Category Archives: interviews

Black Mamba Eat Octopus, Discuss New EP

Black Mamba

In anticipation of the band’s star-studded EP release show at the Casbah tomorrow night, CityBeat has published an interview with Aimee Sanchez and Keith Milgaten of San Diego dream-pop quartet Black Mamba. In it, the pair discuss the new EP, fleshing out the band’s sound, and what it’s like creating music with your significant other:

“I remember the first time we hung out,” Milgaten recalls. “It was at my house. We looked at Aimee’s MySpace page so I could hear her music. I was really blown away by it, even though her recordings were very, uh, very demo-y at the time—.”

“That’s because they were demos!” protests Sanchez with a giggle.

Milgaten smiles. “Yes, they were demos. I was fascinated by her singing style and how she wrote for the piano. I could tell that she was very special.”

And cute, right?

“I’m trying to pertain to the subject,” he laughs. “You don’t even want me to go off on how cute she is.”

Aren’t they adorable? Come by the Casbah tomorrow and bask in the warmth of their gorgeous, sensual compositions. The Paddle Boat, Tape Deck Mountain, and Drew Andrews will be on hand to make the evening even more special.

Bat For Lashes Bare All

Bat For LashesThe Fader has a revealing cover story on Bat For Lashes, where the perpetually disrobed Natasha Khan discusses some of the elements comprising her hypnotic new album, Two Suns:

“Every time I get close, his heart vibrates, gets stronger and we get blinded by it,” Khan says. “So I try and make him a cloak made of rainbow colors to refract the light so we can be close, but every time we do, the suns in our chests set fire to everything. In the end, the two suns burning so hotly creates a third thing, a perfect white diamond that flings into space and we become two planets constantly orbiting, basking in each others light, always separated, but there is that diamond that remains.” This cosmic talk is all metaphor of course, cloaking the timeless themes that dominate Two Suns, as well as Khan’s experience making it: journey, love, struggle and resolution.”

The first single off of Two Suns, “Daniel”, has been getting a lot of play lately, thanks to a cool video and some intriguing cover art which further documents Khan’s glorious distaste for clothing.

You can watch the video for “Daniel” after the jump.

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Bob Talks Barack

Bob DylanIn anticipation of his surprise new album Together Through Life (out April 21), smart-crazy (crazy-smart?) coot Bob Dylan talks to the TimesOnline. In the interview, he touches upon Barack Obama, U.S. Grant, and Civil War ghosts, among other things.

Well, a number of things [have struck me about Obama]. He’s got an interesting background. He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage–cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Exactly?

GloNo Interviews Larry Crane, Curator of Elliott Smith’s Archives

74669_elliott-smith-archives-reel-20-thumbGloriousNoise: “A few years ago, Larry Crane, editor of Tape Op Magazine, and Elliott Smith’s friend and studio partner from back in Portland, become the official archivist of Elliott Smith’s estate. We interviewed Crane back in 2007 before the release of New Moon, a collection of mostly unreleased songs recorded between 1994 and 1997…In the time since that interview, Crane has digitized over a terabyte of audio from various sources. It seems that Elliott Smith was constantly recording. We caught up with Larry via email to see what he’s found since we last talked.”

Q&A With Art Spiegelman

Spiegelman is best known for Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, genre-crossing graphic novel based on his survivor father’s Holocaust experience, and more contemporarily, for a rash of controversial New Yorker covers.

It’s all deserved, of course, but not everyone knows his complete comics lineage, which stretches from his days of concocting Garbage Pail Kids trading cards for Topps to the present, where he’s most recently published Breakdowns, an oversized comic book that bridges old work with new autobiographical panels, giving some light to his genesis as a cartoonist.

[Westword]