer for their live shows.

Jesse: This record was made in a much different environment than Hospice. It was done in a traditional studio, in less time, with a label, with more expectations. How do you think this environment might have shaped its sound?

Peter: Yeah, I think the place that we recorded the album definitely had a lot to do with it. Hospice was done in my bedroom basically, with one microphone. This wasn’t exactly a traditional studio, we moved into a studio share and recorded it ourselves, but it definitely had a very comfortable aspect to it. A lot of the time when you go into a studio there are a lot of studio staff there; the engineer, maybe the second engineer, the producer, the mixing people. It was very much the three of us and we made it ourselves. It has this homemade quality to it but with better equipment at our disposal.

You’ve mentioned a desire not to make another Hospice. Were there certain facets of Hospice sonically that you explicitly said, “We are not going to do this again?”

No, I don’t think there was anything we wanted to turn our backs on musically from Hospice. That album sounded a certain way, washier and it was more about crescendos and epic moments. We wanted to make a record that sounded different. Not because we didn’t like anything on Hospice but more to try something new.

How did moving a way from a narrative open you guys up as songwriters both lyrically and sonically?

I didn’t want to do another story for a record because part of me felt like if I did that again, I would have to on all The Antlers’ records from here on out. Also, the way I wanted to write songs was not as narratives anymore.

The record does feel like a story to some degree. It has a beginning, middle, and end but it’s less overt in that way. I wanted to make a record with some balance. I felt like singing in a way that was working with the music, not like the music was working with the singing. Nothing was trying to overpower anything else. It was supposed to be music and vocals in harmony with one another.

It reminded me of Matt Berniger of The National’s lyrics in this way. You opened for them last year. Did you guys get a chance to talk about writing lyrics?

No, most of the time when bands go on tour together they rarely talk about actually making music. It seems kind of weird. My experience has been that most of the time bands on tour are thinking less about music and more about staying sane on the road – every day things.

I was watching them every night that we played. I already knew their music really well but to see them like that, to really see their whole set, which was close to two hours, I’m sure we all picked up things. If nothing else, it was something to aspire to as far as being a band that really delivers every night. They sounded amazing with everybody locked in. But it sounded natural and it sounded human. That was a quality that we wanted to bring to this record that it sounded like a band, like people playing music. There are different ways you can go when making a record, it can sound more computerized or pieced together, we wanted to make something that sounded like people.

Did you write the songs with the consideration that you would be touring on this record?

Yeah, it was made with the knowledge that we were going to be playing these songs a million times. It was about making music that we wanted to play, meaning songs that we could get into, stretch out and change over time. This was a big part with touring on Hospice that we changed the songs over time. We decided that some things worked better than others. Sometimes, the songs would change drastically from the way they were recorded. We wanted the freedom to do that with this too.

Vocally, for me, it became less about memorizing lyrics, which is something I’m pretty bad at. Hospice had a lot of lyrics. I wanted to focus on singing and as far lyrics, writing them more concisely as opposed to needing that many to get a point across.

Your voice has always been such a big part of The Antlers sounds and it seems like on this record you intentionally gave a bit more room. It’s like another instrument in the trio. Do you feel you’ve grown as a singer since the Antlers project started?

Yeah. I had no idea what I was doing when The Antlers started. I was de facto singer basically. I wanted to record and write songs, I didn’t really have any interest in singing. I didn’t want to make instrumental music so I was like I’ll sing. As the band came together, I was suddenly a front man. Touring on it so long made my voice change a lot, it became stronger. I also had to learn how to take care of it better. By the time we came in to record Burst Apart, I felt like I was a totally different singer than I was when we recorded Hospice.

Can we talk briefly about “Putting The Dog to Sleep” It immediately blew me away. It has this morose title and then you listen to it and it is this touching and sad basically soul song. Can you tell me about the process behind it?

That song came about on one of our first tours on Hospice. The time was about two years ago and we were on tour with Au Revoir Simone. We were traveling across the country and we had a rental van that had a Sirius radio in it. We were listening to the Soultown station the whole tour and were like, “every song on here is great.”  We had it on that whole time. That song started getting written around that time, when we were really into all these old soul songs.

It was a slow to be written song because it took us a long time to actually get in and start recording a record. We didn’t do that for another year and change later. Musically that’s where that song came from, that period of time. Now, we still listen to that kind of music and we still hold it very close to our hearts.

