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You Should Know: Jacob and Mischa DeHart — The Threadless cofounder and his wife want to build an online community for foodies

Article
Chicago Magazine
February 2010
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The fourth-floor loft inhabited by Spaceship Collaborative—on Jackson next to Lou Mitchell’s—doesn’t look like a typical start-up. Freestanding desks, custom cabinetry, and dark wooden tables made by an Amish craftsman fill the sleek, airy office. Then again, this isn’t your typical start-up. Jacob DeHart, 28, is a Chicago internet success stories, cofounder of the pioneering multi-million-dollar T-shirt company Threadless. Along with his wife and Spaceship Collaborative partner Mischa, 25, DeHart is getting entrepreneurial again with Culinary Culture, an evolving social media hub featuring restaurant profiles, event listings, and a modern, upscale spin on the old-fashioned recipe swap.

“Our business is like a recipe,” he says. “If next month our users want a new feature, we can just tweak the recipe.”

In 2007, Jacob left Threadless, which he cofounded with Jake Nickell in 2000 while studying design at Purdue. The company solicited T-shirt designs from the public, then asked people to vote on the most popular-making the community the creative team, decision makers, and end consumers. That formula worked: one million users registered for the site.

Although happy with his accomplishments, DeHart craved the excitement of starting from scratch with a small team. At the same time, Mischa began cooking more seriously. A Columbia College marketing and public relations grad and nonprofit fundraiser, she’s an MBA at Dominican University near Oak Park, where the couple live.

They started Spaceship Collaborative in 2008 to serve as an incubator for projects like Culinary Culture, which they began designing in early 2009. By winter, when the site was open to the public after private beta testing, it had roughly 1,500 active users commenting on recipes ranging from lotus root hash browns to a drink called cherry bounce.

Right now, the community is small. But DeHart’s big takeaway from Threadless was that community engagement, not size, matters. “If you give people an opportunity to do something they’re passionate about, they’ll do it,” he says. “If you give them the ability to interact with others who are just as passionate, you will create a community. If you have a strong, loyal community, you can do anything.”

As of December, Culinary Culture (culinaryculture.com) was self-funded and without a revenue stream. But the DeHarts are considering various potential revenue options, including allowing restaurants to post menus or offer special deals. Right now, the focus is on making the site useful. And if Jacob needs to sample more of Mischa’s cooking, that’s R&D he can get behind.

Interview: Four Tet

Interview
Pitchfork
January 18, 2010
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Kieran Hebden describes his recent stint as a monthly resident at London’s Plastic People club as inspirational. Coming from him, it doesn’t sound like the typical DJ platitude. With the night to himself and an enthusiastic crowd open to anything from highlife to Art Blakey or Carl Craig, it sounds like his ideal situation. Hebden has an inclusive approach to music; from his start in the band Fridge to his solo work as Four Tet and recent duo recordings with powerhouse drummer Steve Reid, he finds way to redraw the Venn diagrams people place around genres.

While his rolling, surging rhythms often have an all-encompassing vibe, his recordings tend to be documents of specific times and places. Much of Hebden’s new album, There Is Love in You, which contains the same techno pulse that surged through 2008’s Ringer EP, was road-tested at Plastic People and tweaked to fit that crowd. When we spoke to Hebden, he discussed his need to document his progress, leaving himself hidden messages and going in utero in the club.

Pitchfork: After you made Ringer, you mentioned you had previously been doing DJ sets at the End in London, which were a big influence. Have the recent sets you’ve been doing at the Plastic People residency been as big an influence on this album?

Four Tet: Even more so. After the End closed down, Plastic People gave me a monthly thing and I’ve been doing that for the last 14 or 15 months. I was there throughout the whole making of the record. I’d do five to six hours, starting at 11 p.m. and going on to 4 or 4:30 in the morning. It would just be me, and that’s what I liked about it. I had all the space in the world and could play whatever I wanted. Pretty much all the tracks on the record were tried out in that club, and I worked on the tracks so they sounded as good as possible in there. “Love Cry” was probably the first track I did for the album, and I’ve been playing that every month for the last year or so. I wanted to make something that was for the night.
Read more…

Rjd2: The Colossus

Music Review
Pitchfork
January 18, 2010
Link

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Independence is thrilling, but after those first tentative or defiant steps towards freedom, the urge to look back and survey the situation you just left can be hard to resist. That seemingly contradictory perspective, looking both forward and backwards, was at play when Rjd2 wrote The Colossus. His fourth solo album arrives at a pivotal moment, and not just because it follows the lyrical trainwreck and one man-band overreach of The Third Hand. The producer is now more than a successful yet hungry talent; he’s the boss, head of the new RJ’s Electrical Connections imprint. Taken in tandem with the recent release of the vinyl-only career retrospective 2002-2010, it’s unsurprising he’s in a reflective mood.

