Crazy Styles  Music Blog

Formed on Craigslist, signed to SubPop, Rogue Wave is a shining star of the Bay Area’s Indie Rock scene. Sidelined for the second half 2004, due to a slipped disk in Zach Rogue’s (lead singer, guitarist, songwriter) lower back. Newly revamped and standing tall, the band has big plans for the coming year, which kicks off with a headline party gig at the Bottom of the Hill this New Year’s Eve. I talked to Zach and Pat Spurgeon (guitar, drums, vocals) last week. SFS: I read you named the band after Neal Stephenson’s book "Cryptonomicon" but am not sure why, can you elaborate? Zach: Yeah, there is a part where Stephenson’s talks about cataclysmic events, you know, natural disasters, and he mentions rogue waves. Sounded interesting, so I learned what they were and was fascinated by them; how they seemingly come from nowhere, have very little scientific understanding, etc. It seemed like a metaphor for art/music and the mysterious forces of inspiration, the unknowable, the wide-eyed expectation, youth, getting close but never completely getting your arms around the source….SFS: I find it hard to believe you met on Craigslist, which sounds like a rogue wave in and of itself, is it actually possible? Pat: It is, even though I’m not a computer person, my friend pointed out Zach’s post and that was it, it was kinda like going to Guitar Center but it worked out. Zach and I both know former San Francisco music man, Bill Racine, who produced Out of the Shadow, the album that was re-released through SubPop. SFS: The first thing that jumps out at me when I saw RogueWaveMusic.com, is the awesome artwork, any info on its creator? Pat: Sure, it’s Jeff Kleinsmith, a Seattle based designer who makes a lot of rock posters and album covers for SubPop. SFS: Is Jeff designing a poster for the New Year’s Eve show? Zach: No, but we will have a poster, designed locally by Attaboy, you can find them at yumfactory.com. SFS: Still have those day jobs? Pat: We do what we can, most of our plans changed when Zach needed surgery earlier this year. Greg [Labron] (guitar and keys) runs the Lobot Gallery over here in Oakland. A gallery space for artists and musicians. The rest of us pick up this and that, here and there. SFS: I heard you had a line up change? Pat: Yeah, Sonya Westcott is no longer with the band. Evan Farrell is taking over on the bass, he’s a friend of mine from the college days. SFS: Any surprises to ring in the New Year? Pat: Maybe some surprises, we putting together some visuals and cover tunes. We will be playing some new unreleased songs, too. SFS: Cool, so we can expect a new album soon? Pat: Hopefully by September, that all I really know now. We got a lot of touring ahead of us in 2005. SFS: Touring? I heard about the NoisePop show, where else are you playing? Pat: Before we play NoisePop (the band also headlines Slim’s February 26th), we are touring throughout the Southwest; Austin, Houston, etc. After NoisePop, we head Europe for several weeks, SubPop is still working out the details. Then sometime after that we’ll head into the studio to record our second album. SFS: Any final words of wisdom? All: Yes, come to our show because Kelly Stolz and The Herms are also playing, and they are both great!

by matthew thayer on Dec 24, 2004 Email Print Share

Mastering piano technique and keyboard precision precedes artistic expression of the music. Czerny’s exercises are still among the finest techniques.

