Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

Edible conflict: A cinematic feast of Chicago food moments

Article
Onion A.V. Club Chicago
September 2010
Link

abe_froman_jpg_595x325_crop_upscale_q85

Chicago’s first Food Film Festival pairs a program of provocative documentaries with a tantalizing array of food, including DMK Burgers and fried cheese curds, which still can’t top the fat content of artificial butter topping. While the “Hog Butcher of the World” label doesn’t exactly scream for a close up, plenty of films set here capture the city and its cuisine. Here are some of the top dining moments in Chicago’s cinematic history.

Lunch at Chez Quis, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
The preternaturally cool teen-philosopher, one of John Hughes’ greatest characters, proves his true guile in what might be one of the movie’s most underappreciated scenes. At a haughty French restaurant downtown called Chez Quis—a play on the down-market pizza parlor Shakey’s—the truant hero Bueller (Matthew Broderick) tries to score a table for his girlfriend Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara) and friend Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck), meeting with interference from an incredulous, snooty waiter. Bueller responds by scanning the reservation book and claiming he’s Abe Froman, later revealed to be the “sausage king of Chicago,” and doesn’t back down until he’s seated. The teens enjoy lunch, barely missing Bueller’s father on the way out. The true significance may be in the no-show; if the real Froman had a reservation, why didn’t he show up? Perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, Bueller planted the name as part of an elaborately constructed (not spur-of-the-moment) day downtown on Cameron’s behalf. The interior was shot in Los Angeles, and the exterior was a Gold Coast stand-in at 22 W. Schiller.

Soul Food Cafe scene, The Blues Brothers (1980)
Jake and Elwood Blues (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) enjoy a few memorable meals on their quest to get the band back together, including a dinner scene (filmed at Chez Paul on Rush Street) where Belushi stuffs his face in a manner that recalls the cafeteria scene in Animal House. But the ultimate has to be the dry white toast and four fried chickens they order at the Soul Food Cafe. The brothers enter looking to re-recruit Matt “Guitar” Murphy and “Blue” Lou Marini, but so piss off Mrs. Murphy (Aretha Franklin) in the process, that she gets testy enough to belt out “Think.” Even though that song-and-dance routine was filmed on set, it and other scenes in the film were good evocations of Maxwell Street, a once-vital, now mostly gentrified neighborhood famous for its open air market, live performances by local blues artists, and Polish sausage sandwiches.

Dancing Zorba’s and wedding dinner, My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)
Nia Vardalos’ Grecian family comedy was, in many parts, a tragic reminder of how easy it is for Hollywood to use stand-in cities for Chi-town. The incredibly profitable indie flick made the most of its small budget by filming in Toronto’s Danforth neighborhood, one of the largest Greek neighborhoods in North America, and featured exterior shots of venues from that city, like Pappas Grill. The main restaurant, Dancing Zorba’s, was shot at Simcoe and Pearl streets in Toronto. It was a massive missed opportunity to showcase Chicago’s own Grecian heritage, including the supposed introduction of flaming saganaki by the Liakouras brothers, Chris and Bill, at the Parthenon restaurant. With all the jokes about Greek cuisine, flaming cheese seems too good to pass up.

Baseball bat banquet, The Untouchables (1987)
De Niro whacks a disloyal associate with a bat during a climactic banquet scene shot at the Crystal Ballroom at 636 S. Michigan Ave. The scene was based on an actual mob assassination attempt; henchmen and thugs Albert Anselmi and John Scalise plotted a Chicago outfit coup, but Capone got wind and beat them both to death during dinner on May 7, 1929.

Sunday dinner, Soul Food (1997)
A tribute to the bonding power of a family meal, complete with a child narrator as sweet as his grandmother’s sweet potatoes, this film is filled with scenes where the camera lovingly pans over tables overflowing with traditional Southern fare.

