The Coctails made their debut in Kansas City, wearing matching yellow tuxes with burgundy bowties, quietly butchering a Miles Davis song at an art-gallery opening for the bass player’s girlfriend. The quartet’s initial albums exploited this sense of nerdy, nervy cool, blending the hygienic graphics and sparse black-and-white cover art of ’50s jazz releases with…
Formed in Newcastle around the same time other English bands — Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and This Heat — were discovering the beauty of noise for its own sake, the reclusive and enigmatic Zoviet France started on a path that combined abstract sonic collage and electronic manipulation with a distinctly art brut sense of instrumental…
Over the course of his career, which has already yielded a shelf full of records, Chicago singer/guitarist Sam Prekop has drawn from enough disparate sources to make himself admirably difficult to pin down. Is he a folkie with jazz influences? A jazzbo with a jones for Caribbean music? An art-rocker with country leanings? The labels,…
Back in the early ’90s, shortly before the concept of being a “slacker” captured the wider imagination of the mainstream, three university-educated young men shared an apartment in New Jersey, paid the bills by working as security guards and spent their spare time pouring bent lyrics and guitar noise into a four-track recorder. While Bob…
It’s rare for musicians raised on avant-gardery to pursue pre-rock forms without first donning a specious cloak of irony, but this Nashville-based ensemble (known as Posterchild until lawyers from Poster Children’s label got involved) has staked its claim to the title of America’s first post-punk jug band without the slightest hint of dress-up pretense or…