Lyrically, I have come to think of the phrase “putting the dog to sleep” not as literally putting a dog to sleep, which is an extremely depressing thing, but as putting a matter to rest, closing the book on something. I think to some degree that’s what Burst Apart is about, moving on from something.

In addition to “Putting the Dog to Sleep’s” soul influence, there are a few examples on the album of genre songs: “French Exit” has a large dance music undercurrent and “Every night my teeth are falling out” has this really cool bossa nova feel. Was this intentional on your part or was it just something that came out of playing with the songs while recording?

I find myself really influenced by the music that I’m listening to. I’m pretty much constantly listening to music. Especially, when I’m home and not on tour, there’s always music playing that seeps into the way I end up writing songs. So I was listening to a lot of soul music, electronic music, and George Harrison playing guitar on late Beatles stuff. Those were all working their way into the record and ended up as these kind of genre songs or at least an emulsion of that.

You spoke about how the band bonded over electronic music and you spoke about how you wanted this album to feel more like a cohesive band. Can you talk about the push and pull between the prerecorded nature of electronic music and instantaneousness of making it feel like a live band?

To some degree I think of this record as an electronic record. But, a lot of electronic records are very sterile, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a quality the music has, as it’s not supposed to feel human all the time. We wanted to make something that sounded like a human electronic record. The way that ended up happening was letting these almost synth textures work their way into the record like they hadn’t been on Hospice. Even though all the drums were played live, they were molded to have an electronic sound. Part of it was all of us playing these parts; nothing was preprogrammed, which ends up adding to the human quality of it.

It was also about taking how electronic songs have this movement where they are just driving forward. They don’t have a typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure all the time. Sometimes they just go and we wanted to try that as a band of guitar, keyboards, synths and drums. See if we could work that into our sound in a natural way that would sound like people, like musicians playing this stuff opposed to something programmed or pieced together.

As you said, what you listen to ends up getting incorporated into your songwriting. Do you have any influences that are embarrassing or not “cool?” Maybe Mariah Carey or Dave Matthews Band, something your fans would not really expect.

Hahaha. I don’t know, the Grateful Dead? I still think the Grateful Dead are pretty cool but some people really hate them. They would be one.

To some degree, I think old 90’s slow jams. It’s all around right now in a weird way. I don’t know if we are coming full circle but there are a lot of bands doing the slow jams sound. Making songs a little bit slower than you’d expect, to let them breathe a little bit more and have a better flow, is sort of a technique. I guess it worked its way in.

Speaking of genre, the first time I saw you guys live, you played Hospice all the way through in order. I immediately thought, “This could make a really beautiful and unique opera.” Have you ever thought about turning it into a stage show?

We’ve been approached by a couple people wanting to turn it into a production. Somebody wanted to turn it into a stage show and a couple people wanted to turn it into a movie. But I felt weird about it because I’m really sensitive about exploiting Hospice or the story behind it. Promoting it as much as we did, didn’t trivialize it exactly, but it started to feel a bit manipulative to me. Especially, with all the imagery around it and the fact that people were focusing so heavily on a terminally ill person, sometimes I think people are missing the point that the record is metaphor. It was really a record about a relationship not about losing a loved one. At the time, something came up to accentuate death and it made me kind of uncomfortable.

So, I don’t think that that would happen.

Last question. On a lighter note, when preparing for this interview I stumbled upon another Peter Silberman. He is a music theory professor at Ithaca College and French horn player. Do you know this guy?

I don’t. If we ever need a French Horn player he is definitely first on the list now. Just for the sake of confusing people. There is also a character from all the Terminator movies named Dr. Peter Silberman, spelled exactly the same way. I would like to get him involved some how.

Maybe a concept album about a future dystopia?

Yeah. Remember, how the Mighty Mighty Bosstones had that dancing guy?

Yeah

Well he can be our dancing guy.

It’s perfect. Call him up…

“We have an amazing opportunity for you”

It’s exactly what he’s been waiting for, someone to start an indie rock band with his character’s name.

Yeah, his ship has come in.

(Photo by Shervin Lainez)

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Since we at Jewcy have noticed that there is already an abundance of booze, but a serious lack of Purim celebration, we’ve decided to locate the best hamantaschen in Austin (baked by a tiny Hasid with a huge cowboy hat) and will be distributing it to anybody who wants it.