Autolux: Guitarist Greg Edwards Expands His Sonic Vocabulary

Story
EQ Magazine
September 2010
Link

267_Autolux_nr

L.A. trio Autolux strikes a rich vein of guitar and bass tones, recalls the dark, prickly melodies of Blonde Redhead and Sonic Youth, and roughs everything up with drummer Carla Azar’s heavyweight hammering. It’s a balance of high and low fidelity, according to guitarist Greg Edwards, which he constantly tweaks while playing and recording.

“It’s easy to get texture and emotion from a lo-fi approach, and it’s easy to get dynamic, sterile sound with good technique that has no lasting impact,” he says. “We’re always trying to combine emotion and impact that’s not a mess, and fidelity that’s not just soulless and academic.”

Transit Transit incorporated lessons learned during previous sessions with producer T-Bone Burnett that comprised 2004’s Future Perfect. Burnett’s engineer labored over mic placement, and when Edwards set out to record the new album himself, he followed suit. Recording in a practice space with below-average acoustics, something that precluded using a room mic, forced the matter.

While recording himself, Edwards avoided excess compression and extraneous pedals. He alternated fluidly between Gibson ES-345 Hollow Body, Gibson SG, and Jazzmaster guitars, playing through a VHT cabinet with a Pitbull head into a pair of positioned mics. A Neumann U57 provided punch and articulation while a Royer R-121, a “very EQable, pleasant sounding mic,” brought out the mid-range and high frequencies, important on songs like “Supertoys,” where the bass and guitar constantly shared frequencies.

“The midrange is a mysterious area for me psychologically,” says Edwards. “I want to hear more than I should, so I undershoot with midrange. I follow the old wisdom about taking away frequencies to reveal what you want to hear and turning down the high and low ends.”

Tracking to an Alesis ADAT HD24 hard drive captured multiple versions of the same line, and provided more options for mixing. Many of the bent, distorted tones come from running two amps simultaneously to create tension. The fundamental sound from the amp, layered or not, is always the starting point.

“With guitar mics you can get a wide range of differences in tone just by changing the angle, pointing into the cone, or changing the mics’ positions in regards to one another,” he says. “I get the amp sounding exactly like I want, and then it’s up to me to put the mics into the right position, do some subtle EQing with the pres, and really capture what’s coming out.”

The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s

Feature
Pitchfork
August 30, 2010
Link

Here are my contributions to Pitchfork’s rundown of the best tracks of the ’90s.

176
176. Orbital
“Chime”
[FFRR; 1990]
Simon Reynolds called this early rave anthem “The British ‘Strings of Life’,” and the grounds for comparison between Orbital’s buoyant first single and the Derrick May Detroit techno classic extend beyond the keyboard riff and pulsing beats. “Chime” shares the low-tech, handmade feel of “Strings”, and its origins are equally humble. Rushing to finish a track before hitting up the pubs in Sevenoaks, England, in summer 1989, Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll sorted through his dad’s easy-listening records, nicked a few samples he still hasn’t cleared, and cobbled together a track– on his parents’ cassette player, no less. Released at the dawn of the 90s, it went top 20 in the UK and established Orbital as a dance music force. They still perform the track for raving throngs today, heads and headlights bobbing. –Patrick Sisson

54. Portishead
“Glory Box”
[Go! Beat/FFRR; 1994]

Despite their arsenal of artful samples and expectation-shredding musical acumen, the greatest weapon of Portishead producers Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley has always been the voice of Beth Gibbons. Her every inflection hints at an anguished backstory that she never quite reveals. “Glory Box” tastefully lays down a loop of sleek strings from Isaac Hayes’ “Ike’s Rap II” and accents it with taut snares, vinyl crackle, and Utley’s moaning guitar. But the song still belongs to Gibbons, whose alternately lacerating and shivering delivery throws down the gauntlet. “Give me a reason to love you/ Give me a reason to be a woman.” She’s begging for an answer, and sings with a deep understanding of how futile it may be to pose the question. Trip-hop often delved into darker, weirder recesses, but this one hit a fragile emotional note. –Patrick Sisson

