File this guy under “so completely ridiculous, he’s actually kind of awesome.” Seriously, we’re really hoping this post gets us invited to one of the parties at his 15,000 sq ft. castle in the Hamptons. Yeah, we’re whores.
“Sir Ivan” Wilzig is the son of a billionaire banker (and Auschwitz survivor) who quit the family business in 2000 to chase his dreams–which, in his case, apparently consisted of dressing up like a superhero and making really bad techno versions of classic 60’s protest songs. (Here’s a wild guess: shortly before quitting his banking job, Ivan had a really mind-blowing night of ecstasy-fueled debauchery at some New York nightclub and possibly a candy-raver afterparty.)
The punchline to Sir Ivan’s story, of course, is that his cheesy Eurodisco versions of “Imagine” and “San Francisco” were very successful. There’s really no end to the market for bad dance music–even when it’s delivered by a middle-aged dude in a superhero cape. Actually, these days, every electronic act from the Bloody Beetroots to Deadmau5 dresses up in weird costumes, so maybe Ivan was really ahead of the curve.
Anyway, after laying low for a few years (apart from being a contestant on a reality TV show called Who Wants To Be A Superhero? and making this amazing appearance on VH1’s The Fabulous Life), Sir Ivan is back and promising to release a full-length album called I Am Peaceman later this year. The album features 15 tracks done in his inimiatable style, which he calls rocktronica, which is actually a pretty major improvement over “Technippy”, which is what he used to call his stuff (cause it’s techno = hippie music…get it? yeah, nevermind).
The first single from I Am Peaceman is a techno version of–I shit you not–”Kumbaya.” The video for it is below. It’s pretty painful stuff, but tough it out til the 1:38 mark, when there’s a batshit-crazy closeup of Ivan that has to be seen to be believed. He’s like the Jewish Tom Jones–if the Welsh tiger had gobbled some shrooms at Burning Man and stumbled into one of the dance tents.
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We’re kind of going a little off the reservation with this one: Moritz “Mo” Wolpert is clearly not a band, or even, strictly speaking, a musician. He’s more of a multimedia artist who specializes in designing unique, very ornate instruments in a style that a lot of blogs refer to as “steampunk”–a somewhat annoying term that apparently refers to the fact that Wolpert’s creations have a sort of Victorian sci-fi quality about them. If this guy isn’t a huge Jules Verne and H.G. Wells fan, then slip some laudanum into our absinthe and say goodnight.
Wolpert has designed several amazing gizmos, including an analog sequencer called a Schaltzentrale, with a brass body covered in elaborate etchings, and something called a Trafokasten, which as near as we can tell is sort of a cross between a musical saw and a Theremin. His most well-documented contraption is also his most complex: a massive, multipiece device called the Heckeshorn, which uses various cranks and pulleys and tubes and God knows what else to produce all sorts of eerie tones that a player can apparently manipulate via a set of lap-steel-like strings across the top. It also sports what appears to be a rubber mouse, but we’re not really sure what that’s for.
Wolpert’s website and MySpace are all in German, as is most of his press–and even though Jake took two years of German in high school, all he really remembers is “Ich habe hunger” and “Wo sind die toiletten?” so he wasn’t much help. So we honestly know very little about this guy, although we could at least figure out that he was born in Bremen, Germany in 1966 and is now based in Berlin. He hand-lathes all his devices himself, and works with a guy named Christian Gunther on the electronics. Pretty nifty stuff.
Update: Apparently the purpose of the Schaltzentrale was to semi-automate the performance of the Heckeshorn and the Trafokasten; after a bit of digging, we finally found this video of Wolpert and a group of musicians putting all three devices through their paces. The video is nearly two hours long and kind of demystifies Wolpert’s creations a little, since it’s all shot in a brightly lit studio and features a bunch of people in street clothes wandering in and out of frame to tweak whatever’s playing. But it’s worth watching just to get a sense of how many moving parts there are, and how many bizarre, creepy sounds it can all produce when everything’s patched through the Schaltzentrale (which we’ve also since learned, via the comments on another blog, is German for “central switchboard”).
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Confession time: yes, I spent many of my high school and college years playing Dungeons & Dragons. (Jake did, too, even though he vehemently denies it.) So needless to say, I was pretty excited to discover that there’s a band out of Chicago called The Minstrel Cycle that’s basically a rock band for fantasy gaming geeks. Finally! A band that probably decides their set lists by rolling 12-sided dice!
