MUSIC

Local trio Wild Fruit makes some pretty nice, stimulant-addled David Byrne-ish garage jams. With You're Jovian and Rocket Boat at Black Cat Backstage. $8.

I have no idea how to pin down the blurred, nostalgic aesthetic DJs Aaron Baird and Sean Peoples (of Sockets Records) will explore at Color Wheel, their night at St. Ex, but this playlist should give you an idea. 10 p.m. at St. Ex.

Or, if you want more blurred and nostalgic music, see San Francisco ambient producer Tycho at Rock & Roll Hotel. $15.

FILM

A bunch of Ibero-American Film Showcase offerings.

MUSIC

Two journo bands are playing tonight: Ryan Little's Tereu Tereu at Velvet Lounge, and David Malitz's The Cheniers at Black Cat. Both writers broke big local stories recently (Black Cat Bill and Elliot Smith's "lost" sessions) and made time to practice (presumably) for these shows. Respect. Bonus: Tereu Tereu's recently remixed Jukebox The Ghost's "Half Crazy." Listen to it on YouTube.

Tenor saxophonist Bobby Muncy brings his Radiohead jazz project back to Twins this evening. It is exactly what it sounds like: Radiohead tunes translated to improvisational jazz. 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. $10.

Local DJs Sean Peoples and Aaron Baird have a new night at Café Saint-Ex: Color Wheel. They're promising house music from the past, present, and maybe even the future. 10 p.m. Free.

FILM

Two film festivals kick off today: the Capital Irish Film Festival and the Washington Jewish Film Festival. The former begins with a showing of Alexandra McGuiness' debut feature Lotus Eaters, which the Hollywood Reporter called "Less a succinct narrative than a meandering portrait of several ultra-rich, ultra-empty thirtysomethings who waste away their days with sex, drugs and ennui." That shows at 8 p.m. at E Street Cinema, $10. Uptown, the Jewish Film Festival hosts an opening night reception and showing of Mabul at the Avalon. 7 p.m. $25.

BOOKS

In case you missed him at Barnes & Noble Georgetown, Steve Jobs biographer and Aspen Institute prez Walter Isaacson is giving you another shot at getting your book signed, this time inside the cozy room at Politics & Prose. 7 p.m. Free.

Sockets' Sean Peoples also dropped off the label's summer 'zine, which documents some of the season's indie-rock happenings, like Layne Garrett's tunnel experiment, Buildings' guitar orchestra, shows at the Cherch and Everlasting Life, and more. How do you get one of these? No idea. Ask Sean, I guess. There are 100, and different versions of the cover, so act quickly.

Lastly: Sockets has a showcase next weekend in Baltimore with SPRCSS, True Womanhood (disclosure: they're my buds), America Hearts, and Foul Swoops.

Penumbra photo courtesy Sockets. 'Zine photo by Darrow Montgomery.

“Do not. Remove. The matchbox.”

That was the advice Aaron Leitko, Hugh McElroy, and Sean Peoples received five years ago when they bought their white, nearly windowless 1995 Ford Econoline 150—a hulking, utilitarian shell of a vehicle that had spent much of its previous decade hauling some of D.C.’s most tour-hardened indie-rock outfits across the country.

Here’s a partial list of those bands: the Make-Up, Faraquet, Trans Am, the Warmers, HiM, the Sorts. And here’s a partial list of shit found in the van at the time of its death three weeks ago: a basketball; some cassettes; a mic stand; numerous parking tickets; an even dollar in change; a pink, rainbow-adorned Care Bear.

And, of course, the matchbox, which had sat on the dashboard ever since the van’s original owner, successful indie-rock manager and former Warmers bassist Juan Luis Carrera, placed it there some 15 years before, when he bought the van on tour in Arizona.

"The matchbox is a mystery,” says McElroy, an ex-member of defunct Dischord outfit Black Eyes. “It was pointed out to us that the matchbox had to stay in the van—that there would be consequences to the matchbox leaving the van.”

Despite the van’s exhaustive repair history—written partly on a Crownhate Ruin flyer—the totem must have served the Econoline well. “[I]t was really in good shape until it wasn’t,” says Leitko, an editorial aide at the Washington Post, freelance music critic, and purveyor of druggy-sounding post-disco with electronica duo Protect-U.