52. The Stone Roses
“I Wanna Be Adored”
[Silvertone; 1991]
The Stones Roses’ debut has been acclaimed and canonized so much that it’s now recognized to be just as good as the album the cocky Mancunians felt they were making in the studio. The band was famously self-confident, but when you’re celebrated for something as elemental as “I Wanna Be Adored”– finally a hit single in 1991, two years after it was first released– sticking out your chest seems only human. Every simple, uncomplicated piece of the song contributes layers of meaning; John Squire’s unspooling guitar, Mani’s thick bass, Reni’s timekeeping thud and most famously, Ian Brown’s airy vocals. The lyrics can appear self-absorbed, the object in this construction merely a tool to worship or redeem. But with a scant 19 words, “I Wanna to Be Adored” suggests multitudes– a desire for love, sabotage through self-hatred, or fame’s glowing hope and poisonous pessimism. For all the hype, it was about fundamentals. –Patrick Sisson

School Of Seven Bells on Ethereal Vocal Layering

Article
EQ Magazine
September 2010
Link

SVII_Photo

The Cocteau Twin-esque dream pop of School of Seven Bells contains a particular mix of weighty and weightless vocals from identical twin singers Claudia and Alejandra Deheza. Their shimmering melodies and intricate harmonies may conjure up visions of endless effects pedals, but the band relies on precise layering and a vocals-first approach.

“There’s so much going on with a voice that’s not happening with a guitar,” says Benjamin Curtis, the band’s guitarist and producer. “It’s the most unique organic sound that you can manipulate.”

While recording their sophomore disc Disconnect From Desire [Vagrant/Ghostly International] at their home studio in New York City, Curtis set up a Neumann U 87 with a high-pass filter and hung it upside-down. Overdubbing and rarely singing simultaneously, the singers have similar voices but different styles. Alejandra comes on stronger and dives into extended explorations of scales, singing about a foot off the mic. And Claudia, who weaves in intricate harmonies, is more premeditated and sings right next to the mic, often barely above a whisper. The contrast is clear on “The Wait.” Alejandra glides through strong harmonies during subdued verses, while Claudia’s pinpoint flourishes energize the chorus.

Curtis runs tracking vocals through a Universal Audio SOLO/610 pre directly to Logic, without compression. “I replaced the stock tubes in the UA 610 with older tubes, which opened up the sound,” he says. “We tried the Empirical Labs Mike-E, which we use live, but it wasn’t sounding right. We thought recording with compression was going to enhance the sound, but they don’t need it. We compress the hell out of everything in the mix, but I hated making that decision early on.”

Occasional vocal effects crop up, such as the delay and reverb that gave “Joviann” extra bite, or the chorus of “Babelonia,” sung a step up then pitched down for more personality. But Curtis and mixing engineer Jack Joseph Puig focused on blending and placing vocal tracks (up to 20 a song) in the fore.

“I like printing the vocals in mono to make sure the frequencies are fighting,” says Curtis. “Putting vocals last is a problem. It’s the same frequency range as guitars. Get the vocals down and know where they’re going to live and don’t be married to the guitar. It’s a beautiful thing when frequencies are rubbing. Your brain always picks out the center note and the weird interactions in the speaker. It’s beautiful.”

Machine Love: Matmos

Feature
August 13, 2010
Resident Advisor
Link
Supreme-Balloon-by-Matmos_eR0uK9eMVDox_full
RA talks to Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt about micing cacti, counting with “the Bjork” and the philosophical dilemmas of live performance.

While Matmos is often described in terms of conceptual frameworks and inspired sampling—bowing a rat cage or recording liposuction are but two of the most famous examples—the experimental duo’s dialogue of ideas, and the playfulness with which they perform live, is what has kept them relevant. Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt are never content to stand still. Watching them behind their bank of instruments, which sometimes includes an Indian drum machine, a metal sheet, a spring reverb called The Moisturizer, a cactus and more, only reinforces the conversational aspect of their music.

Known for their unpredictable shows, we caught up with the duo for the latest edition in RA’s Machine Love series to talk specifically about their live set-up. It was the afternoon before their performance at this year’s Mutek festival, a set which mixed tracks from their 2008 synth odyssey Supreme Balloon and from Treasure State, their recent collaboration with minimalist New York ensemble So Percussion.