Carl Czerny was tutored by Beethoven and by age 16 was musically accomplished enough to attract a following of his own students. His performances were considered fluid and brilliant.As a composer, Czerny turned out a thousand opus numbers (some containing more than fifty pieces, such as Op. 749 – The Art of Finger Dexterity and Op. 299 – School of Velocity), while maintaining ten to twelve hour teaching days. He could work on five or six pieces simultaneously. He wrote in many forms, but is renowned for his etudes, which have been the foundation of piano technique lessons for generations of students. Czerny wrote literally thousands of technical studies for piano, all different. Indeed, he developed the world’s first piano pedagogy.Czerny created an original method of piano practice, incorporating many didactic piano pieces named “Etudes”, which he wrote for piano practice of his students. His method is focused on finger dexterity and velocity, as well as on the sound control and expressiveness. In addition to his etudes, Czerny composed no fewer than 304 sets of variations and potpourris, based on 87 operas of the time. These works were highly popular all over the world. According to Loesser, “His talent was extraordinary. Within the limits of a narrow harmonic scheme, he developed a prodigious understanding of the motion shapes feasible to keyboard-traveling fingers. Rapid, feathery, well-articulated pianistic passagework, chiefly for the right hand, bouncing, leather-covered little hammer-heads of the Vienna pianos could deliver best, always smooth and pretty and rather ear-tickling when played fast.”He was well-known for his superb teaching methods, and tutored Franz Listz and Sigismond Thalberg, among others. “His manner of teaching,” Leschetizky related, “Indicated the different shades of tempo and coloring. He insisted principally on accuracy, brilliancy and pianistic effects. Czerny taught that Beethoven should be rendered with freedom of delivery and depth of feeling. A pedantic, inelastic interpretation of the master made him wild. He felt that Chopin’s compositions were sweetish. He understood Mendelssohn.”When practicing Czerny, work on developing the hand and general playing mechanism for strength, stamina, and perhaps most importantly, control. About New Jersey Piano LessonsBarbara Ehrlich is a Somerset County private piano teacher based in Bedminster, NJ with a roster of current young piano students that includes a broad array of student ages, cultures and backgrounds. The newly formed New Jersey Piano Lessons works closely with parents to oversee and coordinate music activities in a variety of areas, including piano lessons, practice, theory and sight-reading. Visit New Jrsey Piano Lessons at http://www.piano-nj.com/mission-barbara.html for more information about playing the piano in Somerset County.

Liquid motions between thunderstorm systems and humid home openers, the weather’s been nice lately. Shall we take a dip? Swim, the latest album by Canada’s Dan Snaith, also known as Caribou, is like early summer sessions that turn the pool cloudy. Party invites apparently included “a quartet of Toronto free-jazz horn players and Born Ruffians’ Luke Lalonde”, among others. Out now on Merge Records, Caribou takes dance and dunks it in water. Never releasing the mathematical influence of his background, Snaith holds patterns under until they start to panic and twitch. The vocals throughout all songs contribute like ghosts escaping from bodies. Songs like “Hannibal” are driven by muted soft synths and swampy bass tones, like when a car drives off a pier and hits the water in slow motion. A greenhorn to the suckle of swimming, an escape for Snaith when not working on music, confesses that underwater ideas are obviously the premise of the entire album. His obvious experimentations with elements, off patterns, and tonal discrepancies, surround sound chaotically perfect. Even the shortest song on the album, “Lalibela”, is full of texture and emotion, build up and dramatic falling, and a 4-on-the-floor that nods to sounds of Cassius circa 1997.“Sun” is the last song and arguably the guilty pleasure of the entire album. IDM stimulates intellectual two-step and light-hearted grooves give goose bumps. But there is something about the shuffle, dramatically lifting and falling with the busted horns stampeding through arctic marshlands in the background, that feels like the shower after a win. With each song satisfying on its own accord, my only criticism in Swim is its length. But like all liquid entities, Caribou’s latest is unrelenting. You will find joy in repetition, driving self-motivation, and you will get wet.

by Ryan Rosario on Apr 22, 2010 Email Print Share

Hercules RMX, a master rule portable DJing solutions over computers also manufacturer of sport hardware unveils their present DJ creation, the Hercules DJ ControlMP3e2.

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Chicago has never been short on locally-produced cult bands, and for a brief moment in the mid-1990s it almost looked like the City by the Lake had finally come into its own as a legitimate musical hotspot.

Local alt-rock radio station Q101 had become the third- (arguably second-) most influential station in the nation, and local acts Smashing Pumpkins, Smoking Popes, Urge Overkill and Liz Phair rose to the top of the alternative rock heap on the strength of near-simultaneous releases of now-classic albums.

But before Siamese Dream and Exile in Guyville, there was power-punk outfit Pegboy, whose brief run at the top yielded nothing more than a handful of occasional EP releases, sporadic reunion shows – and the other, lesser-known best album of 1991.