The van, whose health had been declining in recent years, met its end the way it probably should have: on the highway, coming back from a show.

McElroy, who’d been road testing his new group Cephalopods in New York and Philadelphia, was returning to D.C. on I-95 when, around Baltimore, the van began to wobble. The band pulled over and smelled burning rubber; that night they made it back to D.C. on back roads. Several days later, a mechanic told McElroy that repairs to the brakes would cost around $1,200.

“It was sort of a not-worth-it situation,” says McElroy. The van’s insurance was about $1,000 a year; it was a magnet for parking tickets; the owners had been using it less.

So they signed the vehicle over to the auto shop and walked away from this unassuming artifact of D.C.
music history.

“My most resonant memory of the van is how decadent it was,” says former Warmers drummer Amy Farina, who now plays in the Evens. “Especially for a band like us. It wasn’t like we were paying the bills.”

Decadent? Only if you’re in an indie band, for which cramped transportation with unidentifiable odors is de rigueur. The Econoline was stripped-down—but also new. “After being on tour with a few bands the years prior and lacking the mechanic’s ‘touch,’ I wanted something reliable,” Carrera writes in an e-mail. During one period in which he left the van unlocked but with a Club on the steering wheel, would-be thieves left strange objects inside it. One time, he found someone sleeping in it.

Once, when Warmers guitarist Alec MacKaye was driving down 16th Street NW after a show in Philly, two teenagers in a coupe pulled up next to the Econoline at a red light. “This kid in the passenger seat was giving us this hairy eye, just being this aggro kid,” MacKaye recalls. “He was really young. I gave him a look like, ‘What’s the problem?’” The light turned green and MacKaye drove on. The teens just sat there. “They’re behind us, and they just floored it.” MacKaye stopped at the next red light. “And they just drove right into the back of the van, at maybe 40 miles per hour, and just destroyed the front of their car....They had lights hanging out and wires—man, it was weird.” The teens sped off.

The van was basically unharmed, and the band returned home to Mount Pleasant, then walked to a 7-Eleven and reported the incident to a policeman there. “And immediately he got the call back that they stopped the car and they have some suspects,” MacKaye says. The Warmers followed police to where the teenagers were being interrogated. The band identified them, and the driver was arrested. The cop decided to let the passenger—the aggro kid with the hairy eye—go. “They told him tonight’s your lucky night, and the kid’s like, ‘How do I get home?’....And the cop says, ‘Why don’t you ask these guys?’”

“I can’t remember if we give him a ride; I don’t think we did,” MacKaye says, laughing. “But we might’ve.”

The Warmers broke up in 1997, but by then Carrera was operating a record label and managing bands. He frequently lent the Econoline to other groups. The Make-Up took it out on one tour, although frontman Ian Svenonius can’t remember which. “[I]t was...necessary since renting is so expensive (and often impossible for the marginally employed) and...most groups aren’t going to lend their wheels,” Svenonius says via Facebook. “For a while Make[-U]p was proud that we had a ‘shorty’ or more diminutive Chevy van but as soon as we opted for a full size bass rig we had to find another one.”

Trans Am has less fond memories. Someone tagged the van in Montreal during a tour around 2000. “Just to let you know, Trans Am is traditionally a Chevy band,” writes the group’s Philip Manley.

Faraquet borrowed the van several times before member Jeff Boswell, now the operations director at Washington City Paper, bought it in 2000. The group used it for only around 20 shows before breaking up in 2001. The van then became Boswell’s main ride. In 2002, he packed it with Dischord merchandise to sell on a Fugazi tour. That was the year of the Beltway snipers—who were initially described as traveling by plain white van. “Every time I drove around I felt like someone was watching me,” Boswell says.

In 2005, Boswell sold the van to Leitko, then an editorial aide at Washington City Paper who played in A Day in Black and White, and Peoples and McElroy, who were playing together as Hand Fed Babies. A Day in Black and White did some touring in it but soon broke up; Hand Fed Babies barely drove it. Leitko then used it for a noise project, for the group SPRCSS, and Protect-U; McElroy and Peoples used it for their respective labels, Ruffian and Sockets, as well as other projects.

“In my own world, it had a new life. It became the Fatback van—it was very helpful with that,” says Peoples, referring to the vehicle’s role in lugging around gear for the popular funk and soul dance night he helps run. “It’s as if it mirrors the D.C. musical trajectory, which is less and less well-known bands and now these dime-a-dozen DJ nights,” he says, only somewhat jokingly.