What pieces are you performing tonight?

Drew Daniel: It’s half and half. We’re going to play two pieces from Supreme Balloon and two pieces from the new album we’ve just created with So Percussion that we’re about to tour. But since So Percussion is busy in New York, we’ve had to create standalone electronic versions of them. I guess when we play live it’s always 50/50 between structured loops and rhythms and free improvisation and that often means I’m more…

Martin Schmidt: To be honest, what we’re doing tonight, there’s not a hell of a lot of free improv.

DD: What I was going to say is that’s it’s improvisation in that there are a lot of open choices about when you bring things in and how long you stay in them and what you’re doing on top of a structure. The structure isn’t cut out in advance. I don’t have a cut sequence that’s 200 bars and it starts and it ends. What I have is a lot of options I go through. What’s clear is that the song may have seven sections, but how long each section is and how busy it is and what we’re doing on top of those sections is freely determined in the moment. I’m calling that improvisation, but it’s not, of course.

It’s not totally free, there’s just a set of options.

MS: Yeah, it’s not free improv but it’s improvisatory. I am incapable of counting. I mean, I can count, I really can. But musically I can’t do it. It’s sort of a structure based on necessity really. Oh yeah, I should do this now… for a while. This caused trouble with the Bjork. During her songs, you’re supposed to be counting. And I kind of couldn’t do it. There was some trouble and she was patient… to a point.

DD: We try to use our videos as graphic scores to drive our awareness of where we want to be in a piece. If we have a seven minute video, and the squiggly black circles are turning into red misty clouds, that means I need to bring in the Coupigny [a modular synthesizer used on Supreme Balloon] sounds and thin out the drum machine more and more.
Read more…

The Last Poet: Gil Scott-Heron is still the first name on the rhyme scene

Feature
Wax Poetics
Issue 42
Link

i42-C1b

Gil Scott-Heron doesn’t suffer no fools. During an afternoon phone call from his office in New York, the 61-year-old author and performer fielded interview questions with the same combination of humor, bluntness and insight that have made his poetry, novels and lyrics so valued and influential over the last four decades. When asked about his relationship with hip-hop, he replied, “I haven’t seen hip-hop lately. I see rappers as individuals.” While I was trying to ferret out information about his forthcoming book, The Last Holiday, he told me he has 628 pages right now, and while he’d love to talk about each and every one of them, he’ll let everyone read the book themselves. Towards the end of our conversation, he said “I told you everything except my DNA. Don’t you think you have enough for a story?”

His patience may have been tested, but his capacity for storytelling was barely tapped. Born in Chicago and raised in Tennessee and the Bronx, Scott-Heron’s literary ambitions and social conscience quickly manifested themselves. After writing a novel in 1968 at age 19, The Vulture, Scott-Heron began a long musical career with the release of Small Talk at 125th & Lennox in 1970. He’s collaborated with musicians such as Brian Jackson, Malcolm Cecil and industry legends like Bob Thiele and Clive Davis. The influence of his blend of socio-political commentary and R&B and soul — as heard on seminal tracks like “The Bottle” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” — has never waned and is in face considered a key element in the evolution of hip-hop. But Scott-Heron’s recent recorded output was sparse until the release of I’m New Here, which came out earlier this year. A set of modern tracks paired with the poet’s frank observations, it was a pet project of XL Recordings’ owner Richard Russell that found its genesis in Russell’s 2006 visit to see Scott-Heron at Rikers Island, where he was serving time for cocaine possession. Scott-Heron’s baritone voice may have aged, but his focus and literary integrity will never go out of style.
Read more…

Interview: Diplo

Interview
Pitchfork
July 26, 2010
Link

diplo452

“If you rated someone’s popularity by how much hate they get from journalists, I’m fucking super-popular.”

Wesley Pentz– better known as DJ, producer, and Mad Decent label boss Diplo– dropped that quote near the conclusion of this interview, which might suggest he’s got a problem with the media. But considering the breadth of his activities, from recruiting artists like Po Po and Bosco Delrey to making new Major Lazer tracks, Diplo seems more interested in his own creative projects and being part of the media instead of wasting time worrying about it.