If you are in need of triangle cookie with apricot/strawberry/raspberry jam in the middle, either seek out somebody from Jewcy, or tweet “Hey @JewcyMag I want #Austinhamantaschen” after the sun goes down on Saturday, and we will tell you where to get it.

The post There Will Be Hamantaschen (In The Streets Of Austin) appeared first on Jewcy.

Krai is composer Olga Bell’s collage of recollections and impressions of the Russian frontier (“kraal”), sourced from the composer’s memories, her mother’s stories and from online images, video and audio clips of present-day Russia, as well as bird-calls, sacred Orthodox chant, Cossack, Tuvan and Inuit music.

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(All photos by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

There has always been something special about female drummers. More than the way they don’t cross their legs, and more than the way their long (if they have it) hair flails around at the kit; it’s something more spiritual, almost sacred.

In the Old Testament, after the Hebrew slaves were freed from Egypt, Miriam, the first woman in the Bible to be called a prophet, lead a victory dance with her timbrel, an early tambourine and main percussion instrument of the Israelites. Some even speculate it was her drumming that parted the Red Sea. For 3,000 years in ancient civilization, women were almost exclusively in control of sacred music, using the frame drum to conduct rituals and trances for fortunetelling, ecstatic transformations, and mediating between realms. The rise of the Catholic Church brought an end to the female drummer by banning women from music, and it was not until recent history that women returned to music with a new power and great drive.

“Drumming is healing and cathartic. You get to bang and make a lot of noise, how can that be bad?” said Mindy Abovitz, who as creator and editor-in-chief of Tom Tom Magazine, the first magazine about female drummers, is forefronting the movement to bring women beat makers to the spotlight. Abovitz is a female drummer herself, for the wild all-female post-punk trio Taigaa, as well as at least eight other mostly female bands, and she was also the featured drummer for Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn’s recent whimsical video “The Forest,” that was filmed at Mirah’s parent’s farm in Vermont last year.

Abovitz, 31, who is self-taught, started playing drums when she was 20, after her friends pooled together to buy her a drum kit. Previously, she had been banging on anything she could find. She moved from Gainsville, Florida to New York where she began teaching at Rock Camp for Girls, working at East Village Radio, at a guitar shop in Williamsburg, and taking Brooklyn’s indie-rock scene by storm.

With long brown hair and eyes as green as leaves, Abovitz has a strong jaw, a button nose, and a consistently raised eyebrow that seems to say, “I get you” with skepticism and empathy. She also has meekness and sass. Like that Israeli cactus cliché, she is prickly, but sweet, giving off a no-bullshit approach, and a confidence that if she can dream it, she can do it, even if it means publishing a magazine in a time where that seems more difficult than parting the sea.

Born to Israeli parents and raised as an Orthodox Jew, her world shifted focus upon entering public high school. “I had to quickly get my bearings and become a normal kid,” she said. It was there that “the world around me came into focus” and she began to embrace anarchist punk culture. Being a self-identifying Israeli-Jew was not easy in the radical scene, whose leanings tend towards Palestinian rights, and when I asked her if she experienced a clash she said, “It wasn’t easy.”

Abovitz is not one to hide her identity or roots. Her family had lived in Israel before it even became a state, which Abovitz commented was “hardcore.”

“I’m Jewish/Israeli. It’s undeniable. I’m part of the Cohen tribe. I’m not going anywhere,” she told me.

Her family is very supportive of her work, even when they don’t exactly understand what she does. When her saba, the Hebrew word for grandfather, asks her if she plays music at Bar-Mitzvahs, she replies, “Saba, I have a magazine. Saba, I don’t play cover songs.”

Coming from a family that she calls “creative and businessy,” Abovitz thanks her parents for teaching her hard work and to “do the best with what you have,” she said. It’s not easy to have very much when working in the magazine publishing business, but instead of being discouraged, Abovitz spends her energy making Tom Tom available to more people in more places worldwide.

As is, the magazine is not sustainable, but she’s rallied the support and help of around 1,000 people, without whom it could not exist. Along with her parent’s insistence on hard work, her radical-anarchist adolescence taught her that if you want to make something happen, you should just D.I.Y (Do It Yourself) or D.I.T (Do It Together) and though Tom Tom’s much sleeker and shinier than a zine and the production value is much higher than staples and a photocopier, Tom Tom Magazine is a punk collaboration at its core.

