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

PATRICK SISSON

Portfolio

Deastro: Detroit’s Sparkplug Performer

Interview
XLR8R
April 2009
Link

deastro_29.540wide

“I consider any musician a cheerleader for community,” says 23-year-old Randolph Chabot, conducting a phone interview in between bites of a chicken sandwich at a diner in Lansing, Michigan. “Music inspires people to live life to the fullest. A perfect example was a recent show in Milwaukee—I quieted everyone and said, ‘You’re not going to need anyone else other than the people in this room.’”

It may sound precious coming from anyone, but when it’s Chabot speaking, someone who wears a shirt that says “Sing With All Your Might” un-ironically, it appears doubly so. Or, at least it does until you see him passionately perform with his band—friends he’s known since childhood—as 8-bit noise and electronic melodies engulf his very earnest lyrics. He’s blessed with an ability to energize, engage, and get people on his side. (He once hit Ghostly International’s label manager with a stage prop and they still signed him.)

His new full-length, Moondagger, is immediate, full of electro-pop music caught in a playful tug of war between gratifying, squirmy rhythms and lush neon melodies. “Greens, Grays and Nordics,” a stop-start rush of clipped guitar, warm keys, and kinetic samples boils over with Chabot’s cascading, strident vocals. On the title track, Chabot’s pure, bright tone is at the eye of a storm of synths and guitars. It’s the latest in a string of albums and singles that Chabot has been pumping out for over a decade. Named after a G.I. Joe villain and inspired by Dan Deacon and the Baltimore scene’s DIY ethos, Deastro has a similar passion for firing up the crowd. “If I feel my intestines about to come out after a show, I know I did well,” he boasts.

It’s all the more intriguing since, until his late teens, Chabot’s musical exposure was mostly classical and Christian, along with a fair dose of electronic music. Raised in a Pentecostal family with a youth pastor for a father, he listened to a lot of Christian punk groups, Pedro the Lion, Joy Electric, and Danielson (the alternative music section of any Christian bookstore, basically). At one point he went to school to become a youth pastor, and it was during his time at North Central Bible College that a friend inspired him to get into music.

“He was saying, ‘Isn’t it crazy, you and me could try and get homeless people off the street all our lives, and maybe help like 20 people. It would be the best things we could do with our lives. But think about all the people in all the cities you’ve ever been to that aren’t being helped,’” Chabot recounts. “It inspired me to get back into music. Even at the smallest show you’ll ever play, you meet more people than you could just about any other way. It reminds me of church in a lot of ways. I don’t go to church anymore, but I love going to shows. It feels like a unique chance to gather.”

Chabot seems to be generally positive about everything, including the Motor City music scene, which he says is really starting to come into its own and could be some Motown-like model of collective music making. “It’s not there yet, but you can feel everybody wants to work together,” he says. “It’s a matter of time before everything comes into place.” It’s hard not to be drawn to that kind of confidence.

Don’t Love Thy Neighbor: Kevin Roose Interview

Interview
Playboy.com
May 2009
Link

kevin_roose

Brown sophomore Kevin Roose didn’t study abroad, but he definitely visited a foreign land during his semester off-campus at Virginia’s Liberty University, the school founded by preacher Jerry Falwell to train “champions for Christ.” Roose chronicles his stint as an evangelical embed in his new book, The Unlikely Disciple. Fair and revealing, the book is much like Roose himself. Admitting you attended a masturbation addiction group meeting — even for research purposes — shows a certain level of self-comfort (no pun intended). Roose spoke with Playboy.com about evangelical pick-up lines and the frontlines of “Every Man’s Battle.”

PLAYBOY.COM: Did you ever see anybody with a Playboy at Liberty?
KEVIN ROOSE: I didn’t, although I had two related experiences. I heard from a couple guys that Playboy once ranked Liberty girls the second hottest in the nation. Not sure if it’s a true statistic, but guys there like to talk about it. The other one was this group I went to, “Every Man’s Battle,” for recovering masturbation addicts that [also] doubled as a group for porn addicts. There’s a reason there are no single dorm rooms at Liberty. They want to keep everyone’s mind pure. According to Liberty, the sin isn’t masturbating, it’s lust.