“I’d love to take a year off to do strictly film work,” he says. “That seems to reach a lot more people. When I do music, it’s got a huge voice and gets to people immediately. Film reaches so many more people, especially when you do a film about music. You can actually get out there and understand the fundamentals of what’s going on in these different scenes.”

Speaking over Skype from Taiwan, Diplo appeared to be multi-tasking as usual. He said he was performing at a club called Luxy the following night, but spent the day at the studios of Apple Daily, the company that made the bizarre and popular animated Tiger Woods news report video, to get his own video made for a collaboration with Lil Jon. We spoke to him about building a label, the evolution of baile funk, and why he doesn’t care about M.I.A.’s politics.

Pitchfork: One of the founders of VICE said there’s now a universality of youth culture, that the internet and media can bring together kids from the middle of Kansas and Italy who have similar interests. But is there also a flip side to this kind of globalization, the homogenization of these different scenes?
Diplo: I can give you two examples. I just did a compilation of dubstep for Mad Decent. Not the best or the truest, but the stuff I like. It’s so diverse: stuff like Rusko that’s straightforward or the stuff like that’s more hardcore, like this Canadian kid Datsik. I wrote in the liner notes about the dubstep scene and how it had grown simultaneously across the world, because kids were doing the same forms and sharing the same techniques at the same time.
But you can see, even in London, there are like six different kinds of dubstep. There’s the emo vibe, the hardcore vibe, and the more techno-y vibe. It’s one of the first scenes that grew globally and came up around the world at the same time. You have kids from Israel, New Zealand, there are big scenes everywhere. Sometimes you can’t even tell how it’s connected, sometimes you can’t tell it’s dubstep. Guys like DJ Mujava from South Africa say they make house music. To me it doesn’t even sound like that. To me, you can’t take away…

Pitchfork: Geography?
Diplo: The connection to people. When someone does it just to make it and it sounds like a carbon copy, I can hear that right away. When it’s really weird and mixed up, that’s exciting to me. I’ve done more shows in Indonesia in the last two years than I’ve done in Philly. And the kids there are crazy, the DJs are great and up to date with the newest music. The producers there are giving me the best demos I’ve gotten all year. It takes one or two people.
Another good example is Proxy from Russia. It’s just him and a couple friends from the suburbs making heavy sounds like an amplified car engine. There are pluses and minuses. The minus is a lot of kids do it because they want to do it. I get so many demos and usually the stuff I give to the Mad Decent kids is the good stuff at the end. If I had to listen to everything it would be too much, but the good stuff does rise to the top.
Read more…

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Jamie Lidell Creates Electrified Soul From Eclectic Studio Sessions And A Series Of Bad Breaks

Feature
EQ
June 2010
Link

Jamie-Lidelly

Compass, the latest album from live-wire musician Jamie Lidell, finds the pitch-shifting, melody-looping extrovert experiencing a catharsis. Grasping for solid ground after suffering what he calls a “triple whammy”—the dissolution of a relationship, a change in management, and a move from Berlin to New York— he set down and in the course of a month, wrote his own version of “good, old-fashioned relationship blues.”

“It left me to reinvent myself with all the joy and pain and the freedom to think and deal with the fear and shit that got stirred up,” Lidell says. “It’s the deepest blues I’ve ever felt. But music is a really sweet healer.”

Raw performances aside, the classic sentiment expressed throughout Compass [Warp] was built from technology-enabled, studio-hopping collaborations. Production was done at multiple studios. There were collaborations with Beck and others at the famed Ocean Way complex in Hollywood. Meanwhile, musician Chilly Gonzales and Wilco multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone contributed backing parts remotely via online file sharing, and Lidell recorded synth parts on his Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 in his apartment.
Read more…

Rusko: O.M.G.!