All things have to start somewhere and Tom Tom started as an online blog after Abovitz became bothered by the lack of legitimate representation of women in the media. “It just dawned on me that we female drummers need a place to connect and communicate and promote ourselves and that’s how Tom Tom emerged,” Abovitz said in an interview with GearPipe last April.

She began raising money from benefit shows until he had enough to print the first issue. “This thing is going to keep going because of all the people who think it should be in existence,” she said, and compared the project to crowd surfing.

With four issues and a fifth one coming out next week, the quarterly magazine offers interviews with female drummers, features, and even though it contains practical technical advice, the magazine is still accessible to those who may not be female or drummers. I had heard the criticism that the magazine is all pictures of pretty hipster drummers, but I don’t think Abovitz is to blame for so many female drummers looking good.

The post For Female Drummers Only: Mindy Abovitz Of Tom Tom Magazine appeared first on Jewcy.

Listen: Lost in the Trees – “Song For the Painter”

All Alone in an Empty House is the new EP by Lost in the Trees, North Carolina indie rock dynamo Ari Picker’s new band.  The record is said to be the product of a series of Picker’s personal family tragedies.  A somber cello that flows through the majority of the eleven song EP immediately instills in the listener a sense of grief.  Picker’s strong, yet emotive voice sounds like combination of a less brittle Connor Oberst and Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch. The vocals instill in the listener a sense of pain tragedy, but this is a complex record and there’s a lot more here.

One of the most striking things about All Alone in an Empty House is the vast array of sonic ground covered on the record.  All of the songs on this EP fall under the expansive umbrella of indie rock, however, almost every song has a completely different theme and feel to it, like a painter exploring a different approach with each canvas.  Herein is what makes this record a must listen.  All Alone in an Empty House almost feels like a “Best of the Indie Aughts” compilation.  Upon listening to this record one could think it a collection of different artists if not for Picker’s voice, acting as a constant.  The lyrics, like the rest of the record are somber without broaching on maudlin.

Once again, Anti Records has managed to put out a record that feels a culling of a genre.  All Alone in an Empty House sounds like an indie rock all star game, drawing from so many unique aspects of the bands which have most defined the indie genre.  It’s a record that encapsulates the past ten years and therefore well worth the half hour or so it takes to listen to.

The post Ari Picker Is An Indie All Star With The Band Lost In The Trees appeared first on Jewcy.

Planets also won awards for “Most Beautiful Piece of Orchestral Prog Pop,” “The Best Album Featuring Author Rick Moody Singing On,” and “Revenge of the Jewish High School Band Nerds.”

The reason for all these awards?  Because Michael Hearst and his merry crew of songsters somehow figured out how to combine Peter Gabriel-era Genesis with klezmer and a Danny Elfman soundtrack — and not make it sound like a huge mistake.  In a year that saw folks like Sufjan Stevens upping the ante for indie pop, One Ring Zero did what they do best, except a little better than usual.

The post Favorite Album About The Solar System Of 2010: “Planets” By One Ring Zero appeared first on Jewcy.

Jeff Mangum, this generation’s brilliant but elusive musician, performed an extremely rare live set, comprised mainly of songs from his iconic 1998 album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

The album, featuring songs inspired by the life and death of Anne Frank, is normally listed at the top of many “greatest ever” lists, and has been performed only a handful of times in the last decade.

Whether or not Mangum will be playing any other shows in the future is unknown.

The post Jeff Mangum Performs Neutral Milk Hotel Songs; Indie Nerds Kvell Hard appeared first on Jewcy.

• Yeshiva University breaks the dreidel spinning record.  All hail the new kings.

• Sarah Lefton of G-dcast is interviewed at the SF Examiner.   Big props to Jews who call Hebrew classes “Sunday school.”

• Yo La Tengo resume their yearly tradition of playing eight nights of Hanukkah shows at Maxwell’s in New Jersey.  Who will they have play with them?  Nobody knows except the indie stalwarts and the special guests.

• It will be a little harder to get drugs in west Jerusalem tonight.

The post Daily Jewce: Dreidel Champs, G-dcast In The Paper, Yo La Tengo Hanukkah Shows and More appeared first on Jewcy.