NAME: Charlotte Gainsbourg
PROGRESS REPORT:Rehearsing songs from her upcoming album with Beck, titled IRM, out in January. Recorded at The Library, Anonyme, Capitol Studios and Ocean Way in Los Angeles.
Even though her first language is French, actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg speaks English with a prim, hesitant British accent, a result of the lessons she took in order to star in a British film. It's a pretty, soothing sound that crosses into her singing voice -- thankfully, since her voice is her sole instrument. Speaking with her, it's obvious that this fact is a source of both joy and anxiety for Gainsbourg. Her second album (as an adult) is a collaboration with Beck, and while she loved having him take control of the project, it's that same lack of control that prevents her from wanting to sing the album live. Currently she's back in Los Angeles, working with Beck and his band to figure out how to play their new songs in front of an audience, or if that's even something she can do. "I really want to be able to do it, but it has to be a pleasure, it can't be a terrifying experience," she says. "I love the songs, and I love singing them, so I just have to find that pleasure again."
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Posted at 10:11 AM by Jessica in ,
Tags: Antichrist | Beck | Charlotte Gainsbourg | Diskjokke | Serge Gainsbourg
latest by Kyle Lemmon
NAME: Caribou
PROGRESS REPORT: Mixing his still-untitled followup to 2007'sAndorra. Recorded at home in London.
"I'm not able to make music based on what people like. It's a very selfish pursuit, in a way," Caribou's Dan Snaith says. And for Snaith, it's also a very obsessive one. Unlike other easily distracted Progress Report subjects, Snaith says it's hard for him to get pulled away from work -- he usually has to be persuaded to leave the house. And he works very slowly. So even though he started working on the album over a year ago, he's put in full days every day since. Right now his Andorra followup is 80% completed, and will probably be out by the spring.
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Posted at 9:56 AM by Jessica in
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latest by OrangeKrush
NAME: Vampire Weekend
PROGRESS REPORT: Turning in their second album, Contra. Recorded at Treefort Studios in Brooklyn and Topetitud in Mexico City.
Yesterday was officially XL Recordings' due date for Vampire Weekend's second album Contra. After writing songs pretty much since the release of their self-titled record back in January 2008, and after putting in marathon studio sessions (12 hours a day for six weeks) in Brooklyn over the summer, producer/instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij says that he and the rest of Vampire Weekend are still excited rather than nervous or relieved. "Ezra [Koenig] and I have talked about this, and our feeling in general about music is, if you've ever been extremely excited about something at one moment, then it's probably good. That excitement can fade from the fact that you're just required to listen to something so many times in order to finish it, and you start to attach stress and pressure to that music," he explains. "I actually still feel a ton of excitement about these songs."
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Posted at 5:33 PM by Jessica in
Tags: Ezra Koenig | Rostam Batmanglij | Vampire Weekend
latest by Kyle Lemmon
NAME: Massive Attack
PROGRESS REPORT: Wrapping up their fifth album, working title Weather Underground ("It's not going to be the title"), at their studio in Bristol.
Massive Attack have been working on their new record on and off for about five years, but when it comes out early next year, it'll be a last minute affair. Maybe because members Grant Marshall ("G") and Robert Del Naja ("D") have been working so long, something's relaxed -- maybe too relaxed -- about the album's progress. For instance, last year they toured with what was to be their next album, then decided to scrap all that material and start over. "By the time we played it out we were kinda going nowhere with it. It had already been broadcast. It was kind of one of those 'start again' moments," Del Naja explains. Former member Tricky wanted to make whole albums, not them. "We came from a DJ background and we were all about single tracks, playlisting single things, not really making an album as a whole. To us it didn't really matter because we were just ripping things apart and sampling them. There was a sort of irreverence towards other peoples' albums."
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Posted at 2:20 PM by Jessica in
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latest by glazzy
NAME: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
PROGRESS REPORT: Recording their followup to 2007's Living With The Living at Seaside Lounge Recording Studios in Brooklyn, NY.
In some ways, Ted Leo's next record will be like starting over. After a couple years and one album on Touch and Go, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists are, once again, an unsigned band. But being signed had its own problems. Leo said he felt pressured to finish a new record, and he wasn't happy with the songs he was writing last summer. Now, without the label pressure, and without the same hangups that plagued him a year ago, Leo is happily writing again--happily enough, in fact, that this time his problem is picking an arbitrary date or goal to stop recording, since he keeps writing new stuff.
In addition to a thoughtful Q&A, Ted provided us with a slew of camera pics from the studio (the captions are his!) and a ("very rough") demo MP3 of a new song titled "Last Days." For now.
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Posted at 3:28 PM by Jessica in ,
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latest by sara k
NAME: !!!
PROGRESS REPORT: Recording the last guitar and keyboard tracks for their fourth, still-untitled LP, recorded at "The basement of the club Festaal Kreuzberg in Berlin, The Hangar in Sacramento. The one in Greenpoint [Brooklyn] doesn't have a name, so I am hereby dubbing it Total Health Care Studios. I'm sure it'll stick because that's what we're putting on the liner notes."
Surprise: it's hard to get real answers from !!! front man Nic Offer, which is expected from a group that won't even give you a straight answer on how to pronounce their band name (I pronounce it like three fart noises). Since Offer says the next LP probably won't be out until early next year, !!! still have time to be vague, especially with the new song titles: "'Child Bearing Lips,' 'A Day In The Wife,' 'Justice Is Surf' and 'Carpe Deez Nutz.' Actually, I don't think we're using any of those. Those are free to whoever needs good song titles, and some of you out there do."
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Posted at 4:04 PM by Jessica in
Tags: Chk Chk Chk
latest by TURKISH
NAME: Thao Nguyen
PROGRESS REPORT: Releasing her third album, Know Better, Learn Faster, on October 13. Recorded at Portland's Sound Foundry and Jackpot! Studios, and producer Tucker Martine's Flora Studios.
If you saw Thao Nguyen with her band, The Get Down Stay Down, more than once during their nonstop touring, you'd see a band getting more comfortable with their own performances. If you saw them late in their tour, you'd also have seen what Nguyen calls "the bro-down showdown," a rowdier audience responding to the rowdier band. "I think one of our strengths is a more energetic show. Or that's what we aspire to. It was a goal of mine to kind of convey that energy on the next record," she says. But there were less fun things she wanted to get across on the record too.
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Posted at 1:33 PM by Jessica in
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latest by scrobytilt
NAME: The Go! Team
PROGRESS REPORT: Recording the followup to 2007's Proof Of Youth at Brighton Electric Studios in Brighton.
"Some people think of music as self-expression, where you're pouring things out. I think of it as mining," says Go! Team's leader Ian Parton. From The Go! Team's past records, a bright collage of grainy samples, playground double-dares, and manic guitars, his mining sounds like a lot of digging through record bins and messing around with the pieces on his laptop. But that's not how Go! Team songs start out, especially for this record. For one, Parton says the emphasis will be on "singing and melody" here more than on the last two records. And his mining is a lot like that of other Progress Report songwriter -- recording every idea onto tape, or on his cell phone, then seeing which ones stick with him past the initial stage. "I hoard ideas," he says. "Someone once described it like a Ray Mears-style water filtration system. I do the same with samples -- I stick 'em down and then focus on the best ones. This time I've been mostly fitting them to a song I've written rather than using it as a basis for a song." Thus many of Parton's songs begin on acoustic guitar, played in his kitchen.
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Posted at 3:11 PM by Jessica in
Tags: The Go! Team
latest by bobby