PLAYBOY.COM: Are there evangelical sex symbols? I’m thinking someone like Bree from Desperate Housewives.
KEVIN ROOSE: There’s a pastor at Liberty, a young Ryan Seacrest look-a-like, who’s extremely popular. And I just came across a website called Christiannymphos.com about this movement of Christian wives who say they’re proud nymphos and love sex with their husbands. They get a little raunchy — what does the Bible say about anal sex, what does it say about toys — stuff like that. It’s controversial, but I like the thought.

PLAYBOY.COM: I like the thought, too. What does the Bible say about anal sex and toys?
KEVIN ROOSE: I don’t know… but I think it supports both — in marriage.

PLAYBOY.COM: Is there evangelical slang for hot girls?
KEVIN ROOSE: There are definitely evangelical pickup lines. If a Christian guy says, “I feel like God is leading me to kiss you,” or, “I feel like we should pray and hold hands while we do it,” that’s their way of making a move.

PLAYBOY.COM: It seems weird playing off God as some kind of omnipotent wingman.
KEVIN ROOSE: Yeah, that’s totally true.
Read more…

Various Artists: Local Customs: Downriver Revival

Music Review
Pitchfork
April 2009
Link
8.0

downriverrevival200

Despite all the superlatives lobbed at the Numero Group’s catalog, the descriptions that really stick often come from the reissue label’s own liner notes. Along with the warm patina of age emanating from re-mastered recordings and the cracked, yellowing photographs, these narratives are prime examples of music anthropology, thick with details that amplify each song’s impact. The label exceeds its own storytelling standards with Local Customs: Downriver Revival, a collection of music recorded at Double U Sound, a rec room turned recording studio in suburban Detroit. The 24-track guided tour through Double U’s history is paired with a detailed multimedia DVD that includes a 30-minute documentary and an interactive sound vault with over 200 extra tracks, arranged by individual boxes of tape. It not only makes most bonus DVDs look like cheap wastes of plastic and time, it lets listeners virtually walk into the lost basement studio in Ecorse, Mich., and view some of the people and places that seeped into Double U’s reels of tape.

Proprietor Felton Williams, an unassuming Ford Motor Company electrician and member of the Church of the Living God, managed to piece together a truly DIY studio operation. While the self-taught electrical whiz’s longed-for hit factory never materialized, his dedication and open-door policy unwittingly turned Double U and its small stable of labels, mostly active from 1967 to 1981, into a local music time capsule.

Williams’ church connections and devotion to gospel weren’t uncommon, but the variety of sacred music he recorded stands out. Toledo, Ohio, singer and fellow congregant Shirley Ann Lee’s sweet, somber voice graces “There’s a Light”, which tests the fidelity of Felton’s setup, and “Please Accept My Prayer”, a bluesy end-of-service ode to the Lord. Mother-daughter duo the Coleman Family drop some rambling, back porch Appalachia-infected tunes and the Apostles of Music deliver a showy, funked-up version of “Wade in the Water”. Some of the most peculiar songs, including Calvin Cooke’s “What Happens to People”, incorporate Church of the Living God’s unique infatuation with the sitar and pedal steel guitar, producing an odd, wobbly twang.

Equally intriguing secular sounds, ranging from sunny vocal harmonies to funk workouts, also blasted out of Williams’ basement, like the Organics’ Hammond-flavored instrumental “Foot Stumpin'”. The true outlier of the bunch is “Running Mod”– with the Quadrophenia-appropriate chorus “You can’t catch a running mod”– by Young Generation, a cut-rate local garage band fronted by black singer Alan Crowell.