Apparently, Minstrel Cycle (a name that definitely would have reduced my Gary Gygax-worshipping 15-year-old self to uncontrollable fits of Beavis-like snickering) is the brainchild of a couple of a guys from another Chicago band called CAW! CAW! who are themselves pretty quirky; no less a luminary than Chicago Sun-Times music critic Jim Derogatis called them “gleefully tuneful, ceaselessly energetic and at times willfully naïve.” Still, where the stuff on CAW! CAW!’s MySpace page falls pretty squarely into messy indie rock territory, Minstrel Cycle appears to be a little bit more all over the map. Based on this MP3 excerpt from one of their 24-minute epic songs (all their songs are apparently designed to be the length of an LP side, a la classic Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull), they’re definitely trying for something a little more prog-rock, but as you’ll hear in the YouTube clip below, their stuff can also be pretty Tull-meets-Spinal Tap…and not necessarily in a good way. They do get bonus points for having a drummer who appears to be wearing some kind of goblin mask though. That’s pretty RPG fabulous.
Anyway, Minstrel Cycle is on the same label as CAW! CAW!, a little L.A.-based indie called Slanty Shanty, and it appears that currently, the only music available from them is a cassette tape called Tales From the Books of Lore. Hopefully they’ll come out with a CD soon, too…or a dice-based role-playing game about a wandering band of musician-paladins who fight dragons and orcs in between gigs at seedy, mead-soaked taverns. That would be AWESOME.
Sorry the below clip is so damn dark, by the way…as of this posting, it’s one of only two that are available. There are a few other YouTube clips labeled Minstrel Cycle, but they appear to feature either this theatrical troupe from Eau Claire, Wisconsin or this punk band from Iowa. Seriously, guys…three different acts all called Minstrel Cycle? Really? It’s not that funny.
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(photo credit: Alexander Perrelli)
For some bands, being weird has nothing to do with high-concept gimmicks or wacky outfits. They just show up, plug in their instruments, and the weirdness smacks you in the face with the force of a two-by-four. Such a band is Brooklyn’s Little Women.
According to Little Women’s press release, this quartet “creates music whose aim is transcendence via brutally precise sonic assault and ascendant melodies.” For those of you who don’t speak Music Press Release, that translates to four guys with two saxophones, a guitar and a drum kit wailing away to create a wall of revved-up noise so hard to listen to, you’d be forgiven for assuming they must all be schizophrenic.
To be clear, it’s not that Little Women is the only band in history to make a living by pummeling their audiences with atonal, free-jazz skronk played with savagery of speed metal and the whiplash tempos of math rock. Ever since Ornette Coleman decided that the best way to play a saxophone was to pretend you were strangling it, plenty of artists have been testing the outer reaches of music with stuff that most people would dismiss as noise. But there’s something about the way Little Women do it that is, in the words of one critic, “terrifying.” This would be very, very bad music to listen to while under the influence of psychedelic substances…especially this part:
(Bonus fun fact: New York is also home to an all-female pop/alt-country quartet called The Little Women Band. Wonder how many of their fans have clicked on the wrong MySpace page and been totally traumatized.)
Links:
- Little Women on MySpace
- AUM Fidelity official site (the band’s current label)
- Socket Records (label behind Little Women’s first album, teeth)
Even though we blog together, roomed together in college and have probably gotten drunk together more times than Tiger Woods cheated on his wife, the truth is that Eddie and I have pretty radicaly different taste in music. Where I tend to go more for the headbang/facemelt school of rawk, Eddie mostly prefers bands you can listen to without fear of spilling your part-skim soy latte. Highbrow high-fallutin sissy music, as I like to call it–but only to his face, because it’s fun to watch the way it makes his ears turn red.
But the other day, our pal Nicole (thanks, Nicole!) turned us on to a band that, for once, we can both agree on. They’re called The Metal Shakespeare Company and their name says it all, really. If Ozzy even played a Renaissance Faire (yeah, like that’ll ever happen), it would probably sound like these guys.
Anyway, this video pretty much tells you everything you need to know about these guys. Has theater geek dorkiness ever looked this awesome? I thinkest not.
(All lyrics by Shakespeare himself, or so the band claims. I’m frankly not that up on my Bard quotes, and even if I was, most of the time the strangled cries of lead singer Lord Simms are pretty much impossible to understand, anyway.)