The Colossus, as its name implies, strives for scale, but also strains a bit under a heavy burden. While Rjd2 excels at sonic collages, the mixed motives on this album– a current spin on past techniques, a synthesis of old songs and a turn toward the future– are difficult to balance. After years spent mastering instruments and recording techniques, he still finds a new way to overachieve, adding his own passable, if sometimes bland, live drumming to five tracks. But, as if admitting his DIY ethos and perfectionist tendencies on Third Hand went too far, he brought in a team of guest vocalists and instrumentalists to augment his own performances. Interlude “Salud”, featuring a goofy British voice similar to the one on Deadringer, says as much: “I’ve assembled a healthy bunch of folks who are much more talented than I am.”

But more important to anyone put off by his unique foray into singer-songwriter territory, he rediscovers, or at least indulges in, some of the mood-setting backgrounds and rattling, rigged-to-explode instrumentals that originally made him such a vital producer. “Let There be Horns” opens the album with stretched-out, Looney Tunes strings and a vaguely Latin beat, jumping between staccato breakdowns and guitar riffs. The applause during the song’s conclusion might as well be the sound of some fans breathing a collective sigh of relief on a partial return to form, since the dust-heavy samples have long been replaced with more electrified melodies.

But just as quickly as he comes out of the gate, “Games Can Win” re-enters more shaky singer-songwriter territory. While his lyrical abilities, which still haven’t caught up to his compositional skills, produce some clunkers (“Play your hand close/ Like you have a glass chin”), he takes a step forward in terms of balance with appropriately toned down percussion. The rest of the album trades off between rumbling tracks like “Small Plans” and a few songwriting efforts like the “The Glow”, which –with it’s smug focus on having “the glow,” overseas accounts and living a life of leisure– seems like the interior monologue of a bailed-out banker. It’s still pretty creaky but better than the cringe-inducing moments from The Third Hand.

Rjd2 showcases a grasp of mood and a talent for arranging on The Colossus. His backing of Phonte Coleman’s soulful vocal turn on “Shining Path” and the springy, triumphant synths on posse cut “A Son’s Cycle” are both understated yet fitting. But on tracks like the eerie “The Stranger”, rolling with punched-up drums and clipped guitars, or “Giant Squid”, which bounces on a guttural beat, the career fusion concept pays off. His instrumental skills, and the synth-funk of Since We Last Spoke (in full overdrive on the movie theater sound check that is “A Spaceship for Now”) help bring more string tones and textures to the mix, but he manages to capture some of that foreboding yet funky mood from his early work. He’s spent the last few albums trying to go beyond sampling songs to creating them from scratch, and he still can sound like he’s cramming tributes to half of his record collection on the same track. But when his relentless drive and sense of restraint match up, they make parts of this album a forward thinking look back.

Let It Bleed : Recording In A Small Mexico City Studio Helped Chuck Prophet Get Aggressive

Article
EQ
January 2010
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When San Francisco guitarist and singer Chuck Prophet set out to record ¡Let Freedom Ring! [Yep Roc] last spring, he assumed a change of environment, specifically Mexico City, would inspire him and add some manic energy to the album. He didn’t count on periodic power outages ruining takes at Estudio 19, the old-school studio he picked to lay down tracks, nor a 6.4 earthquake shaking the building’s foundations. And nobody expects a pandemic.

“What I didn’t predict was that the swine flu scare would start three days after we arrived,” Prophet says. “The CNN paranoia, if you crank that stuff up to 11, makes everybody start to feel a little off. People got itchy. We put on blue masks and had a driver take us to the studio.”

Also, according to producer Greg Leisz, Prophet didn’t remember how small (roughly 12 feet by 20 feet) the high-ceiling main room was at Estudio 19. Reacting to his last record, Soap and Water, which included sections with arranged strings and a children’s choir, Prophet wanted to dial things down. The former member of ’80s L.A. cowpunk band Green on Red wanted a light touch and a raw performance. Normally, tight spaces complicate the situation. But with a few deft arrangements of equipment and a willingness to use bleed and leakage to their advantage, the musicians and engineers working on ¡Let Freedom Ring! made it sound both spacious and fully charged.