But the album is just a warm-up for the DVD’s wealth of music from artists on the CD and those that didn’t make the cut. After hearing jam sessions and alternate takes, a Shirley Ann Lee radio show, Felton Williams’ pedal steel lessons, the Mergers’ oddball organ rocker “Unworthy Americans”, and even the disorienting sounds of deteriorating tapes, it’s hard to imagine uncovering more layers to the story. The documentary includes interviews with and performances by Williams, Lee, and Cooke, who rocks the pedal steel. Footage of sunlight striking a white cross and shots of weeds cracking through the asphalt of crumbling houses make the setting almost palpable. It’s one thing to hear a tape of the young Shirley Ann Lee, but to watch her older self gently sing along to a recording of “Please Accept My Prayer” in the front seat of a parked car, and then whisper “thank you” as the shot fades to black, isn’t easily captured in words. Downriver Revival not only adds a chapter to Numero’s legacy of spotlighting the art and ambitions of forgotten artists, but it lets listeners share some of that rush of discovery.

Soul Savers

Article
Chicago Magazine
April 2009
Link

eccentricsoulheader

His Comcast uniform didn’t meet the usual sartorial standards of soul crooners. But a glance at that belt buckle—the name “Renaldo” in bold brushed metal—suggested there was plenty of funk left. It was rehearsal night for the Eccentric Soul Revue, an upcoming concert focused on an obscure chapter of Chicago history, and Renaldo Domino, 59, was getting reacquainted with music he hadn’t touched in three decades. As the backing band moved through tracks like “Not Too Cool to Cry,” Domino’s hips loosened and the gears began to grind. That sweet-as-sugar tone returned. “It’s in my blood,” he said.

The Eccentric Soul Revue, presented on April 4th by the local re-issue label Numero, won’t just be celebrating history. It’ll be reinventing it. The featured musicians are a mix of active performers (such as the headliner, Syl Johnson, and the Notations) programmed alongside people who haven’t played professionally in years. What they all have in common is an association with Twinight, a phantom Chicago soul label that started in 1967 and disappeared by 1972.

This reunion of artists fits Numero’s aesthetic perfectly. The label is known for its “eccentric soul” series, compilations of forgotten sounds that are lovingly assembled after exhaustive research and detective work. But the label has never done a concert. “We try to have new experiences in every record, and this is our way of doing it totally outside of the recorded realm,” said Numero’s Tom Lunt. The staff tracked down performers for the event, found a venue (the Park West), and have even assembled a memorabilia-filled slide show. Many of the artists, like Domino, feel good that people still care about their music. But for Syl Johnson, there’s a little bit of the original motivation: “I wouldn’t be singing this if it wasn’t for the women.”

Buraka Som Sistema’s Lil Jon on the music of Portugal

Interview
A.V. Club Chicago
April 2009
Link

110

The raw, energetic beats of kuduro music were something of a fad in the mid- to late ’90s in Portugal, a fusion of club tracks and Angolan rhythms that produced a few one-hit wonders and then faded fast. But the members of Buraka Som Sistema—Lil Jon, Riot, Conductor, and Kalaf—were intrigued by the music and started hosting a Friday residency a few years ago in Lisbon, where they began experimenting with a new style of kuduro. DJs like Sinden, Simian Mobile Disco, and Switch discovered their tracks, and as soon as you can say RapidShare, the group became a club hit, signing a record deal with Fabric and collaborating with M.I.A. With a new album out, Black Diamond, the group will swing through Sonotheque tomorrow night as part of an international tour. But before that, Buraka’s Lil Jon (João Barbosa) spoke to Decider about public perceptions of Africa and why he hates his name.

Decider: What’s some Portuguese slang people should know for when you play in Chicago? What should they listen for and what should they yell out when you’re performing?
João Barbosa: That’s a hard one. They could say, “Move your ass,” which is mexe o rabo [pronounced mesh-e eww habu]. They can sing that synchronized with one of our songs. That would be cool.