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Of all the weird bands we’ve blogged about here on TWBITW, the one that’s gotten by far the biggest response so far is Die Antwoord, the South African “zef rap-rave crew” fronted by a scrawny, prison-tatted MC named Ninja and an even scrawnier singer/rapper/fly-girl named Yo-landi Vi$$er. Like a lot of baffled yet undeniably delighted observers, we suspected the whole thing might be a put-on, but there was something so awesome about the group’s outlandish attitude that we decided they were probably for real.
Well, it turns out we were had–sort of. Die Antwoord is actually the latest incarnation of another group called Max Normal, an earlier hip-hop crew which also featured the inimitable Ms. Visser (minus the dollar signs) and a fellow by the name of Waddy Jones, an actor/musician/artist/troublemaker who, before he created the Ninja character, fronted his Max Normal crew in a three-piece suit and (according to a band site that’s been taken down but is still viewable in archive form) performed “motivational speaking style raps” to deliver “high energy hip-hop power point presentation[s].” Quite a far cry from Die Antwoord’s ghetto fabulous approach, although judging from the above publicity photo, both groups do share the same Keith Haring-esque design aesthetic.
Waddy and co. have clearly attempted to cover their tracks: the old MaxNormal.tv website has been taken down and replaced with a deliberately primitive-looking WordPress “advertising blog” ; www.waddyjones.com similarly features a very plain-envelope “article directory,” which we’re guessing (although we can’t find an archived version) has not always been the case. Even the Max Normal Wikipedia page was just taken down yesterday–ostensibly for copyright infringement.
Not that we’re complaining about any of this. As the rest of the blogosphere has already widely proclaimed, what Jones and his crew are doing is so clever that an added layer of Borat-like chicanery is all just part of the fun. So enjoy this Max Normal video–which, as near as we can tell, is about two years old–and appreciate a.) how fucking versatile these guys are, and b.) how much better they’ve gotten in just a few years. If Waddy Jones doesn’t have his own HBO special by this time next year, we’ll guzzle the juice in this fish paste jar.
[Bonus factoid: the dude in Die Antwoord with progeria has been widely identified as an artist named Leon Bartha. Another zef rap-rave mystery solved!]
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Our next weird band comes to us from Florida, land of spring break, old people, Disney World, stolen presidential elections, and death metal. Not many people know about that last one, but it’s true–many of the evillest sounding metal bands of all time hail from the Sunshine State. When you grow up surrounded by beaches and old farts in golf carts, screaming your head off about death and carnage over jackhammer-fast riffs seems like as good a response as any.
To our ears, Yip-Yip kinda sounds like what might happen if a couple of computer science geeks tried to combine their love of Devo and, oh, let’s say Donkey Kong with one of the more technical death metal bands like Cynic. There are no guitars, just lots of spazzy synthesizers and the occasional saxophone or robot vocal, all kind of sounding violent and playful at the same time, like a really good mosh pit. Do people mosh at Yip-Yip shows? If they don’t, they should.
The Yip-Yip dudes hieghten all this electro insanity with a fondness for strobe lights (seriously, epileptics should NOT visit this band’s MySpace page) and these goofy checkerboard costumes, although judgeing from their more recent videos and live performance clips, they seem to be ditching the checkboards in favor of a beret-wearing look that’s more sort of Nerd Special Forces. They still love those strobes though.
Anyway, here’s a recent video from Yip-Yip’s YouTube channel, which has got all kinds of great stuff, including a truly hilarious clip of them playing a high school homecoming dance. Seriously, those kids at Lyman High don’t know how lucky they are–at my high school dances, we just got lame-ass top 40 DJs and one time, a really shitty ska band. (Warning: more strobe effects!)
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Apparently it’s freak week here at TWBITW. Oops, sorry, let’s rephrase that: it’s “Persons With Unusual Medical Conditions Week,” or possibly “Likely Subjects of a One-Hour Special on the Discovery Health Channel Week.” Earlier we had Die Antwoord, a South African hip-hop crew featuring a dude with progeria syndrome; today, it’s a pair of conjoined twins called Evelyn Evelyn who only have two arms between them, but somehow manage to play everything from accordion to piano to guitar to ukulele. It’s a heartwarming tale, really, of overcoming physical obstacles in the pursuit of creative self-expression. Maybe they can get a Discovery Health Channel special and a Lifetime movie of the week.