Leitko, McElroy, and Peoples never opened the matchbox until they had to clear out the van. Says McElroy: “Inside it’s got a number of small objects. I guess I shouldn’t say—well, small wooden cylinders wrapped in thread. Maybe small, tiny effigies?”

The Econoline’s former owners “got their money’s worth,” says a mechanic at Adams Morgan’s J&N Auto Body, where the van was deposited. If a band could swallow the $1,200 bill, he says, the van probably has another tour or two in it, despite its odometer reading of more than 200,000 miles. “Honestly,” he says, “it’s not that big of a repair.”

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

On Friday night, Sockets Records will celebrate its fifth anniversary on the mainstage at Black Cat with a five-band bill featuring Hume, Imperial China, Big Gold Belt, Buildings, and the Cornel West Theory. It will be quite the local-music blowout.

But getting to this point took a lot of work. No, really, it took a lot of work. For years Sockets founder Sean Peoples subsisted on a steady diet of minor encouragements, modest successes, and outright bummers. There were boxes of unsold CDs and gray hairs, not to mention hairs that were lost outright. But Peoples hung in there. Over the years he's evolved Sockets from a humble limited-run CD-R operation to a real-life record label that sometimes gets repped by Chuck D. Here's a look back at those early years.

DJ DLX Mixtapes: In late 2004, Peoples started compiling CD-R mixtapes under the name DJ DLX and handing them out among his friends. These were the first official Sockets releases. “I was trying to emulate what DJ/rupture was doing. I heard Minesweeper Suite and thought ‘Oh shit! That was awesome,'" says Peoples. “The label was an extension of that. My girlfriend dumped me and I thought, ‘Maybe I should do a label instead of sulking.'”

Audiozine1 & 2 : In late 2005, Peoples decided to released the first Sockets Audiozine. A 16-track compilation of songs, jams, and weirdness, the disc defined what was then the core of the Sockets community. It was a small community at the time, though. A few contributors who had promised material flaked-out at the last minute. As a result, the tracklist wound up being a little heavy on Peoples' side-projects like FFFs and Big Cats.

Peoples looks back a little more fondly on the second compilation. “That one was a big deal, mostly because I had managed to do it again. Also, I got more people to contribute, so it wasn’t just a bunch of my side projects,” he says. “We had an even bigger release show—it was a 7 or 8 act thing. I felt like that was one of the biggest milestones in Sockets history. A lot of people came out, people that I hadn’t met before." Progress was, however, illusory. "After that, things took another turn and slowed down," laments Peoples.

Caution Curves: A Little Hungry

In 2005 Sockets pressed its first official CD, A Little Hungry, by D.C.-based all-female improv/noise trio Caution Curves. It was a pretty weird record. Vocalist Tristana Fiscella shrieked and wailed over Rebecca Mills' laptop improvisations and Amanda Huron’s drumming. “They were my jam,” recalls Peoples. “Everybody was doing noise at the time. Everybody wanted to fart into a mic with the delay pedal. Luckily, there were three women doing it in a way that was more interesting.” The disc got a nice write up in UK music mag The Wire, some of the first Sockets-related ink. The buzz was short-lived, however. Soon after the disc’s release, the Fiscella/Mills/Huron lineup of Caution Curves imploded. Peoples wound with more than a few copies lingering in his apartment. “That was a big learning experience,” says Peoples. “I took some time off after that.”

NA: B-Sides

Japanese noise-duo NA was Sockets’ first non-local release. “They were on tour, they came on the radio show I was working and did this freaky improv jam,” remembers Peoples, who dug the band's Boredoms-style recklessness. Later on the band approached Peoples about releasing a compilation of material that didn’t make the cut for their record. Critical acclaim poured forth—the CD-R got a nice writeup in the music magazine Signal to Noise and wound up in the racks at NYC-based record store Other Music. “Those were pretty popular,” says Peoples. “It got me out of realm of just DC music.”

Kohoutek: Hair On the Sidewalk

Hits were pretty hard to come by during Sockets’ CD-R years. Product moved modestly, if at all. So at the time Hair On The Sidewalk, by D.C.-based psych-improv collective Kohoutek, seemed like a Thriller-level success. The CD-R/DVD comp, released in ’06, moved more than 200 copies. “A lot of it had to do with Scott Verrastro and his contacts,” says Peoples. “That was helpful. It went to Japan, it went everywhere.”