D: Have you ever had any encounter with the other Lil Jon?
JB: No, I’m actually researching changing my name because I don’t like it. It was given to me. Then all of a sudden this whole Buraka thing started. I needed to come up with something because my name is very complicated for someone who isn’t Portuguese to say. I decided to use it for the CD, and it didn’t really make sense, so I need to change it. I think Diplo just met Lil Jon. I heard he’s working with him, so I might meet him when we’re in the States.

D: A lot of musicians have been going to Portugal lately, like Panda Bear. Is it a good setting to make music?
JB: It’s a chill place. Al Qaeda would never drop a bomb here because nothing ever happens. The damage of that would be useless to the world. It’s one of those places that moves a little slower than the rest of the world, which is annoying when you’re growing up. But if you’re already doing something cool, you need to come and relax a little bit. Lisbon and Porto are beautiful cities, and the club scene is pretty great as well. You can go on until nine in the morning and get pretty pissed. Actually, I’ve been trying to meet Panda Bear for ages. I’ve been in contact with him through MySpace. But we’re never here in Lisbon at the same time.

D: How has the revival of kuduro changed people’s attitudes toward Portugal and Africa?
JB: There’s definitely one good element about the whole thing. We’ve been to Angola a couple of times, and two of us [Kalaf and Conductor] are from Angola. And the reality is people still see the African continent as some sort of safari park. Either misery or safaris or tourism or beaches in Mozambique or some shit like that. The reality is that exists, obviously, but that’s not the whole continent. Rhythms like ours, which were born in a computer, aren’t traditional music. They’re not old men under a coconut tree playing some strange guitar with two chords. This is people on computers using the same software people use in New York to make music, and when people see something like that, I hope it opens everyone’s eyes and changes their whole judgment of the continent. They’re listening to computer-based music that comes from Africa with all these strange house and techno influences—to me, that’s important. And there’s lots of stuff coming from other countries in Africa. It’s a whole new world.

Papercuts: You Can Have What You Want

Music Review
Spin
March 2009
3.5 out of 5
Link

You_Can_Have_What_You_Want-Papercuts_480

On the latest analog indie-pop gem from singer-guitarist Jason Quever, it’s as if the sun is always cutting through an early-morning mist. Or reflecting through stained glass, since Quever is so fixated on mortality and gazing skyward. Foregrounding vintage organ tones, You Can Have What You Want floats dusty folk-rock melodies in thick echo, giving the vocals an otherworldly cast. “Future Primitive” swings with a girl-group backbeat and cascading melodies, while “Jet Plane” exudes a Mazzy Star warmth.

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity

Book Review
Playboy.com
March 2009
Link

9780393065145

Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Number of Pages: 352 Pages
Cover Type: Hard Cover

Populist anger may be boiling over against Wall Street and its recently chastised traders. But when they’re inflating our own nest eggs and driving up our own investment returns, we don’t mind a few Gordon Geckos at the helm. It’s a cycle of love and hate, of boom and bust, and naked self-interest that mirrors the market gyrations profiled in writer Michael Lewis’ new compilation Panic, a collection of articles about the last two decades’ worth of financial downturns. “The same herd instinct that fueled the boom fueled the bust,” Lewis writes about the Internet bubble. That statement can apply to any of the crises Panic covers—from Black Monday in 1987 to the current sub-prime mortgage collapse.

Financial journalism, like the increasingly complex subject it covers, can often be specialized and mystifying. But the working details of and personalities behind the system are fleshed out in the broad range of articles, insider accounts and post-mortems supplied by the book’s contributors. There are plenty of nostalgic details in articles from the 1980s; traders, beaming at the Dow’s then record high of just over 2500, receive stock quotes via handheld radios. But as the book progresses through pieces profiling damage wrought by the Asian financial crisis and the manic, misplaced faith in Internet stocks, the story arcs of each crash seem eerily similar. And the small details—commodities brokers flocking to a pawn shop near the Chicago Board of Trade, heads of now-defunct online companies waxing poetic about wasteful Super Bowl ad buys—make these pieces about much more than numbers and balance sheets.