“People think isolation is the way to go,” says Jason Carmer, who engineered the album. “But getting the bleed reinforces the stereo imagery. You can hear the guitars from the perspectives of all the mics in the room. I find that the bleed gives you great depth of field.”
Read more…

Radian: Chimeric

Music Review
Pitchfork
January 6, 2010
Link

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The cobbled-together beast from Greek mythology known as a chimera should be a recognizable concept for fans of electronic music, a genre that has evolved via the repurposing, re-contextualizing, and splicing together of sounds and samples. The instrumental, electro-acoustic Austrian trio Radian has spent more than a decade as a seemingly contradictory hybrid itself. Perched between precise composition and improvisational creation, members Martin Brandlmayr, Stefan Németh, and John Norman wear their glitch-heavy, avant-garde pedigrees on their collective sleeve, making sure their songs are sculpted and pockmarked just so. But on Chimeric, they stretch out and breathe a bit more, elongating melodies and placing more accent on organic sounds, such as wisps of brushed snare drums and the vibraphones’ soft echo.

The band’s last album, 2004’s Juxtaposition, blended labored-over microtones and billowy bass; on “Rapid Eye Movement”, Brandlmayr’s taps, scrapes and brushes don’t accompany as much as sync up with oscillating, mechanical screeches and tones. Chimeric is relatively looser and less dense, owing to more reliance on live interaction. While it’s arguable how loose the micro-managing trio allowed themselves to become during mixing, since recordings were re-organized and spliced together as if working with a tape machine, Chimeric sounds like the product of less tense and more spacious recording sessions. The band considers the record raw, broken, and unpolished, but they have nothing to be apologetic about. By loosening up they sound invigorated.

The hum of a switch being slowly flicked on and off at the outset of opener “Git Cut Noise” could be a gesture toward the analog and imperfect. It continues stomping forward in fitful starts, eventually picking up a caustic tone and a bass line with a slow, creeping gait. The 10-minute “Feedback Mikro / City Lights” indulges in a slow-burning crescendo, with interplay between a bright, churning guitar line, wavering tones, and a circular, ramshackle drum pattern. Songs like “Chimera” find the band occupying a more open landscape. It’s a dusty plateau dotted with lonely snatches of guitar notes and sweeping cymbals, one of the many finely tuned sounds Brandlmayr coaxes out of his drum kit. In his hands, the drums seem as rich a source of textures and tones as a sampler, ranging from slow, sweeping pulses to chaotic, jagged fills.

Unlike Rec.Extern and Juxtaposition, Chimeric was not recorded with producer and Tortoise drummer John McEntire. But between Brandlmayr’s swirling, textured percussion and the band’s more breezy approach– compare the jazzy brushes and washes of sound on the Chimeric track “Subcolors” with the more taut variations on “Rapid Eye Movement” and “Shift” off Juxtaposition — the new album sounds more informed by the trappings of Chicago post-rock and improv. That’s one of the main reasons Chimeric is much more a rearranging of existing elements and past themes than a reinvention. Despite the slight advantageous shifts, it isn’t the new creature its name might imply.

Top 50 Albums of 2009

Feature
Pitchfork
December 18, 2009
Link

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18. Atlas Sound
Logos
[Kranky]

While it has plenty of watery drips and washed-out backdrops, Bradford Cox’s Atlas Sound project can also be very blunt. Like his work with Deerhunter, he places gothic horror side-by-side with gorgeous guitar riffs and sonic textures, a disarming combination. But Logos makes it a point to get dark. Guilt and suffering are commonplace; it’s suffocating to enter the album’s lyrical landscape of cold lights, grey dawns, and regrets. The simple line “my halo burned a hole in the sky” is stigmatizing.

Logos is another turn at making pop music wrapped in sonic gauze, yet all the wounds remain exposed. Just look at its cover; Cox’s own frail, caved-in chest contrasts with a face obscured in a blinding light. But the aura and the album are also revealing and redemptive. “Shelia” spins an elderly couple’s burial into something poppy and romantic. Saints aren’t born saints, Laetitia Sadier implies in “Quick Canal”, later cooing that “wisdom is learned.” Perhaps it’s all about moving toward change. As the refrain says on “Walkabout”, the album’s propulsive and sunny highlight, “Forget the things you’ve left behind/ Through looking back you may go blind.” –Patrick Sisson

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9. Fever Ray
Fever Ray
[Mute/Rabid]

When the first singles for the Knife singer Karin Dreijer Andersson’s Fever Ray dropped, it was clear that her solo project was inscrutable, even by the standards of someone who considers Venetian plague masks a cornerstone of her wardrobe. The first impression is that atmosphere trumps narrative; bass notes, simple rhythms, and stark synth chords creep like a rolling fog while a cast of pitch-shifted voices emerge from dark corners of the woods or darker recesses of the mind. But Andersson’s use of chilling childhood imagery and warped lyrics, filled with morphing perspectives that cultivate curiosity and raise questions that may never be answered, make it addictive. Who knew dishwasher tablets could be so unsettling?

