Steve
Posts by Steve
The Getaway
We try not to get too thick on the website here with details of our lives, per se. We’ve all got details, and lots of ’em. But there are two particular life-details which this post needs in order to mean anything: (1) our two and half year old daughter Hazel, who’s pretty amazing if you ask us, but who, like all kids who don’t have their driver’s license yet, is pretty much always around either one or the other of us, and (2) our dumb cellphones and computers, which for reasons that are harder to explain, are pretty much always around both of us.
We have a bunch of writing we’ve been wanting to do for a Little Silver recording this winter, and have been struggling to find the time. Right or wrong, we attribute this in no small way to Hazel, cellphones, and computers, though maybe not in that order. So this last weekend we made arrangements with Hazel’s kind grandparents, and with the kind cellphone-impervious mountains of Virginia, for a getaway from those things that largely order our normal lives.
I’d put preachy revelations about “self-actualization” in the same gooey category as overly personal blogging, and really, who needs either of them… But I will say this: the weekend, the rest, the writing, were all pretty great. I seriously don’t know what took us so long.
Here are some photos. We look forward to you hearing the songs soon!
Little Silver opening for Hem!
Worlds will collide, heavens will shine (or at least instrument cables will be shared and backstage will be crowded) this next month when Little Silver shares the stage with Hem for the first time. Philly and D.C., come see what will be a great double bill! Full details on our calendar.
“Stolen Souvenir” video by Peter Hamlin & Nina Frenkel
Peter Hamlin and Nina Frenkel took this song on a dreamy, animated ramble, and we’re totally dumbstruck and thrilled with what they came up with. Load the video fullscreen and give it a look… We also gave this little interview to IFC on the making of video for its premiere on their site. [and, hey, update: Nina and Peter won a 2012 International Motion Arts Award for this flick! Pretty serious stuff…]
“Little Silver Rocked – Yes Rocked – The Glasslands Gallery”
Speak Into My Good Eye ran this review of our show at Glasslands, which, it must be noted, was a very very fun night for us. Many thanks to The Inner Banks and Yellowbirds for helping cram a chilly night with great music.
Secret Sound Shop – Basement Tapes
Our buddies from Secret Sound Shop spent some time with us in a dim and echoey basement a few months back, and they wrote this good post as record of the event. We served up renditions of Sleep til Morning and Food From the Cow, all amidst some real basement flotsam.
Texan Thanksgiving
We were in Austin and environs for the Thanksgiving holiday this year — seeing family, playing a few shows, and washing ourselves in wond’rous Texan goodness. Here are a few photos from the trip. Special thanks to Bruce Curtis and Kristen Warnick for keeping the camera shutters clickin’ while were there.
Bruce Blog
Erika’s still reeling. Read on.
The Living Room, Cold Spring, NY
We’ve got a show on Saturday 9/8 at The Living Room, a gorgeous gallery space up the Hudson in Cold Spring. NYC’ers: come make a day of it! DIA Beacon, Breakneck Ridge, whatev’s, then an evening with us. Sound good? Swear and Shake will playing as well. It’ll be grand.
Sounds of Summer: Imaginary Cuba
I’m going to posit here that there have to be at least two kinds of summertime music. There’s the kind that smells like Hawaiian Tropic and alcohol and feels like hot wind in a car window. It sounds loud and beautiful like youth, and is the perfect doppelganger to holiday music, that other music hanging around that other solstice six months prior. I bet it’s the first pop music many of us ever loved.
This little blog is about a different kind of summertime music. It feels like a fever and sounds like a hallucination, and it’s the perfect compliment to the way this overheated apartment feels right now. We’re on the top floor of our building, face south, can’t fire-escape-fire-code-blah-blah put AC in half our apartment, and we’re pretty much melting. (And not just us: we, like idiots, went to do some baking for a friend the other week, and this is what we saw when we opened a bag of chocolate chips.) So, like I said, it’s hot.
Bill Laswell’s Imaginary Cuba is most definitely not the sound of surfer girls and Tastee Freez. It’s maybe more like a malarial episode, except that it’s absolutely awesome, and I understand that malaria is not. The record is a mashup of all sorts of music and sound, flowing oddly and effortlessly from Cuban son and Santeria, to recordings of street noise or café clamor, to heavy dub drum and bass, back to some folk song, and all the while tripping along ambient beds of sound, echo, heat…. It’s a true feverdream, a record that drips down the walls and pools on the floor, and it’s one of the most evocative, transporting things I’ve ever heard.
If you’re lying down as I was earlier, semi-conscious and watching the ceiling fan turn, find this album (a couple sample tracks appear below) — stream it, buy it, put it on. You may wake on soaked sheets, with the sound of the ocean, or the street below, or the neighbor’s music, floating in past the curtain in the window. You might then just pour yourself a glass of cold water, turn on the radio, and cross your fingers for some Beach Boys or Rihanna.
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