Lewis’ own journalistic work also appears in each section. His wry and knowing voice, recognizable from books like Liar’s Poker and a recent string of insightful articles about our current economic funk, is enjoyable—like that of an omniscient narrator relishing the cast of characters and their foibles. One of the main points Lewis makes in his introduction is that misplaced faith in complex financial instruments has led to people underestimating risk and undertaking risky behavior. Hubris, one might say. Lewis has gathered writing that, above all, never forgets the human element behind the market’s tumbles.

Cooking Vegan with Liquid Liquid

Interview
XLR8R
March 2009
Link

sal_31.540wide

New York has no shortage of concept restaurants, culinary experts, and celebrity chefs. But how many of those Michelin-star chasers will invite you into their house and cook you a healthy vegetarian meal? DJ and musician Sal Principato, percussionist and vocalist of the famed No Wave group Liquid Liquid, extends that kind of courtesy to anyone looking for a vegetarian or vegan cooking class, a home-cooked meal, and company.

“It’s social—a relaxation technique and a healing technique in a way,” says Principato about preparing a good meal. “I kind of look at food as a way to counteract all the other wear and tear you put on your body.”

Principato started hosting these informal events, called Go Gather, this past winter. Guests pay $15 a head to learn some of Principato’s kitchen secrets, including how to make Nigerian bean cake and vegetarian pizza. The latter is made with almond cheese, and Sal claims it’s so good that it stacks up to a slice of NY-style street pizza. He’ll guide visitors through a few steps and often broaden the context of the lesson, explaining where he purchased certain ingredients and why he uses them. He’ll have some wine, perhaps make an espresso, and wax poetic about food. “I believe, to a certain extent, that music and food are the highest extensions of a culture,” says the 30-year vegetarian. “Ultimately, cooking is more like an art in a way, and if you have a feel for it, you’ll be good at it,” he says. “I could take a tin can and cover it in animal fat and salt and make it taste good. But to make vegetables and legumes taste good and sing, that’s an art.”

To set up a group class with Sal Principato in New York, email him.
Read more…

Young Polish Initiative

Interview
Time Out Chicago
February 2009
Link

“We face the same problems that the Latino community faces, like people being deported or mistreated,” says Kasia Tarczynska, 27, a full-time student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But nobody wants to talk about it.” One incident, the case of Polish-born immigrant Tony Wasilewski, inspired Tarczynska, Monika Starczuk and Paulina Marek to form the Young Polish Initiative in 2007. Wasilewski was three months from getting his green card when his Polish wife, Janina, was deported. He has been fighting to get her back ever since and even testified before Congress in 2007.

The YPI, now seven members strong, regularly meets around the red wooden tables at CafeYA (4801 N Milwaukee Ave, 773-205-7300), where the neon-green jukebox plays rock and synth-pop above the chatter of conversations in Polish. A cozy Jefferson Park bar and café strewn with magazines, it serves up coffee, cake and Lech beer. Located around the corner from Polish community mainstay the Copernicus Center and across the street from a taqueria, it stands at a symbolic intersection in the city’s Northwest Side. Poles are still Chicago’s second-largest ethnic minority (after Mexicans), but they aren’t voting as often or in as concentrated blocs, so they aren’t politically represented relative to their size. As generations of Poles assimilate, their communities and political voice become less unified. “Neighborhoods like Ukrainian Village or Bucktown were totally Polish,” says YPI member Monika Tietz. “Yeah, we made those neighborhoods cool,” Starczuk jokes. “Then we moved out.”

Tarczynska, a small, quietly confident woman peering out from underneath brown bangs, exemplifies a new generation of Polish immigration. She was born in Lublin, Poland, on December 13, 1981, the day the government declared martial law in response to the Solidarity movement—her mother, a member, was arrested a few days later. But she says her contemporaries don’t know much about the history surrounding her birthday. While older generations of Poles came to escape communism or World War II, by the time Tarczynska entered the United States in 2002, to study at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, immigration was about opportunity. “My generation, we don’t really remember communism,” she says. “I was raised in capitalist times. We look more to the future, how to get good jobs and careers.”