What’s made Andersson’s work even better is how her videos and performances amplify the music’s sense of dread and mystery. Does the dirty rave dancer on a diving board know she’s being watched (“When I Grow Up”)? Why is the Miss Havisham figure in a silver dress cavorting with farm animals (“Seven”)? Are they the same person? It’s deliberate, theatrical smoke and mirrors, constant reinvention, and a David Lynch-like veneer of unseen danger that invite audience reinterpretation. The more material this unique artist releases, the less any of it makes sense. –Patrick Sisson

Read the complete list here.

The Top 100 Tracks of 2009

Article
Pitchfork
December 14, 2009
Link

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91. HEALTH
“Die Slow”
[Lovepump United]

It’s fitting that HEALTH’s most melodic song to date manages to rip and rend something sweet from a grind. It’s a hook that could have been fashioned from sheet metal, but adorned with wiry guitar and Jacob Duzsik’s airy vocals, the cycling, jagged loop gains velocity and feels visceral yet restrained. These Smell alums obviously know how to move a sweaty, packed room; listen for the double bass-hit and the chugging, heavy riffs that make a brief appearance 10 seconds in, a paean to house parties past. What makes “Die Slow” stand out is that it’s some of the best evidence yet that, after a dance remix record and road tip with Trent Reznor, these guys know how to play to a much larger room. –Patrick Sisson

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18. The Big Pink
“Dominos”
[4AD]
Big Pink’s “Dominos” rolls big and boisterous, as carefree and brash as the commitment-averse dude at the song’s center. And when we’re talking about a blur of sexual conquests and quick flings (as the LP’s title says: a brief history of love, indeed), what’s to learn, or more accurately, what do you want to learn? Though some of the lyrics belie grief and bitterness, the massive hooks, slabs of crunchy synths, waves of big beat build-up, and blind optimism of the music encapsulate the rush of a long chain of encounters, one bumping into the next. That you don’t see the end of the line quickly rushing toward you doesn’t matter. Connecting the duo’s influences– noise, shoegaze, and booming pop– can be instructive. But when obsession over a song can be boiled down to big, dumb, and fun, why bother? –Patrick Sisson

See the whole list here.

Torture Team: A Place to Bury Strangers on Homemade Electronics and Dangerous Distortion

Feature
EQ Magazine
December 2009
Link

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Oliver Ackermann’s mixing advice— “It’s all about listening and figuring out what sounds good”—might sound funny coming from a vocalist/guitarist known for working at such a punishing volume. That’s not just hyperbole. When Ackermann and his A Place to Bury Strangers bandmates Jay Space (drums) and Jono Mofo (bass) went to get the single “To Fix the Gash in Your Head”/”Ocean” pressed at a mastering plant last year, the red noise levels on the tape caused the plant’s equipment to malfunction.

The group’s sophomore album Exploding Head [Mute] doesn’t ease off the accelerator, rampaging through 10 speaker-shattering songs that experiment with guitar tones and distortion like Pollock playing with paint. Recording with engineer Andy Smith (David Bowie, Paul Simon) at the band’s Death by Audio studio space in Brooklyn—a former warehouse, which doubles as a venue and base for Ackermann’s custom effects pedal business— allowed them to work without the fear of what could have been numerous noise complaints.

“We actually built the whole second floor,” Ackermann says. “It was rough for morale to live in sawdust for two months, but it worked. I like being in a space where you don’t have to be afraid to saw a table in half if you want to turn it into something else.”

Playing through a bank of custom Death by Audio guitar pedals with names like Full Range Sonic Assault and Total Sonic Annihilation, Ackermann is the unlikeliest candidate to strum a graceful, quiet chord. But while it appears he’s aiming for overdrive, he actually seeks a tight interplay between the instruments and effects. “When you go for that loud guitar sound, it’s all about how it fits in with other instruments,” he says.
Read more…

Jahdan Blakkamoore: Buzzrock Warrior

Review
Pitchfork
November 30
Link
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Jahdan Blakkamoore’s solo debut begins with familiar sounds: a coy flute melody, a clapping cadence, and then the sub-aqueous bass notes of Baby Kite and Nokea’s “Reef”, the slow burner that kicks off DJ /rupture’s Uproot mix. The track– co-produced here by Rupture and Matt Shadetek and rechristened “Get Hustlin”– is a shot across the bow from the Guyana-born Brooklyn MC. That opening selection might be broadcasting intentions, suggesting this heavyweight hybrid is another the-music-world-is-flat spin on bass culture.