The group actually emerged from the remnants of hardcore icons Naked Raygun, who had mostly run their creative course following their 1988 masterpiece Jettison. Guitarist John Haggerty left Naked Raygun in 1989 in search of an outlet for a more melody-driven brand of punk; Haggerty and brother/drummer Joe joined up with singer Larry Damore and bassist Steve Saylors of Bhopal Stiffs, and in 1990 formed the first incarnation of Pegboy.

Later that year, the Three Chord Monte EP announced Pegboy’s arrival with a quartet of lean, hook-heavy punk tracks. From the opening drive of the chugging “Through My Fingers,” the group made no secret of its pop sensibilities, yet the epic distortion and frenetic rhythm section arrangements never strayed from the quartet’s punk roots. Countless bands would attempt this formula later in the decade, but Pegboy had the notable advantage over so many left in their wake of not just sounding like a punk band but actually being one.

Strong Reaction, Pegboy’s 1991 full-length debut, took the formula one step further. The hooks were bigger, the band played more tightly, and the songs took nothing but the best of both the punk and pop worlds. The intense, focused title track became a battle anthem of personal solidarity, but immediately gave way to the resilient “Still Uneasy” with its fitting chorus of “I don’t want to know.” The uptempo lamentations of “Superstar” gave the band the closest thing it ever had to a hit single, yet the harmonics-driven “Field of Darkness” and bare-knuckled “Not What I Want” matched that track note-for-note in both sarcastic humor and over-the-top catchiness.

Much of the success of Strong Reaction came from the confrontational nature of the songs, although rather than the overtly political themes of most of their contemporaries, Pegboy focused on the confrontation within the self. Damore’s blunt lyrics dealt almost exclusively on themes of self-doubt and personal suffering, and the musical contributions of Saylors and the brothers Haggerty kept in line with these themes through some very lean arrangements, John’s riffing at times almost closer to mid-tempo metal than to punk. They were all major key compositions, but never played with the sunniness that defined so many other similar groups, more closely resembling an uptempo Black Sabbath singing downstroke songs about downtrodden times.

The 1992 re-release of Strong Reaction added the contents of Three Chord Monte as the final four tracks, and the compilation very quietly evolved from a bargain purchase to a picture of a band at the height of its powers only three releases into its catalog. The 1993 Fore EP was really just a holding pattern until 1994′s Earwig, but both of those releases shared the fatal flaw of sounding too much like Pegboy albums �C more specifically, of sounding too much like the Pegboy albums that came just before them without advancing the cause set forth at the band’s outset. Earwig never lacked for decent songs, and the group’s cover of Mission of Burma’s “Revolver” gave fans a new favorite, but Fore and Earwig never quite matched the impossibly high bar set by Three Chord Monte and Strong Reaction.

Pegboy released the Dangermare split EP with Richmond-based Kepone in 1996 and followed up with Cha-Cha DaMore in 1997. Neither recaptured the intangible excellence of the earliest work, although Cha-Cha came close with the hard-hitting “Dog, Dog” and “Dangerwood,” not to mention the loving cover of Cheap Trick’s classic “Surrender.”

The band drifted in and out of existence over the next few years, mostly disbanded but enjoying local hero status strong enough to warrant the occasional one-off shows around Chicago. In the end, their closest neighbors in the pantheon of Chicago bands turned out not to be contemporaries Screeching Weasel or Smoking Popes, but rather folk-poppers Poi Dog Pondering or alt-rock stompers Local H: groups that certainly made it, but never really made it too far out of the city. Pegboy may have been revered as a great band, but at the end of the day they were still a Chicago band.

Their deep and lasting local impact still resonates enough to draw sell out crowds at thousand-seaters around Chicago, a fact made doubly intense considering those tickets sell primarily on the strength of one album, one EP and a pair of outstanding cover songs, all released between twelve and nineteen years ago. Pegboy never exactly became the superstars Damore so eloquently sang of, but by their own double-fisted standards the group did just fine.