Local love was slightly more reserved. “The music burbles or throbs during the vocal parts, but the group—especially guitarist Luke Wyatt—periodically asserts itself,” wrote Mark Jenkins in The Washington Post.

Fly Girlz: Da’ Brats From Da’Ville

After the considerable stress of producing, assembling, and distributing some 45 CD-R releases in just over two years, Peoples decided that Sockets needed a re-boot. “There was a time I was like, ‘This is stupid, nobody’s paying attention,'” says Peoples. “I took a year to pick people’s brains, figure out what I wanted to do, and charge in fresh with a new start.” He decided to ditch CD-Rs in favor of CDs and vinyl LPs. He started a blog. Through friends based in New York, he wound up collaborating on the release of Fly Girls’ Da’ Brats From Da’ Ville—the product of a Brooklyn-based program that paired local musicians with teenage rappers. It was a noble project and also one that was highly restorative to Peoples' sagging spirits. More importantly, it was a success. Fly Girlz even made it onto Morning Edition.

Cornel West Theory: Second Rome

D.C.-based hip-hop group Cornel West Theory’s debut record, Second Rome, came out just a few months ago, but the band has been with Sockets from the get-go. If one group can knit the various eras of Sockets–CD-R to CD, and onward—it's this one. “They were on one of the first audiozines. I went to school with Tim and his brother Tony. We were in the same dorm,” recalls Peoples.

“The lineup and the sound in ’06 when they were doing this stuff, it was just a clash of things that were ridiculous [in a good way]. It was definitely hip-hop in some ways, but it was also noise and jazz and rock and reggae.”

Around that time CWT worked with Peoples and engineer Hugh McElroy on what was supposed to be the group's Sockets debut. For reasons now lost to time, it never came together. The group vanished into the ether for a few years. When they finally re-booted, Peoples was still interested. “They got a manager and they got help in the studio. They’ve become more of a band than they were before. It finally all came together,” says Peoples.

There's more to life than gigs.

A handful of area musicians are keeping that notion in mind this weekend, stepping outside their comfort zones for collaborative, one-night-only performances. There's Zomes, the drone-y project of Lungfish's Asa Osborne, which performs tonight at the Writer's Center in Bethesda as part of the ongoing Story/Stereo series. For the performance, Osborne will collaborate with two local artists, the fiction writer Dylan Landis and the poet Brian Gilmore, who will both read from their work. The performance starts at 8 p.m., and is free.

Then, for tomorrow, Sockets Records' Sean Peoples and Panda Head Magazine's Melissa Krodman have organized an experimental program called District Calling: Freedom. The evening, which includes two performances at the District of Columbia Arts Center in Adams Morgan, features music (members of the Cornel West Theory, Hume, and Noon:30), visual and video art (Ayo Okunseinde), and theater and dance artists (Carmen Wong and Heather Doyle). The evening's theme is freedom, and the artists have been collaborating on the project for several weeks. As for what it'll sound like, Arts Desk has no clue, but consider our curiosity piqued. The shows are at 7:30 and 10 p.m., and tickets are $10.

More cross-pollinated performances after the jump, including randomly assembled dance, strange maracas, and classic Warholian acid tests!

Radiohead, Sigur Rós, and Merce Cunningham Dance Company: Merce Cunningham's contributions to dance are incalculable, and he participated in a host of fascinating collaborations—most notably with his romantic partner, the great avant-garde composer John Cage. Split Sides was a work in which every element—choreography by Cunningham, music by Radiohead and Sigur Rós, design, costumes—was created in two parts, and matched up by chance immediately before the performance. The dance troupe first performed the work with both bands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003, and Sigur Rós released its half of the music, some of which was played on a xylophone made of dancing shoes, as the Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do EP. A bootleg of Radiohead's half, meanwhile, is out there in the ether.

Lucky Dragons and the audience: This experimental duo from L.A. makes lengthy, ambient compositions that basically sound like Christmas in Hyrule: See Little Dragons live, and don't be surprised if someone shoves a magic stick—an instrument not far off from a maraca or rain stick—into your hands, or likely something weirder. Few bands are so Zen. Also: Want Lucky Dragons to make music in your living room this winter? Write them.