Buzzrock Warrior doesn’t reach that plateau, but it does due diligence, rattling with digital bass and opening the floor to showcase the headliner’s vocal talents. Co-produced by Rupture and Shadetek with a roster of collaborators, the music here drives but doesn’t dislodge the bassbin, mostly settling on sleek, polyglot rhythms, some of which have been floating around for months. “Go Round Payola”, a Shadetek joint that originally came out last year, is a restless bit of fizzy, 8-bit energy. “Let’s Go”, by cumbia artist Chancha Via Circuito (Pedro Canale), rides jazzy cymbals and bass in a tight but shuffling rhythm. “Earthshaking”, a dirty shuffle produced by Brazilian Maga Bo, drops plodding low end over the sound of sizzling electricity, and Modeselektor’s “Dem a Idiot” fuses strings and depth-charge beats into a midtempo burner. Buzzrock is positveily laid-back compared to something like the Bug’s London Zoo.

Blakkamoore’s delivery gets plenty of room to flex, pointing to a promising talent who can bridge margins and is at home with dancehall-style riffs, dub-friendly pronouncements, and sweet harmonies, vital in a free-flowing exchange of global rhythms. He doesn’t fully rise to the occasion, however, delivering a dexterous but not truly memorable performance that favors delivery over content. Blakkamoore bounces between loose and languid duets (“Rise Again”), duels with gruff MCs and soulful material such as “Come With Me”, where he recounts his immigration experience– staying with family as his parents worked and saved for his trip, his first snow storm, and middle-of-the-night quizzes so his story would be straight for U.S. customs officials. But his voice occasionally gets saccharine. Fired-up lover’s ode “She Said”, with pace-setting bass riffs, burns out, and the slack groove of “The General” is tweaked too far with Auto-Tune. On “Get Hustlin”, he smoothly lays down rote and unremarkable lyrics, and “Mesmerized”, a muddle of world-in-peril lyrics, is redeemed by Blakkamoore’s alternately sweet and gruff wordplay while trading off lines with grime MC Durrty Goodz.

Combining too many flavors can often dull the final results, and while this album is far from bland, it also lacks a compelling identity or strong message. A decent set of global grooves isn’t bad, but Brooklyn internationalist Blakkamoore sounds poised to achieve more.

Gift Guide 2009

Article
Pitchfork
November 25, 2009
Link

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Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy
Edited by Nikolaos Kotsopoulos; Black Dog publishing

This thick tome might as well be called the field guide to krautrock (“notice the long, unkempt hair and colorful plumage on Gerd”). The original genre tag in part represented the condescension directed toward this vibrant strain of German music. This book– a Taschen-like wealth of photos, cover art, timelines, and bios, including specific producer write-ups– treats the kosmische artists as visionaries. Introductory essays demarcate and dissect the cultural landscape, especially Michel Faber’s grounded examination of the unpopularity of krautrock in Germany, and the completist set of profiles and images showcase the personalities behind the scene. As Steve Krakow writes in a brief contribution, “the Germans picked up the freak-flag torch, and took it further out.”

Freedom, Rhythm & Sound: Revolutionary Jazz Original Cover Art 1965-83
Compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker

The design fetish for Blue Note’s cool urbanity often obscures the color and personality of art from more obscure corners of the jazz world. Within the free jazz milieu chronicled in Freedom, Rhythm & Sound, freedom wasn’t a pose. Personal ideologies and collective organization, as well as economic realities, helped turn the scene into an incubator for independent labels commissioning vibrant, striking cover art. Broadcaster and fervid collector Gilles Peterson and Soul Jazz label boss Stuart Baker assembled a gallery of African-American jazz albums– European and Asian artists and labels are largely out of sight– beginning with Sun Ra’s pioneering Afro-futurist sketches and Egyptology and branching out into Emory Douglas-like collages and striking black-and-white photography. Some lack polish, but like the uncompromising music they represent, all the covers broadcast a sense of bold, brazen ideology.

[Read the complete gift guide for more suggestions]

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