When Tarczynska returned to Poland for a year in 2007, she noticed changes in her homeland. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, the economy has improved and a new avenue for legal immigration to European countries has opened. Many Poles now forgo a move to the U.S., a decision reinforced by our economic slump. “I was uncertain about [if I could be successful in] Poland when I went back,” she says. “But then I saw how there are good opportunities [there] if you work hard.”

As they sip glass mugs of tea, the group members discuss the changes they want to see for Poles in the U.S., including immigration laws that give illegals a path to citizenship. Tarczynska will be in a limbo of her own in 2010, when she will earn her master’s degree in urban planning and lose her student visa. In order to legally stay here, she could find an employer to sponsor her or she could get married. The last point draws friendly laughter from her colleagues. But it’s a serious issue, since her avenues to stay legally and put together a postgraduation life in the States all depend, in some part, on other people. Still, the upswing in the Polish economy and Poles’ new freedom to move around the European Union allow Tarczynska to take the instability in stride. “My future isn’t as simple as I’d like it to be,” she says. “I might go to Poland or even somewhere else in the EU. But I’m more relaxed about my future now.”

Interview: Argentinian electronica songstress Juana Molina

Interview
A.V. Club Chicago
February 2009
Link

juanamolina_jpg_595x325_crop_upscale_q85

The career of Argentinean actress-turned-singer Juana Molina has followed an unusual trajectory. Star of the comedy series Juana Y Sus Hermanas (Juana And Her Sisters), a smash-hit in the Spanish-speaking world, Molina’s turn as a singer and producer of lush, looping electronic music was a bit of a curveball; think Julia-Louis Dreyfus suddenly becoming Björk. But this isn’t a vanity project. Music was her first love, and she actually started acting to pay for music lessons. Her latest, Un Dia (One Day), is another set of inviting, hypnotic coils of sound. Set to play Morse Theater Feb. 22 on her first U.S. tour with a band, Juana Molina spoke with Decider about noise receptors, foreign sounds, and musical embryos.

Decider: You started acting to fund your music lessons. Were you a good student?
Juana Molina: I was a very good student for a few years. I’d spend six hours a day or more playing, learning new things. In the middle of the studying process, I would always get an idea that would lead me to a song, a new little thing I would record on a tape recorder. I ended up with many cassettes, with beginnings, embryos of songs. I called them invento, inventions, because they weren’t really anything finished. For my first three records, I came back to those cassettes and took some ideas from them.

D: How important is it for you to make mistakes when you’re recording?
JM: It depends on the mistake. Some of them become the greatest things in the song. The only way to make mistakes is just to let yourself go and do whatever comes to mind. That’s one of the main reasons I like to work on my own. There are no witnesses to all the crap I can do.

D: How much of the sounds of your immediate environment in Argentina are in your music? In previous interviews, you talked about how the elevator going up to your grandmother’s apartment made some very influential noise.
JM: I’ve always thought we have some kind of reflectors in our bodies that are sensitive to certain sounds, and we all have different ones. Everything that comes from the outside just awakens these receptors. Different things are awakened according to the influences you’re exposed to. My sister is a musician as well. We grew up listening to the same music and what we do now is completely different. As far as that elevator, I think there was always something about drones and very steady rhythms, rhythms that make you move. Even if it’s just the tip of your finger, that’s enough for me.

D: Do you find there’s a big difference between Americans and Argentines when it comes to jokes and their respective senses of humor?
JM: When most people in the States tell a joke, they then tell people they’re kidding or it’s a joke. What is a joke if you have to explain it? It’s weird. There’s some kind of extra politeness going on. That wouldn’t happen in Argentina. They would get it or not, but you wouldn’t say you’re joking. The sense of humor is the last thing you catch when learning a language. It’s deeper than the language itself.

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