Sonic Youth and Gossip Girl: Kidding!

The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol: Perhaps the classic example. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable productions paired rock's original hipsters with Warhol's art films and performances—well, "performances"—by members of his Factory retinue. Also, lots of seizure-inducing lights.

While gathering info for my piece "Beats Working" (featured in this week's 2008 Music and Arts in Review issue), I spoke with several DJs and promoters who had very interesting things to say, though space constraints prevented their quotes from making the print. Good thing we've got this spacious Internet to stretch out in.

Over the the next week or so, I'll be posting a series of Q&As, quotes, and other additional insight from D.C. folks who are hard at work in the city's dance culture.  The series will serve as a supplement to the article—which on its own is by no means an exhaustive survey of all the many great dance nights that are currently happening around the District.  Principally, I intended to spotlight the most successful stuff from '08, and promising stuff from '09 in the no-dress-code, no-holds-barred side of the D.C. dance scene. Hopefully, these posts will add to that scope.

First up is a full Q&A from Sean Peoples: In addition to running the Sockets CD-R label, Peoples is co-creator of the monthly funk and soul dance night Fatback (mentioned at the beginning of "Beats Working"), which celebrated its one-year anniversary last Friday. He already tipped us off to his some of his favorite things from '08, but here's a more in-depth look at the progress that led Fatback from its origins at Local 16 and Dahlak to a packed house every second Friday of the month at Red Lounge, seven DJs strong. Follow the jump for the full text.

Fatback took place at Dahlak for a while before moving up to the Red Lounge. How did that space work out for you?

Dahlak's great—it's a restaurant, first and foremost. I think one of the things about Fatback was that we didn't really want it to be a pretentious dance night at all, and having it be in a restaurant for the first 6 months is definitely one way to go about that, because you get up, you show up early, you've got to pull all the tables out, you've got to set everything up—there's really no set up already there, besides a couple speakers. So you really have to change the space into something that's different from what you walk into. But the owner, Daniel is really great. I think he's found out that his space is really well located, and he's trying to get more people to come through, and he's found that DJ nights and bands are one good way to do that.

Well the Red Lounge seems to fit you more in terms of size, but do you think you'll have to expand to larger venues in '09?

I think we're gonna try to do some more special events outside of the regular Fatback night. But I think right now we're pretty comfortable at Red Lounge—we don't really want to grow it more. I mean, I think if you start to grow it too large, the only way to go from there is to peter out, so we're trying to keep the same energy at Red Lounge as long as we can. But it's definitely a topic of conversation each time, because we don't want to alienate people in one way by saying, "hey we're gonna stay at this venue," but then the people that want to come have to stand outside—that's something we're trying to prevent. But just in terms of trying to do bigger events, we're gonna be doing a big inauguration party, and we're also doing a huge Valentine's Day thing with Brightest Young Things. So we're trying to do these things that are taking the name and join forces with some other people to have parties that are located in bigger venues so we can draw on different crowds. But now we're trying to cultivate and keep the people we have, and match Red Lounge's space a little better.

It's weird though, because we've all been smacked in the face by this. So now we have to get organized, and it's funny to hang out with your friends, but then have to do a business meeting. It's something that all our DJs are trying to get used to.

One of the things you mentioned was that you didn't want Fatback to be pretentious. Is there a large amount of pretension at other dance parties in D.C. that you've seen firsthand? Is that one of the reasons you started Fatback? How does pretension get in the way of a good dance party?

It's not necessarily something that we've seen firsthand. One of the things that all our DJs love to do is dance at a house party. House parties are so much fun because—at least in the terms of the ones we've throw in the past three years—you know there's gonna be great music, and people that you want to see. And that atmosphere is sometimes hard to translate over to a club. So it's less about reacting to what we've seen, and more about trying to replicate what we know we like. We just love dancing. There is a lot of pretension in terms of having the DJ up off the floor, and there being a limited contact between the DJ and the people who are consuming the music. But for us, it's less about the DJs and more about what we're all creating. That sounds really dorky, but I think that's what we honestly try to do. We have the DJs and turntables set up really close to the dancers—it's like we're on the same level. It's just the stuff like, us being able to feed off the energy of the people, because they give off a lot. That's the whole idea: We want to make them dance, and we want to flip them out.