Review
Pitchfork
July 2, 2010
Link
6.7

rusko omg200

Perez Hilton doesn’t spend much time on the dubstep beat, but in mid-May, the Queen of All Media blogged about Rusko’s contributions to the forthcoming Britney Spears album. Britney was the obvious link bait, but as word of the collaboration spread, it created Rorschach-like responses about the producer’s role– whether he was a blatant sell-out or a genre ambassador to the masses– and fed into anxiety/happiness over the scene’s increasing popularity. The recent L.A. transplant had already remixed or produced for Kid Sister, M.I.A., and Basement Jaxx. Working with the former pop princess seemed to test his recent exhortation that dubstep is “the punk rock of the electronic-music world.” But the spiky-haired Brit would probably be the first to say ditch pretension and politics, get hyped, and just jump in the pit and have fun.

From the start of O.M.G.!— which opens with a celebratory “woo!” that punctuates redlining, wall-of-bass lead single “Woo Boost”– Rusko dives in headfirst, rolling forward on distended low end while occasionally stepping into new territory. He bounces between the laid-back digital dub of “Rubadub Shakedown” and “District Line”, more uptempo and ravey territory on “Kumon Kumon”, and the Gucci Mane collaboration “Got Da Groove”, a successful fusion of strutting beats and a bulbous bass line. As for that Britney collab, he could do a lot worse than “Hold On”, a decent though stretched-out two-step rhythm that shines light on the versatility of Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman.

But over the course of the entire album, O.M.G.! doesn’t live up to its breathless title, coming off more as a disjointed dance survey course than anything game-changing. Sheer massiveness can be visceral, and Rusko has certainly pushed that idea forward with singles like “Cockney Thug”. But he can also slip into hyperactive and cartoonish territory (parts of “I Love You” sound like a very slowed-down version of the chattering aliens from “Sesame Street”). And fusing blown-out bass lines with stock parts from other genres– the trancey build-ups of “You’re on My Mind Baby” and “I Love You” or cheesy club-lite of “Feels So Real”– doesn’t add up to much. Rusko still puts together some moving, visceral moments, but here, they seem fleeting, good ideas in search of a vision.

Site Unseen: Two locations scouts name their favorite Chicago spots filmmakers may have missed

Feature
A.V. Club Chicago
June 30, 2010
Link

Our iconic architecture, crowning skyline, and diverse neighborhoods practically dare cinematographers to resist its charms. Not surprisingly, film history is dotted with iconic Chicago moments, from Jake and Elwood of Blues Brothers careening over the Skyway bridge to Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off contemplating Seurat at the Art Institute. Surely a city as sprawling as ours has plenty of hidden treasures untouched and undiscovered by film crews.

According to Susan Doll—a professor of film history at Oakton College, writer/researcher at Facets Multi-Media, and blogger for Turner Classic Movies—you’d be hard-pressed to find a part of the city that hasn’t been used in a film, and not just because of productions like The Dark Knight or even Call Northside 777, a 1948 crime drama starring Jimmy Stewart that showcased the city’s grit. Chicago was a legitimate center of the film industry around World War I. In the 1890s, William Selig opened a factory in Chicago to manufacture film equipment and later started making his own motion pictures, and in 1907, George Spoor and Broncho Billy Anderson founded Essanay Pictures in Uptown. That doesn’t even begin to factor in the contributions of independent African-American filmmakers of that period, including those working for the William Foster Photoplay Company and director Oscar Micheaux, who made a picture called Within Our Gates in 1920 that included an intense lynching scene (the year after the National Guard was called to Chicago to quell race riots).

“We couldn’t come up with anything,” Doll says. “Every time we came up with something, someone could name a film shot there. There have been about 2,000 films shot in the city since the film-school era in the ’60s.”

Sounds like a challenge, doesn’t it? The A.V. Club spoke with a pair of Chicago location scouts—Al Cohn, who worked on Eagle Eye and is working on Transformers 3, and Steven A. Jones, who worked on Henry, Portrait Of A Serial Killer and Mad Dog And Glory —and asked them to name great places in the city to film action sequences that haven’t been seen in a film before. Here are their choices.
Read more…

Older Posts
Newer Posts
© 2025 PATRICK SISSON | Writer and reporter