Interview

 Don't Stop, the latest full length from Nordic electropopper Annie, delivers a collection of irrepressibly upbeat bangers produced by Xenomania, Bloc Party collaborator Paul Epworth, and Timo Kaukolampi and Richard X, with whom she collaborated on her first album Anniemal. The call-and-response opener "Hey Annie" combines her sweet and direct songwriting with a gritty, 80s analog aesthetic, leading the charge through a dozen sparkly pop songs that mix surface sweetness with a self-aware, and sometimes times melancholy, interior. (PHOTO BY NINA MERIKALLIO)

While a label dispute delayed the release of Don't Stop for more than a year, Annie relocated from Bergen, Norway to Berlin and has been immersing herself in the global capital of forward-thinking electronic music. I spoke with her during her quick DJ tour of the U.S (the New York stop is Saturday at the Tribeca Grand).

ALEX SHERMAN: Are you familiar with some of the laws in New York City that prohibit where and when you can dance? They call them Cabaret Laws.

ANNIE: Yeah! That I find really exotic! It's really strange to have a place where it's not allowed to dance. It's like, you can dance over there but not over here. I find that more exotic than annoying.

SHERMAN: What do you mean by exotic?

ANNIE: I don't know any other place in the world where you have rules that you're not allowed to dance in certain places. I can understand some places you're not allowed to spit or scream something awful, but not allowed to dance to me is really... interesting.

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The beloved All Tomorrow's Parties festivals have earned a reputation as the premier gathering for obsessive indie music fans. Now ATP has the concert documentary its fans deserve, simply called All Tomorrow's Parties. Jonathan Caouette, with a crew of 200 festival-goers-turned-camera operators, captures the frolicy vibe of the ATP getaway, mingling performance footage with off-stage antics, elliptical banter, and poignant moments of sincerity. Caouette, who made Tarnation, the surreal 2003 documentary about his childhood, draws from Cassavetes and Quadrophenia and uses the festival and its culture to tell a story about youth, nostalgia, and millenial expressions of tribal recreation. The end result isn't so much a collection of performances by some of the bands that have played ATP, but an ode to their moment, fleeting as it may be. Below, he explains some of his choices.


ALEX SHERMAN: This movie took hundreds of people to make? Sounds epic.

JONATHAN CAOUETTE: The amount of footage that we got was unbelievable. Like 800 hours. I never want to make another movie like that again, where you have too much content and too many choices. We really had no premeditated notion of what we were going to go for. Most of the people who did this were not professional DP's or videographers. They were just holding cameras.

SHERMAN: A lot of it reminds me of the audience scenes from the Woodstock documentary.

CAOUETTE: Woodstock has always been one of my favorite docs ever. Any film that has to do with a particular subculture is hopefully going to be pretty strong and honest in terms of seeing them as a reactionary component to the current state of times. People from this particular world or subculture are just that. They seem very hopeful to me.

SHERMAN: Like a tribal gathering.

CAOUETTE: Yeah, it feels like you have stumbled upon a big three-day event for a cult where music is the god.

SHERMAN: The scene with Grizzly Bear performing by the sea is really evocative of that experience. How did that come together?

CAOUETTE: I saw them outside one of the bars at ATP and said, "Hey, would you like to play this song on the beach." I had the Who movie Quadrophenia in my mind, the scene where all the mods are screaming on the beach.

SHERMAN: It's wonderful.

CAOUETTE: It wasn't really our intent. You never know what's going to happen. [But] it's almost like, "Here we are, a group of misfits on the beach making our own world." I think that's what ATP is–a bunch of wonderful misfits getting together to celebrate the music they love.

All Tomorrow's Parties will screen November 13 and 14 at IFC Center in New York and in Chicago on Novemeber 20. It will be available on DVD and for download November 24 from www.warpfilmstore.com.

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El Perro Del Mar, the nom de guerre of Swedish chanteuse Sarah Assbring, has returned with her third album Love Is Not Pop (The Control Group) (released in the US today),  a burst of beautifully textured and refined pop songs exploring the melancholic side of love.

For it, her third release, EPDM steeps her sparse and simple songwriting in a new sonic brew with the help of Rasmus Hägg, one-half of the virtually ungoogleable Swedish electronic duo Studio, whose notoriously clever remixes and album of sun-drenched kitschy grooves "Yearbook 1" have blown a few minds in the last several years.

The emotional thrust of Love Is Not Pop comes from the natural feel of their partnership. Hägg's production disguises the line between analog and synthetic instrumentation as if it were a metaphor for the difficulty of identifying when love is real, the album's thematic core. For an album that explores the darker side of devotion, lust, infatuation, and tender weaknesses, it's an inspired, though short, collaboration.

I caught up with Assbring over the phone from Stockholm where we talked about Bertolucci, why so many Swedes prefer singing in English, and her fears of opening up the creative process to the unknown.

ALEX SHERMAN: Can you tell me a little bit about how your collaboration with Rasmus worked out?

SARAH ASSBRING: Ever since I heard Studio for the first time, I had Rasmus in the back of my mind for some kind of collaboration. When I started drawing sketches for this album, I got in touch with him and we started talking about what we could do together. But it was just a discussion because we didn't really know each other. Especially for me, I've always been a bit afraid of bringing someone too much into the process of making an album. He was the same way, also kind of a control freak.

So we talked a lot–a lot!–because we were afraid of what might happen. Finally, we just said, "Let's just stop talking," and after that everything was so simple. All of the things we spoke about and decided theoretically were put aside and we just worked together. It was very organic and the best recording situation I've ever had.

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Kurt Vile, Philly's self-ordained "Constant Hitmaker," emerges from the City of Brotherly Love with his first proper full length after unleashing a bounty of folk pop nuggets under the apt billing Constant Hitmaker (Gulcher). That record began with the impeccable opener "Freeway," a road song so intuitive, deceptively simple, and instantly pleasing to the ear, it would have been AM gold in a past era. (PHOTO CREDIT: SHAWN BRACKBILL COURTESY OF MATADOR RECORDS)

"Freeway" led to a dream come true for the Philadelphia-born guitarist. Plucked by Matador Records on the heels of another notable signing–an obscure, distorted rock band called Sonic Youth–both are worthy of being celebrated as hallmarks of the label's 20^th anniversary renaissance. His latest album, Childish Prodigy, came out earlier this month and can be streamed in its entirety here.


ALEX SHERMAN: Do you get a lot of people asking if your name is made up?

KURT VILE: Yeah I do. People seem really insulted when they hear it's not. That other Kurt Weill doesn't even spell it the same way.

SHERMAN: It's kind of a beautiful pun.

VILE: Well, thanks. But like I said, it is my real name. And I always thought it was a good name. But then some people think it's too good, so it's bad. They think I'm making a bad joke.

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