Spoiler alert: Despite their rather elaborate backstory (born Eva and Lyn Neville on a farm in Kansas in 1985, shipped off to the circus at age 11, etc., etc.), Evelyn Evelyn are clearly the invention of the musical duo who claims to have “discovered” the twins via MySpace: Amanda Palmer, of Dresden Dolls fame, and Jason Webley, an accordionist and former street musician from Seattle who shares Palmer’s love of vaudeville, Brecht and old-timey folk music. We weren’t familiar with Webley before (based on his MySpace page, his solo stuff kinda sounds like a cross between Tom Waits and the Decemberists), but we’re big fans of Palmer, and we gotta say–even by her eccentric standards, Evelyn Evelyn is pretty out there. Conjoined twins shtick aside, the duo’s debut album (due out in March) reportedly features a song called “MySpace” featuring guest vocals by (ready?): Weird Al, Andrew W.K., Neil Gaiman, Tegan & Sara, Gerard Way and Frances freakin’ Bean Cobain. Somewhere in rock ‘n’ roll heaven, Kurt Cobain is laughing his ass off.
Anyway, here’s a little interview with Palmer and Webley, along with a clip from Evelyn Evelyn’s first public performance. Perhaps the biggest mystery of all: Where did Webley’s beard go?
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We gotta say, 2010 has gotten off to a pretty slow start here at TWBITW. There just isn’t much genuinely weird shit out there these days. Note to bands: There were over 100,000 new albums released last year. You might wanna try to, y’know, stand out a little.
So thank Christ on a crutch that someone finally hipped us to this “zef rap-rave crew” from South Africa called Die Antwoord. Frontman Ninja is fond of mentioning in every one of the group’s songs, videos and interviews that his crew is onto some “next level futuristic shit” and we gotta say–dude ain’t lying.
Die Antwoord–whose name apparently means “The Answer” in Afrikaans–also consists of singer/dancer/future American Apparel model Yo-landi Vi$$er, producer/DJ Hi-Tek (who will no doubt be getting a cease-and-desist letter shortly from this dude), and a little guy with progeria syndrome whose main job seems to be to stand around looking weird. Based on the intro to this video, you’d think the whole thing was a joke, but then Ninja starts rapping like a white South African Busta Rhymes over Hi-Tek’s squiggly beats and Yo-landi’s helium-voiced croons and something undeniably awesome starts to happen. What that something is exactly, we’re not sure, but we like it.
It’s hard to pick just one of Die Antwoord’s videos because they each showcase a different aspect of the group’s goofy, slightly malnourished charm. But the one that probably blew our minds the hardest was “Enter the Ninja”…especially the little inspirational monologue at the 4:05 mark. If you’re hungry for more, we’d also recommend the video for “Wat Pomp,” which appears to use the same set. Recycling–it’s da bomb, baby!
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A few months back, we blogged about Caninus, the world’s only (to our knowledge) death metal band featuring dogs on lead vocals. Well, in the interest of giving equal time, we guess it’s time to acknowledge that when it comes to replacing the feeble vocal chords of humans in the death metal scene, Caninus is not alone. There’s also a death metal fronted by a parrot. We couldn’t make this shit up if we tried, people!
Amazingly, Hatebeak has been around since 2004 and released at least three records, including a split with our old pals Caninus. The band is made up of Blake, Mark and Waldo. We’ll let you guess which one is the parrot.
Much like Caninus, Hatebeak is strictly a studio project, so no live footage or music videos exist. However, several enterprising fans have posted most of the band’s catalog on YouTube at this point. They were signed to a Baltimore hardcore label/store called Reptilian Records, but it literally just closed its storefront today (today! what are the odds?) and although their website declares, “Is Reptilian going under? Hell no!” the link for the band’s page on the Reptilian site doesn’t work. So have Hatebeak squawked their last? We’re not optimistic. Although, we hear parrots live to be like 150, so maybe Waldo can pull a Dave Mustaine and go on to have lasting success with some other project, occasionally squawking bitterly about how shittily Blake and Mark treated him in interviews with Metal Hammer.
Anyway, here’s Hatebeak in action. Kind of arty compared to Caninus, but we’re diggin it.
Links:
- Hatebeak on MySpace
- Interview with Hatebeak from ParrotChronicles.com – the online magazine for parrot lovers