In terms of other dance nights around town, does Fatback fill a particular niche? How does it fit into the overall scene?

Hopefully it fits the house party niche, the one that's not staid, or too buttoned-up. It's tough to find a space, but we've lucked out in terms of the spaces that we've gotten. Some of the nights I've been to, one month's it's OK, and the other month it's off the hook. And I feel like that can happen to any night, but it's been really good each night at Fatback. I mean, even if 50 less people showed up at ours, it would still be fun.

Where do you see Fatback going in 2009? Is there a threshold you want to reach? How do you see it growing?

"We want to keep going. We want to keep the momentum that we've had behind our backs. Early in 2009, we're trying to do two big things: The inauguration party, which is gonna be off the hook, and this Valentine's Day thing. We've got all these ideas that we don't know what to do them—we definitely have a lot of stuff that we want to do. But you don't want to over-saturate, you know? I think it's a testament to us wanting to be cautious, but grow at a good pace. We don't want to burn out the star too quickly. But yea, going into 2009 we're really excited, because I think we've got a lot of good opportunities to do stuff that'll hit a lot more people, because we're gonna try to get some sponsorships and hook up with groups like BYT, to really grow our niche. But yeah—with cautious optimism, we're really happy to go into next year.

This past year was busy. I can't think of much by way of disappointments, but the following stood out and really made 2008 for me:

• Dmerit is a DJ/production duo who are killing it right now. I just caught a DJ set of theirs and it included a bunch of their own remixes. I expect even more from these guys in 2009.
• All Our Noise blog – Some friends of mine started this blog, which highlights Washington, D.C.'s cultural rebirth. AON Sessions films local artists performing live and provides a good alternative (not to mention local flavor) to YouTube's video distractions.
• Sonic Circuits – Jeff Surak's Sonic Circuits festival is becoming the pride of a small community of folks who celebrate experimental music here in the District. Jeff's tireless efforts over the past several years seems to be paying off and this last year's festival was packed with great performances.
• I started DJing a funk, soul and R&B night we call Fatback with some friends this year. We've changed venues a couple of times, but found a home at Red Lounge on 14th Street NW. The audience is always ready to dance at 10 p.m. and it keeps going until they push us out at 2 a.m.
• Future Times – Andrew Field-Pickering's new boutique 7" label is already one of my favorites. He has great taste and who doesn't love a 7" these days? Compact discs are so 2002.
• The Lighthouse – House shows are always more interesting than club shows. There is possibility in the air. And there is usually a potluck/cheaper beer. The Lighthouse had some amazing shows this past year and I bet they continue providing an alternative venue for bands passing through D.C.

What were your bestselling discs?

The bestselling disc was definitely Little Women's Teeth. Little Women is this great freak-out-jazz quartet from NYC who combine blistering horns, shredding guitars, and pummeling drums. Imagine constant streams of spiraling horns meeting a punk rhythm section. The live show is intense. They share members of ZS and Extra Life, which also claim bestselling status on the label. The albums included Extra Life's "2 Song EP" and the ZS "4 Systems". All three of these bands are from the NYC area and have pushed the limits of experimental music in my mind.

Favorite discs?

A lot of my favorite local bands are still working on their full albums, but some of the records that really stood out this year included the following:

• Belly by Food For Animals – This is hip-hop from the future that has come to save us all from the present.
• Methods EP by Imperial China – I have waited a long time to hear a record like this. For it to come out of DC makes it worth the wait. It harkens back to some great post-punk sounds of DC past, but it doesn't feel overly nostalgic.
• Ghost Games by Apes – Ghost Games sounds like it came from a swamp. Apes are one of the most consistently awesome live shows in DC right now.

As for music in general, it would be a long list. But here are a few that you might not have heard:

• Los Angeles and the corresponding EP's by Flying Lotus really impressed me. It was a swirling, cosmic down-tempo affair from this kid in California.
• Fallin' Off The Reel, Vol. 2 released by the Truth & Soul label. This is soul music that you've never heard before, but somehow it tastes familiar. Every track is spot on.
• Sand by Philip Jeck – For me, Jeck manipulates sounds in such interesting and engaging ways. Instead of just using laptops, he approaches sound sources with older tools, always producing something beautiful and new.

—Sean Peoples